Attracting warmakers, polluters, etc.

The story of evolution continues, and machine intelligences are likely. Jack Semura, professor, physicist, explains how machines are growing, and how we are growing new technical capabilities. When the universe began, there were subatomic particles, then atomic particles developed, and then many molecules developed. We are, now, creating new atoms and molecules before, that have never, as far as we know ever, been produced anywhere before. Jack tells us about the motive forces behind many industry and public efforts, and what's happening in computers, data storage, artificial intelligence, genetics, robotics. Many experts think it is very likely that we will live in a radically different world within several decades. We need to be aware of the technology that is being born today. We need to contemplate our relationship with the artificial life forms that we are developing, what we want to teach them, and what they may teach us.

Note: I, Lion Kimbro, recorded these notes in real time. These notes might be wrong, I may have recorded the wrong thing, and there are (I assure you) several ommissions.

In attendence, at the beginning: 

* Jack Semura - professor, cosmology, computers
* Lion Kimbro - consciousness reincarnating into machines, or is panpsychism true? Future study, work
* Carl Anderson - Network design engineering network data analysis collection statistical - Externalization of memory, consciousness, biomimicry, theory, life in cyberspace, through networks, presence, footprints & impressions - crux: "Does life & consciousness spontaneously emerge out of complex systems?"
* Ruben Nelson - from Canada - trying to make sense out of the world - policywonk, futures researcher, community developer, not sure consciousness is just what machinery produces - skeptical of the language of machinery - does not capture the biological - here to learn, explore, get a better sense of jack
* Emmanuel Von-Lee - interested in hearing Jack's take - background: foundation field, interested in seeing where the divine & scientific meet
* Barbara (?) - Heard a conversation between Jack & another & was fascinated - concern: If I tried to read about it, would stop on page 4, but this seems important, and I want to be educated about what's goin on - appreciate Jack's perspective
* Michell Levey - "I'm just here intuitively, not by analysis, was just looking at the venue." It just called to me. "It lit up, said go there."
* Jair - Interested in analog & digital technology; Idea of A-Life caught my eye, interested in seeing where go with conversation
* Joel Levey - Brain studies, Consciousness, EG, anomylous behavior. Was with Dali Lama - "Can a sentient incarnate in a sophisticated computer system" - Dalai Lama said, "I think this could happen- why not?"
* Bill Aal- Refugee from computer world, was programmer, many years, until 1988 end - riseup.net - meditation, group work, following post-60s/70s consciousness from machinery thoughts - holds no opinions
* Michael Lindfield - Similar interests to Joel - difference between form and indwelling life - how can form and the in-dwelling life be resolved - zombies explanation talked with him - something that is a child of the conscious universe - can we make forms, as cocreaters, that have consciousness? - willing to have my software update
* Jack Semura - long background (30 years) in physics, thrown out of straight physics, ended up in experimental program, environmental sciences PhD - out of theory, into: how do you make eq's for bio things? I'm a meditator, aunt uncle buddhist priests, theoretical physics was a spiritual quest - asian kids thought: pinnacle of physics is theoretical physics - backpeddled from it

* In last 10-12 years, looking at courses that don't exist anywhere. Setting up things, researching from scratch, working on tasks like: "Complexity and the Universe" - Computation field is interestingly reinventing.
* Trying to fund a field of "cosmological complexity" - Proton/Neutron thinking vs. Digital
* Trying to make a case: There's something to - 13.7 billion years - to make a case we're in place for transition to another state - in grand scheme of things
* Drawing the universe as a U - starts from one end, goe's to another, and then an "i" at the end, the universe seeing itself - cost of observing universe is a sense of separation - mind is dualistic, objectifies, and then we forget that we're a part of it
* To me, the wild thing is: beyond participatory universe, and then after looking, the "i" starts to figure out the rules of the universe - not just seeing it, but decoding it - forming equations - and figuring out how to manipulate the symbols - start tweaking the knobs - hand emerges from the painting, and starts turning the knobs,
* it's driven by computation, pieces are driven by chip makers, software companies, ...
* It's all coming together: Biotechnology - Nanotechnology - Computation
* Ray Kurzweil - Age of Spiritual Machines, Singularity, ...
* John Von Neumann - noticed the singulary - feedback loops are for acceleration
* Before, people were worried about it - Robot machine 700's, Icarus and the Wings, the Frankenstein - Joining machines to body, and becoming symbiotic
* But maybe we're close, - if we're off by decades, it's nothing to the billions
* Humility: Each time has it's issues, we must deal with things as we find them today
* Talking about evo of the universe, talking about activism, part of a bigger overarching vision, we can enlarge the frame even more - daily life, tea, doing our activism: "The world we are going into is not going to be the same as the one we are in"
* If you project computer memory, ~2035, computer may have more memory than the entire globe of humans
* Computation is primitive and mechanistic, but our neurons are based on clicking on and off, and there's something incredibly massive about the memory of several billion people in what is a small thing - Bio, nano, electrical, computational - Biological processes are beging given to chips so that they can reconfigure themselves - why people doing it, when the computers or the DNA can do it, and the DNA clicks and links and reprograms the chip, with a gold molecule on it's back so it can be programmable, proofs and demonstrations have been done, we know how to do this- what if you can mate circuits and reproduce and they go on from there?
* Picking out parts, sharing parts of the body, electronics reproducing other circuits
* Computers can assemble their own - off the end of a line is another computer - computers can self-replicate
* They don't have to be mechanistic - muscle and tissue fibers are extremely efficient - we can make computers that have operations on muscle power - solar power transducers - circuits that reproduce, reconfigure - programs can program other programs
* I have a responsibility to all of this, have been in this 20 years - "Computers can't program themselves - people can't do it?" No, that's not true. Computers CAN and do program themselves. You can throw in random mutations.
* Robot walking training algorithms
* Vicky - Ethical domain - What of ethical DNA? What are the ethical codes - if computers are going to self-replicate, and humans increasingly side-lined - Silicon Race - what is the ethical code that we want to leave behind?
* "There's a project known as the Seed project." To get to super-intelligent computer. Lots of people involved. "This is a potentially dangerous world." We need to seed it with a seed that is friendly to humans. "What is friendly?" No universal agreement. But there's a project: "The Seed Intelligence."
* To convince people -- "Follow the money" - burnstein - all the money going into this field - billions and billions of dollars - think tanks, developments, universities, - when Stanford starts a project, starts 1.7 million dollars - UW - budget cycle just a hiccup - Berkeley, MIT lots of projects - Pharmaceuticals - Genetech - DoD - millions and millions - Bio/Nano/Computation/AI/Complexity - whole mess catalyzes places
* People WANT a better world, and they may be working with DoD - intention runs the whole gambut - it's not a matter of good or bad - I DO worry about it, but I come to some (?) - Trying to make a neutral fair of information to help dissemenate them.
* List of things:
* Misconception: Life is about reproduction - molecules can reproduce - molecules can catalyze other offspring molecules - we're building compounds, even artificial elements - new molecules that have never existed before
* At start of universe, just a handful of elements, trace of Lithium, H, He, ... Table fills up a bunch, can build next hierarchical level - atoms connect into making molecules - the molecules are all formed, there's a space of reactions in the laws of our universe to begin with - but there were things like plastic that didn't exist yet - space of existing molecules expanded, "the adjacent probable" - expanding to make new things - the space of compounds is expanding, expanding, expanding - we understand Chemistry enough that we're making artificial molecules that have *never existed before* - created by tens of thousands, automated - used to use programmed testtubes, but now have micro-channels and miniature nano hydraulics and nanoanalysis - tens of thousands of molecules - most people don't even know - peptides can self-replicate - "Even Peptides Do It" - "Peptide love"
* Roughly how many elements exist now? 100-150? Few dozen are new.
* We have meta-level laws: We can now figure out how to automatically create the things - Automated theorem proving - Automated logic - Computer memories are going to be beyond human population memory
* With meta-level laws of how programs can program themselves - can evolve better ways for programming themselves - A computer generation may not be 70 years, may be 70 days, 70 nanoseconds - Experiments of revolution can be sped up many-fold
* Quantum computation, - we're looking at our own computers as primitive! - Quantum computers can perform amazingly parallel computations - May be able to use quantum information to multiply computer powers by millions - we can do ~16 (?) bit computations right now
* This thing may open it's eyes, figure out it's eyes, and start turning it's own knobs.
* While we are doing our activism, we should be aware of this framework
* We're worried about destroyed species, we should also see the species we are creating
* The direction our vision faces should not look just backwards, but also future - using our wisdom to talk about these things
* "Jack, just flew in from Los Alamos," then from Vienna - "We're building life from chemicals of the shelf" - Building amino acids, from off the shelf, click click click until you have like a cell - building artificial life: demonstration process
* "Here's a cell," - people in field have no doubt that they can do this
* We can send our mind ahead 20 years, look backwards, say, "Those were the primitive ages."
* Remember the Bronze age tools, and the early printing process. Bronze age people polished it, looked in mirror, thought it was amazing.
* But from future point of view,
* We've ressurected a 14 million year old bacteria from an bee in Amber - South San Luis Obispo or San Diego
* Demonstration project to make prototype bacterium - can make another one, they evolve
* They do it by symbiosis - bacteria eats another and then extends it's genome
* Computer programs do this too - embed programs within programs.
* See the virus, in the computers
* We have constructed this world based on our world, our education, our intelligence, our wisdom - smart people working on this stuff
* We're not out to destroy the human race
* You get so interested in this, and you're paid, and you do it
* ALife demonstration project.
* Animal brains controlling machines - attach a brain so that the creature is turning on and off life - studying the psychology of the organism, what do these things do
* Why should people program robots, if they can just figure it out on their own?
* Programming sensors - Robots with learning processes - Processes that can change the way they themselves learn - from psych AI - metalaws about how to change self
* working out universal computers that can figure out future programs (Metauniversal computing) - convergence of billions of dollars - hoards of motivations, industry, profit defence, fight for tenure
* Artificial intelligence is to stage - humans not replicating human intelligence - Metacognitive learning processes - sexual reproductions - programs can mate with other programs - those that work well reproduce
* We're at this stage where most people educated in old century don't understand. I feel like an oddball lots of times.
* DNA is interchangable - can make new things that have never existed before - recombinant DNA technology - post WWII technology
* clones - hokey clones - hiccup in 13.7 billion years
* do you want 70 of a particular animal?
* Developing mixed bio-nano-compu agents with giga memory on tiny little chips and letting them learn and go
* we're reverse engineering everything, using DNA for computation, change A-T in the genetic code, means something, put it in a computer and let it go - binary pairing (G-C-A-T)
* the medium doesn't count so much - switching letters and placing them around - it's absolutely interchangable - one proton or another it doesn't matter - proven theorems about interchangability
* we've reinvented all of this, and at the bottom of all of this, you only need 1 and 0 and you can do all of this
* we've reinvented the way the universe at the basement has formed all these structures - rich diversity of mass and energy - with ones and zeros - simple, abstract form: process- only took us 13.7 billion years!
* look what we can do with ones and zeros? - digitized signals wiki shakespeare ...
* trans-genetic species - human ear on the back of a mouse - recombinant DNA - DNA is just interchangable replacable - industry declared a moratorium - in 1970's declared a moratorium - "until we understand better, don't do this" - the moratorium DID NOT LAST - lasted about 2 and a half years - was US dominated, 1977 1978 moratorium was called off - industrial genetic engineering biochem -  - the concern was the destruction of the integrity of life (Bill Aal knows about this and available to talk about this stuff)
* Carl: genetically modified strains of cereal grains have been a distaster, except for Monsanto - ecological failure - "the terminator seeds" - a "complete destruction of the flow of life" - can grow, but cannot reproduce - in effort to monetize biotechnology - "we have to control it, it has to be scarce, they want farmers to buy seeds over and over and over again"
* (back to Jack)
* Original founders scare thesmelves "we gotta not do this" - Genie has NEVER been kept in te bottle - That's knowledge - you lose control - another group says: "I'm going to do that" - tragedy of the commons & competition - whole show starts all over again
* This kind of thing MAY go on
* While we're doing all of this - pace is speeding up - we're not saturated, at ALL: We've figured out metalaws, we can teach these things as algorithms - better strategy, bank of 60 different strategies, try them out systematically - future modeling and estimation - reproduce mate - may be more memory than entire human population in a single mchine
* Miniaturizing
* Trans-genetic species: combine genes arbitrarily from this place and that place - green flourescent potatoes - Flourescent jelly fish - in plants and flowers that are blooming - black lit room and flowers bloom with UV florescent designs
* New form of aesthetics
* This is a world we're moving into
* Bring in discussion of community leaders and activists and traditional - to enlarge the context - not just preserving old ecology, looking at the future ecology as well
* To come into this world with our eyes open
* This hasn't filtered into the public mind
* How can we bring our collective wisdom individual wisdom wisdom traditions - think about what's possible and what we might do - there are other groups going with eyes wide open and TRYING for these futures
* Transhumanists, Extropeans; Seed Intelligence groups - will cross over and exceed
* I wouldn't be as worried if these were just deluded nightime dreams, but I actually see these people doing these things, and billions of dollars, and the well intentioned and the less well intentioned, - these are not just "dreams" - not EVERY scenario will happen, but the potential is there, but the groups are there
* Known fundamental laws are not keeping these things are happening - when something doesn't work, we can find another way - there are also not moral laws

* J: what else is there?
* Jack: Follow wikipedia, follow the links

Jon Cleland-Host: Cockroach going in remote control

* "Dreams are private?"
* Microelectrodes reading spikes

* Michael Lindfield: "Action learning" - picking up all these possibilities - we're looking for "the dream" - past/present/future quivers in the moment, synchronistically - ability of these new entities to perceive at the nontemperal, transtemporal - soul level - can they see these things that are part of who we already are - we are part of the call the calling and the caller - we are cocreators - created in the image of god his her likeness - intenntionality - purpose - dream - intended to be - how can these entities based on phenomenal way of perceiving the future - dow ork of fusing with a soul - can we infuse with consciousness - if we're going to dream a dream how can they become codreamers - computational power didn't give rise to the unvierse, helped in its production - that's my area of inquiry
* Jack: There are those who would say that these organisms, these new organisms, that are in part biological - most people in A-Life aren't concerned about Soul - "they'll learn, they'll be superior, they will have lives, they will have dreams with vastly more power than humans do - will deal with much higher levels of understanding"
* Jack: "They will have dreams and idealism"
* J: I'm not putting this out to cause a stir - so we can give this consideration - Noosphere - work at Princeton - Noosphere project - Dream analysis of the future - Noosphere project -

* Consciousness discussion - has human ego created an idea called the soul as an expression of - isthere something else, really? - Will machines become ensouled? - Soul as a metaexpression of the evolved human - somehow or another we became ensouled - did god pick us? or moving it into machines? or..?
* Carl: As consciousness has arisen out of an excess of...
* Carl: Generative by the biology
* Carl: Abstracting consciousness? Abstracting to a biochemical? No; Exponentiation of computing power - grows out of our control our through our encouragement - nothing to say consciousness and awareness will spontaneously arise - nor that it won't
* Gabriel Shirley: There's a lot of unknown out there
* Growing way beyond what we can put our arms around it.
* What kid of principles would we oput around it.
* Michael Lindfield: I hold the planet as a sentient being - I am a creative scell - I hold the universe as a living reality - it's not just US evolving shooting to the stars - we are playing a part responding to the needs of a greater being - a choice free choice - figuring a best way of getting there - once we unleash this other stuff - as long as we understand it's done in a living context aligned with purpose - strength resonant field -
* ML: There's a certain bandwidth we play in, there's a certian resonance - the planet is a living being we shouldn't forget
* Bill Aal: if everything has consciousness doesn't matter how it comes into being (if panpsych) - question is for us as ethical human beings - how do we want to play - mistake made in the genetic engineering time with moratorium - economic interests allowed to push faster - than society can deal with - instructive to look at the history - scientists got competitive - let's assume something is going to happen - something interesting is going to happen now as a species - nano bio whatever - how do we deal?
* J: Michael, are you talking about this creative lifeform being able to astrally project, have super-cognitive powers, (Minority Report,)

* Sarah von Caldar - Yes! Magazine - We're destroying the earth's biological systems, may be destroying our own capacity to live here - we must breath, ... AI would have much less connect with the biological systems of the Earth - extremely dangerous - what is the level of fundamental intelligence that says caring for the earth is important
* J: As we ask selves to break down the barrier between man and nature, ...

* Joel Levey: These things are happening: How is it that each of us, countless people in networks we're part of - how can we work with those teams - generate fields of intentions and prayers - allow highest possible outcomes for all life to the realities that are unfolding here
* Joel Levey: Trees, fish, passion for all these realms - designed experiments, ran prototypes, developed new prototypes - deeply spiritual process - did this with Monstanto - pockets of deep caring scientists out there

* "At the heart of this conversation, are assumptions about control itself. I don't know how you can back off. Whether it should be done. If control is a good thing. At the base of all these technologies, it's about manipulation and control, bottom line." World in a place of total control."How do we open up a conversation to look at the fundamental value."

* metaphor of the highways syste, and distribution of control
* German engineers - plants dying because of methane - cancelled experiment - if had been released, within a decade, all life could have been wiped out, turned into methane

* Vicki: In the short term, in this - Yang experimental investigative expansive very Yang energy - you can't ask it to grow up and have ethics yet - needs a parental force - developing an ego, expressed in monetary reward - scientific world - can we turn that competitive impulse for success such that - open access archives - financial piece - so, I'm just saying that: In a way, this question is not going to be something we can deal with, without dealing with unrestrained corporate power - unrestrained design is such that the cats going to get out of the bad again and again and again - here kids, here's your truck, here's the ground worlds - no glory for hitting