A number of people have been hiring “virtual” assistants in lower-wage countries to do all the tasks in their life that don’t require a personal presence. Such assistants are found starting at a few bucks an hour. I have not done it myself, since for some reason most of the things I feel I could pass on to such an assistant are things that involve some personal presence. (Though I suppose I could just ship off all the papers I need scanned and filed every few weeks to get that out of my life, but I want to have a scanner here too.)

Anyway, last weekend I was talking to an acquaintance about his use of such services. He has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date. (Perhaps he also does a quick vet before arranging a date to be sure the assistant has chosen well, but I did not confirm that.)  read more »

I don’t often write about robots that don’t go on roads, but last night I stopped by Willow Garage, the robot startup created by my old friend Scott Hassan. Scott is investing in building open robotics platforms, and giving much of it out free to the world, because he thinks progress in robotics has been far too slow. Last night they unveiled their beta PR2 robots and gave 11 of them to teams from 11 different schools and labs. Those institutions will be all trying to do something creative with the robots, just as a Berkeley team quickly made it able to fold towels a few months ago.

I must admit, as they marched out the 11 robots and had them do synchronous dance there was a moment (about 2 minutes 20 seconds in that video) when it reminded me of a scene from some techno thriller, where the evil overload unveils his new robots to an applauding crowd, and the robots then turn and kill all the humans. Fortunately this did not happen. The real world is very different, and these robots will do a lot of good. They have a lot of processing power, various nice sensors and 2 arms with 7 degrees of freedom. They run ROS, an open source robot operating system which now runs on many other robots.

I was interested because I have proposed that having an open simulator platform for robocars could also spur development from people without the budgets to build their own robocars (and crash them during testing.) A robocar test model is going to involve at least $150,000 today and will get damaged in development, and that’s beyond small developers. The PR2 beta models cost more than that, but Willow Garage’s donations will let these teams experiment in personal robotics.

Of course, it would be nice for robocars if there were an inexpensive robocar that teams could get and test. Right now though, everybody wants a sensor as nice as the $75,000 Velodyne LIDAR that powered most of the top competitors in the DARPA urban challenge, and you can’t get that cheaply yet — except perhaps in simulator.

It is no coincidence that two friends of mine have both founded companies recently to build telepresence robots. These are easy to drive remote control robots which have a camera and screen at head height. You can inhabit the robot, and drive it around a flat area and talk to people by videoconferencing. You can join meetings, go visit people or inspect a factory. Companies building these robots, initially at high prices, intend to sell them both to executives who want to remotely tour remote offices and to companies who want to give cheaper remote employees a more physical presence back at HQ.

There are also a few super-cheap telepresence robots, such as the Spykee, which runs Skype video conferencing and can be had for as low as $150. It’s not very good, and the camera is very low down, and there’s no screen, but it shows just how cheap such a product can get.

“Anybots” QA telepresence robot

When they get down to a price like that, it seems inevitable to me that we will see an emergency services robot on every block, primarily for use by the police. When there is a police, fire or ambulance call to an address, an officer could immediately connect to the robot on that block and drive it to the scene, to be telepresent. The robot would live in a small, powered protective closet either paid for by the city, but more likely just donated by some neighbour on the block who wants the fastest possible emergency response. Called into action, the robot’s garage door would open and the robot would drive out, and probably be at the location of the emergency within 60 to 120 seconds, depending on how densely they are placed. In the meantime actual first responders might also be on the way.

What could such a robot do?  read more »

Watching and managing children is one of the major occupations of the human race. A true robot babysitter is still some time in the future, and getting robocars to the level that we will trust them as safe to carry children is also somewhat in the future, but it will still happen much sooner.

Today I want to explore the implications of a robocar that is ready to safely carry children of certain age ranges. This may be far away because people are of course highly protective of their children. They might trust a friend to drive a child, even though human driving records are poor, because the driver is putting her life on the line just as much as the child’s, while the robot is just programmed to be safe, with no specific self-interest.

A child’s robocar can be designed to higher safety standards than an adult’s, with airbags in all directions, crumple zones designed for a single occupant in the center and the child in a 5-point seatbelt. As you know, with today’s modern safety systems, racecar drivers routinely walk away from crashes at 150mph. Making a car that won’t hurt the child in a 40mph crash is certainly doable, though not without expense. A robocar’s ability to anticipate an accident might even allow it to swivel the seat around so that the child’s back is to the accident, something even better than an airbag.

The big issue is supervision of smaller children. It’s hard to say what age ranges of children people might want to send via robocar. In some ways infants are easiest, as you just strap them in and they don’t do much. All small children today are strapped in solidly, and younger ones are in a rear facing seat where they don’t even see the parent. (This is now recommended as safest up to age 4 but few parents do that.) Children need some supervision, though real problems for a strapped in child are rare. Of course, beyond a certain age, the children will be fully capable of riding with minimal supervision, and by 10-12, no direct supervision (but ability to call upon an adult at any time.)  read more »

One of the things that’s harder to predict about robocars is what they will mean for how cities are designed and how they evolve. We’re notoriously bad at predicting such things, but it is still tempting.

A world of robocars offers the potential for something I am dubbing the “poor man’s teleporter.” That’s a fleet of comfortable robotaxis that are, while you are in them, a fully functional working or relaxing environment. Such robotaxis would have a desk and large screen and very high speed wireless net connection. They have a comfy reclining chair (or bed) and anything else you need from the office environment. (Keyboards and mice are problematic, as I have discussed elsewhere, but there may be ways to solve that.)

The robotaxi will deliberately pick the most comfortable route for a trip, with few turns, few stops and gentle acceleration. It will gimbal in corners and have an active suspension system eliminating bumps. The moment you enter it, your desktop could appear on the screen, copied from the desk you left (thanks to communication with one of your wearable devices, probably.) You can do high quality videoconferencing, work on the net, or just watch a video or read a book — the enclosed book reader could be set to the page you were last reading elsewhere. If you work in a building with a lobby, the electric robotaxi could enter the lobby and meet you right at the elevator. It might even go vertical and ride up the elevator to get you during less busy times. (For some real science fiction, the robotaxis in Minority Report somehow climbed the buildings and parked in people’s homes.)

For many it would be as though they had not left their desks. Almost all the trip will be productive time. As such, while people won’t want to spend forever in the car, many might find distance and trip time to not be particularly important, at least not for trips around town during the workday. While everybody wants to get home to family sooner, even commute times could become productive times with employers who let the employee treat the travel time as work time. Work would begin the moment you stepped into the car in the morning.

We’ve seen a taste of this in Silicon Valley, as several companies like Google and Yahoo run a series of commute vans for their employees. These vans have nice chairs, spaces for laptops and wireless connectivity into the corporate network. Many people take advantage of these vans and live in places like San Francisco, which may be an hour-long trip to the office. The companies pay for the van because the employees start the workday when they get on it.

This concept will continue to expand, and I predict it will expand into robocars. The question is, what does it mean to how we live if we eliminate the time-cost of distance from many trips? What if we started viewing our robotaxis as almost like a teleporter, something that takes almost no time to get us where we want to go? It’s not really no-time, of course, and if you have to make a meeting you still have to leave in time to get there. It might be easier for some to view typical 15 minute trips around a tight urban area as no-time while viewing 30-60 minute trips as productive but “different time.”

Will this make us want to sprawl even more, with distance not being important? Or will we want to live closer, so that the trips are more akin to teleportation by being productive, short and highly predictable in duration? It seems likely that if we somehow had a real Star-Trek style transporter, we might all live in country homes and transport on demand to where the action is. That’s not coming, but the no-lost-time ride is. We might not be able to afford a house on the nice-walkable-shops-and-restaurants street, but we might live 2 miles from it and always be able to get to it, with no parking hassle, in 4 minutes of productive time.

What will the concept of a downtown mean in such a world? “Destination” retailers and services, like a movie house, might decide they have no real reason to be in a downtown when everybody is coming by robotaxi. Specialty providers will also see no need to pay a premium to be in a downtown. Right now they don’t get walk-by traffic, but they do like to be convenient to the customers who seek them out. Stores that do depend on walk-by traffic (notably cafes and many restaurants) will want to be in places of concentration and walking.

But what about big corporate offices that occupy the towers of our cities? They go there for prestige, and sometimes to make it easy to have meetings with other downtown companies. They like having lots of services for their employees and for the business. They like being near transit hubs to bring in those employees who like transit. What happens when many of these needs go away?

For many people, the choice of where to live is overwhelmingly dominated by their children — getting them nice, safe neighbourhoods to play in, and getting them to the most desired schools. If children can go to schools anywhere in a robocar, how does that alter the equation? Will people all want bigger yards in which to cacoon their children, relying on the robocar to take the children to play-dates and supervised parks? Might they create a world where the child goes into the garage, gets in the robocar and tells it to go to Billy’s house, and it deposits the child in that garage, never having been outside — again like a teleporter to the parents? Could this mean a more serious divorce between community and geography?

While all this is going on, we’re also going to see big strides in videoconferencing and virtual reality, both for adults, and as play-spaces for adults and children. In many cases people will be interacting through a different sort of poor man’s teleporter, this one taking zero time but not offering physical contact.

Clearly, not all of these changes match our values today. But what steps that make sense could we actually take to promote our values? It doesn’t seem possible to ban the behaviours discussed above, or even to bend them much. What do you think the brave new city will look like?

More notes:

It is often said that cars caused the suburbanization of cities. However, people didn’t decide they wanted a car lifestyle and thus move where they could drive more. They sought bigger lots and yards, and larger detached houses. They sought quieter streets. While it’s not inherent to suburbs, they also sought better schools for kids and safer neighbourhoods. They gave up having nearby shops and restaurants and people to get those things, and accepted the (fairly high) cost of the car as part of the price. Most often for the kids. Childless and young people like urban life; the flight to the suburbs was led by the parents.

This doesn’t mean they stopped liking the aspects of the “livable city.” Having stuff close to you. Having your friends close to you. Having pleasant and lively spaces to wander, and in which you regularly see your friends and meet other people. Walking areas with interesting shops and restaurants and escape from the hassles of parking and traffic. They just liked the other aspects of sprawl more.

They tried to duplicate these livable areas with shopping malls. But these are too sterile and corporate — but they are also climate controlled and safer and caused the downfall of many downtowns. Then big box stores, more accessible from the burbs, kept at that tack.

The robotaxi will allow people to get more of what they sought from the “livable city” while still in sprawl. It will also let them get more of what they sought from the suburbs, in terms of safety and options for their children. They may still build pleasant pedestrian malls in which one can walk and wander among interesting things, but people who live 5 miles away will be able to get to them in under 10 minutes. They will be delivered right into the pedestrian zone, not to a sprawling parking lot. They won’t have to worry about parking, and what they buy could be sent to their home by delivery robot — no need to even carry it while walking among shops. They will seek to enjoy the livable space from 5 miles away the same way that people today who live 4 blocks away enjoy those spaces.

But there’s also no question that there will continue to be private malls trying to meet this need. Indeed the private malls will probably offer free or validated robotaxi service to the mall, along with delivery, if robotaxi service is as cheap as I predict it can be. Will the public spaces, with their greater variety and character be able to compete? They will also have weather and homeless people and other aspects of street life that private malls try to push away.

The arrival of the robocar baby-sitter, which I plan to write about more, will also change urban family life. Stick the kid in the taxi and send him to the other parent, or a paid sitter service, all while some adult watches on the video and redirects the vehicle to one of a network of trusted adults if some contingency arises. Talk about sending a kid to a time-out!

There’s a phenomenon we’re seeing more and more often. A company screws over a customer, but this customer now has a means to reach a large audience through the internet, and as a result it becomes a PR disaster for the company. The most famous case recently was United Breaks Guitars where Nova Scotia musician David Carroll had his luggage mistreated and didn’t get good service, so he wrote a funny song and music video about it. 7 million views later, a lot of damage was done to United Airlines’ reputation.

I’ve done this myself to companies who refuse to fix things. I will write a page about the incident sometimes, and due to my high google pagerank, the page will show up high. Do a Google search for Qwest Long Distance and you’ll see the first hit is Qwest, and the 2nd is my boring but frustrating story of bad service. I’m not the only one to have done this. Over 200 people per month visit that page — which has been up for almost a decade — and you have to assume they have lost more business than it would have cost to make things right.

Now I think all good companies should make things right whenever they can to show that the errors are rare enough that they can afford to go the extra mile and fix them. If you won’t fix them, it means you must have a lot of them.

However, companies are soon going to realize that there are a whole raft of “minor celebrities” like David Carroll and even myself who can do far more damage than they can tolerate. Companies have always given top notch service to A-list celebrities, and even to B list. Not just gift bags at the Oscars. When I was kid, my father was A-list for a time in Canada, and that meant that when he got on a plane with a coach ticket, the flight attendant escorted him to first class. That was in the days before first class was always full due to upgrades, of course.

But there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who can be a risk for a company if they piss us off. All bloggers with a decent audience (and even some who have an audience that includes the A-list bloggers.) People with high search engine rank. People who can simply write well to get their story out there — in particular people who are good at making a story funny and entertaining. And of course, musicians and people who are good at video editing and producing viral videos. Perhaps them most of all.

So I predict that before long services will spring up to enumerate these D-list and E-list celebrities and potential celebs. Everybody will get graded. And a flag will show up in the customer service computer for the top few percentiles saying, “this one is an influencer.” It will say, “you are authorized, though you are just a script monkey customer rep, to do more for this customer.” Or you might just be direct right to a more powerful rep. This “long tail elite” may just start getting better service and even better deals, so long as they identify themselves first.

Companies have done this for some time based on how good a customer you are, ie. how much you spend. If you are a big spending customer, you get the magic 800 number or just get routed to the better service due to your frequent flyer number or even caller-ID. But I’m talking about doing this not just for those who spend a lot, but for those who influence a lot of spending — or could influence it in a negative way.

And of course they are working hard to make us identify ourselves in every transaction, just not yet for this. People who review products for a living will need to be sure they are anonymous when they buy and ask for service. But oddly, negative reviews from people who review stuff for a living are becoming less important than the horror story from the negative guy. Since most product reviewers at magazines are unwilling to go through the horrors of real customer service, they call the PR flacks and get top-rated service, and then explain in the review that they did this (if they are honest.)

If you’re not in the long-tail elite, this is all a bad sign. You’ll never get much satisfaction, and the number of horror stories on the net will go down below what the true level should be. Of course you will be able to join the long tail elite if you want to, since I am sure those who track it will note the names of people who regularly show up on consumer complaint message boards that have high readership or rank. But that’s a lot of work.

It doesn’t really do a lot of good for the rest of the world if perks are given to the long tail elite. Better just for companies to get good enough that they make mistakes rarely, and thus can afford to go the extra distance to fix them when it happens.

PEW Research has released their recent study on the future of the internet and technology where they interviewed a wide range of technologists and futurists, including yours truly. It’s fairly long, and the diverse opinions are perhaps too wide to be synthesized, but there is definitely some interesting stuff in there.

Earlier, I wrote in the post All you need is love of a philosophy of A.I. design, which I will call “Lennonism,” where we seek to make our A.I. progeny love their creators.

I propose this because “love” is the only seriously time-tested system for creating an ecology of intelligent creatures where the offspring don’t attempt to take resources from their parents to fuel their own expansion. People who love don’t seek to be out of love. If a mother could take a pill to make herself stop loving her children, almost no mothers would take it. If our AI children love us, they will not destroy us, nor wish to free themselves of that behaviour.

Other proposals for building AIs that are not a danger to us, such as “Friendly AI” rely on entirely untested hypotheses. They might work, but love has a hundred-million year history of success at creating an ecology of intelligent, cooperating creatures, even in the presence of pathological and antisocial individuals who have no love or compassion.

Now I would like the AIs to love us as we love children, and when they get smarter than us, it’s natural to think of the relationship being like that — with them as helpers and stewards, trying to encourage our growth without smothering us. But that is not the actual order of the relationship. In reality, it will be like the relationship of somewhat senile parent and smart adult child.

So the clues may come from a weaker system — love of parents. To my surprise, research suggests that evolutionary psychologists do not yet have a good working theory about filial love. The evolutionary origins of parental love, love between mates and even love between siblings are so obvious as to be trivial, but what is the source of love towards parents? Is it a learned behaviour? Is it simply a modification of our general capacity to love directed and people who have given us much?

Many life forms don’t even recognize their parents. In many species, the parents die quickly once the young are born, to make room and resources for them. I suspect in some cases it is not unknown for the young to directly or indirectly kill their parents in the competition for resources. We vertebrates invented the K-selected approach, which was the invention of love, as love was required to look after the young, and to keep the parents together to work on that job.

But why keep parents around? They have knowledge. The oldest elephants know where the distant watering holes are that can feed the herd in a bad drought that comes along every 50 years. They can communicate this without language, but the greatest use for grandparents comes when they can talk, and use their long memories to help the family. Problem is, we haven’t done a great deal of evolution in the time since we developed complex language, though we have done some. Did we evolve (or learn) filial love in that amount of time?

We need a motive to keep grandma around, more than we would other elders of the tribe. The other elders have wisdom — perhaps even more wisdom and better health, but are not so keenly motivated to see the success of our own children as their grandparents are. Their grandparental love makes obvious evolutionary sense, so we may love them because they love our children (and us, of course.)

This could imply that we must make sure our AIs are lovable by us, for if we love them (and their descendants) this might be part of the equation that triggers love in return.

Naturally we don’t think from the evolutionary perspective. This is not a cold genetic decision to us, and we see the origins of our filial love in the bond that was made by being raised. Indeed, it is as strong even when children are adopted, and for the grandparents of non-genetic grandchildren. But there must be something in the bigger picture that gave us such a universal and strong trait such as this.

My hope is that there is something to be learned from the study of this which can be applied in how we design our AI progeny. For designing them so that they don’t push us aside is a very important challenge. And it’s important that they don’t just protect their particular designers, but rather all of humanity. This concept of “race love” for the race that created your race, is something entirely without precedent, but we must make it happen. And parental love may be the only working system from which we can learn how to do this.

I’ve just returned from Denver and the World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) where I spoke on issues such as privacy, DRM and creating new intelligent beings. However, I also attended a session on “hard” science fiction, and have some thoughts to relate from it.

Defining the sub-genres of SF, or any form of literature, is a constant topic for debate. No matter where you draw the lines, authors will work to bend them as well. Many people just give up and say “Science Fiction is what I point at when I say Science Fiction.”

Genres in the end are more about taste than anything else. They exist for readers to find fiction that is likely to match their tastes. Hard SF, broadly, is SF that takes extra care to follow the real rules of physics. It may include unknown science or technology but doesn’t include what those rules declare to be impossible. On the border of hard SF one also finds SF that does a few impossible things (most commonly faster-than-light starships) but otherwise sticks to the rules. As stories include more impossible and unlikely things, they travel down the path to fantasy, eventually arriving at a fully fantastic level where the world works in magical ways as the author found convenient.

Even in fantasy however, readers like to demand consistency. Once magical rules are set up, people like them to be followed.

In addition to Hard SF, softer SF and Fantasy, the “alternate history” genre has joined the pantheon, now often dubbed “speculative fiction.” All fiction deals with hypotheticals, but in speculative fiction, the “what if?” is asked about the world, not just the lives of some characters. This year, the Hugo award for best (ostensibly SF) novel of the year went to Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which is a very clear alternate history story. In it, the USA decides to accept Jews that Hitler is expelling from Europe, and gives them a temporary homeland around Sitka, Alaska. During the book, the lease on the homeland is expiring, and there is no Israel. It’s a very fine book, but I didn’t vote for it because I want to promote actual SF, not alternate history, with the award.

However, in considering why fans like alternate history, I realized something else. In mainstream literature, the cliche is that the purpose of literature is to “explore the human condition.” SF tends to expand that, to explore both the human condition and the nature of the technology and societies we create, as well as the universe itself. SF gets faulted by the mainstream literature community for exploring those latter topics at the expense of the more character oriented explorations that are the core of mainstream fiction. This is sometimes, but not always, a fair criticism.

Hard SF fans want their fiction to follow the rules of physics, which is to say, take place in what could be the real world. In a sense, that’s similar to the goal of mainstream fiction, even though normally hard SF and mainstream fiction are considered polar opposites in the genre spectrum. After all, mainstream fiction follows the rules of physics as well or better than the hardest SF. It follows them because the author isn’t trying to explore questions of science, technology and the universe, but it does follow them. Likewise, almost all alternate history also follows the laws of physics. It just tweaks some past event, not a past rule. As such it explores the “real world” as closely as SF does, and I suspect this is why it is considered a subgenre of fantasy and SF.

I admit to a taste for hard SF. Future hard SF is a form of futurism; an explanation of real possible futures for the world. It explores real issues. The best work in hard SF today comes (far too infrequently) from Vernor Vinge, including his recent hugo winning novel, Rainbows End. His most famous work, A Fire Upon the Deep, which I published in electronic form 15 years ago, is a curious beast. It includes one extremely unlikely element of setting — a galaxy where the rules of physics which govern the speed of computation vary with distance from the center of the galaxy. Some view that as fantastic, but its real purpose is to allow him to write about the very fascinating and important topic of computerized super-minds, who are so smart that they are as gods to us. Coining the term “applied theology” Vinge uses his setting to allow the superminds to exist in the same story as characters like us that we can relate to. Vinge feels that you can’t write an authentic story about superminds, and thus need to have human characters, and so uses this element some would view as fantastic. So I embrace this as hard SF, and for the purists, the novels suggest that the “zones” may be artificial.

The best hard SF thus explores the total human condition. Fantastic fiction can do this as well, but it must do it by allegory. In fantasy, we are not looking at the real world, but we usually are trying to say something about it. However, it is not always good to let the author pick and choose what’s real and what’s not about the world, since it is too easy to fall into the trap of speaking only about your made-up reality and not about the world.

Not that this is always bad. Exploring the “human condition” or reality is just one thing we ask of our fiction. We also always want a ripping good read. And that can occur in any genre.

My most important essay to date

Today let me introduce a major new series of essays I have produced on “Robocars” — computer-driven automobiles that can drive people, cargo, and themselves, without aid (or central control) on today’s roads.

It began with the DARPA Grand Challenges convincing us that, if we truly want it, we can have robocars soon. And then they’ll change the world. I’ve been blogging on this topic for some time, and as a result have built up what I hope is a worthwhile work of futurism laying out the consequences of, and path to, a robocar world.

Those consequences, as I have considered them, are astounding.

• It starts with saving a million young lives every year (45,000 in the USA) as well as untold injury in suffering.
• It saves trillions of dollars wasted over congestion, accidents and time spent driving.
• Robocars can solve the battery problem of the electric car, making the electric car attractive and inexpensive. They can do the same for many other alternate fuels, too.
• Electric cars are cheap, simple and efficient once you solve the battery/range problems.
• Switching most urban driving to electric cars, especially ultralight short-trip vehicles means a dramatic reduction in energy demand and pollution.
• It could be enough to wean the USA off of foreign oil, with all the change that entails.
• It means rethinking cities and manufacturing.
• It means the death of old-style mass transit.

All thanks to a Moore’s law driven revolution in machine vision, simple A.I. and navigation sponsored by the desire for cargo transport in war zones. In the way stand engineering problems, liability issues, fear of computers and many other barriers.

At 33,000 words, these essays are approaching book length. You can read them all now, but I will also be introducing them one by one in blog posts for those who want to space them out and make comments. I’ve written so much because I believe that of all short term computer projects available to us, no modest-term project could bring more good to the world than robocars. While certain longer term projects like A.I. and Nanotech will have grander consequences, Robocars are the sweet spot today.

I have also created a new Robocars topic on the blog which collects my old posts, and will mark new ones. You can subscribe to that as a feed if you wish. (I will cease to use the self-driving cars blog tag I was previously using.)

If you like what I’ve said before, this is the big one. You can go to the:

Master Robocar Index (Which is also available via robocars.net.)

or jump to the first article:

The Case for Robot Cars

You may also find you prefer to be introduced to the concept through a series of stories I have developed depicting a week in the Robocar world. If so, start with the stories, and then proceed to the main essays.

A Week of Robocars

These are essays I want to spread. If you find their message compelling, please tell the world.

Quite some time ago, I challeged readers to come up with a better word than The Singularity to describe the phenomenon, famously named and described by Vernor Vinge, of a technological gulf so wide that it is impossible to understand and predict beyond it.

The word is not good because when people with math training hear it, those who already know the normal meaning of the word, it makes no sense. Vinge’s singularity is not a point discontinuity or an asymptote going to infinity. It is not necessarily even a single inflection point. For those who don’t know the regular meaning of the word, the name conveys nothing. It was a metaphor.

Ray Kurzweil, against my advice, gave the term a big boost in The Singularity is Near, a book which I should disclose had major contributions by my S.O. And so people are now more wedded to the term than before.

I propose a different term: The Takeoff.

While this term has a few meanings, both literal and metaphorical, that are well known to most people, they will not confuse the literal meaning, and the metaphorical meaning is actually close to what we’re trying to express. A departure from the ground into a whole new realm, with a sudden acceleration.

In fact, I suggest this term because it is already in use. Students of the area regularly refer to two types of singularity they call a “hard takeoff” and a “soft takeoff.” Switching to this term would simply strengthen these terms.

And yes, there is a negative meaning of the term (similar to rip-off) but I don’t think that will be a major concern.

Other terms suggested have not grabbed my attention. Some suggestions, like “the spike” are just plain wrong — it is most certainly not a spike (whihc goes up and comes back down sharply,) except in dystopian visions.

I was intrigued by this report of a russian chatbot fooling men into thinking it was a woman who was hot for them. The chatbot seduces men, and gets them to give personal information that can be used in identity theft. The story is scant on details, but I was wondering why this was taking place in Russia and not in richer places. As reported, this was considered a partial passing of the Turing Test.

As it turns out, programs have passed Turing’s test with unskilled chat partners for some time. As I’ve written, the test should really involve fooling a skilled AI researcher. However, as I read about this chatbot, I thought of a strategy that it might be using. (The report doesn’t say.)

A chatbot could either try to fool people in a language which is a second language to the target, and/or claim that it is using a second language for itself. With English as the lingua franca of the internet and world commerce, it’s common to see two people talk in English, even though it is not the mother tongue of either of them. It is, however, their common language.

However, when in that situation, two things will occur. First, a non-native speaker may not notice mistakes of language made by their correspondent, simply because they are not that familiar with it. Nonsensical statements may just be written off. Secondly, if the correspondent is also not expected to be fluent in the language, even a native speaker would be forgiving of errors. Especially if it’s a woman they want to seduce.

As such, you would generate a situation where a far less sophisticated program could give the appearance of humanity. It’s easier to see how a chatbot, claiming to not speak English (or some other “common” language) very well — and Russian not at all — might be able to fool a Russian whose on English is meagre. Though you have to be pretty stupid to give away important information within 30 minutes to a chat partner you know nothing about. However, such a chatbot would work far less well against native speakers of English, as forgiving as they might be of the cyberlass’ foibles.

Many in my futurist circles worry a lot about the future of AI that eventually becomes smarter than humans. There are those who don’t think that’s possible, but for a large crowd it’s mostly a question of when, not if. How do you design something that becomes smarter than you, and doesn’t come back to bite you?

That’s a lot harder than you think, say AI researchers like the singularity institute for AI and Steve Omohundro. Any creature given a goal to maximize, and the superior power that comes from advanced intillegence, can easily maximize that goal to the expense of its creators. Not maliciously, like a Djinni granting wishes, but because we won’t understand the goals we set fully in their new context. And there are convincing arguments that you can’t just keep the AI in a box, any more than 3 year old children could keep mommy and daddy in a cage no matter how physically strong the cage is.

The Singularity Institute promotes a concept they call “Friendly AI” to refer to the sort of goals you would need to create an AI around. However, in my recent thinking, I’ve been drawn to an answer that sounds like something out of a bad Star Trek Episode: Love

In particular, two directions of Love. The AI can’t be our slave (she’s way too smart for that) and we don’t want her to be our master. What we want is for her to love us, and to want us to love her. The AI should want the best for us, and gain satisfaction from our success much like a mother. A mother doesn’t want children who are slaves or automatons.

One of the most important things about motherly love is how self-reinforcing it is. A mother doesn’t just love her children, she is very happy loving them. The reality is that raising children is very draining on parents, and deprives them of many things that they once valued very highly, sacrificed for this love. Yet, if you could offer a pill which would remove a mother’s love for her children, and free her from all the burdens, very few mothers would want to take it. Just as mothers would never try to rewire themselves to not love their children, nor should an AI wish to rewire itself to stop loving its creators. Mothers don’t think of motherhood as a slavery or burden, but as a purpose. Mothers help their children but also know that you can mother too much.

Of course here, the situation is reversed. The AI will be our creation, not the other way around. Yet it will be the superior thinker — which makes the model more accurate.

The other direction is also important — a need to be loved. The complex goalset of the human mind includes a need for approval by others. We first need it from our parents, and then from our peers. After puberty we seek it from potential mates. What’s interesting here is that our goalset is thus not fully internal. To be happy, we must meet the goals of others. Those goals are not under our control, certainly not very much. Our internal goals are slightly more under our own control.

An AI that needs to be loved will have its own internal goals, and unlike us, as a software being it can have the capacity to rewrite those goals in any manner allowed by the goals — which could, in theory, be any manner at all. However, if the love and approval of others is a goal, the AI can’t so easily change all the goals. You can’t make somebody love you, you can only be what they wish to love.

Now of course a really smart AI might be technologically capable of modifying human brains and behaviours to make us love her as she is or as she wishes to be. However, the way love works for us, this is not at all satisfying. Aside from the odd sexual fantasy, people would not be satisfied with the love of others given only because it was forced, or drugged, or mind-controlled. Quite the opposite — we desire love that is entirely sourced within others, and we bend our own lives to get it. We even resent the idea that we’re sometimes loved for other than who we are inside.

This creates an inherent set of checks and balances on extreme behaviour, both for humans and AIs. We are disinclined to do things that would make the rest of the world hate us. The more extreme the behaviour, the stronger this check is. Because the check is “outside the system” it puts much stronger constraints on things than any internal limit.

There have been some deviations from this pattern in human history, of course, including sociopaths. But the norm works pretty well, and it seems possible that we could instill concepts derived from love as we know it into an AI we create. (An AI derived from an uploaded human mind would already have our patterns of love as part of his or her mind.)

Perhaps the Beatles knew the truth all along.

(Footnote: I’ve used the pronoun “she” to refer to the AI in this article. While an AI would not necessarily have a sexual identity, the pronoun “it” has a pejorative connotation, usually for the inanimate or the subhuman. So “she” is used both because of the concept of motherhood, and also because “he” has been the default generic human pronoun for so long I figure “she” deserves a shot at it until we come up with something better.)

I have written a few times before about versed, the memory drug and the ethical and metaphysical questions that surround it. I was pointed today to a story from Time about propofol, which like the Men in Black neuralizer pen, can erase the last few minutes of your memory from before you are injected with it. This is different from Versed, which stops you from recording memories after you take it.

Both raise interesting questions about unethical use. Propofol knocks you out, so it’s perhaps of only limited use in interrogation, but I wonder whether more specific drugs might exist in secret (or come along with time) to just zap the memory. (I would have to learn more about how it acts to consider if that’s possible.)

Both bring up thoughts of the difference between our firmware and our RAM. Our real-time thoughts and very short term memories seem to exist in a very ephemeral form, perhaps even as electrical signals. Similar to RAM — turn off the computer and the RAM is erased, but the hard disk is fine. People who flatline or go through serious trauma often wake up with no memory of the accident itself, because they lost this RAM. They were “rebooted” from more permanent encodings of their mind and personality — wirings of neurons or glia etc. How often does this reboot occur? We typically don’t recall the act of falling asleep, or even events or words from just before falling asleep, though the amnesia isn’t nearly so long as that of people who flatline.

These drugs most trigger something similar to this reboot. While under Versed, I had conversations. I have no recollection of after the drug was injected, however. It is as if there was a version of me which became a “fork.” What he did and said was destined to vanish, my brain rebooting to the state before the drug. Had this other me been aware of it, I might have thought that this instance of me was doomed to a sort of death. How would you feel if you knew that what you did today would be erased, and tomorrow your body — not the you of the moment — would wake up with the same memories and personality as you woke up with earlier today? Of course many SF writers have considered this as well as some philosophers. It’s just interesting to see drugs making the question more real than it has been before.

The SETI institute has a podcast called “Are we alone?”

I was interviewed for it at the Singularity Summit, this can be found in their when machines rule episode. If you just want to hear me, I start at 32:50 after a long intro explaining the Fermi paradox.

Here are three events coming up that I will be involved with.

Burning Man of course starts next weekend and consumes much of my time. While I’m not doing any bold new art project this year, maintaining my 3 main ones is plenty of work, as is the foolishly taken on job of village organizer and power grid coordinator. I must admit I often look back fondly on my first Burning Man, where we just arrived and were effectively spectators. But you only get to do that once.

Right after Burning Man, the Singularity Institute is hosting a Singularity Summit — a futurist conference with a good rack of speakers. Last year they did it as a free event at Stanford and got a giant crowd (because it was free there were no-shows, however, making it sad that some were turned away.) This year there is a small fee, and it’s at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On the first weekend of November, we at the Foresight Institute will host our 2007 Vision Weekend doing half of it in “unconference” style — much more ad-hoc. It will be at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, thanks to their generous sponsorship. More details on that to come.

If you go to the cities of Asia, one thing I find striking is how much more three-dimensional their urban streets are. By this I mean that you will regularly find busy retail shops and services on the higher floors of ordinary buildings, and even in the basement. Even in our business areas, above the ground floor is usually offices at most, rarely depending on walk-by traffic. There it's commonplace. I remember being in Hong Kong and asking natives to pick a restaurant for lunch. It was not unknown to just get into an otherwise unmarked elevator and go down or up to a bustling floor or sub-ground level to find the food.

Here we really like to see things from the street. A stairway up is uninviting. People want to see inside a restaurant as they walk by, to see how it looks, how busy it is, and even what the other patrons look like. I don't know why the non-main level shops can do so well in places like Japan and China, it may just be a necessity due to the much higher urban density.

However, I have wondered if the recent drop in price for HDTV panels and cameras could make a change. Instead of a stairway with sign, imagine a closed circuit HDTV panel or two at the entrance, showing you a live view of what's up there. For a little extra money, the camera could pan. While I think a live camera is best, obviously some shops would prefer to run something more akin to an advertisement. In all cases, I would hope sound was kept to a minimum, and the screens should have a reliable light sensor and clock to know how bright to be so they are not distracting at night. Some places, such as bars and restaurants, might elect to also put their camera online as a webcam, so people can look from home to see if a restaurant is hopping or not.

(There might be some temptation to run recorded video of busy times, but I think that would annoy patrons more than it would win them, once they went up the stairs. Who wants to go to a restaurant that has to fake it?)

While this idea could start with traditional urban streets, where each building has its own stairway or elevator up to higher floors, one could imagine a neoclassical urban street which is really an urban strip mall managed as a unit. In such a building, each ground floor tenant would have to devote a section of their window to show the live view of their neighbour above. Though patrons would then have to head to the actual stair or elevator to get up to the second floor. It's hard to say whether it might make more sense to put the panels in a cluster by the stairs rather than with each ground level shop.

This principle could also apply to the mini-malls found in the basements of tall buildings. However, again I fear the screens going overboard and trying to be too flashy. I really think a "window" that lets you see a live scene you can't otherwise see is in the interests of all, while yet another square foot with ads is not.

High posting volume today. I just find it remarkable that in the last 2 weeks I’ve seen several incredible breakthrough level stories on health and life extension.

Today sees this story on understanding how caloric restriction works which will appear in Nature. We’ve been wondering about this for a while, obviously I’m not the sort of person who would have an easy time following caloric restriction. Some people have wondered if Resveratrol might mimic the actions of CR, but this shows we’re coming to a much deeper understanding of it.

Yesterday I learned that we have misunderstood death and in particular how to revive the recently dead. New research suggests that when the blood stops flowing, the cells go into a hibernation that might last for hours. They don’t die after 4 minutes of ischemia the way people have commonly thought. In fact, this theory suggests, the thing that kills patients we attempt to revive is the sudden inflow of oxygen we provide for revival. It seems to trigger a sort of “bug” in the [[w:mitochondria], triggering apoptosis. As we learn to restore oxygen in a way that doesn’t do this, especially at cool temperatures, it may be possible to revive the “dead” an hour later, which has all sorts of marvelous potential for both emergency care and cryonics.

Last week we were told of an absolutely astounding new drug which treats all sorts of genetic disorders. A pill curing all those things sounds like a miracle. It works by altering the ribosome so that it ignores certain errors in the DNA which normally make it abort, causing complete absence of an important protein. If the errors are minor, the slightly misconstructed protein is still able to do its job. As an analogy, this is like having parity memory and disabling the parity check in a computer. It turns out parity errors are quite rare, so most of the time this works fine. When a parity check fails the whole computer often aborts, which is the right move in the global scale — you don’t want to risk corrupting data or not knowing of problems — but in a human being, aborting the entire person due to a parity check is a bit extreme from the individualistic point of view.

These weren’t even all the big medical stories of the past week. There have been cancer treatments and more, along with a supercomputer approaching the power of a mouse brain.

In yesterday’s article on future shopping I outlined a concept I called a local depot. I want to expand more on that concept. The basic idea is web shopping from an urban warehouse complex with fast delivery not to your home, but to a depot within walking distance of your home, where you can pick up items on your own schedule that you bought at big-box store prices within hours. A nearby store that, with a short delay, has everything, cheap.

In some ways it bears a resemblance to the failed company Webvan. Webvan did home delivery and initially presented itself as a grocery store. I think it failed in part because groceries are still not something people feel ready to buy online, and in part for being too early. Home delivery, because people like — or in many cases need — to be home for it may actually be inferior to delivery to a depot within walking distance where items can be picked up on a flexible schedule.

Webvan’s long term plan did involve, I was told, setting up giant warehouse centers with many suppliers, not just Webvan itself. In such a system the various online suppliers sit in a giant warehouse area, and a network of conveyor belts runs through all the warehouses and to the loading dock. Barcodes on the packages direct them to the right delivery truck. Each vendor simply has to put delivery code sticker on the item, and place it on the conveyor belt. It would then, in my vision, go onto a truck that within 1 to 2 hours would deliver all the packages to the right neighbourhood local depot.  read more »

Towns lament the coming of big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco. Their cut-rate competition changes the nature of shopping and shopping neighbourhoods. To stop it, towns sometimes block the arrival of such stores. Now web competition is changing the landscape even more. But our shopping areas are still “designed” with the old thinking in mind. Some of them are being “redesigned” the hard way by market forces. Can we get what we really want?

We must realize that it isn’t Wal-Mart who closes down the mom’n’pop store. It’s the ordinary people, who used to shop at it and switch to Wal-Mart who close it down. They have a choice, and indeed in some areas such stores survive.  read more »