Mind uploading: the write answer

A 1st generation Apple iPad showing iBooks, with the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A book, one might say, is a document consisting of text, printed in ink on sheets of paper. A human mind, one might likewise say, is an entity consisting of ideas, thought processes and emotions, configured into neurons, synapses and glial cells in a brain.

But if I ask whether or not the book you're reading is Alice in Wonderland, I don't care what kind of ink or paper it's printed on, or whether or not it's printed at all. As far as the reader is concerned, a book is text, not the configuration of matter used to store that text. Nobody questions whether or not an e-book can be Alice, just because Alice was originally a printed book.

Dehumanize me!

The usual chart explaining the Uncanny Valley concept. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to a comment thread on this Slashdot post, which I just found yesterday, I don't instinctively act "normal" enough that the average person can accept me as a normal, healthy human being. But I'm too normal to be accepted as anything else. I have Asperger Syndrome (professionally diagnosed), and Slashdot says that puts me in the Uncanny Valley.

(While this hypothesis hasn't been confirmed to my knowledge, it's the only plausible explanation I can find for why Aspies are blind to our own and each other's publicly-perceived weirdness. The Uncanny Valley seems to be a fairly new, but very active, field of research. I'm treating the Uncanny Valley effect as a working hypothesis, while I wait for it to pass the test of science.)

Getting out of it on the human side won't be an option, at least until a way is found to reliably (and therefore without conscious effort) suppress the noticeable effects of Asperger Syndrome. It has to be done without throwing out the baby with the bathwater (apparently AS may be contributing to my talent in computer science). I figure if that's possible at all, it will require AI and/or neuroscience to reach near-Singularity levels.

Plus, staying on the right side of the Valley may prove overly restrictive if I need an extra pair of arms, or if the new chip I want to put in my brain needs a heat sink. A recent nasty incident, involving a camera eye, suggests that being an early-adopter visible cyborg (as I plan to) probably won't help in general.

But there's another option as well: climb out the other side of the Uncanny Valley, and become a cyborg in some non-humanoid form. Instead of rejecting me as an overly abnormal human, people can accept me as something else, and my human side will become a pleasant surprise rather than a let-down. This will probably be technologically feasible by 2030, and I'm already far from alone in wanting a change of body plan. I'd considered the idea before, but only in abstract terms. I'd assumed that looking more or less human for as long as possible would help with social acceptance.

It's a surprisingly Troperiffic conclusion. My​Species​Doth​Protest​Too​Much that I'm a Humanoid​Abomination, because neurotypical people are hard-wired to be Obliviously​Evil Absolute​Xenophobes. Until yesterday, my own Weirdness​Censor kept me so Wrong​Genre​Savvy that I thought I was in A​Form​You​Are​Comfortable​With, and my plans to keep it that way would have been subverted. What​Measure​Is​A​Humanoid? But if I become a One​Winged​Angel, people will realize how much of me has been Human​All​Along, and that's what any Pro​Human​Transhuman would want.

Time to start researching designs for non-human cyborgs, and deciding what I want to be when humanity grows up. Unlike the typical spiritualistic Otherkin, I'm not substrate-chauvinistic enough to believe I have a "true" form. But because I'm not locked into one, I have a wide-open catalog to pick from. Affective psychology class is tough; let's go shopping!

The Singularity movie is near

IMDB says The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil's film adaptation of his 2005 book, is opening in the US this Friday. I don't know where they got this date from (all the other sources I can find just say "Summer"), but let's spread the word anyway. After all, the more people are expecting it to open on Friday, the more incentive there'll be for it to actually open on Friday. (And if the movie's release can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, then maybe its subject matter can as well, but that's another story.)

TSIN is part documentary and part science fiction, and you probably don't have to agree with many of Kurzweil's predictions to appreciate both parts. In the documentary scenes, Kurzweil interviews dozens of experts, gathers opposing viewpoints about the history and future of technology like any good documentarian, and presents his own conclusions.

Computer literacy: the importance of reading for young artificial neural networks

Photo from New York Times

Recently, a Stanford researcher and a Google X team made headlines with their study on unsupervised learning. Starting with one of the biggest neural networks ever built (1 billion connections and 16,000 CPU cores), they fed in a still frame from each of 10 million YouTube videos and watched it learn to identify human faces and cats.

But why aren't experiments on a similar scale being done with text data? I can think of three reasons why they should be.

Boson-ward and upward

Talk about too much excitement before bed! CERN confirmed tonight (both links still updating live) that they've found a particle of the right mass to be the long-awaited Higgs boson.

BBC News explains, though, that to confirm that the newly-discovered particle is the Higgs, scientists will need to know more properties than its mass, and that this'll take a few more years.

Higgs or not, it'll be exciting to see what other results --- and, I'm betting, practical applications --- the discovery leads to in that time.

Mind uploading: from mad science to peer-reviewed literature

It's finally happened.

This month, for the first time ever, a peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated a "Special Issue" to the subject of mind uploading. A theoretical process whereby human beings could become software, mind uploading promises all kinds of benefits imaginable, from immortality to cheap space travel.

Breaking the not-Facebook addiction

Why did I give up on Facebook years ago, and why did I decide today to come back? It's a long story. It started when I was a freshman, and got nothing but disappointment from Facebook that year.

My roommate went to a party school called Durham College, which happened to share the same dorms as my university's satellite campus. The matchmaking was an epic fail. He was in his fourth year of a 3-year program, had never even seen the campus library, and insisted on throwing a party the night before my first class, which I decided would be the worst time to show up without getting a full night's sleep first.

It was one of his party guests who insisted I open a Facebook account. The only people who friended me were the type my roommate tended to associate with -- extroverts who didn't believe in studying or being smart, and who were clueless about science and technology. Thus, I came to believe these were the only sorts of people who used Facebook, and all it was used for was wasting time. (This was back in 2007, so those beliefs may still have been widespread and partly true.)

After I moved into a single room, I stopped using Facebook. I thought, "Don't hate the players, hate the game." The problem was that by then, "the game" was almost everyone I could possibly ever come into contact with. For all practical purposes, "the game" was humanity.

Just as I was learning that smart people were out there (finding out about Transhumanism and Singularitarianism were a start) and that they used Facebook too, the horror stories started pouring in. Likejacking, cyberstalking, the online background check. Meanwhile, the Room 641A revelations were making my dad's ex-girlfriend's conspiracy theories harder to dismiss. Even though I used an anti-virus program and a browser that wasn't Internet Explorer, I felt safer staying off Facebook.

When Google+ came out, I was an early adopter. Finally, a social networking site from a company that had experience handling security and privacy, and where enough of the software engineers were old enough to know what they were doing! Alas, it never took off the way I hoped it would.

When the above "Not Google Plus" video came out, I watched it and commented, "I prefer not Facebook." But I didn't just prefer it -- I let it define me. It was how I stayed secure online, how I avoided distractions when I needed to study. In a sea of Facebook addicts, I was addicted to not-Facebook. Addicted, in other words, to being alone.

And then I wondered why nobody ever read my blog. (That's why I haven't posted much this winter -- I decided if I wanted to write stuff nobody was ever going to read, I'd work on my thesis.)

But things are changing:

• Facebook has made some long-overdue privacy fixes, and ended the all-or-nothing fallacy of its social graph with an "Acquaintances" category.
• A popular video has argued that social media can save the planet (highly speculative, but so are all the alternatives) and politics as we know it can't.
• An expert argues persuasively that a lack of large teams is holding back progress in AI. Software has always been a field for extreme introverts, and AI is one of those fields where money isn't bringing us together in large enough numbers.
• In two years, I'll need an advisor for a Ph.D. dissertation. I can't do it at the one university that already knows me, because they don't have a doctoral-level program in computing. Thus, I need to network with profs elsewhere.
• I also need a girlfriend. As an undergrad, I decided to avoid distractions by staying single. But my biochemistry has changed to the point where being single is a distraction. (Which strikes me as a case of the tail wagging the dog, but maybe that's why it's called "getting some tail".)

Today I decided to give Facebook another try. It'll be a slow process, but maybe -- just maybe -- it'll be worthwhile in the end.