The U.S. intelligence community will now be able to store information about Americans with no ties to terrorism for up to five years under new Obama administration guidelines.
Until now, the National Counterterrorism Center had to immediately destroy information about Americans that was already stored in other government databases when there were no clear ties to terrorism.
Giving the NCTC expanded record-retention authority had been called for by members of Congress who said the intelligence community did not connect strands of intelligence held by multiple agencies leading up to the failed bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas 2009.
Remember, it’s all about data mining. And the government is getting ready to mine *all* your data. Regardless of whether or not you have any ties to terrorism. And that new 5-year limit? I’m sure even that modest limitation will just melt away.
So, the massive ballistics testing is done. Most everything has been cleaned up and put away. My head has stopped throbbing from the repeated low-level concussion of firing over 7,000 rounds of ammo, much of it very powerful and from very short barrels. Now it’s time to see if I can get my attention shifted over to all the other stuff I’ve ignored for the last couple of weeks.
Like this wonderful glimpse of the future here now:
I think it says something – a lot, actually – about the state of the world today that some of the first applications of functional brainwave-controlled mechanisms would show up in this kind of consumer product rather than a military application. It’s not the first such toy, either. Which isn’t to say that DARPA or some similar organization hasn’t been experimenting with such tech, but still.
Again and again, I am surprised at how quickly some of the predictions from fiction (including my own) are coming to be actuality. But that’s just the nature of the beast – what you think is going to happen later happens sooner, what you think is going to happen sooner sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
Related, I’ve just about given up on ever getting a straight answer from Trapdoor about if/when Communion of Dreams is actually going to be published. I’ll worry about it after I see to getting Her Final Year out. Some things I can control with brainwaves (indirectly), some things I cannot.
Two more technological news items that bring us closer to the cybertech from Communion of Dreams. The first is a millimeter-scale computer designed for implantation in an eye to monitor for glaucoma:
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A prototype implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients is believed to contain the first complete millimeter-scale computing system.
The second is a big step forward in brain-activated control of mechanisms thanks to an implanted grid of electrodes:
The method is called electrocorticography, which involves placing a thin plastic pad full of electrodes on the brain’s surface to measure its electrical activity. And it holds promise as being more accurate and telling than other efforts to understand the brain.
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The goal behind decoding the brain’s signals is to allow individuals to control machines with their minds alone. The science holds tremendous potential for people with limb loss, spinal cord injuries and neuromuscular disorders to move and communicate.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, coming up with the tech of 2052 was mostly a challenge because I had to figure out what would slow things down enough that whatever I said sounded plausible.
It’s been a while since I’ve written much of anything about economic conditions; frankly, the whole mess was just too depressing no matter how I looked at it, and I knew (and said) that the end result was going to be that we would wind up transferring more of our wealth to the bastards who caused the economic collapse.
But it is worthwhile to look at what happened and why. And this is perhaps the best examination I’ve found yet of the systemic, structural problems which are behind the latest mess. It’s a somewhat dense and jargon-packed piece on finance, but here’s the money quote:
For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
“Too soft and cushy,” indeed. I must admit (and have before) that one of the reasons that I wrote the backstory to Communion of Dreams the way I did was, as Umberto Eco said so well, “I wanted to poison a monk.” A certain part of me thinks that a good round of ‘off with their heads’ would be really healthy for our society overall, though somewhat less so for Wall Street.
Today’s xkcd sums things up pretty well, I think: the actual discovery was cool, but the hype made it feel anticlimatic.
Above and beyond what this says about our press being driven by ASTOUNDING!! news and the failure to get even basic science stories right (with some very obvious and excellentexceptions), consider just what was behind the hype: excitement at the prospect of non-terrestrial life of any sort being discovered.
Why did this capture the imaginations of so many people? Easy: we’re hungry for this news, and have been for decades. It’s not just the countless science fiction books and movies which have fed this hunger (mine included) – it is also the very real science behind the search for extra-terrestrial life (or intelligence). Proof of the existence of life beyond our planet would likely be considered one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind, and the announcement of such a discovery would be a turning point bigger than even the first time that humans walked on the Moon.
It is easy in a time of recession, when money is tight for most people and the government is trying to figure out ways to cut expenditures, to under-value NASA or basic science research. And I am not arguing for this or that ‘big science’ program, per se. But all you have to do is look at what happened this week, to note the wonder and excitement which was launched by the merest possibility of the discovery of life elsewhere, to realize that this kind of knowledge is something that people around the world are waiting for with eager, almost palpable, anticipation. I think it is one of the very best things about humans that this is the case, and it should be encouraged and used.
NASA scientists announced today an incredible find: a form of microbe that apparently evolved the ability to use otherwise toxic arsenic in their biochemistry!
To understand just how important this is, let’s turn to an analogy from one of my favorite science writers: Carl Zimmer.
The search for alien life has long been plagued by a philosophical question: what is life? Why is this so vexing? Well, let’s say that you’re hunting for change under your couch so that your four-year-old son can buy an ice cream cone from a truck that’s pulled up outside your house. Your son offers to help.
“What is change?” he asks.
“It’s…” You trail off, realizing that you’re about to get into a full-blown discussion of economics with a sugar-crazed four-year-old. So, instead, you open up your hand and show him a penny, a nickel, a dime. “It’s things like this.”
“Oh–okay!” your son says. He digs away happily. The two of you find lots of interesting things–paper clips, doll shoes, some sort of cracker–which you set aside in a little pile. But you’ve only found seventeen cents in change when the ice cream truck pulls away. Tears ensue.
As you’re tossing the pile of debris into the trash, you notice that there’s a dollar bill in the mix.
“Did you find this?” you ask.
“Yes,” your son sobs.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not change. Change is metal. That’s paper.”
OK, I have just broken the usual standards of “fair use” and I hope Carl will forgive me. I’ll compensate by saying that you should go read the whole rest of the post, because it explains far better than I ever could what the full ramifications of this actually are. Seriously – go. I’ll write more tomorrow. Come back then.
Perhaps it is the drugs, or the economic degree talking, but a curious thought occurred in consideration of a stock-market piece in the Atlantic: are we seeing the first real indication of some kind of self-aware Artificial Intelligence in the millisecond-to-millisecond world of automated stock trading?
OK, probably not. The cynic in me says that someone has just figured out a way to game the system to their advantage, throwing out a lot of confusing chaff to slow down the computer systems of other traders. Here’s an introductory paragraph to explain what this is all about:
It’s thanks to Nanex, the data services firm, that we know what their handiwork looks like at all. In the aftermath of the May 6 “flash crash,” which saw the Dow plunge nearly 1,000 points in just a few minutes, the company spent weeks digging into their market recordings, replaying the day’s trades and trying to understand what happened. Most stock charts show, at best, detail down to the one-minute scale, but Nanex’s data shows much finer slices of time. The company’s software engineer Jeffrey Donovan stared and stared at the data. He began to think that he could see odd patterns emerge from the numbers. He had a hunch that if he plotted the action around a stock sequentially at the millisecond range, he’d find something. When he tried it, he was blown away by the pattern. He called it “The Knife.” This is what he saw:
Followed by a graph showing a clear pattern. Then here’s the bit that tells how this could be an advantage to another trader:
Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds. In the highly competitive and fast HFT world, where even one’s physical proximity to a stock exchange matters, market players could be looking for any advantage.
But think about this. What a delightful SF explanation it would be to have one of these powerful automated systems (they have to be some of the most powerful and complex computer/software systems on the planet) starting to “wake up” and experiment in manipulating its environment: the world of stock trading. Here’s a bit from the MeFi thread where I came across this:
All of the serious HFT firms these days use “natural language processing”, which means using artificial intelligence to extract profitable information from news streams. People think of this as just headlines but really it’s anything that might contain useful information – these computers have all of the cable news channels supplied to them digitally and use everything they can scrape. Some of the firms even use facial recognition software to determine whether the speakers believe what they’re saying. My friends joke about how Cramer is a goldmine for their algorithms but that the profitable trades rarely match up with his advice.
One of the facts about ‘hard’ AI, as is required for profitable NLP, is that the coders who developed it don’t even understand completely how it works. If they did, it would just be a regular program. What’s even stranger is that they can’t use regular tools, like a debugger, to observe the algorithms’ behavior, because it interferes with the processing and causes different trades to be emitted. In a very real sense, they can’t explain why their robots send the orders they do. They can tell you what data they “trained” it with, and what sorts of data they “feed” it, but they’re inherently unpredictable.
As a result, a lot of programmers at HFT firms spend most of their time trying to keep the software from running away. They create elaborate safeguard systems to form a walled garden around the traders but, exactly like a human trader, the programs know that they make money by being novel, doing things that other traders haven’t thought of. These gatekeeper programs are therefore under constant, hectic development as new algorithms are rolled out. The development pace necessitates that they implement only the most important safeguards, which means that certain types of algorithmic behavior can easily pass through. As has been pointed out by others, these were “quotes” not “trades”, and they were far away from the inside price – therefore not something the risk management software would be necessarily be looking for.
Even better, perhaps such an AI entity was aware enough to realize its position in the larger world stage, and also realize that one way to bring down humanity would be through the kind of economic crash we recently just avoided – something even worse than the Great Depression. How to do it? Well . . .
But already since the May event, Nanex’s monitoring turned up another potentially disastrous situation. On July 16 in a quiet hour before the market opened, suddenly they saw a huge spike in bandwidth. When they looked at the data, they found that 84,000 quotes for each of 300 stocks had been made in under 20 seconds.
“This all happened pre-market when volume is low, but if this kind of burst had come in at a time when we were getting hit hardest, I guarantee it would have caused delays in the [central quotation system],” Donovan said. That, in turn, could have become one of those dominoes that always seem to present themselves whenever there is a catastrophic failure of a complex system.
Several things of interest, some personal, some news, some related to the book . . .
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I am struck with how powerful just random chance is in determining the course of events. Whether you agree with the Administration’s handling of it or not, just consider how the BP oil leak in the Gulf has come to dominate the attention and course of politics. Who could have predicted that of all the things happening in the world, this would happen? It’s like getting in a car crash – it sort of shuts out every other factor in your life.
I’ve written about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity previously. Simply put, I find the idea interesting but unconvincing. Kurzweil and the others involved in this ‘Singularity University’ are smart people, and I like that they are pushing for research and the development of technology which will benefit all, but it strikes me as mostly as the technological equivalent of the ‘afterlife’ of most religions – more hope than reality. This quote from the article sums up my thoughts pretty well:
William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.
“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.
“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.
Which isn’t to say that there cannot be revolutionary breakthroughs which could radically change our lives. I’ve also written about how hydrogen sulfide (H2S) seems to be connected to hibernation, and now comes a fairly breathtaking bit of news that is related:
Yeast and worms can survive hypothermia if they are first subjected to extreme oxygen deprivation, a new study finds.
The results could explain a long-held mystery as to how humans can be brought back to life after “freezing to death,” the scientists say.
The study uncovered a previously unknown ability of organisms to survive lethal cold by temporarily slowing the biological processes that maintain life.
But the really interesting bit was this:
Documented cases of humans successfully revived after spending hours or days without a pulse in extremely cold conditions first inspired Roth to study the relationship between human hypothermia and his own research in forced hibernation.
In the winter of 2001, the body temperature of Canadian toddler Erica Norby plunged to 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) as she lay for hours in below-freezing weather after wandering outside wearing only a diaper. Apparently dead, she recovered completely after being re-warmed and resuscitated.
The same curious fate befell Japanese mountain climber Mitsutaka Uchikoshi in 2006, who was discovered with a core body temperature of 71 degrees F (22 degrees C) after 23 days after falling asleep on a snowy mountain.
23 DAYS? Holy shit, I hadn’t been aware of that.
* * *
And lastly, you probably heard about this:
KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. geologists have discovered vast mineral wealth in Afghanistan, possibly amounting to $1 trillion, President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman said Monday.
Waheed Omar told reporters the findings were made by the U.S. Geological Survey under contract to the Afghan government.
* * *
Americans discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, according to the report. The Times quoted a Pentagon memo as saying Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cell phones.
Sounds like a brilliant bit of good news? Think about it again. As someone on MetaFilter commented:
Oh man, I wish I could feel optimistic about this… but a homeless guy with no hope and no prospects, who finds a gold watch, still has no hope and no prospects, but now he’s in for a beating too.
Did you ever read The Prize? Same thing. The ore sources for some of these minerals are very rare, they are critical for many high-tech products, and there is going to be a scramble to make sure who winds up in control of them.
Now, this scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell. In a publication in Science magazine, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.
I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.
Cyclone Power Technologies Responds to Rumors about “Flesh Eating” Military Robot
POMPANO BEACH, FL, July 16, 2009. In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets: CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.
On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.
RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.
Communion Of Dreams 