An Ode to Imagination

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

I recently came across the video embedded below, created by Jason Silva (@Jason_Silva), and thought it belonged here for its spirit and enthusiasm, if not for every part of its content.

Silva dedicates it to:

Carl Sagan, Ray Kurzweil, Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, The Imaginary Foundation, Chris Anderson from TED, Linda Mishkin, Richard Feynman, and all the curious and the wonderful…

I rate this selection pretty highly.

Now, Carl Sagan and Ray Kurzweil are kind of gimmes among technophiles these days, Stewart Brand and Feynman are classic choices, and Chris Anderson is pretty au courant, but not that many people include Leary and Fuller in their honour rolls any more and the Imaginary Foundation is a pretty damned outré – so kudos in particular for those choices Mr. Silva.

And as for Linda Mishkin, well I’d never heard of her and you probably haven’t either, so click on her link and find out.

And enjoy the video.

IMAGINATION from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

Brace + Erase: Synthetic Humans in Fact and Fiction [video]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

I don’t generally use this blog to pimp my own projects — I’ve done it once (and even there I included relevant research papers).

But my long-standing interest in synthetic human bodies was the starting point for the blog and also for parts of my upcoming novel, Luck and Death at the Edge of the World.

And in my experience people who enjoy the real science of artificial humanity enjoy it in fiction as well.

So, no long sales pitch.  Here’s the new trailer for my book.  It’s a recorded reading of the first chapter, with music and effects by TTG Music Lab, whose day job is scoring feature films and television shows.  I strongly recommend using headphones and cranking the volume to get every bit of their awesome audio.

If you enjoy the trailer, come over to my IndieGoGo page, where you can get the book and extensive goodies to go with it and find out more at my main site.

As somebody once said: just push play.

The New Organ Prize [video, links]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Hey dude or dudette! Remember to click on the Luck & Death banner, above. For a limited time — getting shorter every day — you can order a special edition of the book at the regular retail price of $5.00. Free sample chapters are available, as is an MP3 sample chapter for your iPod or other device. If you enjoy this site, try it!

Those of you who are space geeks like me will be familiar with the X-Prize, which helped move space tourism (and cheap space flight generally) from being a great idea to being a reality that is in the process of being constructed.

Now the Methuselah Foundation, which is dedicated to extending healthy human life, has initiated the New Organ Prize (embedded video below).

The prize has two categories.

One is for banking organs: the winner must preserve a complex organ for 30 days — thousands of people die because the best we can do now is less than a day.

The other is for creating organs: the winner must build a complex whole organ from a person’s cells, transplant it, and have it function for two years.

As with the original X-Prize, the New Organ Prize is set at $10 million.  And the fact is that X-Prize competitors were sufficiently incentivized with that prize for many of the teams to spend far more than $10 million on their projects.

Prizes like this — when combined with prestige and the prospect of future profits from new technologies — appear to be enough, in at least in some cases, to spawn teams that will meet the project’s goal.

The Fastest Route to Immortality? [video, research papers]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Want radical life extension to the point of immortality?

You can try working on it one cell at a time: Human Endothelial Cell Life Extension by Telomerase Expression [pdf]

You can try caloric restriction: Revisiting the Role of Fat Mass in the Life Extension Induced by Caloric Restriction [pdf]

You can use pharmaceuticals: Life extension in Drosophila by feeding a drug [pdf]

You can follow the program laid out by Ray Kurzweill and Terry Grossman: Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

But if you’re impatient, you can live forever starting right now by having a character named after you in Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.

Watch the video to find out about other swag you can get, then download a free sample of the book and collect your immortality here.

Jürgen Schmidhuber Says Humanity Isn’t the Point, It’s the *Starting* Point [video, research papers]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Jürgen Schmidhuber is an artificial intelligence researcher who not only walks the walk, he also talks a darn good talk — just witness his recent TEDxLausanne lecture, embedded below, entitled When Creative Machines Overtake Man.

He walks his audience through a wonderful, ideosyncratic version of Kurzweill’s law of exponential returns, laced with some pretty good jokes, concluding with the moment when we humans — who are only progenitors of intelligence, not its ultimate expression — pass the torch to something that is not us.

Selected papers available online:

Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up! Response to The Singularity [pdf]. Abstract: Responding to Chalmers’ The Singularity (2010), I argue that progress towards self-improving AIs is already substantially beyond what many futurists and philosophers are aware of. Instead of rehashing well-trodden topics of the previous millennium, let us start focusing on relevant new millennium results.

A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything [pdf]: Abstract - Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible universes, and chat about perceived and true randomness, life, generalization, and learning in a given universe.

Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation (1990-2010)[draft][pdf]: Partial Abstract—The simple but general formal theory of fun & intrinsic motivation & creativity (1990-) is based on the concept of maximizing intrinsic reward for the active creation or discovery of novel, surprising patterns allowing for improved prediction or data compression.

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An AI is a central character in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details on the Luck & Death Page and download a free, previously published short story on the My Writing Page of my site.

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Humanity 2.0: Lecture on Life Extension, Human Augmentation + Their Social Effects

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

The TV Ontario show Big Ideas is one of the best products of public television in Canada.  It’s shot in a lecture or oral essay format and its speakers come from many disciplines, but include scientists, popular science writers,  and science fiction writers, like Steven Pinker, Cory Doctorow, Freeman Dyson, and Clay Shirky.

Besides being broadcast, Big Ideas TV shows are available as podcasts, either in video or audio format and can be viewed online.

The episode I want to foucs on was released on February 3, 2012 and features Canadian science fiction writer and Hugo and Nebula winner Robert J. Sawyer [home page, Amazon.com page] giving a talk called Humanity 2.0, which is, in effect, a primer on human augmentation, life extension, and the social effects of our increasing internalization of our technology and externalization of our consciousness.

Sawyer is mostly summarizing ideas that originate elsewhere — as I’m sure he’d readily admit — but he also sprinkles in some original thoughts and he’s a genial speaker who gives a lucid talk that’s accessible to newcomers, but still has a few ideas in it to interest veterans as well.

For the podcast, go to the audio or video link above and scroll down to the entry for 02/03/12 (their date format, not mine).

The video is embedded below.

Robotic Spine Surgery [video, news item, research paper]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Video introduction to SpineAssist from Mazor Robotics [company page, news reports], embedded below.

News report on SpineAssist in Spine Health here.

Research paper re robotic spinal surgery[pdf]: Transoral robotic surgery of craniocervical junction and atlantoaxial spine: a cadaveric study

Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering [University of Sheffield][video]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Video on this multidisciplinary team ebmedded below.

Team members appearing in the video (with related links, in order of appearance):

Professor John W Haycock

• staff page

Professor Paul V Hatton

• staff page
• Silk-based Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering (with V. Kearns, A.C. MacIntosh, A. Crawford) [pdf]

Professor Sheila MacNeil

• staff page
• BBC report Glowing wound dressing indicates infection
• U of Sheffield Media Centre release Sheffield experts shine a light on the detection of bacterial infection
• Translating Tissue Engineering to the Clinic, European Cells and Materials Vol. 11. Suppl. 3, 2006 (page 14) [pdf]

Professor Giuseppe Battaglia

• staff page

The Evolution of Biomaterials [University of Toronto, CCRM]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Read the article here.

The Author, Roshan Yoganathan, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto and is a development scientist in biomaterials and tissue mimetics at the Toronto-based Centre for the Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine.

For anyone interested in keeping abreast of the biomaterials/business nexus, the CCRM has an email update service here.  Its mission is:

… to create and sustain a global nexus for Regenerative Medicine (RM) commercialization by unifying dynamic business leadership with high value innovative translational technology platforms based on demonstrated excellence in fundamental stem cell and biomaterial science.

Dr. Yoganathan can be found on LinkedIn here and at the CCRM here.

He also has several open access papers:

• A Green Method for Processing Polymers Using Dense Gas Technology
• Polymer Processing Using Dense Gas Technology
• Encapsulation of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles by the Supercritical Antisolvent Process
• Impregnation of Ibuprofen Into Polycaprolactone Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

The image is borrowed from here.

Brain Mapping, Uploading + Immortality — Part III (Henry Markram)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Henry Makram wants to take the kind of map that is being produced by Sebastian Seung (see Part II of this series here) and create a computer model of the human brain.  If he’s successful, this could help people like Dmitry Itskov (see Part I of this series here), who want to digitize human consciousness and instantiate it in a synthetic humanoid body.

Get an overview of Markram’s project from Nature here or of the man’s public profile from Wikipedia here.

The home page for his Blue Brain Porject can be found here.

He was interviewed by Discover here and Seed Magazine has posted a video called Designing the Human Mind here.

Two videos are embedded below.  The first is a TED conference lecture by Markram called Supercomputing the Brain’s Secrets.  The second is a video from 2008 on the Blue Brain Project.

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Brain mapping and the uploading of consciousness feature in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my site.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.