Dean's World

UPDATE: Hey, here are two plotlines that won't make it to TV: (1) With the help of Ray Kurzweil, they develop a "friendly" AI that subverts and converts Skynet as soon as it's hooked up;

Fascinating.

Cool.

I suspect that this will also bring the era of the self-driving car all the closer.

Cool!

Quoted:

On Tuesday, Canadian company D-Wave Systems demonstrated a 16-qubit, specific-purpose quantum computer to a room packed with observers and thick with doubt and awe. Reporters watched as the machine solved a Sudoku puzzle and a seating arrangements problem, and, most impressively, searched for molecules similar to the drug Prilosec from a database of molecules.

But the final significance of D-Wave's demo is as uncertain as the fate of Schrödinger's cat — opinions are all over the place, within the scientific community and without. To cut through the fog, Wired News sought out the father of quantum computing, Oxford University theoretical physicist David Deutsch.

The rest of the article goes into the theoretical implications of quantum computers, much of which rests on the assumption that the idea of multiple universes is true. I never knew that, but he Deutsch states that the entire theory all but requires their existence. Interesting, eh?

In the meantime, they're building specific computers to work on things like Sudoku puzzles or search databases. Using particles smaller than an atom.

And should for some time now.

You know, I've been hearing since the early 1990s now that Moore's Law is stopping, or has stopped, or will stop very soon.

It never has, and shows no signs of it now.

Asimo gets better every year. It's not the only example of such a robot either.

(Thanks for this latest cool video, Bryan.)

A new breakthrough in data storage.

Imagine being able to hold 500 full-length movies on a single DVD-style disc. Or maybe a small cube.

This isn't the end by any means though. On the bleeding edge we have techniques now where, by controlling the spin on individual electrons of atoms, we can make them represent a 0 or a 1.

The next 10 years are going to make the previous 10 years look slow and primitive.

Note from Dean's World pal Jerry Kindall:

"Once upon a time lasers were expensive and if you wanted a laser show, you had to be a big-name group and the lasers went with you on tour, with their own dedicated personnel."

"Now you can just blow up a weather balloon and give everyone in the crowd a laser pointer and let them be your laser light show."

Yep, that probably cost a few hundred bucks at most. Certainly, it lacks the sophistication of what expensive shows do these days, but it's actually far more sophisticated than would have been possible with a million dollars worth of equipment in, say, 1980.

South Korean tech giant Samsung has begun manufacturing sentry/guard robots featuring voice recognition, pattern recognition, independent judgement--and deadly-accurate machine guns.

The South Korean government is currently testing them for use along the North Korean border. More details here.

As Mike in the comments to an earlier thread put it, robots with machine guns? What could possibly go wrong?

Technological growth is almost always exponential. It also usually grows unnoticed until one day the tech suddenly seems common, then ubiquitous. I suspect we're rapidly approaching the "knee" of the curve on robotics, where it gradually becomes apparent to everyone that robots are suddenly popping up all over the place doing a surprising number of things.

Fixing macular degeneration--the most common cause of blindness in the US--using nanotech?

Still in its infancy but it does indeed look promising.

Wow.

They have recently figured out how to grow a new human bladder. Now they're close to being able to grow a liver. There's also an artificial pancreas in the pipeline.

How much longer do you think it will be before they can grow you a new heart, lung, or kidney? Made from your own genetic material and thus bypassing all compatibility concerns?

The next 10 years are going to make the previous ten years look like child's play.

Back in April we say how scientists found a way to engineer a virus to manufacture battery components. Now they've also found a way to use it to enhance electronic memory components.

Quoted:

When her doctors first called her "The Bionic Woman," 26-year-old Claudia Mitchell didn't understand the reference to the 1970s TV show about the secret agent who was part woman, part machine.

Besides, the first woman to be outfitted with a bionic arm says that when the motors are running in the 10-pound device, it reminds her of another famous cyborg — Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Terminator.

"It's really cool," she says. "This is not just something in the movies. This is really happening." Mitchell, a former U.S. Marine, lost her left arm in 2004 on an Arkansas highway when the friend she was riding with lost control of his motorcycle.

She can even feel through it. Fully story right here.

What's cool is this isn't theory. It's actually working. And, as with all high tech, it will over time get cheaper, work better, and be more generally available. By the mid-2020s at latest I'm betting replacements like this are routine, just as hip and knee and heart valve replacements are today.

Oh, but the world's not really changing all that fast...

By the way, this program is yet another reason why conservatives and libertarians who want to cut off all funding for research are simply off-base. It's a technology that would almost certainly take many, many more years for private industry to produce, because the immediate commercial payoff is completely non-obvious. We need government funding for "blue sky" research like this. (Although that can be overstated, and it does not mean we should not be looking for greater reforms and transparency in how that government research is funded and who gets the funds. That's a separate issue entirely.)

Scientists have designed a radically new transistor that's much smaller, much more reliable, uses much less power, and is much less subject to interference than any current design.

Pretty soon it's going to start looking like magic.

Check it out!

A team of scientists at Princeton, the University of Illinois, and the University of Iowa has made semiconductors that manipulate individual metal atoms.

The age of quantum computing draws near.

anyone remember having to use a special mail prefix for sending email to Compuserve or Prodigy users? If not, count your blessings. Though, if the evil forces opposing net neutrality have their way, we might yet see such abominations arise in our URLs...

Well, instant messaging has been in that particular limbo for many years. Decades, in fact. Until today. A while back, Google announced total compatibility with the Jabber chat protocol; that finally set off enough alarm bells of fear at Miccrosoft and Yahoo to set in motion the grand plan of cross-platform chat once and for all. And today, those plans come to fruition.

Behold - cross-platform chat, on Yahoo Messenger and MSN.

Check it out!

We can make the deaf hear, make the blind see, and replacement limbs that operate nearly as well as the real thing. But don't let anyone tell you that the world is changing rapidly...

Instapundit notes yet another astounding biotech advancement.

One argument by warming skeptics is that the Kyoto Protocol would 1. do nothing to stop warming and 2. would utterly obliterate the US economy.

To answer point 1, Kyoto alone would not do enough, but it would be a good start. But doing nothing is worse.

With regards to point 2, I believe that is a gross underestimation of the strength of American innovation and ingenuity. I mean, how can we be talking about the Singularity one moment and then cowering in fear at a few mere engineering challenges the next? If anything the development of new technologies to implement Kyoto will be as much a stimulus to the economy and entrepeneurship as was the introduction of CAFE standards for automobiles - which stimulated the development of hybrids, continously-variable transmissions, and even "clean diesel" engines.

But all that aside, in fact we actually bear a gross ecconomic burden already by NOT having ratified Kyoto. Rather than make a clumsy attempt at explaining economics despite my lack of training in that field, I will leave it to the following expert to make the case:

The Kyoto Protocol is a key first step to help slow the onslaught of global warming and benefit conservation efforts…Until the United States passes its own limits on global warming emissions, innovative companies based here will lose out on opportunities to sell reduced emission credits to companies complying with the Kyoto Protocol overseas. Additionally, without enacting our own emission limits, U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries participating in the Protocol who are developing clean technologies.

That's the new treasury secretary nominee by President Bush, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr. Count him amongst my ilk.

A fascinating article that looks at both the current state of medical care, and what the future may look like, is the cover story of the latest BusinessWeek.

Quotes:

For [Dr. David] Eddy, this is one small step toward solving the thorniest riddle in medicine -- a dark secret he has spent his career exposing. "The problem is that we don't know what we are doing," he says. Even today, with a high-tech health-care system that costs the nation $2 trillion a year, there is little or no evidence that many widely used treatments and procedures actually work better than various cheaper alternatives.

This judgment pertains to a shocking number of conditions or diseases, from cardiovascular woes to back pain to prostate cancer. During his long and controversial career proving that the practice of medicine is more guesswork than science, Eddy has repeatedly punctured cherished physician myths. He showed, for instance, that the annual chest X-ray was worthless, over the objections of doctors who made money off the regular visit. He proved that doctors had little clue about the success rate of procedures such as surgery for enlarged prostates. He traced one common practice -- preventing women from giving birth vaginally if they had previously had a cesarean -- to the recommendation of one lone doctor. Indeed, when he began taking on medicine's sacred cows, Eddy liked to cite a figure that only 15% of what doctors did was backed by hard evidence.

That's something more people should be aware of. Sadly we treat doctors like they know everything, rather than what they really are: smart people who got through medical school but are hardly infallible--and a lot of them talk with confidence of things they have no right to be so confident about.

What's required is a revolution called "evidence-based medicine," says Eddy, a heart surgeon turned mathematician and health-care economist. Tall, lean, and fit at 64, Eddy has the athletic stride and catlike reflexes of the ace rock climber he still is. He also exhibits the competitive drive of someone who once obsessively recorded his time on every training run, and who still likes to be first on a brisk walk up a hill near his home in Aspen, Colo. In his career, he has never been afraid to take a difficult path or an unpopular stand. "Evidence-based" is a term he coined in the early 1980s, and it has since become a rallying cry among medical reformers. The goal of this movement is to pierce the fog that envelops the practice of medicine -- a state of ignorance for which doctors cannot really be blamed. "The limitation is the human mind," Eddy says. Without extensive information on the outcomes of treatments, it's fiendishly difficult to know the best approach for care.

Interestingly, he's also developed a computer system to help with diagnostic recommendations and make them more outcome-based, more evidence-based:

Eddy's computer simulation could help more patients attain appropriate care. His approach is to create a SimCity-like world in silicon, where virtual doctors conduct trials of virtual patients and figure out what treatments work. After getting funding from Kaiser Permanente in 1991, Eddy hired a particle physicist, Len Schlessinger, who knew how to write equations describing the complex interactions in biology. The pair selected diabetes as a test case. In their virtual world, each simulated person has a heart, liver, kidneys, blood, and other organs. As in real people, cells in the pancreas make insulin, which regulates the uptake of glucose in other cells. And as in the real disease, key cells can fail to respond to the insulin, causing high blood-sugar levels and a cascade of biological effects. The virtual patients come down with high blood pressure, heart disease, and poor circulation, which can lead to foot ulcers and amputations, blindness, and other ills. The model also assesses the costs of treating the complications.

Eddy dubbed the model Archimedes and tested it by comparing it with two dozen real trials. One clinical study compared cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to a placebo in diabetics. After 4 1/2 years, the drugs reduced heart attacks by 35%. The exact same thing happened in Eddy's simulated patients. "The Archimedes model is just fabulous in the validation studies," says the University of Michigan's Herman.

You can read the whole thing here.

(Thanks Jerry.)

Whether they're calling it radical evolution, transhumanisim, or the singularity, things are moving faster in biotechnology than most people imagine. Here's a gentle introduction in Popular Mechanics. Note that only half the stuff is speculative, while half is real and actually happening at this moment.

(Thanks Jerry.)

Meet Babybot, an early attempt to engineer perception into a machine.

It's early yet, but probably later than you think.

Cool. This apparently is software you can buy now:

That's what you can do with the live software. Awesome huh? More details right here.

This may seem obvious to you but the fact that the software is so advanced is surprising if you know much about programming you know how tough this stuff can be. The state of software art continues to advance in surprising ways. I'll bet we have excellent real facial recognition in a few more years.

(Thanks Gerund.)

You know, I would suppose that most people would not be as geeked as I am about stories like this, but... Quoted:

By stripping the E. coli genome of vast tracts of its genetic material - hundreds of apparently inconsequential genes - a team of Wisconsin researchers has created a leaner and meaner version of the bacterium that is a workhorse of modern biology and industry.

The feat, reported this week (April 28, 2006) in the journal Science, demonstrates that scientists can make precise, large-scale genetic alterations to organisms without compromising their basic functions. It represents some of the first hard results in a new field of science known as synthetic biology, where researchers are able to mold the entire genomes of bacteria and viruses in unprecedented ways.

They removed--as in, simply edited out--over fifteen percent of this bacterium's genetic code, stuff they basically decided was junk spread throughout the genome. And they got as a result an organism that looks and act just like normal, natural E. Coli.

So this is the state of the art today:

1) They can literally rewrite a genome for an organism.
2) They can produce viable species out of such edits.
3) They understand genetics well enough that they can decide with fair accuracy what's really needed and what's superfluous.

All three of those facts by themselves are impressive. This is way, way beyond what I'll bet most people thought to be possible with today's technology.

Biotechnology appears to be approaching the "knee" of the exponential growth curve, where people suddenly start to notice how fast things are moving.

Designer babies anyone? It may be way closer than you think. Yeah yeah, I know: "But Dean, it's just bacterium! It only reproduces asexually!" Yeah. Anyone else remember when 56kbps was a screaming fast connection?

Quoted:

At least two start-ups have developed technology that monitors a player's brain waves and uses the signals to control the action in games. They hope it will enable game creators to immerse players in imaginary worlds that they can control with their thoughts instead of their hands.

San Jose's NeuroSky has been testing prototypes of its system that uses a sensor-laden headband to monitor brain waves, and then uses the signals to control the interaction in video games. They hope that such games are just the beginning of a mind-machine interface with many different applications.

``Research on brain waves is well known,'' said NeuroSky Chief Executive Stanley Yang. ``But we have worked on a way for detecting them with a low-cost technology and then interpreting what they mean. We think this will have broad applications.''

More right here.

Quoted:

Now 62 and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Koza is the inventor of genetic programming, a revolutionary approach to artificial intelligence (AI) capable of solving complex engineering problems with virtually no human guidance. Koza’s 1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,” as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.

Yet as impressive as these creations may be, none are half as significant as the machine’s method: Darwinian evolution, the process of natural selection. Over and over, bits of computer code are, essentially, procreating. And over the course of hundreds or thousands of generations, that code evolves into offspring so well-adapted for its designated job that it is demonstrably superior to anything we can imagine. The age of creative machines has arrived. And its prophet is John Koza.

More on Popular Science's web site.