The first reason I haven't posted in a while is because I'm a father!  She turns 4 months old next week so I have had much better things to do than to write more blog entries. 
 
Another reason is that I am not as annoyed at Transhumanism now that I have this blog up.  I've gotten a lot off my chest and it's been very cathartic which, ironically, has reduced my motivation to keep things going. 

Finally, Transhumanism is utterly doomed and all the dates when amazing techno-transformations will supposedly happen are rapidly approaching.  As these predictions flop, I am content to just sit back and watch the carnage. 

The baby's crying. 

-HP

In case anyone out there mistook Aubrey de Grey for an actual Cambridge scientist, click this link to learn the truth. 

In turns out that de Grey was really just the computer guy at Cambridge's genetics department.  Moreover, he has apparently been fired for exploiting his marginal association with Cambridge to push his nutty Malthusian techno-religion. 

In Aubrey de Grey's new book Ending Aging, he bases his belief that we will live for 1000s of years not on science but on an empirically false and biased view of the history of technology.  He believes that initial breakthroughs in science and technology lead to inevitable improvements afterwards.  The sole example he uses is aviation where he points out that the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903 was followed in 1927 by Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, then in 1949 by the first commercial aircraft and then by the Concorde 20 years later in 1969.  So, there has been a "serenely smooth" acceleration of aviation technology with a revolutionary milestone occurring every 20 years or so. 

Setting aside the fact that supersonic passenger aviation could be viewed as a technological flop, de Grey's example (and his entire argument about technological acceleration) requires that there was another revolutionary milestone achieved in aviation around the year 1990. 

Well, what was it? 

I just got my copy of Ending Aging in the mail and I am thrilled.  I have read pretty much everything de Grey has written on life extension on his web page and I have skimmed his book and I now realize that he is easy to refute. 

Basically, all of the technical details that de Grey goes into in his book are a big obfuscation.  His SENS ideology (according to him) will only give us an extra 20 years or so which isn't crazy.  After all, we already got 40 years of added life expectancy over the last 150 years.  Another 20 isn't unreasonable.  Indeed, many of de Grey's opponents in the gerontology community have said that another 7 years might be possible, so 20 years isn't out of bounds. 

The reason people are opposed to de Grey is because he believes that we will live another 1000 years, not just 20, and his basis for believing in this can be summed up in one single sentence on page 328:

"This stark contrast between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs is, I would contend, typical of the history of technological fields."

(To put this line in context, read his essay here.)

A HA!!!  Wrong!!!  Most technologies flop as shown by the 98% of patents that never make any money, or the 99% of drugs that never go to market.  The example of flight that de Grey uses proves my point, not his.  He says that the Concorde is an example of a successful technological acceleration when it is actually an example of a technological flop that never overcame the problem of noise pollution. 

Even though I am a physical scientist, I have been spending a lot of time reading de Grey instead of, say, Drexler.  I think the reason is that I consider Drexler (and Kurzweil) to be small potatoes compared to de Grey.  De Grey has real scientific arguments and isn't saying frothing-at-the-mouth nonsense like Kurzweil is about the entire Universe being turned into a giant computer.  That is why I am so thrilled that I don't actual have to address any of his scientific arguments to refute his immortalist claims. 

Thanks Aubrey for making my job a lot easier!

Many of the assorted nuts at the recent Singularity Summit apparently believe that the entire universe (or at least much of our planet) will be turned into a giant computer.

After all, if you extrapolate Moore's Law then very soon computers will be so powerful, that they will start to think for themselves and then start expanding over the face of the Earth like bacteria did billions of years ago.  There is at least one problem with this: transistors have been getting more expensive over time. 

I have already shown that small is expensive, but here I want to point out that the long term trend for transistors (at least) is to increase in cost when normalized with their size.  In 1965, transistors were roughly 1 mm square and cost $1 each.  Today, for 1 dollar you can buy 50 million transistors which makes it seem like they are much cheaper.  However, they are much MUCH smaller today with features roughly 100 nm in size.  The shrinkage in size greatly outweighs the cost reduction which means that pound for pound (or liter per liter) transistors are 4 to 5 orders of magnitude more expensive today then they were 40 years ago. 

The fundamental reason for this is that the universe (through the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) wants things to be spread out and hates it when structures are packed in tiny spaces.  So, this trend will inevitably increase for Si/SiO2 integrated circuits and for any other potential replacement for them (i.e., molecular, quantum, DNA computing, etc.)

Even if we manage to invent an A.I., which is not inevitable, it will still be constrained by the laws of physics and economics which are driving the pound-for-pound increase in the cost of computing substrates. 

This is yet another reason why the Singularity is physically impossible. 

All futurology falls into one of two categories. 

The first branch predicts that we will soon become subsumed in our technology and radically alter human nature by either becoming immortal or having genetically altered babies or uploading our brains into computers, etc.  These people I call New Testament Transhumanists because they have heard the good news of Technology and welcome its commencing.  

The second type of futurist is the Old Testament Transhumanist.  He agrees with the New Testament folks that technology is accelerating, but is fearful of the inevitable techno-future.  Leon Kass and Bill Joy fall into this category.  Some, like the Peak Oil people, believe that we will be betrayed by technology and hurled back into the Olduvai Gorge to live like cavemen again. 

Some people flip-flop between these two positions.  For instance, British journalist Bryan Appleyard wrote a book called Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in the Genetic Future where he wrings his hands about a future similar to Huxley’s novel.  However, here is an article where Appleyard now says that we are heading to a “New Dark Age” where technology will fail us.  

Can’t the truth be somewhere in the middle!!!

This is precisely my point.  Our future lies somewhere in the roomy middle (see figure below).  My argument against both branches of futurism is radical in how boring it is which is precisely why you will never hear of it in the popular media.  Our future is more of the same.

I just realized that I did do something that relates to Transhumanism over my summer vacation.  I went to Palmyra, NY to the Hill Cumorah, the site where Joseph Smith received the golden tablets from the Angel Moroni.  The two images below were taken from on top of the hill.  The statue is of the Angel that first appeared to Smith in a vision telling him not to follow any other religions.  Smith later went on to create the Mormon religion. 

How does this relate to Transhumanism?  Because Mormonism is another example of a Gnostic religion, which is what Transhumanism is.  There are many aspects to Gnosticism, but the main ones that relate to Mormonism and Transhumanism is that a secret Knowledge (or Gnosis) will liberate you from your body and you will become a God or you will create God.  In the case of Transhumanism the Gnosis is modern science with its dense jargon; indecipherable except to a chosen few.  Whether through de Grey’s SENS ideology, or Kurzweil’s brain uploading or Drexler’s nanobots, supposedly we will soon transcend our flesh and the thousand natural shocks it is heir to, to become immortal omniscient Gods.  Indeed, Kurzweil openly states that the Singularity is the creation of God.  Thus, the standard Christian theology is flip-flopped: instead of God creating us, we create God.

Similarly, Mormons believe that after death, they will become Gods.  Married couples are married through eternity and actually have sex in the afterlife in order to populate new worlds that the married couple will essentially be the God and Goddess of.  Not many people realize that Mormonism is as profound a departure from Christianity as Islam is.  Remember that next November when you consider voting for Romney.

From "In Search of Methuselah: Estimating the Limits to Human Longevity" by Olshansky, et al. (1990): 

They estimate that if we cure all cancer, we would only increase the life expectancy of Americans (in 1985) by a little over 3 years.  Same for heart disease.  If we cure all circulatory diseases, diabetes and cancer, life expectancy would increase only by about 15.5 years.  Now 15.5 more years would be great but it wouldn't be civilization altering.  After all, we have already increased life expectancy over the 20th century by about 30 years.  Another 15 wouldn't be out of the ordinary.  The figure below shows the reduction in mortality resulting from elimination of various diseases. 

Every night on the news we hear of new treatments and medications that reduce mortality rates from various diseases and one could get the impression from all of this that overall mortality will greatly drop in the near future, however, the figure above suggests otherwise.  Eliminating all the diseases you have ever heard of would only increase life expectancy a couple of decades but we will still die of cell senescence.  I understand that Aubrey de Grey plans on reversing damage from metabolism rather than its pathologies, like the diseases in the figure above.  My point is that
the vast majority of money currently being spent in the World to combat disease won't actually result in dramatic improvements in life expectancy even if all that research is entirely successful. 

As Olshansky, et al., say in their paper: "the period of rapid increases in life expectancy in developed nations has come to an end." 

we are buying a new house and selling our old one and that is taking up a lot of time.  Also, GoDaddy changed the interface on my Quickblog so I am learning it.  I lost my picture of the Hindenburg burning and can't figure out how to put it back up. 

I have been reading a lot and I have a lot of posts to put up.  It's just a matter of writing them.  Thanks for all the emails though. 

The properties of most matter in the universe can be approximated using continuum mechanics.  This is an astonishing simplification since it allows us to ignore all of the individual atoms and molecules of materials, fluids and gases and just consider them as continuous materials with well defined properties. 

For instance, a grain of salt contains about 1.2 X 10¹⁸ atoms, yet since it has cubic symmetry; its linear elastic properties are completely defined by just 3 numbers. 

Most of the technologies mankind has developed so far exploit this massive simplification to the hilt.  Materials scientists (like me) design new materials with different properties which engineers then put to use to make new designs and technologies, all the while ignoring the atomic complexity of those materials. 

However, there is a small subset of materials in the universe that have properties that can not be approximated but rather are complex and functional at the molecular level.  These materials are made up of atoms that have been temporarily scooped up by the Darwinian algorithm and bonded with other atoms in precise ways to make tiny little machines that have precise functions within the context of living cells or organisms.  All molecular machines have specific functions that they perform which can not be generalized to other molecular machines.  Therefore, there is not a broad simplification that can be applied to all the machines that will simplify our task in understanding how they work. 

Since science is always reductionistic, the second class of materials in the universe can not be easily understood by science unlike the first class of materials described above.  In a sense, Mother Nature temporarily infuses the second class of materials with a sort of magic power I call Soft Vitalism.  Soft because it is only ‘sort of’ magic.  The second class of materials is all built on hard naturalistic ground.  I am not arguing for old-fashioned Vitalism which said that there is a supernatural life force that animates living material.  I am only saying that Darwinism produces material that is mostly resistant to the inroads of science. 

This is why I am skeptical about Transhumanism.  So far, most of the technologies that we have made have used the first type of materials which are amendable to reductionistic science.  However, Transhumanists believe that science will be just as successful with the second class of materials as it has been with the first.

I doubt it. 

Not much happened on my vacation that would be relevant to Transhumanism.  Unfortunately, we didn't make it to Kitty Hawk, we'll save that for next year.  However, I did visit Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson.  He designed his house himself and had numerous inventions and curiosities.  He was a voracious reader and had a device for holding 5 open books at once which he likely designed (here).  Imagine a President today inventing gadgets in his spare time. 

Our technology is so complex and specialized that ordinary people can't really contribute to technology like they used to be able to.  In many ways, we are less technology-oriented today in the sense that we don't understand our technologies and don't need to.  People living in Jefferson's time had an intimate understanding of how things work and would actively make alterations.  We, however, live in a kind of techno-womb, sheltered from technology yet entirely dependent upon it. 

Sorry I haven't posted in a while but we were on vacation.  I submit this picture as evidence, taken on the anniversary of Pickett's charge on July 3rd at Gettysburg.  The Union re-enactors are helping the Confederates over the low stone wall at the "Angle" near the copse of trees. 

One of my central arguments against Transhumanism is that technology, broadly considered, is not accelerating.  Here I present a plot showing that multi-factor productivity (MFP), a measurement of technology growth, has actually been stagnant since the 70s.  This plot shows that technology clearly is not accelerating and that, despite what everyone assumes, we are currently living through the doldrums of technology growth.  However, MFP doesn't capture growth in medical technology. 

The plot below (from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development) supports that medical technology is also slowing down and has been for some time.  R&D expenditures over the last 40 years have increased 10 fold but the number of new drug approvals hasn't even doubled.  This proves that we are well into the period of diminishing returns for technology and we probably can't expect much more growth in the future.  

So, since this is a blog, I have to have a picture of my dog on it.  Freddy opposes Transhumanism too:

All Transhumanists believe in one way or another that we are going to transcend biology through Technology.  Whether through genetic engineering where we will select genes for intelligence or through the invention of an A.I. modeled on the human brain or through the conquest of death, Transhumanists think that Science & Technology will be able to unravel biology.  

I doubt this will happen anytime soon.  The main reason is because of Leslie Orgel’s 2nd Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Evolution is based on Absolute Ignorance: random variations are selected for by how well they increase the chance of replication.  Since the variations are random, they will mostly fail to work and the variations that do work, thereby enhancing the chance of replication, tend to be deeply illogical, inscrutable and perversely intricate.  These bizarre solutions that evolution comes up with are heaped on top of one another in a cumulative process that builds generation after generation.  Moreover, evolution is supremely wasteful since the random variations usually fail.  Finally, evolution has no goal that it is trying to achieve, it’s merely lurching about like a drunk staggering out of a bar.  

In contrast, Science is always reductionistic.  It is constantly striving to explain phenomena in terms of simple laws which then can be used to predict the future.  Scientists work with “model systems” and try to tease out simple relationships between just a few variables.  However, in the real world, things can get very complex very fast and you can quickly find yourself in, what a colleague of mine calls, the realm of infinite experimental design space.  The variables explode and the problem becomes intractable.  

When confronted with the mind-boggling complexity of biology (produced by Absolute Ignorance), reductionistic Science is struck dumb.  There is no reason to expect that we will figure out our own biology to the extent necessary to greatly change, mimic or enhance it.   

I believe that nanotechnology is possible, but not feasible.  (That's why my blog is called infeasible.)  The difference between possibility and feasibility is money.  For example...

A typical CPU is about an inch square and a few millimeters thick.  However, the vast majority of the cost of making the CPU goes into just a few very thin layers of silicon, silicon dioxide (that make up the transistors) and copper interconnects which is maybe 10 microns thick total.  The rest of the packaging, substrate and wires cost pennies. 

A typical CPU costs about $100. 

This means, by my calculations, that 1 gallon of transistors would cost a whopping 58.6 million dollars!  A swimming pool would run about half a trillion dollars. 

Using a density of 5000 kg/m^3 for copper averaged with silicon I get almost $100,000 per ounce!  Gold is about $650/ounce.

Now this isn't fair to the semiconductor industry since transistors aren't purchased by the gallon or pound.  However, it nicely debunks the myth at the heart of Drexler's vision of nanotechnology: that small is cheap. 

The universe doesn't want these tiny structures to exist and it will extract an enormous price during their construction.   The universe (through the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) wants energy to be spread out, not packed in small tight spaces, and all those interfaces have energies associated with them.  This is why it is highly doubtful that nanostructured materials will ever be cheap compared to more garden-variety materials. 

Most technologies flop because they just aren't worth the increased expense not because they've run into some physical limit.  One can theoretically show enhanced material properties by designing the correct nanostructure, but will it be worth the added expense? 

I remember reading something Eric Drexler wrote were he proudly claimed that no one has ever disproved his ideas on molecular nanotechnology and that this means that his ideas are feasible.  Don’t be fooled by this argument. 

The main reason that no scientist has disproved him is that none of us can be bothered to do so.  We have much better things to do with our time like write papers or research proposals or spend time with friends and family.  Anyone who has ever had to prepare a TEM specimen intuitively knows that Drexler’s ideas are nonsense and doesn’t have to go through the ordeal of actually addressing them in detail. 

However, I promise to do so one of these days.  Ugh…

Readers have asked me to prove that Strong AI or nanobots are impossible.  But it is impossible to prove that any given technology is impossible.  You won't know if a technology is possible until you actually develop it. 

The reason that most technologies flop is because you invariably run into problems that no one ever thought of to begin with.  This is one reason why even though no scientist has disproved Drexler's Molecular Nanotechnology or de Grey's SENS we should still be highly skeptical of their possibility. 

I understand that this sounds like a cop-out on my part because I can't explicitly predict what might go wrong with the future development of technologies Transhumanists like, but there it is. 

Transhumanists believe that all you have to do is think of a technology and that means it is not only possible but inevitable and (usually) immanent.  This is the belief at the heart of the SENS ideology, Molecular Nanotechnology and Genetic Engineering.  There are even some Transhumanists (like Moravec) who believe that we will one day use our technology to create new Universes!!! 

But in reality, technologies are really hard to develop.  Hundreds of competing factors can go into a technology’s development making it unpredictable.  At the end of the day, the vast majority of technologies flop usually for reasons that no one ever thought of when the technology was first being planned. 

So, if all technologies are inevitable, then what about Time Travel?  Rather than convening a Commission on Bioethics to discuss the implications of Genetic Engineering or Immortality, shouldn’t we be discussing Time Travel?  It seems to me that Time Travel is far more dangerous than, say, Molecular Nanotechnology. 

I was just thinking how boring my blog is compared to the blogs of my enemies.  Kurzweil’s, de Grey’s and Drexler’s sites are filled with thrilling claims of immortality, Matrix-style brain uploads and space elevators. 

For comparison, here are my boring answers to some commonly asked questions:

Q: Can you prove that Strong AI is impossible?

A: Nope.

Q: Is Strong AI, Molecular Nanotechnology or Immortality inevitable?

A: Nope.

Q: Is any technology inevitable?

A: Nope. 

Q: Will we ever achieve interstellar space travel?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Will Nanobots ever be feasible?

A: Dunno.

Q: Will I live forever?

A: (Almost certainly) No. 

See how boring my blog is? 

I just watched Christopher Hitchens on BookTV on a panel for the LATimes concerning religion.  As usual, he was very entertaining.  He pointed out that all religions are arrogant and so require believers to proselytize.  This is certainly true of Transhumanism.  I wouldn't mind if Kurzweil practiced his faith in the privacy of his own home, but he is traveling around the country pushing it to a mostly gullible public. 

Hitchens referred to religion as the grossest solipsism as it requires believers to think that the Universe was designed for them; an astonishing claim.  Believers in the Singularity share this solipsism but in my opinion they are worse because they think they are being scientific.  It is borderline psychotic to think that our entire Universe was leading up to the evolution of mankind and that we will instigate a cosmic process whereby the Universe will be transformed into a giant computer.  How anyone can delude themselves into believing this nonsense is beyond me. 

The foundational belief of all Tranhumanists is that technology is accelerating.  It is taken as a self-evident truth.  Aubrey de Grey admits that his own ideas will only buy a few years of extra life so he resorts to his faith that biomedical technology will keep accelerating.  Of course, Kurzweil puts his bogus "Law" of Accelerating Returns at the heart of his philosophy.  So, when a scientist discovers some new drug or invention that represents an incremental improvement on what came before, it is heralded as the tip of an inevitable technological iceberg, because after all, technology is accelerating. 

Here is my adaptation of Sidney Harris's classic cartoon of two scientists discussing some equations at a blackboard that I have changed to illustrate the reasoning of Transhumanists:

One of the central tenets of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS ideology is that if we can increase life expectancy by 1 year every year then we can be immortal.  If the increase in life expectancy is itself increasing incrementally year after year then we might be able to “pull out” of the death spiral similar to a plane using it’s afterburners to pull out of a nose dive. 

However, reality suggests that this improvement in life expectancy is far off in the future (if ever). 

According to data provided by the Center for Disease Control, the average 65 year old has a life expectancy of about 17 years, so he will live to 82 years on average.  The figure below shows the change in life expectancy for 65 year old white males over the 20th century.  Surprisingly, life expectancy has improved only about 5.5 years in the last 100 years. 

Most of the increase in life expectancy from birth (about 27 years from 48 to 75) came from reduction in infant mortality.  However, once you made it past about 10 years old, life expectancy improved only a few years in the 20th century, despite massive improvements in scientific knowledge and application. 

Looking at the figure, one can see that life expectancy for 65 year olds has been improving more rapidly starting from the 1970s.  However, before you get too excited, this improvement has been on average only about 40 days/year; well below the required 365 days/year necessary for immortality. 

What more, this trend seems pretty linear and not exponential so there is currently no reason to think it is accelerating. 

So based on the scientific evidence, the reasonable person should take Aubrey de Grey’s claims of immortality with a grain of salt. 

When an exponential trend (like the improvement in the price-to-performance ratio of computers) is going your way, everything’s wonderful.  But when improvement stops being exponential and becomes merely linear (as all trends eventually do) then things get very bad. 

Ray Kurzweil claims that in the next 10 years we will see 20,000 years of technological progress.  Kurzweil comes to this number by taking the exponential of 10 which equals 22,026.  This, of course, is nonsense, because technology, broadly measured, is not exponentially accelerating (see here).  Kurzweil is referring to Moore’s Law which has accurately described the exponential acceleration of computers for some time now.  If Moore’s Law (the doubling of computer power every year) continues then we will have about 20,000 years of improvement (at this year’s rate) in the next 10 years. 

However…

If Moore’s Law ends, then it will take 20,000 years at today’s rate of improvement to get to where you thought you would be in 10 years. 

This is why Kurzweil’s religious fantasies won’t come true.  The improvement in the price-to-performance ratio of computers will plateau just like all technologies have and since computers will no longer improve exponentially; we will be thousands of years away from where the Transhumanists thought we would be in just decades. 

Exponential trends cut both ways. 

So I have finally officially started my blog.  After 2 months of posts, I have already refuted the Singularity.  The quality of my posts has improved and with the simplicity of this blogging interface, I think I am off and running.  Watch out Transhumanists!

In about 300 years from now, the entire universe will be turned into a giant Toilet Brush.

I know this seems incredible, even a bit funny, but after studying patterns in history for
the last 20 years, I have come to this inexorable conclusion. Consider…

The Big Bang happened about 13.7 billion years ago and it took about another 10 billion years after it for life to emerge on our planet; quite a long time. However, the next salient event in cosmic evolution, the evolution of the digestive tract, happened just 2.75 billion years later. After that, the next salient event in cosmic evolution, the emergence of the sphincter, happened just 575 million years later.

Do you see a trend emerging? The time between salient events seems to be getting shorter. Not just linearly shorter, but exponentially shorter. That exponential shortening of time between salient fecal events is the key for understanding, what I call, the inevitable Toilet Brush Singularity.

The figure below shows salient events in cosmic history plotted on an exponential plot. The trend is robustly linear, which shows that cosmic history, stretching back to the Big Bang, is accelerating and heading towards the invention of the toilet brush. Therefore, a toilet-brush-creating species is the inevitable product of Evolution by Natural Selection.



Since this exponentially-accelerating trend originates in the Big Bang, it will inexorably, inevitably and immanently continue.

Extrapolating this trend into the future shows that the number of toilet brushes on the planet earth will continue to exponentially increase. Once all the matter on the Planet Earth is turned into Toilet Brushes, the Toilet Brushes will consolidate themselves into one Giant Earth-Sized Toilet Brush.

The Giant Earth-Sized Toilet Brush will then expand out from the Planet Earth (which will now be a Giant Toilet Brush) and turn all non-toilet-brush matter into toilet-brush matter.

By my estimation, given exponential growth, it will take approximately 300 years for the Giant Cosmic Toilet Brush to consume the entire Universe. At this point, our Universe (now a toilet brush) will begin to invade parallel Universes, turning them into Giant Toilet Brushes.

If you doubt the inevitable Toilet Brush Singularity, you probably suffer from what I call the intuitive linear view of history. From your limited perspective, the number of toilet brushes has been merely increasing linearly. But as I show in the figure above, toilet brushes are on the vanguard of a long-term exponentially accelerating trend originating in the Big Bang itself.

This is all quite inevitable.

Over the last few posts, I have been hammering away at one of the articles of faith of the Singularity: that evolution by natural selection is inevitably heading towards a technology-creating species. 

I first showed that there is no exponential trend leading up to us since all species will show exponential trends if you merely use their taxonomic branching points as data points (as Kurzweil speciously does).  Therefore, the Singularity is false. 

Since then, I’ve been arguing that there is no scientific way one can prove that higher intelligence is inevitable, so belief in it is a matter of faith, no different in principle than Christians’ belief in the virgin birth. 

Conveniently, a paper just came out last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy that nicely bolsters my argument.  The paper is titled “More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution,” so I guess you can figure out what its conclusion is.  The authors (Bakewell, Shi, and Zhang) encapsulate the common Transhumanist belief:

“Observations of numerous dramatic and presumably adaptive phenotypic modifications during human evolution prompt the common belief that more genes have undergone positive Darwinian selection in the human lineage than in the chimpanzee lineage since their evolutionary divergence 6-7 million years ago.”

Indeed, if a technology-creating species is inevitable and evolution was accelerating up to us we should expect way more positive selection of genes for humans than chimps. 

However, the authors found the opposite was true.  They found 154 human genes that showed evidence of the rapid positive selection that marks out adaptive traits, but 233 chimp genes with the same qualities. 

The authors conclude:

“These observations … refute the anthropocentric view that a grand enhancement in Darwinian selection underlies human origins.”

HA HA!!!  Exactly my point!!!  SUCCESS!

How sweet it is to see hot-of-the-presses Science refute Transhumanism. 

I few of you have emailed me about my refutation of Kurzweil claiming that I am saying that Homo sapiens was not the inevitable product of evolution rather than higher intelligence.  This convenient misinterpretation of what I have been saying is a Strawman argument.

I want to be very clear in saying that I believe that there is no scientific way you could prove that a technology-creating species is (or isn't) the inevitable product of evolution.  Higher intelligence, whether in bipedal mammalian form or crustacean form or insect form or any other form is an evolutionary fluke, just like every other species in the history of the planet. 

The only way you could scientifically prove that a technology-creating species is inevitable is by creating multiple planet earths (like in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and running them in parallel and seeing how many of them produce technology. 

The belief that a technology-creating species is inevitable is a matter of faith, which is why Transhumanism is a religion. 

Christians believe in the Prophets who foretold of a time when God’s Providence would bring forth the Messiah who would usher in the Rapture leading us all to Heaven. 

Transhumanists believe in Kurzweil, Drexler and De Grey who predict Inevitable Technological Progress which will bring forth the Strong A.I. who will allow us to Upload Our Brains into the Cosmic Computer. 

Two weeks ago I went to Las Vegas and had a first hand experience with the ability of random phenomena to produce trends.  I lost $1250, most of it on Baccarat.  Probably 9 out of 10 hands went for the player while I bet on the banker.  As I gambled I couldn’t help but think that things were going to turn my way soon.  I was due after all. 

Of course, previous wagers have no influence on future wagers.  The belief that they do is called the Gambler’s Fallacy and the casinos make a lot of money off of it.  Consider the picture below which I took while at The Venetian.  The display shows the last few numbers that hit on the Roulette wheel.  Although the color doesn’t show up well, the display shows that seven reds hit in a row prior to black 17 hitting.  Prior to 17, someone might think that the table is ‘hot’ for Red and would put a bet down.  The casino wants us to think this because they know it makes us more likely to gamble even though one spin has no influence on another. 

The Singularity is basically a High-Tech Gambler’s Fallacy because Transhumanists think that previous performance predicts future results.  Since we have evolved higher intelligence on our planet, it must have been inevitable not just lucky.  Transhumanists are, in a sense, betting their life savings that this lucky streak will continue.  They are sacrificing their brief lives and obsessing about an utterly imaginary future.  Or as Matthew Arnold put it in his poem The Hymn of Empedocles:

[They] feign a bliss  
      Of doubtful future date,  
      And while we dream on this  
      Lose all our present state,  
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?

In my last entry, I showed that the origin of Mr. Kurzweil’s long-term exponential trend was really the fractal nature of our tree of life.  All species will tend to have exponential trends leading up to them if you just choose their taxonomic branching points as data points.  This refutes the Singularity because it shows that there is no exponential progressive trend leading up to us. 

However, a technology-creating species might still be the inevitable result of evolution without having an exponential trend.  There might merely be a herky-jerky trend leading up to us which, I suppose, Kurzweil might say is enough.  After all, we have evolved, haven’t we?  SO there must have been a trend leading up to us.  Therefore, the Universe somehow wants intelligence. 

The obvious argument against this is that all organisms must have trends leading up to them.  Look at the ancestors of giraffes and you will see a trend towards longer necks.   This doesn’t mean that the long neck of the giraffe was inevitable, it merely means that random phenomena (like natural selection) can produce things that look like trends. 

The figure below shows three results of a random series of 10,000 coin flips where I add ‘1’ when I get heads and subtract ‘1’ for tails.  Note how Series 1 shows what looks like a trend towards heads even though the program was entirely random.  Series 2 initially moves towards tails but then lurches back towards heads whereas Series 3 stays close to zero. 

This shows that just because you see a trend or pattern in some data it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some external force driving the trend or that the trend will continue.  The data might still be random even though it looks like it is heading somewhere. 

Therefore, unaided and RANDOM natural selection is more than enough to produce an intelligent technology-creating species without that species being inevitable.  The burden of proof shifts to the Transhumanists who must show that there is a trend leading up to us that is over and above what might have been produced by mere randomness.  This, I think, is scientifically impossible. 

So the last few days I have tried to make a very simple yet important point about our tree of life and how it relates to the Singularity.  Our tree of life is fractal which means there are trees nested within trees.  Therefore, it doesn’t matter which species you choose, they will all tend to show exponential trends with time if you just choose their branching points as data points (as Kurzweil does for our species). 

Consider the figure below.  Notice how the branches on our tree tend to get denser the farther away from the center you go?  This happens because so many species have gone extinct in the past that the branches tend to get pruned nearer to the root. 

This proves that Kurzweil’s Singularity is merely the product of the statistics of natural selection and is utterly false.  The exponential improvement in the price-to-performance ratio of computers is not the extension of a long term trend stretching back to the origin of life but is merely a local trend and so will inevitably end. 

This refutes the Singularity because it explains away Kurzweil’s “Law” of Accelerating Returns. 

I still have to prove that higher intelligence is not the inevitable product of evolution.  Stay tuned…

The entire course of cosmic history has been leading up to the creation and expansion of Velociraptors.  As you can see from the plot below, all salient events in Velociraptor history line up in a smooth exponential line (measured from 70 million years ago).  This proves that Evolution favors the creation of velociraptors since there is no other explanation as to why this plot would be exponential. 

But then again, velociraptors went extinct 70 million years ago.  They were an evolutionary dead end.  But then why is there an exponential trend leading up to them?  Hmm…  I guess I can’t explain it.  Can you?

The entire course of cosmic history has been leading up to the creation and expansion of E. coli.  As you can see from the plot below, all salient events in E. coli history line up in a smooth exponential line.  This proves that Evolution favors the creation of E. coli since there is no other explanation as to why this plot would be exponential.  Hmmm?

Furthermore, since this trend has continued for 14.7 billion years, we can safely assume that E. coli will continue to expand eventually consuming the entire Universe.  This is because all trends always continue forever.  

This is all quite inevitable. 

The entire course of cosmic history has been leading up to the creation and expansion of Bradford Pear Trees.  As you can see from the plot below, all salient events in Bradford Pear Tree history line up in a smooth exponential line.  This proves that Evolution favors the creation of Bradford Pear Trees since there is no other explanation as to why this plot would be exponential.  Right?

Furthermore, since this trend has continued for 14.7 billion years, we can safely assume that Bradford Pear Trees will continue to expand eventually consuming the entire Universe.  

This is all quite inevitable. 

The entire course of cosmic history has been leading up to the creation of and subsequent domination by Naked Mole Rats.  As you can see from the plot below, all salient events in Naked Mole Rat history line up in a smooth exponential line.  This proves that Evolution favors the creation of Naked Mole Rats since there is no other explanation as to why this plot would be exponential. 

Our future is clear.  Naked Mole Rats will inevitably spread out from the horn of Africa and consume all biomass on the planet earth.  Next, the Naked-Mole-Rat ball will expand out from the planet earth converting non-Naked-Mole-Rat matter into Naked-Mole-Rat matter.  The entire universe will then be turned into Naked Mole Rats.

This is all quite inevitable. 

One of the main errors Transhumanists make with their religion is that they are way too specific with the date when the Messiah (a.k.a. the Strong A.I.) will come to initiate the Rapture (a.k.a. brain uploading). For instance, Kurzweil believes the Messiah will arrive in 2029. FM-2030 thought it would arrive in, yep, 2030. In being so specific with the date of the Rapture, they are assuring that their religion will fail when the date passes and nothing happens.

Of course, the main reason the date of ~2030 is chosen is because many Transhumanists are baby boomers who are desperately afraid of dying. So they conveniently make up a date that coincides with when the average boomer will reach the average human life span of ~85 years.

Successful religions are suitably vague with their prognostications. It is enough to say that believers will be saved at some future date but leave the when and where up to their imaginations.

As it so happens, this pattern of religious prediction followed by disappointment happened at least one other time in American history when the Millerite Dispensationalist movement in upstate New York failed to predict the coming of the Messiah on October 22nd, 1844. Interestingly, this Great Disappointment did not lead to the end of the Millerite movement but rather transformed the movement into the Seventh-day Adventists who are still around today. The Adventists merely reinterpreted the prediction as being when the process of Investigative Judgment began in heaven. This is still part of the theology of Seventh-day Adventists today.

So, maybe I spoke too soon about the end of the Religion of Transhumanism in ~2030. Following the 2nd Great Disappointment, I suspect that Transhumanists will still believe in the inevitability of the techno-Messiah, just that the date was off a bit for a variety of reasons. Expect cryonics to see a huge boom around 2030 as thousands of Transhumanists freeze themselves. There will likely be many offshoots of the Religion of Transhumanism at this time, each one just as bizarre as the original.

Since I will be in Las Vegas this weekend, I thought it would be a good chance to talk a little probability and how it relates to evolution.

Transhumanists believe that an intelligent technology-creating species was the inevitable result of evolution. It was in the cards, so to speak. They might allow for freak events like supernovae and meteor impacts that set us back to zero, but the trend towards intelligence is inexorable. I claim that there is no way to prove that such a trend exists and that therefore we must accept the null hypothesis which is that we are a fluke just like all other species.

Let's say that you want to gamble for 1 hour in Vegas. According to the great and powerful Wizard of Odds, the chance of being dealt a blackjack is about 1 in ~20.7 which means you will on average be dealt about 3 blackjacks during 1 hour of gambling (assuming 1 hand every minute). This isn't a guarantee but it is pretty likely.

If, however, you play Poker, the chance of being dealt a royal flush is 1 in 649740. You would be very lucky to be dealt a royal flush in one hour of gambling. Indeed, many poker players never see a royal flush their entire lives. It isn't impossible, but it is so unlikely that it is essentially zero.

If we say that the time that life has to evolve on our planet (about 10 billion years before the sun consumes the earth) is equivalent to one hour of gambling, then the Transhumanist position is that we are like a blackjack where as my position (and the position of accepted science) is that we are a royal flush.

Most people will say that Portobello Mushrooms, Bradford Pear Trees, and Naked Mole Rats are like royal flushes since the set of possible organisms is so vast, the chance that any specific organism will evolve is vanishingly small. So the null hypothesis is that we must also be just as flukish as any other species.

I think this blackjack vs. royal flush analogy is useful for understanding my differences with the Transhumanists. My next argument in my ongoing Refutation of Transhumanism is to show that intelligence is not inevitable.

Robert Wright, author of Non-zero: The Logic of Human Destiny is now a guest columnist on the most influential opinion page in the country, if not the world: the New York Times. In case you don't know who Wright is, a few years ago he wrote a book called Non-zero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright's central thesis is that (you guessed it) there is a long term trend towards increasing complexity in the history of life on Earth and our species is the inevitable outcome of that trend. This inevitable trend continues when technology picks up where biology left off and we get complex things like computers and the internet, etc. How does he know this? Because organisms get caught in "arms races" which inevitably creates more complexity.

Of course, this is all nonsense. Wright never bothers to define complexity in a way that is scientifically measurable. Like pornography, he knows it when he sees it, and he sees it in us. But we are naturally biased to view ourselves as being on the top of the heap. Furthermore, who is to say that an organism caught in an "arms race" might not win the arms race by become less complex. For instance, big brains are a huge expense both in the time required for learning and in the energy required for maintaining the brain. Better to dumb yourself down and just make more babies if you feel you are
under evolutionary pressure.

In any case, Wright's book and philosophy were a big hit with left-leaning believers in the Idea of Progress like Bill Clinton and Times columnist Tom Friedman. Surely, it was Friedman who got Wright his current gig at the Times. Friedman's blind belief in Progress caused him to support an absurd war in Iraq because he, like Bush, believed in the inevitability of Democracy.

Wright's last column is an example of the smarmy optimism that results from his Progressive philosophy. According to Wright, "The selfishness of our genes gave us the illuminating power of love and put us on the path to a kind of transcendence." This happened because our genes force us to love our kids. Wright says that this genetic love results in truth because we see our progeny more honestly than we see other people's children. Really?! It seems to me that we are much more blinded to the truth by this genetic love.

Also, Wright fails to mention the enormous hatred that our genes produce in the form of tribalism. Just look and see what is happening in Iraq right now for the sake of tribes.

Given the way Wright has spun his bogus philosophy of Progress into a column in the Times, it seems that I am on the wrong side in this debate. The Idea of Progress is simply too powerful right now in America for my blog to be very successful.

But, I shall persevere! At least until I get too lazy.

Where did the meme of Transhumanism come from anyway? I have sketched a rough taxonomy that I think gives the basic genealogy of this idea (see below).

It all starts with the enormous influence of our common Judeo-Christian heritage and specifically the idea of Providence which is the belief that there is a loving God watching over the world and guiding history. In the 1700s, philosophers starting with Fontanelle and Condorcet secularized Providence by claiming that history follows inevitable progressive trends. Since the 1700s, every modern ideological movement has linked itself to the Idea of Progress: Marxism, Fascism, Positivism, Capitalism and now
Transhumanism.

In America, many religious faiths, such as Mormonism and the Southern Baptists, have been influenced by Gnostic ideas. Broadly speaking, Gnosticism was an ancient religion that professed that we were self-created instead of created by God. However, one day we would all become Gods through knowledge. This is an obvious influence on Transhumanism because a post-human will be a kind of God: immortal, omniscient and all-powerful.

Finally, the empirical observation of Moore's Law coupled with the insight from cognitive science that the mind/brain is like a computer caused the movement to gel around technology in the mid-90s.

Now that growth in computational power is winding down, the movement doesn't have much time left but I'm sure it will be replaced with some other religion.

One of the articles of faith of the Religion of Transhumanism is that technology is accelerating. It is a truth that they hold to be self-evident. However, the Transhumanists never bother to actually measure technological growth, which one can, in fact, do. They just make hand-waving arguments or they cherry-pick unrelated data points out of thin air so that they will fit an exponential plot like Kurzweil.

The best way to measure technological growth is multi-factor productivity (MFP) which measures the output per unit input for our entire economy. As technology improves, the amount of output you get per dollar and per labor-hour should increase.

Well…

The Northwestern Univ. economist Robert Gordon has looked into these issues for some time now and he concludes that technological growth has stagnated since the 70's. Gordon recognizes (along with most historians of technology) that the key technical advances of the past 200 years all came in four clusters from 1870-1910. These clusters were the development of electricity (motors, light and household appliances); the internal combustion engine (which created motor and air transport, transforming the economic geography of the world); the chemical revolution (creating industries such as petro-chemicals, man-made fibers and pharmaceuticals); and, finally, the radio wave revolution (giving birth to telephony, radio and television). These technologies percolated into the American society over the first two-thirds of the 20th century causing productivity growth to rise dramatically (see below).



However, during the 70's, productivity growth collapsed dropping to pre-1900 levels. This shows that technology has slowed down dramatically since the early 70's. There may have been a blip of MFP increase in the last few years thanks to computers but this productivity growth was mainly confined to the semi-conductor industry and was not felt in the wider economy.

This scientifically proves that technology is NOT accelerating.

Transhumanism is a religion. It is based on the Idea of Progress which is the belief that there is an inevitable historical trend towards some grand Utopia. But the Idea of Progress is really just a secularized version of Christian Providence.

I am an atheist but not a militant one. Live and let live, I say. My problem with the religion of Transhumanism is that it claims to be a science. Also, I have some affection for those old time religions because they are beautiful, whereas Transhumanism is ugly.

For all you Transhumanists out there: if you have such a pressing need for some purpose in your life, why not consider Christianity or Judaism? They have so many things that the Religion of Transhumanism lacks: music, poetry, art, Saints and sinners, customs, traditions, etc.

But the most important things they have are girls. There aren't many female Transhumanists and I suspect that most Transhumanists are lonely men who really need a girlfriend. Just show up to a Church and you will find lots of nice girls to meet.

After reading Kurzweil's section on brain scanning and how it is exponentially-accelerating, it dawned on me that I am actually pretty-well suited to refute Kurzweil on these matters. As it so happens, I just wrote a proposal to a certain government agency on a new method for imaging plant cells.

So the first problem with Kurzweil's claims is that all optical techniques, including the knife-edge scanning microscope he cites, are limited by the diffraction limit of light:

Spot Size = 0.61 lambda/N.A.

where lambda is the wavelength of light and N.A. is the numerical aperture of the microscope objective. N.A. will be around 1 (up to 1.5 for immersion lenses) and the wavelength is usually no lower than about 200 nm. So the minimum spot size will be around 200 nm. This resolution will allow you to see some cell structures but it won't give you the resolution to see the interneuronal processes which are important to cognition. (Much of Kurzweil's religion is based on the belief that you can ignore what happens within neurons. I will debunk this faith-based assertion in future posts.)

Techniques based on AFM (atomic force microscopy) require that the sample be on a flat substrate and can only measure surface structures.

Actually, the main problem for in vivo brain scanning is that neurons move tens of microns whenever the heart beats. All imaging techniques require relatively stationary samples so all these techniques will fail in vivo.

So, of course, Kurzweil falls back on his belief in the inevitability of nanobots, even though there isn't a single scientific article on nanobots. Not ONE!

So, once you scratch the surface, all of Kurzweil's arguments fall apart.

Last November, Ray Kurzweil and David Gelernter debated at MIT on the topic of Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics. In case you don't know, Gelernter is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale who has written extensively about computers and information technology. More importantly, he survived an attack by the Unabomber in 1993. He wrote a book called Drawing Life where he talked about the bombing and its effect on his life.

I read Drawing Life when it came out and one part that stuck in my mind was that the Unabomber apparently wrote a letter to Gelernter after the bombing; the only instance of him doing that for any of his victims. In the letter Kaczynski seemed to express a twisted regret in attacking Gelernter because he stumbled on some writings that suggested that Gelernter was skeptical of technology. Kaczynski had bombed the wrong guy and he wanted to save face.

I mention this because I think it is relevant to Gelernter's debate with Kurzweil. Kurzweil and Kaczynski have the same basic beliefs about technology except that one is utopian and the other is dystopian. Both spew the same nonsense about inevitable accelerating change and super-intelligent machines.

In the debate, Gelernter clearly gets exasperated with Kurzweil. At one point you can see him waving his hand that is still in a cast after being damaged by the Unabomber 13 years prior. Gelernter must be aware of the obvious connection between Kurzweil and Kaczynski. Perhaps he viewed the debate as a confrontation-by-proxy with the Kaczynski?

I am a big fan of Gelernter and have read his columns in Commentary for some time. He also wrote a great book on the 1939 World's Fair. Gelernter, like me, seems to like technology for its own sake, not for some bizarre pseudo-religious reason like Kurzweil.

I think the tactic Gelernter took in the debate, which was to question the definition of consciousness, was somewhat ineffective. The way to attack Kurzweil is at the root: refute his "Law of Accelerating Returns" (see below).  I will continue the attack in the posts to follow but I feel honored to be on the same side as Gelernter.

Well, this will sound corny, but I am refuting Transhumanism to make the world a better place.

I am in my mid-30s and I recognize my own limitations enough to know that I will never win the Nobel Prize. Also, science funding is so terrible now that most of my time is spent on proprietary programs that don't allow me to write many papers. Even if I could write more, it wouldn't leave much of a mark as most papers aren't referenced 5 years after they've been published anyway.

However, thanks to the internet,