Monday, February 29, 2016

nice quote

 "The first computer I used professionally, in 1996, had a processor eight times slower than my phone has now, and cost $10,000."-source

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

post on kurzweilai

Well, except the "stop liking what I don't like" crowd.

Yup, and like with cloning, they might be firmly opposed irregardless of whether it's right or wrong. For example if cloning tech were perfected to the point it was provably safer than natural conception, why shouldn't it be allowed?
As for this, again I've also pondered the possibility of biological androids, that is brainless humans with artificial synthetic brains. There really is no reason for there to be anything wrong with this. An AI or AGI could even remotely control multiple bodies from a local server in your home... the bodies would be no different than remote controlled appliances, these bodies would also be your property.
The problem again is, that some might want to infringe on the rights of others through the law, and that's a big no no. Hopefully the developers of agi, and thus superior weaponry, thus power, will side with liberty. If they do it doesn't matter what the majority thinks, the law of the land is determined by the entities with greatest power, right now that's the governments with their military force, but if a superior force emerges the rights of governments all over the world can be contested.
By the time we can build the AI that will fit into the chassis, we will be able to build a convincing chassis out of non biological materials; probably even ones that can self-repair.

This depends on the viability of hard nano, high levels of self repair may be impossible if hard nano is not possible.
Biology on the other hand can last for over a month without energy sources, aka food(and two weeks without water if optimized probably more might be possible), is there any battery tech on the horizon that can last over a month of full activity? Most robots with lots of motors last far far less than that. That's not the only thing biology is capable of, a few genetic tweaks and self-repair can be increased above and beyond what's possible in humans including regrowth of limbs.
Also a few genetic tweaks, and the body becomes ageless, remaining at whatever age is set indefinitely.
If hard nano turns out to be impossible as some seem to believe, then matching a maintenance free self repairing biological body will not be possible.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Reply/Comment to blog post over at Josh Mitteldorf's blog

Michael Fossel seems to suggest that increasing telomerase activity might be very promising regards rejuvenating tissues.   His latest interview in singularity one on one, almost seemed to imply that such would remove age related senescent cells by restoring them to a more youthful function.


I'm interested in knowing how good is Alpha Lipoic Acid regards telomerase activation, it appears to be an indirect activator via  PGC-1α
http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(15)00825-6

How would it compare to something like TA-65 at human tested doses of 600mg, 1200mg, and 1800mg?

How many cell types would it affect?

As for those talking about mutations if we had rejuvenated cells, even 100 year olds with aged less functional repair pathways, have only accumulated a few hundred mutations.   A newborn has about 50 new mutations and turns out fine.   Given billions of cells a few hundred mutations per century*(which may be far less if the cellular tissue are rejuvenated and have youthful repair and maintenance), is nothing to worry about... especially if you have cancer immunity as some fraction of the population seems to have.

link to source

reply to thread regarding future advances in computing tech at kurzweil ai forums

2 cents

I like this quote regards analog devices
[quote]Archimedes made a great discovery that digital representation of numbers is exponentially more efficient than analog ones (sand pile sizes). Many subsequent analog devices yielded unimpressive results. -Leonid Levin[/quote]

As I've said previously lower energy consumption, and cheaper manufacturing tech is required.   I believe that eventually we will transition to synthetic biology.   Which is why medical investments in tissue engineering are very good.   The brain has about 100 Billion cells, but almost all of those cells are in the cerebellum.

Judging by this picture http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/science-society/watching-brain-working, that's about 10% of the size of the brain.   But each neuron tends to have 1000s of synapses, so there are countless trillions of components. 

But it is likely digital logic can be carried out by molecules, even if we had to resort to nanomechanical systems, but perhaps molecular electronics is possible still...

Perhaps some form of protein-like logic element could be imbued into circuit like multimolecule machines in membraneous like areas within microscopic cells with some simple genetically guided circuit construction,  Some manner of intercellular communication, and you'd have self repairing self replicating circuitry, which in some multicellular machine would amount to quite alot.  Let's assume 100M such components per cell, then for an organ similar to the liver with about 240Billion cells, that would give 24 Quintillion logic elements.   Operating even at a few Mhz speeds, such a system would probably beat even hypothetical Yottaflop supercomputers in processing power, but would likely consume only a few tens of watts.

Link to thread

EDITED