Infeasible

I'm Back ... Briefly

HP LaLancette — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:55:03 GMT

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

Happy Birthday Jacques Barzun!!!

HP LaLancette — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:55:52 GMT

Jacques Barzun turns 100 years old today. His book Science: The Glorious Entertainment is on my night stand right now. He wrote one of the best books I have ever read: From Dawn to Decadence.

Aubrey de Grey: Just the Computer Guy after all

HP LaLancette — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:12:55 GMT

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.

Accelerating Aviation?

HP LaLancette — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:57:41 GMT

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?

Ending Aging

HP LaLancette — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:35:47 GMT

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!

Transistors: Pound for Pound

HP LaLancette — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:38:22 GMT

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.

Mad Max or the Matrix?

HP LaLancette — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 20:36:43 GMT

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.

Mormonism and Transhumanism

HP LaLancette — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:58:01 GMT

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.

Life Expectancy won't Budge Much

HP LaLancette — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:18:56 GMT

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."

Sorry for not posting for a while but ...

HP LaLancette — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:08:54 GMT

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.

Soft Vitalism

HP LaLancette — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 20:06:27 GMT

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.

Jefferson and Technology

HP LaLancette — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:26:00 GMT

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.

Back from Vacation

HP LaLancette — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:26:36 GMT

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.

Diminishing Returns for Pharmaceuticals?

HP LaLancette — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:59:08 GMT

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.

My Dog

HP LaLancette — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:44:44 GMT

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

The Heart of my Argument

HP LaLancette — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:40:00 GMT

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.

Why I'm Skeptical about Nanotechnology

HP LaLancette — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:37:28 GMT

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?

Who can be bothered with this nonsense?

HP LaLancette — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:19:00 GMT

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…

My Cop-Out Argument

HP LaLancette — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:57:00 GMT

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.

What About Time Travel?

HP LaLancette — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:48:48 GMT

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.