In the Future...

......sheep will learn to make rudimentary tools, and then we're screwed.

Futurist: M104 member Robert Hinkley.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After this weeks festivities in Boston, whether you viewed them as a tremendous renewal of hope for our nation, a massive hot-air-athon, or an unwlecome disruption of your summer re-run viewing, what better wrap-up could there be than a little good news?

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day I

1. Lung Cancer Gene Identified
2. Raising Nicer Rats. And Monkeys. And Children.
3. Richer All the Time
4. Frozen Ark
5. Stem Cell Therapy Even a Mother Could Love
6. There's Never an Alien Around When You Need One
7. IP Addresses for Everyone Everything!
   
   Quote of the Day II
   
   Update

Quote of the Day I

We've discovered the secret of life.

-- Francis Crick

via BrainyQuote

Item 1
Lung Cancer Gene Isolated?

The Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium (GELCC) examined 52 families who had at least three first-degree family members affected by lung, throat or laryngeal cancer. Of these 52 families, 36 had affected members in at least two generations. Using 392 known genetic markers, which are DNA sequences that are known to be common sites of genetic variation, the researchers generated and then compared the alleles (the different variations each gene can take) of all affected and non-affected family members who were willing to participate in the study.

The good news:

First off, this is good news because it should provide some additional impetus for some people not to smoke. As the article explains:

Another interesting discovery the team made involved the effects of smoking on cancer risk for carriers and non-carriers of the predicted familial lung cancer gene. They found that in non-carriers, the more they smoked, the greater their risk of cancer. In carriers, on the other hand, any amount of smoking increased lung cancer risk. These findings suggest that smoking even a small amount can lead to cancer for individuals with inherited susceptibility.

Of course...

Many will argue that you would have to be crazy to smoke, anyway. Maybe the knowledge that you carry this gene would be enough to scare a long-time smoker into quitting; maybe not. But you would really have to be crazy to know that you carry this gene and go ahead and start smoking anyway.

Anyway...

This news suggests a possible path to gene therapy treatments that could be used to prevent, maybe one day even cure, lung cancer. Great stuff.

Item 2
Nature, Nurture, Tomato, Tomahto

Try connecting the dots between the these three pieces of news.

(1) From Tech Central Station

Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.

Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.

(2) From NewScientist.com:

Good mothering can abolish the impact of a "bad" gene for aggression, suggests a new study, adding spice to the "nature-versus-nurture" controversy.

The new work, on rhesus monkeys, backs an earlier study in people which gave the same result.

(3) From Kurzweil AI:

Scientists have discovered that rat genes can be altered by the mother's behavior.

All newborn rats have a molecular silencer on their stress-receptor gene, they found. In rats reared by standoffish mothers, the silencer remains attached, the scientists will report in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience. As a result, the brain has few stress-hormone receptors and reacts to stress like a skittish horse hearing a gunshot.

The good news:

So it appears that good parenting is as important for monkeys as it is for humans. And if human physiology is similar to that of rats in this regard (which is a leap, of course) it's just possible that kids are better today because we've actually made them...better. Maybe they aren't just making better use of what nature gave them, maybe nature has — through the good offices of their parents — given them a little more to work with than the previous generation had.

Item 3
The Rich Are Getting Richer, and the Poor Are Getting...Richer!

Without a doubt, there is some connection between economic and technological development. Technological development fuels productivity growth, which in turn drives economic growth. This raises an interesting question: is there an economic version of Moore's Law? How fast is our standard of living increasing? If Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974, is it fair to say that standard of living is doubling every 30 years? And if so, how does that rate of growth compared to what was experienced in years gone by?

The good news:

The article draws a link between increasing economic productivity, technological advancement, and improved standards of living. It seems that these three are related in a very positive way, which keeps pushing all of us towards better and better economic circumstances.

The downside:

As Stephen points out in the comments to the linked entry, although the wealthiest individuals may have vastly more material resources than the poorest, the difference between the two in terms of standard of living is getting smaller and smaller. It's so sad: being super-rich doesn't buy you the same gloating rights it used to.

Boo hoo.

Anyway...

The steady rise in the standard of living over time means most of us, inlcuding some of the poorest among us, richer than kings.

Item 4
DNA Code Freeze

Britain's "Frozen Ark" project boarded its first endangered passengers on Monday: an Arabian oryx, a Socorro dove, a mountain chicken, a Banggai cardinal, a spotted sea horse, a British field cricket and Polynesian tree snails.

The "ark", a project by three British institutions, doesn't include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species.

Like Noah, the scientists harbour hopes of repopulating the Earth.

The good news:

Everybody complains about the loss of biodiversity through man-made extinctions, and now somebody is doing something about it.

The critical assumption:

The ark approach is similar to cryonics, but the aim is to preserve whole species rather than individual organisms. In both cases, it is assumed that the future holds the key to restoring that which we have lost (or in this case, are losing.)

This project assumes that, in the future, we will have the technology to restore these lost species, and to generate new populations of them. It also assumes that we will have — or have the ability to create — a suitable habitat for them. To support a project such as this may involve believing that the present is not all it should be, but one could not possibly get behind such an endeavor without believing that a better future is possible.

Prediction:

Most of us reading this will live to see the restoration of at least one "extinct" species of animal.

Item 5
Fetuses Give Pregnant Women Stem Cell Therapy

Diana W. Bianchi, M.D. of the Tufts University Sackle School of Graduate Biomedical Research has found that cells from fetuses during pregnancy cross over into mothers and become a large assortment of types of specialized cells in the mothers and persist for years.

The good news:

This good news on a couple of fronts. First, it suggests a heretorfore unimagined health benefit associated with motherhood. What could be more deserved than that? Perhaps even more importantly, it suggests that we may have found a new source of fetal and embryonic stem cells, one that may be free of the controversey which has surrounded stem cell research up to this point.

As Randall Parker explains it:

My guess is that a large fraction of the hESC research opponents will decide that extraction of hESC from a mother's blood is morally acceptable. No fetus will be killed by the extraction. The cells so extracted are not cells that would go on to become a complete new human life. If a sizable portion of the religious hESC opponents can be satisfied by this approach for acquiring hESC then Bianchi's research may well lead to a method to get hESC that will open the gates to a much larger effort to develop therapies based on hESC.

On thing is for sure...

It will prove a lot easier to "win" the stem cell debate by coming up with a solution that both sides like than it would have been to get one side to agree that we should walk away, or the other side to agree that it's okay to kill an embryo. There's a lot to be said for the win-win scenario.

Item 6
Close Encounter Soon?

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is predicting "First Contact" with an alien civilization within a generation. To be specific the prediction is:

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades.

The good news:

If there's anybody out there, and these calculations based on the Drake Equation are correct, we should know about it in a fairly short period of time (relatively speaking. And if there isn't anyone out there, we will be more sure of that if we haven't heard anything within the next 20 years or so.

The downside:

The problem with Drake's equation (which Drake would certainly acknowledge) is that all variables are unknown. We can make educated guesses, but we can't know with any degree of certainty as long as our sample size for known civilizations is one.

Anyway...

Drake's equation has always been better for providing a framework for speculation than for proving anything. But Shostak has expanded Drakes' framework and has given SETI a goal.

Item 7
The Gift of Understatement

Paul Hsieh on the new version six of the Internet Protocol:

The new IPv6 internet naming and number protocol will make it possible for every person (or device) on Earth to have their own IP address.

The Good News:

Every person or device on Earth? Well, er, yeah...and then some. The linked article repeats the same modest claim before getting to heart of the matter:

Vinton Cerf of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the next-generation protocol, IPv6, had been added to its root server systems, making it possible for every person or device to have an Internet protocol address.

Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."

The Good News Amplified:

Our friend Alex Lightman gave a talk a while back that touched on a number of interesting topics, one of which was the introduction of IPv6. He estimates that IPv6 will provide enough IP addresses so that every atom in the known universe can have one.

Now that oughta hold us for a while.

Quote of the Day II

Watching science catch up to science fiction. Portable computers, Star Trek communicators, all that stuff has actually happened and there’s more on the way.

-- Major Robert Blackington, USAF, on what's best about living in the future.

UPDATE
It's Official

SpaceShipOne will fly September 29, 2004, making the first of its two qualifying flights required to win the X Prize.

We'll be there. (Virtually, of course.)

For more good stuff, don't miss the latest Winds of Discovery.

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, Kathy Hanson, and Michael "El Jefe Grande" Sargent. Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SpaceShipOne will fly September 29, 2004, making the first of its two qualifying flights required to win the X Prize.

We'll be there. (Virtually, of course.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:31 PM | Permalink

Britain's "Frozen Ark" project boarded its first endangered passengers on Monday: an Arabian oryx, a Socorro dove, a mountain chicken, a Banggai cardinal, a spotted sea horse, a British field cricket and Polynesian tree snails.

The "ark", a project by three British institutions, doesn't include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species.

Like Noah, the scientists harbour hopes of repopulating the Earth.

This approach is similar to cryonics, but the aim is to preserve whole species rather than individual organisms. In both cases, it is assumed that the future holds the key to restoring that which we have lost (or in this case, are losing.)

This project assumes that, in the future, we will have the technology to restore these lost species, and to generate new populations of them. It also assumes that we will have — or have the ability to create — a suitable habitat for them. To support a project such as this may involve believing that the present is not all it should be, but one could not possibly get behind such an endeavor without believing that a better future is possible.

Prediction:

Most of us reading this will live to see the restoration of at least one "extinct" species of animal.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:37 PM | Permalink

Researchers may have isolated (or may be close to isolating) the gene that determines susceptibility to lung cancer:

The Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium (GELCC) examined 52 families who had at least three first-degree family members affected by lung, throat or laryngeal cancer. Of these 52 families, 36 had affected members in at least two generations. Using 392 known genetic markers, which are DNA sequences that are known to be common sites of genetic variation, the researchers generated and then compared the alleles (the different variations each gene can take) of all affected and non-affected family members who were willing to participate in the study.

First off, this is good news because it should provide some additional impetus for some people not to smoke. As the article explains:

Another interesting discovery the team made involved the effects of smoking on cancer risk for carriers and non-carriers of the predicted familial lung cancer gene. They found that in non-carriers, the more they smoked, the greater their risk of cancer. In carriers, on the other hand, any amount of smoking increased lung cancer risk. These findings suggest that smoking even a small amount can lead to cancer for individuals with inherited susceptibility.

Sure, many will argue that you would have to be crazy to smoke, anyway. Maybe the knowledge that you carry this gene would be enough to scare a long-time smoker into quitting; maybe not. But you would really have to be crazy to know that you carry this gene and go ahead and start smoking anyway.

Additionally, this news suggests a possible path to gene therapy treatments that could be used to prevent, maybe one day even cure, lung cancer. Great stuff.

Hat tip: M104 member and co-blogger Kathy Hanson

Posted by Phil at July 27, 2004 03:30 PM

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:14 AM | Permalink

In the Future...

...the market for almost-historical artifacts and souvenirs for tourists from alternate universes will be considerably larger.

(via InstaPundit)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

FuturePundit Randall Parker reports that pregnant women often receive stem-cell therapy from the children they are carrying. Not only that, mothers (past and present) may turn out to be one of the best sources for fetal stem cells:

It is possible that many years after a pregnancy there are no longer cells in the mother's body that are fetal and capable of becoming all cell types. But a better point at which to try to catch fetal cells from the blood stream of women would be while they are still pregnant or perhaps shortly after giving birth. If fully pluripotent stem cells can be isolated from the blood of pregnant women then this may well provide a source for such cells that will not raise religious hackles.

Randall notes a certain irony:

A confirmation of this result poses what seems to me an ethical problem for the religious opponents of embryonic stem cell research. If developing embryos effectively are donating human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to mothers and literally doing cell therapy to mothers then this natural process is doing something that at least some hESC therapy opponents consider to be morally repugnant.

It will be interesting to see where the various hESC research opponents come down on this result. Will they oppose the extraction of embryonic stem cells from a mother's blood while she is pregnant. If so, on what moral basis?

My guess is that a large fraction of the hESC research opponents will decide that extraction of hESC from a mother's blood is morally acceptable. No fetus will be killed by the extraction. The cells so extracted are not cells that would go on to become a complete new human life. If a sizable portion of the religious hESC opponents can be satisfied by this approach for acquiring hESC then Bianchi's research may well lead to a method to get hESC that will open the gates to a much larger effort to develop therapies based on hESC.

Read the whole thing, including the comments. One reader observes that the opponents of stem cell research may spin this into a victory for their side, which might put the future of therapeutic cloning in jeopardy. This may be. On the other hand, if a means of acquiring embryonic stem cells can be developed that is acceptable to both sides of the debate, who's to say that a mutually agreeable form of cloning (or a subsitute procedure providing the same benefits) can't be developed?

One thing is for sure: it will prove a lot easier to "win" the stem cell debate by coming up with a solution that both sides like than it would have been to get one side to agree that we should walk away, or the other side to agree that it's okay to kill an embryo. There's a lot to be said for the win-win scenario.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

It seems that one of our most cherished beliefs about black holes has been disproved. Stephen Hawking himself delivers the bad news:

"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said. "If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."

Another consequence of his new calculations, Dr. Hawking said, is that there is no baby universe branching off from our own inside the black hole, as some theorists, including himself, have speculated.

Well, this doesn't completely disprove the selfish biocosm hypothesis, as expounded by James N. Gardner in his book, Biocosm. But it looks as though intelligence-friendly universes are going to have to find a different way to reproduce. Black holes won't cut it.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Hsieh on the new version six of the Internet Protocol:

The new IPv6 internet naming and number protocol will make it possible for every person (or device) on Earth to have their own IP address.

Well, er, yeah...and then some. The linked article repeats the same modest claim before getting to heart of the matter:

Vinton Cerf of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the next-generation protocol, IPv6, had been added to its root server systems, making it possible for every person or device to have an Internet protocol address.

Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."

I heard our friend Alex Lightman talking about this a while back. He estimates that IPv6 will provide enough IP addresses so that every atom in the known universe can have one.

Now that oughta hold us for a while.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This bit of wonderful news about the state of American youth was making the rounds last week:

Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.

Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.

The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems -- up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would "give Mom an 'A.'

"In the history of polling, we've never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well," says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of "Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation."

Not that anyone is complaining, but statistics like these raise some very serious questions. Or, let's be blunt, one major question:

What happened?

To turn on old song on it's head, "Why's there nothing the matter with kids these days?" Glenn Reynolds suggest that multiple factors are at work:

The question is, why are teens doing better? I think there are two answers. First, people noticed problems, and tried a lot of different approaches. Private organizations, church groups, schools, and -- especially -- parents started taking a greater role in educating teenagers and encouraging better behavior. As with teen pregnancy, no single policy solved the problem, but multiple approaches tended to make it better until something seen as insoluble just a few years ago began to look, well, solved.

The other reason for the improvement is simple learning. Parents -- who in the 1960s and 1970s thought they could pursue self-centered lifestyles without harming their kids -- learned that parenting isn't to be taken for granted. Likewise, teenagers gradually noticed things that were easy to miss when the culture of drugs and adolescent rebellion was new. However they look at age 17, the "cool" rebels tend to do worse later in life, and the geeks tend to do better. Just as smelly, desperate crackheads were the best anti-drug advertisement ever presented in the inner cities (far more persuasive than frying-egg commercials on television), so did unemployed loser guys and unwed welfare moms provide visible good reasons to stay in school, make good grades, and be careful about pregnancy.

When such a profound change occurs over such a short period of time, it seems natural to conclude that we're talking about behavioral changes. There is little room for any debate about nature vs. nurture, here. These kids must have pretty much the same genes as their parents, right? There hasn't been time for nature to play a role.

Right?

Well...let's take a look at some recent findings. Here's a study from the UK showing that, in monkeys, good mothering apparently makes the difference in whether offspring bearing a certain gene become aggressive:

Good mothering can abolish the impact of a "bad" gene for aggression, suggests a new study, adding spice to the "nature-versus-nurture" controversy.

And this might not just apply to monkeys:

Speaking on Monday at a press conference in London to mark the opening of a conference on genes and aggression, Suomi said that his results strongly mirror those of a study in 2002 co-led by Terrie Moffitt of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

For 26 years, she and her colleagues followed the fate of 1037 children born in 1972 in Dunedin, New Zealand. They found that children were much more likely to grow up to be aggressive and antisocial if they had inherited a "short" version of a gene called MAOA. It makes monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme which helps to break down neurotransmitters such as serotonin, and was less efficient in the individuals with the "short" version.

But carriers only went off the rails if they had had an awful, abusive upbringing. Carriers with good mothering were usually completely normal, showed the New Zealand study. Now, Suomi has replicated the finding in the monkeys, showing that carriers of the "short" MAOA gene only turned bad when denied good mothering. "Good mothering has a buffering effect," he says.

So the nature vs. nurture debate grows more complex. It appears that nurturing does, indeed, produce better socialized offspring, but it does this in conjunction with (or in this example, at odds with) natural mechanisms. So nature on its own isn't completely predictive.

But it may go deeper than that. As Kurzweil reported earlier this week:

Scientists have discovered that rat genes can be altered by the mother's behavior.

All newborn rats have a molecular silencer on their stress-receptor gene, they found. In rats reared by standoffish mothers, the silencer remains attached, the scientists will report in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience. As a result, the brain has few stress-hormone receptors and reacts to stress like a skittish horse hearing a gunshot.

(The original Wall Street Journal article is here. I don't know whether non-subscribers can access this one because I stay logged in all the time and it works for me.)

Anyhow, if human physiology is similar to that of rats in this regard (which is a leap, I realize) it's just possible that kids are better today because we've actually made them...better. Maybe they aren't just making better use of what nature gave them, maybe nature has — through the good offices of their parents — given them a little more to work with than the previous generation had.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rand Simberg remembers that fine July afternoon 35 years ago, and comments on where we are now:

Thirty-five years after Neil and Buzz walked on the moon, we have neither the NASA Mars base, or the huge spinning space colonies. But we're finally seeing new progress on a front in between those two visions. Forty years after the end of the X-15 program, we're recapitulating some of the early NASA program privately, and diversely, with the efforts of Burt Rutan and the other X-Prize contestants and suborbital ventures. They won't be diverted down a costly dead-end path of giant throwaway rockets. Instead they'll slowly and methodically evolve capabilities and markets, creating the infrastructure for low-cost access to space. Once we can afford to get, in Heinlein's immortal words, "halfway to anywhere," we'll finally be able to return to the moon, to complete the job begun by those first voyagers, and this time we'll be able to stay.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here's what I had to say on the subject a year ago. Still seems relevant.

Via Rand, here's a hopeful scenario.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A pair of recent essays on Tech Central Station by the indispensable Arnold Kling drive home (in no uncertain terms) how good the economic news looks to those willing to see beyond the pessimistic obsessions of the media and apocalyptic campaign rhetoric.

First, Kling reports that productivity is not only up, it's way up. In fact, it's blasting through the roof.

The 17 percent productivity growth from the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2004 stands head and shoulders above the growth rate for any comparable period. In fact, it is better than any eight-year period since 1976. In the first 13 quarters of the Bush Administration, the basic determinant of our standard of living increased by almost as much as during the entire 32 quarters of the Clinton Administration.

How's that? Come again? The basic determi-thingy of our what?

Kling spells it out for us:

Productivity is probably the single most important economic statistic. Productivity is what determines our standard of living. In the long run, productivity is what determines how much workers are paid.

Sustained high productivity growth would cancel out any possible economic worry. Global competition from low-wage workers? High productivity would protect our standard of living. Rising costs from Medicare? As I pointed out in The Great Race, high productivity would make the welfare state affordable (although not optimal). Environmental quality? High productivity would give us the resources to devote to addressing any challenge. On the other hand, low productivity growth would mean that our incomes will be low, our tax burden to pay for entitlements will be high, and environmental issues will be much harder to address.

So our single most important economic statistic is showing marked improvement — unprecedented improvement, in fact. While Kling bemoans the fact that only bad economic news seems to get covered, I find it oddly comforting that no one is making political hay out of these productivity numbers. The whole thing would seem a lot fishier if these figures were being trodded out to prove that President Bush is saving or wrecking the economy. (Of course, I don't actually know of a way that a productivity increase could be used to show that the economy is going downhill, but I don't doubt there are those who could.)

The one political (or perhaps I should say politicized) question that came to mind when reading these numbers was what impact, if any, outsourcing might have on productivity. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who have published a very handy little primer on productivity, the impact of outsourcing is greater than negligible, but not by much.

So here we have some extremely good news with very little downside. Kling's second essay, How Much Worse Off Are We? shows how productivity increases over the decades have raised our standard of living. Two tables tell the whole story. The first shows the change in the number of households lacking essential items over the past 100 years; the second shows the change in the number of households possesing certain luxury items over the same period of time. One item from the second table is especially telling. In 1970, 45% of all housholds had clothes dryers in them. Today, 45% of all poor households have clothes dryers in them.

That's right, Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974. The bar has been raised.

Economist J. Bradford DeLong makes the same point in an essay exploring the extreme increase in wealth that occured in the 20th century:

Suppose that you stuffed me and my family into a time machine, sent us back a century to 1890, and then gave us an income equal to eighteen times that of 1890 average GDP per worker–an income that would put us at the same place in the relative income distribution then as some $1,200,000 a year would today. We would not be among the 500 or so richest families in the country that might be invited to the most exclusive parties in the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island; but we would be among the next outer circle of 5,000 or so.

Would we be happy–or at least not unhappy–with the switch? Our power to purchase some commodities would be vastly increased: we would have at least three live-in servants, a fifteen-room house (plus a summer place). If we lived in San Francisco we would live on Russian Hill, if we lived in Boston we would live on Beacon Hill. If we lived in New York we would live on Park or Fifth Avenue.

But the answer is surely that we would not be happy. I would want, first, health insurance: the ability to go to the doctor and be treated with late-twentieth-century medicines. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was crippled by polio. Nathan Meyer Rothschild–the richest man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century–died of an infected abscess. Without antibiotic and adrenaline shots I would now be dead of childhood pneumonia. The second thing I would want would be utility hookups: electricity and gas, central heating, and consumer appliances. The third thing I want to buy is access to information: audio and video broadcasts, recorded music, computing power, and access to databases.

None of these were available at any price back in 1890.

Without a doubt, there is some connection between economic and technological development. Technological development fuels productivity growth, which in turn drives economic growth. This raises an interesting question: is there an economic version of Moore's Law? How fast is our standard of living increasing? If Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974, is it fair to say that standard of living is doubling every 30 years? And if so, how does that rate of growth compared to what was experienced in years gone by?

My guess is that 30 years is a pretty short interval for Middle Class to be downgraded to Poor. And I bet the interval is getting shorter and shorter.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has put together a very cool website in conjunction with the relase of I, Robot.

Check it out...

Don't miss these interesting reflections on the Three Laws of Robotics, including one by our good friend Michael Anissimov, whose name — coincidentally, I'm sure — kind of sounds like "Isaac Asimov."

UPDATE:

Saw the movie over the weekend; found it somewhat disappointing. In line with Mr. Farlops' concerns (see comments) I think the really intriguing ideas get drowned out by formulaic action movie/cop movie tropes. Too bad.

Kurzweil provides a link to this article on the Three Laws. Money quote:

"Asimov's laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine," says Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through learning. "They stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously thought that intelligence was something that could be 'programmed in' as a series of logical propositions."

Our friend ChefQuix says pretty much the same thing in the comments, below.

(Press release follows.)

SIAI RELEASES WEBSITE ON AI ETHICS COINCIDING WITH "I, ROBOT" FILM

ATLANTA, GA - In anticipation of 20th Century Fox's July 16th
release of I, Robot, the Singularity Institute announces "3 Laws
Unsafe" (http://www.asimovlaws.com). "3 Laws Unsafe" explores the
problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the
principles intended for ensuring that robots help, but never harm,
humans. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken
seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are
they truly reasonable? "3 Laws Unsafe" addresses this question.

Tyler Emerson, Executive Director of the Singularity Institute:
"The release of I, Robot is a wonderful chance to engage more
people about the perils and promise of strong AI research. The
constraints portrayed in I, Robot appear extremely dangerous and
excessively lacking as an approach to moral AI. The Singularity
Institute's detailed approach, by contrast, utilizes advanced
technical research for creating a mind that is humane in nature."

"3 Laws Unsafe" will include articles by several authors, weekly
poll questions, a blog for announcements and commentary related to
I, Robot and the Three Laws, a free newsletter subscription, and a
reading list with books on relevant topics such as the future of
AI, accelerating change, cognitive science and nanotechnology.

The Singularity Institute's Advocacy Director, Michael Anissimov:
"It is essential that more considerate thinkers get involved in
dialogues of AI ethics and strategy. Although AI as a discipline
has a dubious history of false starts, the accelerating growth of
computing power and brain science knowledge will very likely result
in its creation at some point. In the past few years, technologists
such as Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy have been informing the public
about this critical issue; but much more awareness is now needed."

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) was
founded in 2000 for the pursuit of ethically enhanced intelligence
by creating humane AI. SIAI believes the ethical and significant
enhancement of intelligence will help solve contemporary problems,
such as disease and illness, poverty and hunger, more readily than
other philanthropic causes. SIAI is a tax-exempt non-profit
organization with branches in Canada and the United States.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are so many exciting developments taking place every week that it's sometimes hard to narrow them down to seven. We'd like to think that the following items are a representative sample, but failing that, they're at least a good start.

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day
1. More Hardware from Veggies
2. Stem Cells Grow Up
3. Hope for Hubble
4. Now All We Need is a Tiny, Portable Sofa
5. Bug-Proof Duds
6. Stoneage Sistine Chapel Discovered
7. Is This Really "Good" News?

Quote of the Day

Only those who will risk going too far, can possibly find out how far they can go

-- T. S. Eliot

Item 1
You Call it Corn, We Call it Optical Disks

In September 2003, Sanyo Electric introduced the concept of a new optical disc, dubbed 'MildDisc' and based on poly lactid acid produced from corn. These discs will have a lifetime of 50 to 100 years and are biodegradable.

The good news:

A CD made from corn? What could be better for running on your spinach-powered laptop? We live in amazing times.

The downside:

The disks have been delayed coming to market. Apparently they do not do well with high temperatures. (Is it possible that their failure is accompanied by a loud popping sound?)

Anyway...

Roland Piquepaille comments on the production of the disks:

[H]ere are interesting numbers. Sanyo said that an ear of corn would be enough to deliver 10 discs. There are about 9 billions of CDs produced annually, and the yearly world corn production is estimated to be around 600 million tons. So only 0.1 percent of the world corn's production would be enough to satisfy the worldwide disc market, according to the company.

Item 2
If I Only Had a Heart, the Nerve, some...Teeth

Our good friend Randall Parker, the FuturePundit himself, has run a series of stories over the past week about major breakthroughs in the use of adult stem cells:

Helmut Drexler of University of Freiburg, Germany and his colleagues treated sufferers of acute myocardial infarctions (i.e. heart attacks) with bone marrow stem cells and found that the bone marrow stem cells boosted the volume of blood pumped by the left ventricle of the heart.

...

Better Humans reports on research by Siddharthan Chandran of the University of Cambridge, UK Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair on the use of a mix of growth factors to successfully turn skin cells into neural stem cells.

...

Working with freshly extracted human third molars (wisdom teeth) scientists have been able to isolate stem cells that can turn into the ligament that hold teeth into place.

The good news:

Adult stem cells are the often-ignored older siblings of embryonic stem cells, which hold so much promise and which are surrounded by so much controversey. The conventional wisdom is that embryonic stem cells are more or less "universal assemblers" capable of replenishing or creating anew virutally any cell in the body, where adult stem cells are much less flexible, having only one direction that they can grow. The second item cited above, which describes adult skin cells being converted to neural stem cells, would appear to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom. We may yet see universal cell assemblers grown from adult cells. And even if we don't, it seems that new applications for adult stem cells are being found all the time — which is tremendous news in its own right.

The downside:

Randall explains:

In the United States the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is throwing up roadblocks even for adult stem cell therapy. The FDA's stance has nothing to do with the debate about embryonic stem cells. Rather, it is part of the FDA's never-ending quest to protect people with fatal diseases from the risk that experimental therapies might harm them. In my view people with fatal diseases ought to be allowed to try experimental therapies and the FDA's position both slows the rate at which treatments are developed and unjustifiably takes away the individual's right to choose which treatment risks are worth taking.

Hear, hear.

Anyway...

It's encouraging to see that progress is being made in so many different areas at once. We can expect to hear a lot more about adult stem cell therapy in the months and years to come.

Item 3
Keep Hubble Repair Options Open - Experts

NASA should not rule out sending a shuttle to fix the aging Hubble Space Telescope, an expert panel told the space agency on Tuesday, six months after a planned repair mission was dismissed as too risky.

The good news:

We are big believers that the Hubble telescope, which has opened the eyes of the world to a universe we could scarcely have imagined, is worth saving. It's gratifying to see NASA coming to the same conclusion.

Anyway:

In a week in which the Cassini probe has survived being peppered by ring chunks, and speculation is increasing about passengers on SpaceShipOne, we didn't want to miss this very positive development.

Obscure Blogosphere Reference:

James Taranto would have headlined this piece as follows:

What Would the Hubble Telescope Do Without Experts?

Item 4
New Portable Multimedia Entertainment Devices Head for Stores

Get ready to feel obsolete with your iPod. Portable media players will be available within weeks, and they store and play not only music, but movies, recorded TV shows, and photo slide shows.

The good news:

These gadgets can be configured with up to 40 GB of storage, "enough to store every episode of The Simpsons." Kawabunga, Dude!

The downside:

The screen sizes are 3.5 and 3.8 inches, which might prove to be a bit of a strain for tired old eyes. Also, at an estimated street price of $500, they are a smidge more expensive than an iPod.

On the other hand...

It's 1984.

The phone rings, and you answer it. It's you, calling from the future:

"Hey, Me-From-20-Years-Ago. How's it going?"

"Okay. How about with you, Me-From-20-Years-Ahead?"

"Great! You'll never guess what I just bought."

"Tell me."

"Well, it's a portable combination TV, VCR, stereo."

"Portable? What does it use, tiny little tapes?"

"No tapes. It stores everything in computer memory."

"No kidding. Can it hold as much as a six-hour extended play vhs tape?"

"It can hold hundreds of hours of video and music."

"Whoah. So you say it's portable. What does it weigh, 15-20 pounds?"

"It weighs about the same as your beloved Sony Walkman. And it's just a little bigger than the Walkman. You could carry it in your coat pocket if you wanted to."

"I don't believe it! How much did it cost?"

"Guess."

"Well, let's see. I just bought some stuff. My TV cost me about $500. My VCR was about $200. My stereo was about $300. That's $1,000 in 1984 money. I'm thinking the device you're talking about must have set you back a good $10,000. What, are we like rich in the future?"

"Gotta go. See you in 20!"

"But, wait I want to know —"

[Click]

So you see, "expensive" is a relative notion.

Item 5
West Nile fears boost protective clothing sales

Recently, the battle of man vs. insect has spawned a new tool: clothes that appear normal in every way, except for their built-in repellent that keeps bugs at bay.

"This is the first new development in personal insect protection since DEET," says Haynes Griffin, CEO of Buzz Off Insect Shield of Greensboro, N.C. DEET is the active ingredient in most tick and insect repellents.

The active ingredient in Buzz Off clothing is permethrin, a synthetic version of pyrethrum, a natural insect repellent derived from the daisy-like flowers of a plant in the chrysanthemum family.

The good news:

You might be wondering just how effective these bug-proof clothes really are. It seems that West Point Academy has reported a reduction in the incidence of Lyme disease from 10 cases to zero one year after switching to field uniforms made from the fabric.

That's pretty impressive.

The downside:

In the long run, insect-proof clothes are probably bad news for, say, the people who make Off.

Anyway...

The Better All The Time Wardrobe grows. Insect-proof clothes now join power-generating clothes, self-cleaning clothes, and bullet-proof shirts.

Item 6

A Stoneage Sistine Chapel

An elaborately decorated cave ceiling with artwork dating to 13,000 years ago has been found in Nottinghamshire, England, according to a press release issued today by the University of Sheffield.

The site of the find, Church Hole Cave at Creswell Crags, is being called the "Sistine Chapel" of the Ice Age because it contains the most ornate cave art ceiling in the world. The ceiling extends the earliest rock art in Britain by approximately 8,000 years and suggests that a primary culture unified Europeans during the Ice Age.

The good news:

The fact that this important find is just now being discovered in a well-known cave is evidence of how much we still can still learn from known archeological sites.

The scope of the discovery:

Jon Humble, inspector of ancient monuments for a preservation group called English Heritage, commented, "The text books say that there is no cave art in Britain. These will now have to be rewritten. It is remarkable to consider that some 500 generations ago people created pictures on the wall of the caves depicting the world that they knew, which certainly was not as we know it."

Moreover...

It seems we know less than we think we do about the world we live in. There's more to learn, folks.

Item 7
Extended Life For Baby Boomers!

In a radio interview, famous futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that health conscious baby boomers have a good shot of living long enough to benefit from life extension technologies - to bootstrap into indefinite lifespans.

On "Living Forever," Kurzweil discussed how to dramatically slow down the aging process, even stop and reverse it, and the social and cultural ramifications. He also described his forthcoming book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever," co-authored with Terry Grossman, M.D.

"The book makes the scientific case that immortality is within our grasp," says Kurzweil. "Our health program enables people to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that we can remain in good health and spirits until the more radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies, now in the research and testing pipeline, become available.

Here's an real audio link to the interview.

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Kathy Hanson. Live to see it!

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Prince of Wales is once again warning about the dangers of nanotechnology:

The Prince acknowledges nanotechnology is a "triumph of human ingenuity".

"Some of the work may have fundamental benefits to society, such as enabling the construction of much cheaper fuel-cells, or new ways of combating ill-health," he says.

But he adds: "How are we going to ensure that proper attention is given to the risks that may... ensue?

Your Highness, maybe you ought to think about joining the Foresight Institute, where they've been planning for nanotechnology for more than a decade — including giving the "proper attention" to the risks involved.

If money is tight, there are several membership options available.

Original Comments

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)