About once a month, I hear another Transhumanist in the news.  Recently, it was Kurzweil in Newsweek saying that he will resurrect his father.  As an atheist, I find this stuff very annoying because Kurzweil is using his credentials and technical jargon to pitch a religion to a public that doesn't know any better.   The reason he does this is not to convince others in the giant universe-sized computer ball which will be God, but to convince himself.  Does he really believe in this stuff, or is this just a scam to make money?  One thing is certain, he is either a liar or a fool. 

Transhumanism started in the late 80s when people began to notice the dramatic increase in computing power and extrapolated the trend.  Transhumanism will end when the price-to-performance ratio of computers reaches it's inevitable plateau and information technology becomes a commodity.  I just wish it would happen already!!!

        

I was curious to see if de Grey had actually tried to defend his belief in inevitable accelerating technology when I came across Bret Weinstein's argument in the SENS Challenge (here).  In my last post, I claimed that de Grey had read my blog since he seemed to respond to a point I made on the deceleration of aviation technology.  This is wrong because de Grey already was forced to respond to this point by Weinstein.  It is instructive to read this exchange because it goes right to the heart of de Grey’s entire argument. 

 

Weinstein identifies de Grey’s fundamental point:

 

The clear, but unstated, implication of de Grey’s framing is that senescence is a tractable engineering problem. In fact, it’s not even an implication, it’s an assumption.

 

Precisely.  However, I would add that de Grey’s assumption is even more expansive than that.  He assumes that there is a technical solution to EVERYTHING.  This includes preventing earthquakes and hurricanes, space travel, and re-engineering stars to prevent them from going supernova.  The only limit comes from our lack of will to solve the problem.  However, Weinstein points out that:

(h)e is ignoring the fact of diminishing returns, and the apparent inevitability of the curve leveling off.

 

Diminishing returns happens to all accelerating trends because each doubling is twice as hard as the previous one.  De Grey’s thinking (like all Transhumanists’) is Malthusian in that he merely assumes that the trend will go on forever. 

 

De Grey responds:

 

The “escape velocity” concept is based not on faith but on the history of technology, in which incremental refinements of an initial breakthrough reliably occur at, if anything, an accelerating rate rather than encountering diminishing returns, subject only to sustained public enthusiasm for further progress (which faded with, e.g., space travel but seems dependable in respect of postponing aging).

 

This sentence encapsulates de Grey’s entire argument.  All of the SENS ideas are just obfuscatory filler compared to it.  In short, all technologies inevitably accelerate and only slow down for lack of public enthusiasm. 

 

In responding to Weinstein’s main point that ‘Diminishing returns is the proper model (for technological progress), and it provides little basis for hope,’ de Grey just reverses Weinstein’s point back at him:

 

reasons also exist for optimism regarding our ability to continue to combat new sources of aging damage … we will be taking advantage of … the accelerating rate of progress in biomedical research generally. 

 

Follow that?  Biomedical research won’t decelerate because it is accelerating. 

 

Another flawed assumption that all Transhumanists have is displayed by de Grey:

 

Engineering problems are properly considered tractable unless their achievement would contravene scientific laws or mathematical theorems

 

Weinstein responds to this point in his rebuttal:

 

And what about the laws, limits and theorems that are emergent in complex systems? Humanity is only just beginning to understand these second order limits that arise in highly complex systems, and yet de Grey would have us believe that the least restrictive set of rules, the ones we already know, are the only ones with which we need to concern ourselves.

 

Precisely.  I made this point in another posting but it is worth repeating.  You don’t know what is going to happen with any technology until you actually test it.  The behavior of even very simple systems can be controlled by complex interactions of multiple factors that can make the technology intractable.  De Grey claims that he is an engineer but he thinks like a scientist in how he assumes that the world follows nice regular abstract patterns that can be easily modeled and manipulated.  In reality, everything around us is interacting in a complex combinatorial non-linear way that almost always defies description by ‘scientific laws and mathematical theorems’. 

 

Weinstein concludes:

 

What can I say? The conclusion is sacred. Total rejuvenation and perpetual youth are foreseeable for people alive today. If escape velocity is required, then it must be justified. If diminishing returns is an impediment, then it must be entirely sociological.

 

Yep.  These Transhumanists want to believe it and nothing you can say will change their minds.  This only reinforces my feeling that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with this nonsense.  I’m not one to argue with religious believers since it is nearly impossible to change their minds and the main reason they believe is because it makes them feel good about themselves, so let them be. 

 

Fortunately, the looming end of the accelerating price-to-performance ratio of computers should deal a severe, hopefully mortal, blow to Transhumanism. 

        

GEEZ!  I am a lazy sod!  It's been almost a year since my last post.  This blog costs me just $53.81/year so it's not too bad I suppose.  Plus, I value my time more than my money.

However, I feel the need to respond to Aubrey de Grey's entry on the current Edge poll about What will Change Everything?  Apparently, de Grey has read my blog! 

In this post, I point out that de Grey's argument about accelerating aviation requires that there be new breakthroughs in 1990 and 2010. De Grey responds that:

"But to make my aviation analogy stick, I of course need to explain the dramatic lack of progress in the past 40 years (since Concorde)." 

His explanation is that "we haven't developed them because we couldn't be bothered, an obstacle that is not likely to occur when it comes to postponing aging." 

Basically, his argument is that the will to invent is a sufficient cause of technological acceleration and since avoiding death is a never-ending source of will, it's cure is inevitable.  De Grey's argument apparently extends to engineering stars to prevent them from going supernova!  I wonder, won't we also have the will to go back in time to rescue dead relatives?  Is time travel inevitable?

It is true that having the will to invent is necessary for technological advancement; the perfect example being the moon landing.  If the Soviets hadn't beaten us into space I doubt we would have ever bothered to land men on the moon.  There would've been no need to one up them.  However, having the will is just the beginning. 

We live in a universe that is governed by laws of physics that limit what is possible.  Real-world phenomena are the result of many complex interactions that defy simple prediction.  Therefore, most limits are unknown until they are discovered by experimentation.  We simple don't know what technologies will or won't work until we actually try to invent them. 

Is it true that the aviation industry just couldn't be bothered to develop anything new?  That doesn't sound like them.  I interviewed with GE Aircraft 10 years ago and they seemed to have a lot of R&D going on.  Mainly on thermal barrier coatings. 

Maybe a better explanation for the decline in progress is that all technologies eventually run into problems that can't be cheaply solved and so no one wants to pay for them anymore.  The technology then becomes a commodity. 

De Grey believes that there are inevitable technical solutions to every problem we will ever encounter, like cookie crumbs leading us out of the forest.  He bases this belief on absolutely nothing.  Not even a Ouija board. 

        

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?