Future of physics

The future of physics and cosmology was discussed at length at a recent conference held by the foundational physics research institute FQXi, particularly considering what may be ultimately possible and impossible for physics.

Theoretical physics has been progressing in many areas but there is still a strong need for observational evidence and/or alternative theories to support or disprove the existing ones. Luckily, much anticipated experimental evidence may be available in the next few years from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Planck Satellite, Pierre Auger Observatory and other observational astrophysics projects. For example, the Planck Satellite aims to look farther back in time than has been seen so far with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), earlier than the 400,000 year old universe. It is theorized that B-modes, primordial gravitational waves from inflation, may be visible in the very early universe, which would provide additional proof of the inflationary phase occurring directly after the big bang.

Composition of dark energy to be known soon?
Another specific example for which observational evidence may be obtained in the next few years is regarding the composition of dark energy, whether it is vacuum energy made up of axion particles as one multiverse theory predicts or quintessence made up of supersymmetric WIMPs.

Many outstanding physics questions
Some other key issues are how our universe was created in the first place (a quantum theory of creation), proof for multiverse theories and possibly detecting bubble universe collisions, more about post-big bang inflation, why there is so much more antimatter than matter (the antimatter problem), why the weak force is 10³² times stronger than gravity (vs. say a more acceptable 3-4 orders of magnitude; the hierarchy problem), the existence, size and parameters of any additional dimensions of space, not to mention the usual unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity, and finally the vexing Boltzmann brain problem, that consciousness could potentially arise from nothing but quantum fluctuations.

Next-gen astrophysics tools critical
Much progress has been made with accelerators, space-based telescopes, terrestrial array telescopes, and adaptive optics but the next era of astrophysics tools could be even more revolutionary. Accelerators are an expensive $5 billion or more and take years if not decades for fundraising, permitting, building and rendering operational. One alternative could be different kinds of accelerators which are smaller, quicker and cheaper to build, notably plasma wakefield accelerators, laser accelerators, and benchtop accelerators. Another way for tools to evolve could be with computational astrophysics and simulations such as MICA's Newtonian N-body simulation (featured by UgoTrade). As computing power continues to grow, accelerator and telescope datasets could be the inputs to large-scale simulation, prediction and test. As nearly every other science has moved into informatics and rigorous math-based prediction, simulation and experimentation, so too could astrophysics, fostering much quicker cycles and a tighter linkage between theoretical and experimental physics.

The FQXi community
Curiosity-driven physics researchers, especially those investigating risky areas on the boundaries of institutional acceptance are encouraged to apply for FQXi grants, and those understanding the value of fundamental physics research funding are encouraged to participate as donors and in the FQXi website community.

NOTE: The author is an advisor to FQXi.

Synthetic biology advances

The realization of synthetic biology, one of the cornerstone fields in this century’s life science revolutions, is a step closer this year with three important advances.

First, synthetic biology movement leader Drew Endy has arrived at Stanford from MIT. Knowing that people and tools are critical to the area’s development, he is assembling a world class curriculum and department to tackle the challenges of synthetic biology, estimating that Stanford is four years behind.

Second, more than 85 worldwide university teams have entered this year’s iGEM (international genetically engineered machines) competition. 900 students are estimated to be at MIT for the November 8-9 presentation of their work and the contest’s culmination. Previous year’s novel synthetic designs have included wintergreen and banana-scented E. coli bacteria, creating virtual-machine like computational platforms in cells and microbial cameras or light programmable biofilms.

Third, record attendance is expected at the fourth annual Synthetic Biology conference will be taking place October 10-12 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Biology investigation, modeling, simulation and building
Synthetic biology is starting to have more process and rigor, particularly as articulated by Martyn Amos in Genesis Machines. Several areas have been simultaneously improving and coming together: biological system and process enumeration, 3D software modeling and simulation, and biological machine building. As CAD and EDA allowed semiconductor designers to achieve new levels of productivity and automate complex circuit design and test, so too are software tools aiding biology.

Bio-SPICE (Biological Simulation Program for Intra- and Inter-Cellular Evaluation) is an open source framework and software toolset for the modeling and simulation of spatio-temporal processes in living cells. The innovation process for synthetic biologists is now:

• investigate the biological phenomenon or mechanisms
  
• mathematically model the existing or novel phenomenon
• use software simulation to test the model
• build it in the lab with standardized off the shelf biological parts of synthesized DNA

Advanced civilizations forgo simulation?

Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument articulates three future possibilities: “either almost every civilization like ours goes extinct before reaching technological maturity; or almost every mature civilization lacks any interest in building Matrices; or almost all people with our kind of experiences live in Matrices. He suggests that there is a 20% chance based on what we know now that we are living in a matrix.

Considering these three possibilities, the second case looks most probable, that technologically-mature civilizations are not interested in running simulations. It could be quite possible both because of its own likelihood and the likelihood of there being little value to simulations with more primitive self-aware participants (ourselves).

Future irrelevance of simulations with self-aware participants
It is quite possible that technologically-advanced societies may be able to achieve their objectives more effectively by other means rather than by running simulations. These more efficient means could be pure math, higher levels of abstraction, greater intelligence and better tools.

The main reasons that a non-technologically advanced society like ours thinks running simulations would be useful are to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our behaviors, to explore alternative histories and for leisure and entertainment either as observers or participants.

It is quite possible in the future that societies and entities will understand themselves so well that simulation will not be necessary. For example, augmented reality overlays could display or predict another party's utility function and provide a 3d data visualization of their likely future behaviors.

Alternative histories (e.g.; Napoleon not defeated at Waterloo, no Yucatan impact asteroid 65 million years ago, Greenland ice sheet not melting in the 2000s) would not need to be run, they would just be known or predictable. They would be obvious to a super-intelligence in the same way that I know my shoe will come untied if I pull on the lace, I do not need to actually try it. This may also be true for clinical trials and all areas of biology and most scientific experiments. Simulations with self-aware participants could be useful to a future society, but only in a forward-looking sense for more complex situations than can be handled by whatever the CurrentTech is, and the self-aware participants would be contemporary to that era not historical (us).

There are other situations where the objective is not obtaining information, the ever-burgeoning entertainment field for example. Entertainment simulations with self-aware participants would certainly be in demand. However, the primitive level of current humans would render us uninteresting in interactions with future society. For time tourism back in history, again, there is no reason to have primitive self-aware agents such as ourselves, artificial intelligences or non-sentient simulations could more adequately realize the experience.

Finally, there is the possibility that new reasons for running simulations could emerge as society advances, and it would be for these as yet unknown reasons that a future society would run simulations, and yes, there is some non-zero possibility of this.

Conclusion
It could be quite likely that future society will have more advanced technology than simulation, and even in the cases when it is interesting for future society to run simulations with self-aware participants, these self-aware participants would likely be contemporary not primitive (us). There may be less than a 20% chance that we are living in a simulation.

Second Life reaches 10 million residents

Exemplifying the electric growth of Web 2.0 companies, the virtual world Second Life has grown from under 1 million residents to over 10 million in a little over one year.

While 10 million residents is perhaps not the best measurement metric for the world’s success (users may have multiple resident accounts and not more than 10% of them so far do anything more than have one quick look around), it is still an important milestone.

Source: Second Life Metrics

Other Second Life indicators reflect vigorous health, for example, a robust economy exceeding $1 million USD per day and a routine concurrency (the number of residents in-world at any time) of 30,000-40,000 with a new peak concurrency of 50,000 reached for the first time in early September 2007. Other statistics are available here.

The virtual world space is itself burgeoning, with 10-20+ worlds now available or about to launch targeted at different age segments (pre-teen, teen and adult). Second Life, There, ActiveWorlds, Multiverse and Kaneva are the best known, several of whom are coming together to develop standards for avatar, object and economic transfer between worlds.

Another growth indicator is the industry gatherings, the second meeting of the Virtual Worlds conference, Oct 10-11 in San Jose CA, attracted over 1,000 attendees, nearly doubling from the first conference. The third annual volunteer-run Second Life Community Convention, Aug 24-26 in Chicago IL, also attracted a crowd of about 1000.

Diverse Participants and Applications
Perhaps most exciting is the broad audience and variety of applications that virtual worlds are attracting; entertainment, enterprise, education, non-profits, governments and individuals are all exploring the medium amidst a flurry of both positive and negative press. Groups of every sort are coming to virtual worlds to collaborate in richer ways than have been possible previously. For example, below is a sim featuring LAX airport traffic data visualization.

Source: Daden Prime

AIs let humans live over math problem

There is a possible future scenario where AIs let humans live due to math. AIs, especially if derived from human intelligence and economic models might covet what they do not have and cannot make. Some examples of scarce or unobtainable resources would be art, fallibility and imperfection, all generated by humans; anything non-mathematically random and to which a curve could not be fitted or any other math applied. AIs might thereby keep humans alive through this quirk, not because they are benevolent or enjoy art or human imperfection as art but rather because humans constitute a vexing math problem. It is unclear what might happen after equations have been developed to explain human behavior...

What are some other possible unintended consequences with AI?

Though easily remedied, there could be some embarrassing AI birth defects such as an AI compiled without write capability. Or a case of co-processisng dependency and anachronistic behavior when the remnants of human sexual jealousy have been inadvertently mapped onto an AI. Why AI-beta2 are you spending so much time processing on AI-delata3’s kernel?

A more serious possibility could be a normal situation of forking copies of a mindfile for research, simulation or other activities gone awry when one forked copy evolves malignantly from the original such that it no longer agrees to re-merge and has an independent survival drive, the natural extreme of which would be plotting to remove all instances of the original.

Historical Simulation Ethical Issues

Historical Sims will be a tremendously useful tool but they are also rife with ethical issues, even without considering that ethics will also evolve morefold by the time historical sims are a norm.

Sim Influencing and Harvesting
To what degree (if any) will external influencing, probing, shifting, etc. be acceptable once the sim has begun? Outsiders do not bring medicine and electricity to tribes living on Earth, the general thought is not to interfere with less-technologically advanced cultures if they are found elsewhere in the world or the universe, but many might want future technology introduced from outside if it were possible. One of the great potential benefits of a sim would be to extract and deploy any developed technologies that do not exist; is this ethical? Both the technology extraction and the introduction would need to be considered, for example, should attribution and royalties accrue to the sim world?

Sim Participant Ethics
Perhaps the largest class of ethical issues relates to sim participants. Self-aware agents (either recruited or created) as sim participants will presumably be more effective than non self-aware agents. The sim participants will either know that they are in a sim and have accepted the historical terms (as in Charles Stross' Glasshouse), particularly the primitive pain and misery of historical harm and death (war, disease, etc.), or not know that they are in a sim, in which case perhaps some argument could be made that it is all right that they do not know since in fact we cannot prove that we are not in a sim ourselves.

Sim Mindfile Access and Participant Privacy
One benefit of sim space is that not just the event outcomes can be known but also much more about the views and experiences of all of the participants not just those who wrote about it or were written about and even before writing and records were preserved. Is it appropriate and ethical to "mindtap" without the sim participant's permission? If the participants know they are being mindtapped, will that heisenberg behavior? Although lifecasting is rapidly approaching normalcy in the current technophilic world, it would be culturally unacceptable in historical periods.

Sim Termination
The issues concerning the termination of sims are non-trivial. Given unlimited processing power, and as a test of existential risk, there is an argument to let all sims continue indefinitely. How is extinguishing a sim not the murder of the self-aware participants or will it be desirable and possible to offer mindfile backups to all participants? This can be tricky, should "death rights" be different for those dying naturally within the sim vs. those dying in an extinguishment of the sim? What are the best approaches if the sim culture does not yet have mindfile backup technology; introduce the idea to sim participants and let them choose, save everyone irrespectively (this could be the future law anyway) with or without their knowledge or allow extinguishment? What would the options be for a mindfile exiting a sim? A state-assigned runtime area and survival resources, and access to the dial-a-world console?

Sims Sponsor Technological Advancement

Running simulations of the past, present and future will be valuable tools in exploring, understanding and testing any and every situation.

What if Rome did not fall, what if Germany won WWII, what if humans were not corrupt, what if it were socially unacceptable for educated women not to work in the paid labor force, what if hormone management programs had become possible and de rigueur centuries ago, what if the Pangaea split had been different, what if the Chicxulub asteroid had not rendered the dinosaurs extinct, what if sustainable life had started earlier?

Technological Advancement
The most useful sims would be those either arising naturally or "managed" such that advancement optima were achieved and the sim world evolved at a faster rate than the world that initiated the sim (how many sims and iterations will that take?) Sims could be run at sped-up time to iterate and generate results more quickly. Ideas and technologies could then be harvested for use in the initiating world. (Would that be ethical? Would that be cheating?)

It might be easier and more desirable to join the sim world, at least with a self-copy rather than extract and apply the technology. Lequel est plus réelle? Some interesting questions could be studied regarding technology relevance in the absence of the ideology, politics, economics, culture [and world] of its founding.

The current human population is gated by physical-world resource constraints, sims could make it possible for billions, trillions, etc. of 'people,' self-aware autonomous intelligent agents, to exist. Would this be desirable? Would this extend human knowledge, productivity, creativity and happiness? What kind of restrictions, fears, threats and opportunities would this impose?

Our avatars ourselves

As companies and other organizations take to immersive worlds, it may be that new employees are assigned an avatar and virtual office space along with their security card and computer. Blogging is now part of some job descriptions and soon employees may be encouraged to spend time in-world for both corporate socialization and professional collaboration purposes within and across corporate lines.

There is a lot of energy around synthetic environments including a full track of virtual world programming at this week's SXSW Interactive in Austin TX and at the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in NY March 28-29. Second Life is sneaking up on 5m users and a $2m/day economy and There engine Forterra has its hands full with enterprise and government clients for custom enterprise applications as well as government and medical simulation and training exercises. If you are not in-world somewhere for your company, you can work as an extra in someone else's world. Sim exercises are populated by "external role players," a new and expanding job category which simultaneously underlines the marketability and necessity of tech-savviness and another step in the Yochai Benkler shift to an economy of distributed individual participants vs. industrialized entities.

Professional avatars will likely be influenced by corporate guidelines and norms regarding appearance and behavior, analogous to the physical world; at least virtual suits are more comfortable! One result of this could be an even more diffuse exploration of virtual identity as humans have a closet full of avatars for all of their different professional and personal virtual activities. Other new job categories are probably already proliferating: avatar imaging, avatar reputation management and consolidation...

Avatar and other content portability across the different emerging public and private virtual world environments is also a non-trivial matter. IEEE avatar translation protocols and standards as well as intra-world authentication services could help facilitate avatar portability. Poor portability could mean poor rendering which could result in miscommunication, prejudice and other dynamics which can be theoretically avoided with virtual worlds. An avatar discrimination lawsuit re: virtual world employment practices would not really be a hoped for milestone.

Is managed experience still real?

Would a simulated experience feel as real if one knew it was a simulated experience? Would part of someone hold back from truly experiencing the situation by knowing it was not fully "real"? Will the simulated experiences of uploaded human consciousnesses be real enough to replace those that we currently experience in the physical world?

For example, could a digital human feel the same sentiments of community, togetherness, nationalism, belongingness, etc. from a simulated digital gathering of community members that ve could in the current physical world picnic, political rally, concert, soccer game, etc.? Would large group simulations be any different than 1:1 simulations?

It might be the conventional wisdom at first, that knowing something is a simulation, one would not fully give oneself to the experience, but examples of other simulation-type experiences - which are not at all as immersive as the ones coming - indicate that in fact people do completely give themselves to the simulation, e.g.; reading a book, playing video or alternate reality games, and may even have trouble reimmersing in the real world, e.g.; the Stanford prison experiment.

In fact, simulated experiences will probably feel even more real and have the possibility of being managed with settings just like other current digital experiences; one could dial up or down the intensity or other parameters as preferred, some people may want more charge, more light, more sound, different sound, more pleasure receptors firing, more intellectual wonder, more fascination, others might want less.

The amount of self-awareness that can come from altering and fine-tuning one's experience of experience could facilitate a new era of interaction amongst intelligences since much of current interaction and communication involves personal constraints (e.g.; ego, acknowledgement, acceptance needs etc.).

Experience management is not new, right now meat humans indirectly manage their experience using drugs, alcohol, caffeine, exercise, TV, conversation, etc. to enhance or dull pleasant or unpleasant experiences, what would it be like to move the intensity bar up or down pre-experience? Or have several self sims running with different parameter mixes to capture the event in just the right way since the most pleasant and unpleasant events are often not pre-determined.

Is managed experience still real? Shouldn't the individual have the freedom to choose?

Micro-content and MMOG Fantasy Sports Leagues

Conceptually, there are many possible way for technology to re-invent the future of professional sports event viewing and fantasy league sports participation.

1) User-driven event viewing, Tivo 2.0

The growing multitude of professional and amateur video and photo footage of professional athletic events from every angle and time frame could be used to allow user-directed event watching.

For example, in a football game, some viewers want to see the whole field view, some just the 10 yards of current action. Some viewers want to see certain replays from certain angles, some don't. Some viewers wish to see the content at varying levels, e.g.; instructional and coaching viewers want to see the maximum detail (time, angle and zoom) where as recreational viewers might prefer a five-minute highlights summary of the event, or of their favorite players.

Users could tag video micro-content segments and mix and mash their own fan highlights and instructional videos. Users could share their custom views and select those of others; e.g.; the defensive coach's view, the Joe Namath view, the Barry Bonds view (e.g.; how Barry Bonds would customize his view to watch a baseball game), etc.

Status: Data exists, needs applications, including (non-trivial) video search micro-content tagging, preferably via an automated tagging engine


2) Simulated Games using real micro-content mashups

Once all physical-world games are repetitively filmed (think massively multiple YouTube listings), micro-content tagged (e.g.; accessible at varying layers of detail, for example, all the footage of one specific player) and available in one or more web repositories, the micro-content pieces can be mixed, matched and re-run in simulation.

Fantasy league play could explode up to the next level of running game sims mashing footage of how the individual players actually played in concert with their other fantasy league team mates and opponents. Some sort of action reading and mapping would be necessary to make the simulated action make sense. Fantasy league games could be events of their own right and would have their own score outcomes.

Status: Need micro-content auto-tagging first, then a mix and match selection and simulation platform with an algorithm to mash physical-world video content of players from many physical-world "source" games into simulated fantasy league games.


3) Virtual World Sports MMOGs

Another way to mix physical-world content in simulation space would be by having lifelike avatars of the entire NFL, European Soccer League, Women's Volleyball Team, NBA, etc. available for play in metaverse worlds or video games.

Players could select to play one, several or a team of avatar athletes to compete against other players playing other avatars. This would be a tremendous licensing opportunity for athletic leagues, including not just the avatorial video resemblance but also possibly a recorded audio database of athletes' umms, ooofs, grrrs and other sound effects.

Status: Need athletic leagues to realize that multiverse world player representations could complement and in fact might ultimately supersede physical-world licensing opportunities.

Brave New Simu World

What an exciting world we live in with so many new and evolving forms of entertainment, learning, experiencing, interacting and actualizing. And they are all converging, merging and bubbling into new possibilities. It's all part of the trends to seamlessness between learning and entertainment and people being more interactive and expressive with every medium.

We used to have radio, then TV, then cable, then video games, then online video games and MMOGs (massive multi-player online games).

As one great example of what is available now, SimuLearn offers the Virtual Leader simulation elearning tool to develop leadership skills for corporate and government customers. What a great tool this could be. What if everyone in a work team played themselves in the online simulation? What if everyone played others especially swapping roles up and down the power hierarchy, what could you learn by playing your supervisor? What if every role was played by others with your personality and work skill characteristics? A dream or a nightmare?

There can be at least two ways to play a role; first by being yourself doing the responsibilities of that position or second by inheriting or creating character attributes (personality, skills, etc.) that filter/direct how the player you are playing can perform their role and interact in that context. Being someone else from the constraints of their value system, background, personality, skills, mindset and outlook can be hugely educational. Identifying these aspects of yourself can be extremely educational. This would be useful in any and all contexts of human interaction: professional relationships, personal relationships, interactions between any entities, politics, international relations in particular....

Kuma War offers game simulations of real world events, mainly war strategy related. The Great Divine is a move-through-the-stages video game but ability to move up is measured via biofeedback of how calm you are. And of course The Sims were the original simulation platform, with Sims Online and Second Life now growing exponentially as users create their experiences, realize their creativity and interact with others.

How soon can we have holographic 3-D displays and simulated conversations with non-human characters representing our dream characters or real-life people!