There is easily enough solar energy coming from the sun to provide all of man’s current energy needs, but today’s solar panels are inefficient at capturing and then converting this sunlight into energy.  The new material from Rensselaer takes us a huge step forward by solving the problem of sunlight capture, but conversion of this captured sunlight into usable energy still needs improvement.  As we continue to improve solar panel efficiency and cost, solar energy has the potential to replace fossil fuel based energy use and solve a large portion of the global warming epidemic.

A similar material from Rensselaer was first announced nearly a year ago, but the big news today is publication of the results of a year long study in which the material was taken out of the lab and used to drastically improve the absorption of light on a solar panel, proving that the material can be used for real world applications.

Not only is this material excellent at absorbing the entire spectrum of sunlight, but also notable is its ability to absorb the light from any angle.  This means that solar panels will no longer need to “follow” the sun during the day on motorized platforms to achieve maximum sunlight absorption.  This will save energy needs, decrease the complexity, and minimize the maintenance requirements of solar panels.

A few choice excerpts from the articles:

The technique allows the researchers to strongly reduce or even eliminate reflection at all wavelengths and incoming angles of light, Schubert said. Conventional anti-reflection coatings, although widely used, work only at a single wavelength and when the light source is positioned directly perpendicular to the material.

The seven layers, each with a height of 50 nanometers to 100 nanometers, are made up of silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide nanorods positioned at an oblique angle — each layer looks and functions similar to a dense forest where sunlight is “captured” between the trees. The nanorods were attached to a silicon substrate via chemical vapor disposition, and Lin said the new coating can be affixed to nearly any photovoltaic materials for use in solar cells, including III-V multi-junction and cadmium telluride.

Below are two cool images from the publications:

Above: To achieve a very low refractive index, silica nanorods are deposited at an angle of precisely 45 degrees on top of a thin film of aluminum nitride.Credit: Rensselaer/Fred Schubert

Above: From top, light reflecting off surfaces made from aluminum, silicon, and aluminum nitride. At bottom is a piece of aluminum nitride coated with the new anti-reflection material.Credit: Rensselaer/Fred Schubert

This year’s competition, dubbed Lunacy, has a moon theme.   Robots will compete on a 27′ by 45′ field, called the crater, with a floor surface and wheels that simulate the low friction conditions experienced on the Moon’s 1/6 gravity (relative to Earth) surface.  Each robot is fitted with a trailer and the objective is to put as many moon rocks (balls) into the opposing team’s trailer as possible.

The FRC, as well as other competitions sponsored by FIRST, is an amazing event that provides young minds with the confidence, experience, and the joy of participating in engineering and scientific endeavor.  FIRST was founded by Dean Kamen who, among other things, is designing the prosethetic arm we reported on earlier.  If you have some spare time, they can never get enough adult mentors.

Below is a video of the inspiring intro movie from the kickoff presentation, followed by an animated video of the Lunacy competition:

A company called Second Sight Medical Products in partnership with a large consortium headed by the Department of Energy is currently testing its second generation model, called the Argus II, on more than 20 individuals.  Patients that were completely blind are able to see moving objects, read very large print, and recognize several other visual cues once implanted with the Argus II artificial retina.  From the article:

A patient named Terry spotted the shadow of his 18 year-old son as he passed
by on a sidewalk. “It was the first time I’d seen anything of him since
he was 5 years old,” Terry told Artificial Retina News, a publication
of the Artificial Retina Project.

The third generation model is already in the works and promises much better vision by interfacing with the brain using a 1,000 electrode array vs the 60 electrode array used in the Argon II.

These artificial retinas are still years away from becoming widespread because they are too expensive, too clunky, and too fragile to withstand decades of normal wear and tear.  Yet all of these problems are being addressed aggressively and soon millions of blind people will be given back the gift of sight.  Amazing!

Above: The Argus II Artificial Retina System

Although Second Sight Medical Products is the private sector company producing the Argus II, the real force behind this awesome product is an initiative from the U.S. Department of Energy called the Artificial Retina Project.  From the Artificial Retina Project website:

The Artificial Retina Project is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to develop an implantable microelectronic retinal device that restores useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases. The ultimate goal of the project is to restore reading ability, facial recognition, and unaided mobility in people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

According to this more technical article, the artificial retina, also known as a retinal prosthetic, works as follows:

1. A pair of glasses with a small video camera is worn by the patient
2. The video captured by the camera is sent wirelessly to a belt pack containing a microprocessor that processes the video signal
3. This processed video signal is sent to an antenna in the eye
4. The antenna is connected to an array of electrodes that have been implanted directly inside the eye on top of the old retina
5. The array of electrodes transmits signals that directly stimulate optic nerve cells that are responsible for sending images to the brain’s vision centers

http://singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2008

There were way more than seven speakers at the summit, so more videos are sure to follow soon.  The current videos cover talks from Vernor Vinge, Bob Pisani, Nova Spivack, Esther Dyson, James Miller, Justin Rattner, Dharmendra Modha, Marshall Brain.

If you have not already seen it, please check out Singularity Hub’s coverage of the event here

Wohlsen’s article has caused quite a sensation across the net.  Years from now the article very well may be seen as the catalyst that moved amateur genetic engineering from unknown hobby to full fledged global phenomenon.  A few quick searches on google shows that the internet is virtually devoid of websites that specifically cater to the genetic engineering hobbyist.  Wohlsen’s article will only accelerate the inevitable mushrooming of several such sites in the coming years.

The ethical repercussions and potential dangers associated with amateur genetic engineering are clearly a concern for all of us.  But the simple fact is that the rise of amateur genetic engineering, like any emerging technology, cannot be stopped.  Rather than oppose this movement and push it into the much more dangerous world of black market activity, we need to embrace the movement with sensible regulation and healthy, open debate.

Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe published a more comprehensive story in September 2008 that is also good reading.

Did you know that re-attaching severed limbs is a routine procedure that was pioneered in the 60’s and has been commonplace since the 80’s?  Well, we didn’t know this either until we stumbled upon an amazing story of a man in England who accidentally chopped his arm off just below the elbow with a chainsaw and had it surgically re-attached hours later.   After just a few months he could move his arm and fingers again and he was back to work.  See the image of his repaired arm to the right.

After reading this article our curiosity was ignited and with a few searches we were shocked to see how common these types of procedures are.  According to this article:

“A severed finger can survive for at least 12 hours in a warm environment and up to a couple of days if refrigerated. .”

“The first step in reattaching a body part is to restore blood flow by reconnecting the arteries. For the procedure to work, the severed tissue must be alive, and the severed arteries must be large enough to manipulate using microsurgical techniques…You also need to reattach the veins, or blood won’t be able to flow out of the severed part. Without a conduit for outflow, the body part will swell, which can cause tissue damage…Tendons, bone, and nerves must also be reattached. In general, the cleaner the cut, the more simple the operation. Ears, which have small arteries and which, when severed, are often ripped off or bitten off, tend to be tricky.

Fingers are one thing, but entire arms, feet, and legs too?  Yes indeed!  An article from the Telegraph claims that in England hundreds of fingers are re-attached every year and larger limbs such as arms are re-attached perhaps a dozen or more times a year!

The key to successful re-attachment is microsurgery, which is surgery that is performed on very small structures, such as blood vessels and nerves, with specialized instruments under a microscope.  According to this article:

“The first successful replantation (reattachment of an amputated body part) was reported in 1964 by Harry Bunke. This replantation of a rabbit’s ear was significant because blood vessels smaller than 0.04 in (0.1 cm)—similar in size to the blood vessels found in a human hand—were successfully attached. Two years later, the successful replantation of a toe to the hand of a monkey was made possible using microsurgical techniques. Soon thereafter, microsurgery began being used in a number of clinical settings.”

Singularity Hub predicts the cost to sequence an entire individual human genome will plummet to an astonishing $1,000 by the end of 2009 and the time required for sequencing will require less than one week.  The ability to sequence entire genomes for $100 in a matter of days or hours is not far behind, probably only two to three years away.

Many might mistakenly think that genomes are already being sequenced for $1,000 by companies like 23andme and decodeme, but these companies do not offer full genome sequencing.   Instead they only analyze a few hundred hot spots in your dna called SNP’s that can tell you lots of interesting things about your dna, but not the whole story.  Fully sequencing every single one of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of your dna is a completely different scenario.

Virtually nobody is talking about the $1,000 milestone happening in 2009, but here at the Hub we think it is likely.  The sequencing of DNA has been broken down into a brute force computational problem that is rapidly being economized and streamlined by relentless advances in information technology.   A host of upstarts and established players are poised to break new barriers for sequencing speed and cost effectiveness in 2009.  Some are already making claims that are closing in on $1,000 for a human genome:

• Applied Biosciences claims that in 2009 their SOLID system sequencer will be able to sequence an entire human genome for only $10,000 in just 2 weeks!  This compares to a cost of $60,000 for Applied Bioscience’s previous generation system only 12 months ago.  That is a 6 fold decrease in cost performance in only one year!

• Complete Genomics claims that in the first half of 2009 they will be able to sequence entire genomes for only $5,000.  They plan to sequence 1,000 entire human genomes in 2009 and 20,000 human genomes in 2010!

• Other players such as Pacific Biosciences and Intelligent Bio-Systems also have promising product pipelines that could surprise in 2009.

When looking back on the last 18 years of gene sequencing advances we can see an accelerating trend of advancement:

The Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 resulted in the first complete sequencing of a human genome.  This first human genome was fully sequenced in 2003 (13 years later) with the aid of an estimated $300 million and the collaboration of thousands of people, corporations, and institutions.

In 2007, only 4 years after sequencing the first genome, the entire genomes of not one, but two people (Craig Venter and James Watson) were sequenced for a cost of roughly $1 million each.

In 2008, only one year later, it appears that at least 3 human genomes have been completely sequenced, one of which was the first female to be fully sequenced.  The sequencing successes in 2008 took less than 1 month and cost roughly $60,000 to complete.  Wow!

Now as we approach 2009 the $1,000 barrier just might be eclipsed.

When viewed as a computational problem the cost/performance trend of genome sequencing is represented by the cost to sequence a single DNA base pair.  The chart below shows that the cost of sequencing a single DNA base pair has consistently been cut in half every 1.9 years for nearly two decades:

source: The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

Although the chart above only goes to 2004, we would expect that the trend has continued through 2008.  In fact it has, but what will be surprising to many (even those that are in the industry) is that the trend of doubling performance every 1.9 years has accelerated to a far greater pace in recent years.  As an example, Applied Biosciences (mentioned above) is claiming to offer a new generation sequencing system that has 6 times the performance of the previous model from 12 months ago!  In 2007 it cost roughly $1 million to sequence an entire genome, and in 2008 it cost roughly $60,000, which is a 17 fold increase in sequencing performance after one year.   At this accelerated rate of advancement the $1,000 milestone will be eclipsed much sooner than many realize, likely in 2009 and with virtual certainty in 2010.

We are in the midst of a revolution…an explosion in ability to analyze the entire dna sequence of individuals.  Cheap, fast, and ubiquitous sequencing of human genomes is now an inevitability that is only years away….that is the easy part.  As Emily Singer points out the hard part will be doing something useful with this new flood of information.  Naysayers will claim that very little medical advantage has been gained so far from the several individual human genomes that have been sequenced in the last decade, but this sort of thinking is naive and short sighted.  The medical and technological breakthroughs that will accompany widespread, cheap, and fast human genome sequencing will be far reaching and stunning, but they won’t come in 2009.  It will take a number of years for us to unlock the secrets that are hiding in all of the data that will be unleashed.

To read more, check out these excellent links:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/the-cheapest-ge.html

http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_7EZAY6_Eng

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/01/america/dna.php

Picture at top: The Solid DNA Analyzer From Applied Biosciences

The internet is only about 5,000 days old, and in this time it has delivered to us an amazing list of capabilities and changes that nobody could have predicted beforehand (satellite photos of the entire world, instant access to almost any piece of information such as phone numbers, photos, sports scores, government forms, real estate listings, etc.)  Kevin points out that most people have accepted and adapted to these changes with very little sense of awe or wonder, as if it is no big deal.  It is amazing how easily mankind accepts the impossible once it becomes reality.

Kevin predicts that in the next 5000 days the internet is destined to evolve into one giant super computer that can store, share, and manipulate all of the world’s information.  All of the devices that we use (computers, handhelds, phones) are simply points from which we are able to access and interact with this global computer or mind…

The theory of the internet as a global computer or global mind is increasingly commonplace and obvious (see here), but Kevin sheds good light on the topic.  The global brain is already exhibiting certain emergent behaviors.  As an example Kevin points out that humans currently act as the eyes and ears of this global computer.  Everyday humans are working on behalf of the global mind to gather data for it by taking photos, recording video, and making observations of every facet of the earth.

Kevin delivers a compelling model of how the internet has evolved since its beginning:

Phase 1: In the first stage the internet was simply the linking of computers.  Computers were networked together and you could hop from one computer to the next.  The information that was distributed across all of these computers was spread out, highly unorganized, and difficult to aggregate, share, and assemble.

Phase 2: In the next stage of the internet we linked to pages of information, rather than merely linking to entire computers.  Directories were created and Google’s were created that allowed us to find, sort, share, and understand these pages of information

Phase 3:  We are currently in stage three of the internet where we now link to individual pieces of information or data instead of an entire page or website.  Granules of information such as a blog post, a picture, a tweet, or a video are created and then we generally share, assemble, and distribute the links to each of these pieces of information.

We can say that the internet was first a database of computers, then a database of web pages, and now it is a database of individual pieces or granules of information.

So what are some of the implications of the emergence of this global mind?  Well, Kevin gives us some key insights to ponder:

1.  The next 5,000 days won’t just bring us a better web, it will bring us something completely different.  Something beyond our current understanding and definition of the web that will bring new capabilities and new ways of doing things that we cannot presently envision.

2.  Humans are part of the future of the internet or global mind.  We don’t simply interact with it by inputting and extracting data.  Rather, we are an extension of the global mind, and integral component of it.  The next 5,000 days of the internet will bring a symbiotic relationship between man and the digital world, neither existing fully without the other.  We will increasingly be dependent on the internet and it will increasingly be dependent on us.

3.  In the next 5,000 days the internet will get smarter.  It might not exactly have a consciousness, but it will be much better at predicting what we want and need and making intelligent sense of all of the data it possesses.

4.  In the next 5,000 days the internet will become more personalized.  Wherever we go on the internet it will know who we are, who our friends are, what our background is, etc. and we won’t have to login to each little part of the web like we do now.  Instead of having a profile on facebook and a separate one on amazon, we can just have one global profile that will follow us everywhere.

The above review cannot do justice to the entire talk, so watch the video to get the full dirt.

On Saturday October 25, 2008 I attended the Singularity Summit at the Montgomery Theatre in San Jose, CA. An impressive lineup of speakers, including Ray Kurzweil (de facto singularity advocate), Peter Diamandis (Founder/Chairman of Xprize Foundation), Vernor Vinge (famous science fiction author), and Justin Rattner (CTO of Intel) were on showcase for the roughly 500 attendees. The summit was thought provoking, inspiring, and overall a success.

The summit began promptly at 9:00am and continued throughout the day until 6:00pm with a few breaks in between and a one and a half hour lunch break. Here are the Hub’s major takeaways from the event:

1. When people become believers in a near term singularity (a singularity that may come in their lifetimes) they radically change their behavior in terms of risk tolerance, eating habits, and investment horizon. If large numbers of people begin to believe in a near term singularity this poses the possibility of enormous and potentially dangerous upheavals for society.

2. Even if a true singularity is not reached within our lifetimes the singularity summit reinforces the vision that tremendous technological change beyond our imagining is coming in the next 40 years. In the next 5 years an explosion in interest about the singularity and the pace of accelerating technology may occur.

3. According to Ray Kurzweil, solar energy is an information technology that is experiencing exponential growth. Solar energy production has doubled every year for the last 20 years and is now only 8 doublings away (that is about 10 years!) from providing nearly all of the world’s energy needs. The implications of this trend are huge and warrant careful consideration for the environment, investment, politics, etc.

4. Peter Diamandis announced that the Singularity University (SU) will be launched in the near future. The Hub’s Keith Kleiner will be a founding member of SU and we will have much more to say about SU soon!

5. According to Intel CTO Justin Rattner Intel has a solid roadmap that will ensure that Moore’s law will continue for at least another 10 years, by which time computers will be at least 1,000 times more powerful than today’s computers

6. Virtual worlds will continue to gain traction and functionality as people continue to recognize and leverage the unique advantages that these worlds offer versus the physical world.

7. Computers may be able to beat humans at chess and air hockey, but they are still a long way off from emulating human emotion and social behavior. Demonstrations today of the cutting edge in computer emulation of emotion and social ability were downright pitiful. Of course it is possible that we will make big leaps in the coming years, but today’s demonstrations were not encouraging.

Below is a breakout of the entire Singularity Summit:

9:05am to 9:35am - Conversation between Bob Pisani and Vernor Vinge

The conversation between Bob Pisani and Vernor Vinge was a pleasure to witness. Pisani is a famous financial news reporter from CNBC who turns out to be a huge fan of Vernor Vinge and the singularity. Pisani was surprisingly well versed in the singularity and he was very familiar with Vinge’s work. Vernor Vinge has written a number of science fiction novels about the singularity and is in fact the person who originally coined the term “singularity” as it relates to technological progress. Vinge has spent decades thinking and writing about the singularity and he had plenty of interesting thoughts and ideas to share with the audience.

Above: Pisani and Vinge Discussing the Singularity

Vernor Vinge pointed out that science fiction writers like himself have been thinking about the singularity for over thirty years now. As a result, science fiction novels are not only fun, but they are also a serious source of ideas, inspiration, and scenarios that we can use to explore the nature and impact of a singularity in mankind’s future.

Vinge confirmed that he still holds to his 1993 prediction that a technological singularity will occur by 2030. He said that the singularity was inevitable unless some cataclysm were to impact society so strongly as to totally or nearly wipe us all out.

Perhaps my favorite part of the conversation was when Vinge gave his thoughts about the embedded networked microprocessors that are becoming pervasive in every aspect of our lives, even to the point of being implanted into our bodies. Vinge said these microprocessors collectively might be the framework for the emergence of a singularity intelligence. On the flip side these ubiquitous microprocessors represent one of many technological single points of failure that could spell disaster for humanity and our march towards the singularity. Vinge said that a power failure or perhaps a massive electormagnetic disturbance could potentially wreak havoc on a society that depends so heavily on embedded networked microprocessors.

9:35am to 9:55am - Nova Spivack

Technology entreprenuer Nova Spivack gave a fast paced, thought provoking, and overall enjoyable presentation.

Nova’s presentation focused on the evolution of collective intelligence, also known as the global mind or world mind. The internet as we currently know it is generally called Web 2.0. Nova is calling Web 4.0 the version of the web that advances to a potentially sentient, global mind of human intelligence. Nova cited ants, bees, and even Star Trek’s borg as examples of superorganisms or superminds that emerge from the limited intelligence of the individuals. Nova speculated on the possibility of human society breeding humans to fulfill pre-designated roles, such as mathemeticians, soldiers, and so on.

The last part of Nova’s presentation focused on his idea of the 7 functions essential to a meta self. At this point I sort of lost interest because I am really not that into hearing someone’s arbitrary categorization of the complexity of human thought. Even if I were to be interested in this part of Nova’s presentation he did not have near enough time to explain it and so the entire idea passed right over my head (and probably that of most of the audience).

9:55am to 10:15am Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is a prominent female investor in technology startups, holding board seats on a number of such companies. Most notably for the purposes of the singularity Esther is on the board of 23andme.

I was fairly disappointed in Esther’s presentation because it lacked very much in the way of new information or ideas. Esther’s talk was fairly random in nature, first covering her upcoming 6 month intensive training as an astronaut in Russia, moving on to a shallow summary of the field of genetics and 23andme, and finally moving on to questions from the audience that were perhaps interesting but still lacking focus.

The main takeaway I gleaned from Esther’s talk was her analogy that our current understanding of genetics is similar to someone who understands 90 words of the Russian language. With only 90 words you can actually do quite a bit with a language, but more importantly you are well on your way to being able to reverse engineer and acquire the other 99% of the language based on your 90 word foothold. This seemed to be a useful analogy and also an inspiring analogy for the majority of us who excitedly await mankind’s ability to fully master the realm of genetics.

10:15am to 10:40am James Miller

James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College, easily delivered the most entertaining presentation of the day. His presentation was so humorous at times that it was somewhat hard to take him seriously. Yet behind this facade of humor lay some very thought provoking ideas that were relevant and important to all of us.

The entire premise of Miller’s presentation was that societies and individuals will radically change their behavior and thinking if large numbers of them begin to believe that the singularity is imminent. James pointed out a number of examples (often humorous) in which such individuals would radically change their diets, their risk tolerance, their daily behavior, and their attitudes in anticipation of a singularity that might arrive in the next 30 years or so.

As an economist, Miller especially focused on how those who believe in a near term singularity would change their investment behavior and he urged his listeners to profit from the predictability of this behavior. For example, according to Miller the field of cryonics ought to be a booming industry in a world of singularity believers who want to preserve their bodies for a better future. In addition, people who believe in the singularity will be unlikely to invest for the long term because of the extreme uncertainty and promise that upcoming technological change will create. Why invest in a massive construction project that will pay for itself after 20 or 30 years if the singularity will cause unknown demand for office space in the future? Why invest in drug research that might bear fruit after 20 years when technological advances that are coming in the next 10 years could make your research obsolete?

Overall, Miller’s point is simple yet powerful: If the idea of a near term singularity really gains mindshare in society then we may be faced with an unprecedented, radical change in human behavior. This is a very big deal.

10:40am to 10:55am - morning break

10:55am to 11:25 - Justin Rattner

Intel CTO Justin Rattner only months ago delivered a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum devoted entirely to the technologies and breakthroughs in the pipeline at Intel that are bringing mankind to a singularity within 40 years. Singularity Hub performed a thorough review of the Keynote here. Rattner’s public belief in a near term singularity has been hailed by the singularity community as a significant endorsement of the singularity concept from a credible industry player.

Rattner’s presentation was in many ways a repeat of the keynote he delivered at the IDF, but with the small difference that it was much more technical, which I for one was pleased to see.

Rattner first focused on the technical pathways by which Intel and the microprocessor industry will be able to continue to uphold Moore’s law of doubling cpu capacity every 18 months for the foreseeable future. Rattner pointed out that in one sense we have already reached the limit of Moore’s original law because we can no longer appreciably increase the speed or shrink the size of yesterday’s cmos silicon gate. Luckily Intel and others have been able to circumvent the limits of silicon by innovating new types of transistor gates, such as the HiK-MG gate that recently allowed us to move to 32 nm microprocessors during the last year. Rattner argued that the industry has a pipeline of transistor innovations such as HiK-MG, Trigate finfet, and III-V, that will allow us to continue Moore’s law for at least another 10 years.

Looking even beyond 10 years, Rattner says that we will eventually reach the limits of metal oxide, electron transport based microprocessors. At this point, we will have to move on to a different primary state variable, such as molecular conformation or electron spin to represent on and off. In addition, at about 20Ghz or so we simply cannot propagate an electrical signal cleanly or quickly enough and we will need to move on to an alternative transport mechanism that replaces electrons. Intel believes the new transport alternative will be photons and Rattner claimed that Intel is well on its way to developing his technology in a decade or so.

Rattner highlighted the major effort Intel is spearheading to create digital multi-radios. Rattner and others have predicted that there may be trillions of radio/wireless enabled devices on earth in the coming years and today’s analog radios are simply too inefficient to supply this need properly.

Finally, Rattner briefly described Intel’s Claytronics initiative, which is a project to build programmable matter that can change shape, color, and other characteristics in realtime. Such programmable matter is envisioned to be made of building blocks called catams which are able to assemble themselves together in various configurations to create superstructures with changeable characteristics.

11:25am to 11:45am - Eric Baum

Eric Baum is a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and the author of a 2004 book entitled “What is Thought”. True to the name of his book, Baum has spent a great deal of time trying to explain and understand what human understanding and consciousness truly are and how they can be replicated.

Overall I have to admit that most of what Baum said went right over my head, perhaps because of my own technical weakness in the field of AI. The entire presentation seemed abstract and was difficult for me to grasp. What I was able to gather was the following:

Baum proposed that understanding is the ability to retrieve and rapidly assemble meaningful programs that are then able to solve new problems and create even more meaningful programs recursively. Rather than evolve understanding through software or to code understanding by hand through software, Baum proposed that the true pathway to creating artificial intelligence would be through a collaboration of man and machine.

11:45am to 12:05am - Dharmendra Modha

Dharmendra Modha is the manager of cognitive computing at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Modha’s small team is charged with the minor task of trying to reverse engineer the human mind

This is not the first time I have seen Modha speak, and just as before I very much enjoyed hearing what he had to say. Modha claimed that mankind is now at the intersection of three trends that are about to make the dream of reverse engineering the human brain a reality:

Neuroscience - Modha claims that in recent years mankind has made huge strides in our understanding of the inner workings of the brain. We now recognize the crucial role that synapses play in brain function. We have detailed maps of the 6 layers of the neocortex, the brain’s primary area of cognition. Furthermore, we have substantial evidence that the connectivity within the brain is not deterministic from genes, but rather is developed from a simple set of rules and then molded and pruned over time as a result of our experiences and sensory input/output.

Supercomputing capacity - Modha calculates that by 2018 the computing capacity will be generally available to simulate the ability of a real human brain in realtime. Modha’s group has just recently published a paper in which they were able to create a reasonable simulation of a rat brain in realtime.

Nanotechnology - Modha claims that the upcoming revolution in nanotechnology will allow us to replicate and develop the nano-scale structure of a true human brain.

12:05pm to 12:30pm - Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel is the person behind opencog.org, which singularity hub reported on earlier here. Opencog is a wiki based website that is promoting the establishment of an open source framework for worldwide collaboration and development of artificial intelligence.

Goertzel promoted his AGI (artificial general intelligence) conference which will be taking place in March 2009 in Washington DC. Goertzel showed a video of a virtual person and a virtual dog that use opencog AI subroutines to communicate and learn from each other. Over the course of the video the virtual dog learned how to dance by imitating the virtual person. Goertzel also showed a connectivity map of terms that was created by using the reasoning module from the opencog project. After unleashing the reasoning module on a collection of widipedia articles the module was able to make associations such as foreign being related to the words “official” (foreign official) and “administration” (foreign administration). Making such associations is a simple and commonplace ability for today’s AI, yet it is representative of the capabilities that are available free and open source for anyone to use at opencog.org

12:30pm to 2:05pm Lunch

2:05pm to 2:25pm - Marshall Brain

Marshall Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and the author of the book “Robotic Nation” that makes predictions about a robot dominated future for humanity. Marshall’s presentation was scientifically weak and was not well received by myself nor by most of the audience from what I could tell. Marshall’s presentation was so terrible in fact that I was torn between feeling sorry for him and being angry at him.

Marshall claimed that we are in the midst of a massive replacement of human labor with robots and that mankind is on a rapid path to unemployment as robots start taking our jobs. According to Marshall, in the coming years robots will replace people in construction jobs and also in retail jobs at places like McDonalds and Home Depot. In addition, we will see longer and deeper recessions and wages will decrease. He tried to back up these claims with some silly graphs showing that of the last three recessions in America, the last one was the worst. Somehow this was supposed to be correlated with the competition of machines with humans in the labor force.

The holes in Marshall’s presentation were numerous and gaping, but here are a few of the major ones:

Even if future jobs are to be taken over by robots, Marshall completely ignores the fact that new job categories are created everyday to replace yesterday’s obsolete jobs. Even as millions of manufacturing jobs have been replaced by robots in the car industry and elsewhere over the last few decades, the creation of new jobs in emerging fields like computer programming and electrical engineering have more than compensated for these losses. In addition, Marshall is woefully underestimating the difficulty involved in creating a robot that can compete with a human in construction, retail and many other fields. When mankind actually creates robots that can perform construction as well as a human can it would be one of the final signs that we have nearly reached or already have reached the singularity. At this point we will be at the convergence of so many changes in society that we will need a much more thorough and fact driven theory than Marshall was offering to understand and predict the implications to job trends, let alone countless other trends in society.

2:25pm to 2:45pm - Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where she and her team are working to develop robots with social abilities and emotions like humans. Her group created the well known social robot, Kismet.

Cynthia’s presentation lacked technical detail that could have made it much more useful and interesting. Furthermore, she wasted the first 7 minutes at the beginning of her precious 20 minute presentation explaining how important it is for robots to have social abilities as if this wasn’t already obvious.

Anyway, the presentation got better once Cynthia moved on to showcasing some of the interesting work her team has been doing in the lab. Using neural net based algorithms Cynthia’s team has been able to develop robots, such as Kismet, that have the ability to learn and imitate human facial expressions. Cynthia showed a demonstration of a robot learning to show fearful gestures and facial expressions when presented with a stuffed animal that it had been told was mean and bad. Cynthia also show a more powerful demonstration of a robot learning to detect and react to the behavior of a person that was deceiving another person by hiding food in a different place when the other person wasn’t looking. The robot correctly identified this deception and reacted appropriately to notify the unsuspecting person of the deception.

2:45pm to 3:30pm - Singularity Conversation Between Ray Kurzweil and John Horgan (moderated by Glenn Zorpette)

Ray Kurzweil, author of the “Singularity is Near” and de facto spokesperson for the idea of a near term singularity faced off in a conversation with John Horgan, prominent science writer and non-believer in a near term singularity. The conversation was moderated by Glenn Zorpette, Executive Editor of IEEE Spectrum.

John started off saying that 20 years ago he was actually a singularity optimist, but since then he has seen a number of once promising scientific visions fall far short of their potential. John argued that the singularity will fall similarly short of people’s expectations. John cited numerous examples to promote his point:

a. 1980’s dreams of nuclear fusion have not come true.

b. 1980’s dreams of an end to infectious disease have not come true

c. Initiatives since the 1970’s to cure cancer have had very little success

d. Visions of gene therapy have not come to fruition despite billions of investment and grand predictions since the early 1990’s

e. Advances in neuroscience since the early 1990’s have had almost zero success in improving treatment and understanding of mental illness

John argued that the examples above show that for many fields man’s advances have been relatively flat rather than exponential or even linear.

Personally, I thought that John’s argument was extremely weak. History is littered with countless examples of grand hopes and dreams that never became reality, but at the same time there were countless other predictions that did come true. In addition, there were several amazing advances that were not predicted or even thought to be impossible, such as landing on the moon or the rise of the internet and mobile devices.

Ray countered John’s arguments by stating that the exponential gains he predicts are only applicable to problems that are grounded in information technology. Nuclear fusion has yet to be based on information technology, so it is not subject to the same laws of exponential advances. Recently, medicine, genetics, solar energy, and brain analysis have all been converted into information technologies and as such they are now on paths of exponential advances.

3:30 to 3:50pm break

3:50pm to 4:10pm Pete Estep

Pete Estep is Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at the Innerspace Foundation (IF). The Innerspace Foundation (IF) is a nonprofit organization established to improve brain function. They sponsor scientific research and prize-based challenges for rewarding innovative technological breakthroughs for improving learning, memory and mind.

Pete Estep gave a presentation to promote and explain the mission of the Innerspace Foundation. Pete proposed that in contrast to scenarios such as Terminator where man and machine are adversaries, the real future will be a partnership between man and machine. Pete claimed that technology and information are accelerating too fast for our brains to keep up. In order to fully leverage and take advantage of this explosion in technology and information we need to augment the brain through BCI (brain computer interfaces).

Pete announced that IF has an impressive $1 Million for research funding in Q1 of 2009.  IF seems to have some serious momentum and it will be exciting to see what they can achieve in 2009 and beyond.

4:10pm to 4:30pm Neil Gershenfeld

Physicist Neil Gershenfeld is the Director for the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Gershenfeld gave an overview of the exciting work that his team is doing to bridge the gap between the digital world and the physical world.

Gershenfeld is working to bring programming to the physical world. The idea is to write software that becomes a physical object, rather than simply describing an object or simulating an object in cyberspace. Think of the replicator on Star Trek…you tell the replicator that you want a cup of black coffee and the replicator fabricates a real world cup of coffee for you from its programming.

What is most fascinating about this work is that although it may be difficult to achieve, research from Neil Gershenfeld, Rolf Landauer, John Archibald Wheeler, and others seems to indicate that such a vision is theoretically possible and does not violate the laws of physics. Gershenfeld’s work is seriously interesting and the Hub will have to make a more in depth post about it in the future.

4:30pm to 5:00pm Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis is the founder and CEO of the Xprize Foundation. He is also a co-founder of the very successful and long running International Space University (ISU).

Diamandis delivered an inspiring and informative presentation about the history and future goals of the Xprize foundation. Diamandis proposed that governments and corporations, although flush with lots of money and people, are actually poor at taking risk and creating innovation. Instead, Diamandis said that it is the massive wealth and vision of individuals combined with small teams of dedicated, smart people that create many of the greatest innovations in the world. Diamandis promoted his vision that the impossible is almost always possible as long as people are willing to devote the money and resources to give it a try.

Diamandis gave a brief overview of the original Xprize, which was a challenge to build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth’s surface, twice within two weeks. This challenge was a stunning achievement that is now paving the way for a revolution in space travel in the private sector. A host of new Xprizes have been launched to promote similar innovation in genomics, automobile efficiency, space, and many other fields.

5:00pm to 5:30pm Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil closed out the Summit with his own vision of man’s current progress towards the singularity along with his critiques of what we had all heard after a long day of presentations

Ray commented on how quickly society can embrace and adopt technologies that had previously seemed impossible or even shunned before they had been made ubiquitous by technological innovation. As an example, the ability of a computer to beat human chess masters was seen as spectacular and nearly impossible until it was achieved by IBM’s Big Blue, yet today this seems unspectacular and obvious.

Technological innovation is showing up in interesting ways and places. Ray stated that half of the farmers in china and africa have web enabled cell phones that access all of human knowledge. Solar energy was cited as an information technology that is experiencing exponential growth. Solar energy production has doubled every year for the last 20 years and is now only 8 doublings away (that is about 10 years away!) from providing nearly all of the world’s energy needs. Magnetic data storage, genetic sequencing are experiencing a similar trend.

Ray made it clear that he did not see the approaching singularity as a pure utopia. Rather, like any technological advance it will have positive and negative consequences. Just as it always has, technology will continue to amplify both our constructive and destructive abilities and it is up to us as a society to work towards the most positive outcomes.

Ray pointed out the interesting notion that when a computer is able to pass the Turing test, it will actually have to dumb itself down to pass. As an example, during a Turing test the computer would have to fake not knowing everything about every book that was ever written even though it might actually have access to this information because clearly this would be beyond human ability.

Ray pointed out that virtual reality will become an increasingly important part of our lives because virtual reality will provide us with new capabilities and enhancements that simply are not offered in the physical world.

Ray addressed the fact that the historical 50% deflation rate in information technology could potentially pose a serious economic problem for society. Thus far this has not been an issue because our growth in consumption of information technology has more than compensated for this deflation, and this trend will likely continue.

The implications for BCI are absolutely stunning.  Paraplegics will regain the ability to move their own limbs (or prosthetic limbs) when signals from their brains can be extracted and interpreted.  Stroke victims who have retained their consciousness yet lost the ability to speak will regain their voices when signals from their brains are routed to a computer that will synthesize speech.  Normal humans will gain superhuman abilities as their brain is freed of its physical prison, allowing the brain signals that comprise human thought to be projected across a wire or even wirelessly to anywhere on earth or even beyond earth.  Imagine controlling objects anywhere on earth or transmitting thoughts and images to anyone or anything simply by thinking about it.

Many will say that BCI is in its infancy and that we are hundreds or even thousands of years from reaping its benefits, but this type of thinking ignores the reality presented by the story from Discover Magazine.  Paraplegics and monkeys are already controlling prosthetic limbs and computer screens.  Those who cannot speak have already been given a very rudimentary voice.  The next 10 to 30 years is likely to offer advances in BCI beyond most people’s wildest dreams.  Look at these key quotes from the story:

The ultimate aim is not just speech but restoration of full bodily
function. If Kennedy has his way, someday the blind will see and the
paralyzed will walk—and other researchers are racing him to make those
things happen.

Miguel Nicolelis says his quadriplegic sub­jects will walk again—not in 10 or 20 years, but in just a few.

The melding of man and machine appears inevitable, Kennedy believes.
“It’s not hard to imagine that eventually somebody’s brain will be
incorporated into a robotic body,” he says. “It could grant humanity a
kind of immortality and also make us redefine what a human is.”

In a few generations, Nicolelis speculates, brain implants will be
as socially acceptable as breast implants are today. “Implants will
happen in normals when there is a benefit and they are safe,” he
states. He agrees with others that the technology will shape the
evolution of Homo sapiens, and his perspective is unmistakably
philosophical.

Today, he says, we are all in a sense locked-in, but we won’t be for
long. “With these experiments we’ve accomplished something that nobody
has noticed yet: We have freed the brain from the body. We have created
a profound new paradigm for the brain—and not just the disabled brain—to enact its will without the limitations of the biological machinery that we call a body.

“My children probably will see the day when they can sit physically
on a beautiful beach in Brazil but at the same time control a rover on
Mars, experience Mars,” Nicolelis reflects. “Their bodies will be here,
but their brains will be free.”

It still seems like science fiction to many, but for more than a decade now mankind has had the technology to regenerate human tissue to repair large or complex wounds resulting from burns, gashes, and surgery.

Earlier we reported on a product from Lifecell called Alloderm that is one of the leaders in this space. Today we would like to introduce you to Cook Biotech, another player in the fascinating field of tissue regeneration medicine. Cook Biotech offers a family of tissue regeneration products that it markets under the name of Surgisis Biodesign.

Cook’s Biodesign family of products have been used to treat nearly one million patients worldwide, aiding in the regeneration of tissue for hernias, large wounds, plastic surgery, colon and rectal surgery, and a slew of other applications.

I found an excellent article here that clearly explains the Biodesign product for those of us that are not tissue experts. Also, here is a clean, short description of Biodesign from the Purdue Research Park. A few cool quotes follow:

“Once in place, Surgisis Biodesign provides a scaffold-like structure and communicates with the body, signaling surrounding tissue to grow across the scaffold. Over time, Surgisis Biodesign is remodeled into fully vascularized tissue, and becomes as strong as the patient’s own tissue. As part of the complete healing process the scaffold is slowly replaced by human tissue and becomes undetectable — providing a permanent repair without a permanent material.”

“According to the American Association of Tissue Banks, one of 20 people will need some sort of soft tissue transplant in their lifetime.”

The Long:

The human body is great at healing itself in the case of small wounds or incisions, but in the case of a severe burn or surgery, the wound is simply too large or complex for the body to regenerate the required tissue properly. For these situations you need a product like Biodesign, which is a thin sheet (called matrix) that serves as a scaffold for new skin to grow and regenerate upon. In the past, synthetic materials such as nylon have been used as a scaffold. These materials are quite limited in their ability to help new tissue grow, are highly susceptible to infection, and stay in the body forever which can cause future complications for the patient. Cook Biotech’s Biodesign product represents a new generation of products based on biological materials that are more capable and more versatile than the synthetic products of the past.

Surgisis Biodesign is a porcine (pig) derived acellullar matrix that can be purchased in different sizes and with different properties based on the desired application. The Biodesign acellular matrix is tissue taken from a very special part of a pig’s intestine that has had its cells removed, leaving behind a valuable collection of proteins, chemical signals, and structural material that human skin cells can populate and vascularize.

Inserting matrix derived from pigs into your body might seem a bit creepy, but keep in mind that the other major competitor in this market, Alloderm, comes from human cadavers! Whether from pigs or cadavers, these matrix products have an amazing ability to help the body regenerate tissue and they have saved or greatly benefited the lives of millions of people. Acellular matrix is a very safe product: it is sterilized through a vigorous process and devoid of any potentially harmful cells, dna, or microbes that may have resided in the originating host.

An advantage of the porcine based matrix from Biodesign is that it is cheaper and the supply is virtually unlimited as compared to human cadaver based solutions such as Alloderm. In order to be more competitive on price and quantity of supply Lifecell has recently launched a porcine based product called Strattice to compete with Cook Biotech’s Biodesign, yet Biodesign appears to be leaps and bounds ahead of Strattice. The secret behind the success of Biodesign is that it comes from a very special part of the pig’s intestine (submucosa) that has just the right chemical makeup to serve as an incredible tissue regeneration matrix in humans. Strattice, on the other hand, is obtained from pig dermis (skin) and although logically it seems as though this should be a superior strategy, it turns out that pig dermis is not nearly as versatile or as effective as intestinal submucosa when it comes to creating the ideal matrix.

Below is an amazing video of Image Metrics’ most advanced animation to date, which they call their Emily Project.  The woman in this video is a computer animation, NOT a real person!

If you want to learn more about this technology then take a look at this video interview from Leah D’Emilio.