FutureSex

Would you still feel like yourself if you modified your body or tried on a different body? Would you have the same sexual appetites and desires? Would it feel the same to be with your partner sexually if you were in a different body? If he/she were in a different body? If you were both in different bodies?

Selecting different bodies would separate the physical and mental aspects of sex. Pheromonal and other elemental physical chemistry might be surprisingly different in different bodies (as Richard Morgan explores in Altered Carbon). There is probably a wide dispersion in people's preferred mix of physical and mental sexual characteristics.

Consider for example senescent seniors trying on teenage bodies for a sexual romp. Should it be illegal to have sex with a body aged below the age of consent if it is inhabited by an adult?

The range of sexual issues that are challenging to discuss in relationships now could explode. Current issues regarding virtual world sex are just a warm-up, for example, is it cheating to have virtual sex with an avatar inhabited by someone other than your partner?

My partner wants to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants to experience being in a different body? What if I don't want to have sex with the person he/she wants to try being?

My partner wants me to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants me to be in a different body? Is self-agency diminished in inhabiting a body picked by my partner or is it just a more extreme form of doing what I know my partner enjoys? Would I or should I feel rejection pangs if my lover wants me to wear the Angelina Jolie body or would it be fun? Then of course the respite to the novelty could be the really wild - lets just wear ourselves tonight...

Its all about me...my partner is a sexual substrate
Would sex disappear as a special interaction amongst partners in favor of a way to explore individual desires? How could I be desiring my partner if I want him/her to wear someone else's body? Do I still desire my partner or is he/she just a sexual substrate if I can have sex with him/her as Brad Pitt one night, as Angelina Jolie the next, etc.? Does it matter if we are both wearing each others fantasy bodies? How could turning current fantasies into reality be achieved in a healthy way that doesn't hurt feelings but rather opens up new doors to fun and exploration?

We generally don't expect our partners to mind if we engage in other means of entertainment and relaxation with others, could an evolved understanding of sex be as casual? As possibilities increase, the possessiveness of sex probably diminishes.

Does it depend on whose body?
Is it different if it is another real person's body (the Brad Pitt) vs. a fictional body (the anonymous Pleasure Bob model)? In an advanced society, there should be no difference in the connotation of a partner's desire for the Brad Pitt body, the anonymous pleasure model, the Next Door Neighbor or the Guy from Work that you met at Happy Hour.

What would the world be like if we could all have sex with our neighbors, co-workers, celebrities and politicians via a filter worn by our partners? Ironically this could strengthen monogamous or polyamorous bonds and allow relationships to revolve around non-sexual aspects.

Multi-flavor
It could be that the Brad Pitt model is actually not that well-endowed, and would need to be modified mid-stream, or switched to the Johnny Depp or the Marilyn Monroe model, or become a rotating kaleidoscope of morphing physicality.

How should I feel if my lover wants two copies of me simultaneously? This is actually a new concept of having sex with yourself. Would I want a threesome or foursome with multiple copies of my lover? How would I expect my lover to feel if I wanted to experience a multiple-some with copies of him/her?

Presumably sexual options will eventually extend at minimum to wearing a neuro-experience filter mapping real or imagined partner behavior to personalized sensors and magnitudes, experiencing your partner wearing someone else or having sex with humanoid robots.

If different bodies can be tried on, sex is but one area for discovery, ethics and imagination.

Virtual currency and the attention economy

Market mechanisms are being increasingly introduced for more efficient exchange of capital and other resources (example: P2P lending marketplaces), for knowledge or opinion sharing, reputation building and preference indicating (example: prediction markets) and for now value attribution and broadcast in their latest launch, the enterprise email venue.

Seriosity, the Palo Alto CA-based serious gaming startup, initially reported to be focusing on enterprise applications in a World of Warcraft-like setting has now launched a virtual currency for the attention economy. The attention economy refers to the modern problem of information overload competing for a person's scarce attention. So far, the serios can only be used with Microsoft Outlook email, the sender applying a number of serios from their finite supply to indicate importance to the recipient and/or to vote on ideas, projects, etc.

The Serio Economy in Practice
The purpose of the serio economy is two-fold, directly indicating value and preference and also allowing meta relationships amongst participants to be seen. However, the importance of email is already generally known, by the sender or by the sender indicating urgency. Having serios attached to email may actually exacerbate the attention economy problem by encouraging people to read and evaluate emails they traditionally ignored. An interesting use case for serios would be charging for emails sent, thus perhaps limiting the number of people cc'd on email.

Regarding visibility into meta-relationships, Seriosity has an early study showing that serio economy relationship webs are different from those elucidated in traditional social networking email studies but it is not clear what new information or value this provides. Unlike prediction markets which have been shown to contribute important new information when appropriately executed, such as with anonymity, the serio economy is not anonymous and so is likely to do little more than codify the existing importance hierarchy and visible power relationships. If observed, people are likely to vote more serios in support of a supervisor's idea or for anyone else with whom a game theory relationship exists.

Since Seriosity is the central bank of the serio economy, issuing serios to market participants, some interesting future situations could arise if serios are transferable between organizations. For example, an individual could finally hedge their job, their long human capital exposure by taking an opposing position in the serios of a competitor or industry basket, similar to the way regional interest rate futures now allow individuals to hedge their long exposure in home-ownership real estate. SEC-attention attracting situations could also arise as individuals take arbitrage positions based on inside information.


There are a myriad of other interesting uses for virtual currencies, for example...

1) Work assignment facilitated by micro-economies
Virtual currencies could help workgroup micro-economies to develop, where arbitrary work assignment would be replaced by an economy. Managers could post projects to the micro-economy with assigned serio loads indicating project importance, drudgery acknowledgment, timeframes and requirements. Individuals and teams could signal available time, skills and interests and bid for tasks. The market mechanism could also reorganize schedules dynamically as priorities shift. Not only would a micro-economy more effectively clear supply and demand for work assignments but would also provide the side benefit of transparency, offering visibility into the direction and progress of the workgroup, sub-teams and individuals.

2) More effective shared resource allocation
Individuals and workgroups could use virtual currency allocations to more effectively allocate scarce resources such as conference rooms, office seating, computers and other supplies, food and drink preferences, vacation scheduling, etc. in a bidding process. Interesting workgroup cultural attributes could emerge from allocation behavior such as the engineering team putting all of their currency towards new computer resources while the marketing team puts more emphasis on conference rooms.

3) Information modulated with value
Just as there should be a rating system for all Internet content, a digg or "Was this helpful?" functionality for all news articles, blog posts, reviews and comments, either as a binary yes/no or as a quantitative rating, so there should be a rating system for an organization's internal and customer support forums. Readers could evaluate posts and postings could then be sorted by value, providing a means of distinguishing the usefulness of information and navigating the ever-growing sea of content that includes forum posts, blog comments, etc. Information modulation would be a higher order step in resolving the attention economy challenge.

4) Preference indication on organizational policies
Having a vote on organizational issues would be an important step in increasing individual inclusion and agency. Virtual currency (anonymously voted or not per the user) on the intranet would be an efficient way to discover majority preferences on issues ranging from preferred holidays, vacation policy, travel policies, preferred health care plans, 401k plans, degree of organization-wide executive communications and supply ordering to more sensitive situations such as lay-offs and salary decreases.

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.

Second Life Meta-Me

The experience of identity is often heavily influenced by physicality (race, gender, height, nose size, etc.). Virtual worlds such as Second Life offer freedom from physicality via unlimited self re-presentation opportunities.

So far, merely the surface of human creativity has been scratched as the majority of avatars are tall, fit, young and attractive which underlines both physical world inferiority sentiments and an unproductive focus on superficial aesthetics.

Meta-me
Virtual worlds could be used to visually represent another more abstract layer beyond physical appearance, the more important and meaningful parts of individuals such as values, actions, ideas and creativity. This could be facilitated by bringing existing Internet-based information into virtual worlds. Visual representations could be executed with shapes, size, coloring, accentuations, vibrations, etc., for example, the bigger the glow around the avatar, the higher the social capital. People might even want to represent themselves in the physical world based on some of these ideas.

Reality filters
Not only could there be a deeper granularity of self-representation but also filters for viewing others. Filters could be based on preference, literally blocking those with unattractive value systems, efficiency, seeing only those other avatars who also wanted to interact regarding certain topics like education, business, sex, singularity, science, etc., or other attributes.

Below are some suggestions for new ways of avatorial representation:

1. Profile-based avatars
Avatars are a visual expression of their profile tags, for example an extropian transhumanist singularitarian might look different from a vegan sustainable development social worker from a politically conservative attorney, but maybe not. Interest indicators could be amalgamated or cycled through in kaleidoscope fashion. The assumption is that social interaction could be enhanced with overt interest-signaling.

2. Reputation-based avatars
Avatars are an expression of how others see them, a visual representation of how they have been rated by others, in-world or as a consolidation of Internet reputation mechanisms such as eBay, Amazon, LinkedIn, Yelp, etc.

3. Idea-based avatars
Avatars are visual representations of the degree and quality of the person's ideas. This may not be able to be rendered until the underlying information is more explicitly captured, either self-evaluated or as another level of reputation. Amazon asks "Was this review helpful?" and a creativity evaluator could inquire "Were innovative and good ideas described here?"

4. Value system-based avatars
Avatars are a visual representation of a person's values. Value systems can be elicited in a variety of ways including as specified directly in a profile, determined from a set of questions, deducted from a log of Internet-based activities or abstracted from physical world activities such as purchasing, recycling, volunteering, exercising, etc. A means of obejective data collection would be important, barcodes/rfid would work in the case of purchases. Would this be tyranny or freedom? Certainly it would be optional and some people would choose to increase their social capital by broadcasting high-congruity lifestyles.

5. Presence-based avatars
RSS presence feeds are streamed into Second Life and aggregated into a visual representation of facebook, jaiku, pownce, twitter, wakoopa, blogging, emailing, texting, social music listening (pandora, last.fm, etc.) and other lifecasting activities. How close a representation of self would people perceive this to be? The essence of individuality is increasingly available on the Internet.

6. Real life Sims Online avatars
Extending the Sims Online game, in-world avatars could follow the same percentages of time spent on activities that humans do in the physical world, working, exercising, relaxing, socializing, eating, sleeping, etc. An invaluable tool for extrospection, the sim could be sped up to show the natural end states of one's current activities, and altered to see different outcomes (e.g.; a 1% increase in exercise leads to greater longevity).

Improving science innovation

To experience most significant scientific advances, humans are dependent on the clunky unreengineered process of science innovation and deployment. Potential improvements to the innovation phase are discussed below.

In the absence of clear feedback loops aligning research investigations with implemented results, scientists can languish in isolated labs for years and the majority do not seem to care whether their findings are useful to or implemented by others. For type A scientists, the in-place incentive system is academic publishing and acknowledgment. Publishing is a codependent phenomenon with scientific publications increasingly exerting influence over the direction of research to generate more interesting reading.


Suggested Improvements

1. Open human knowledge databases
Without yet destabilizing the publishing juggernaut, some progress could be made in releasing already published and unpublishable findings into open databases of human knowledge. There are some early examples of these resources in Physics with ArXiv, the NIH's PubMed and the Earth System Grid for climate research, however there is an opportunity for a new layer of applications to make the information much more accessible to different levels of audiences.

The next three suggestions have to do with creating accountability and a better feedback loop between scientific findings and the use of that information.

2. Quantitative values attached to findings
A system of quantitative values could be applied to research so that findings and scientists could be measured and compared. Supervisors, peers and industry colleagues could rank findings based on a variety of parameters. Unpublishable and null findings would also be incorporated into the valuation program.

3. Annual performance reviews for scientists
The rigor of quarterly goal setting and review, 360 degree feedback and other performance evaluation metrics implemented decades ago in the business environment should also be de rigueur in the scientific community. Performance metrics would be a good start, incorporating what are now standard corporate principles of leadership, communication and management science to reduce subjectivity and otherwise improve scientific working environments would also be helpful.

4. Broader scientific mindset
The most successful scientists have been those who have perceived their roles as not the mere discovers and handers-off of the Truth but also as being responsible for rendering their findings implementable by others. Emphasizing full realization of pursuits and results from a more service-driven than ego-driven mindset could also produce better results more quickly.

Alt approaches to AGI

50+ year old attempts at creating AGI have not been successful. It is possible that AGI cannot be generated from current methods and technologies; the wrong tool is being used, sort of like trying to build a 747 with a toothbrush. Electromagnetism, silicon and Von Neumann architectures may not ever have the capacity to achieve AGI even allowing for continued increases in processing, storage and memory and architectural shifts such as parallelism.

Other substrates might work
Getting around the rigidity of Von Neumann, mathematical, logic-based, computational approaches, symbolic approaches and traditional computers, other computational substrates like quantum computing, DNA computing, etc. might work and also those that humans have not yet invented, discovered or exploited for this purpose like light, air, memes and information. There must be other substrates, and other viable approaches that are not constrained by mathematics and logic.

Information as a substrate
Narrowly, the only existing example of general intelligence is the human brain and the basic requirements of AGI are self-replication and self-improvement. Considering self-replication, there are many examples of more effective self-replication than humans, for example, memes, disease and microbes. Considering self-improvement, memes also self-improve more effectively than humans as they are refined through repetition, and have the unbounded ceiling for improvement of true AGI.

Taking advantage of the self-reproducing and self-improving properties and using memes and information as a novel computing substrate might be one way of extending AGI progress.

Information as a substrate could be developed symbiotically with a very broadly applicable new understanding of the laws of physics based on information and entropy as opposed to mass and energy.

Machine creativity

What are the relevant differences between humans and the machines of the future?

The general claim is that the uniqueness of humans is creativity, imagination and fallibility.

Creativity is rationality
Examining and demystifying the concept of creativity suggests that machines can be every bit as creative as humans. Creativity is merely a new idea or approach, a novel solution to a problem, a fresh representation; a process, a personality attribute, a mindset, an approach to life.

Alternative intelligences/machines can use brute force to rationally crunch through the set of all possible answers to a problem and suggest which are best. Much human creativity comes from "out-of-the-box" thinking which is largely applying knowledge, structure or skills from another domain, and also making mistakes (penicillin, 3M's post-its, Nike's waffle soles, painter Apelles' foam depiction, etc.). Machines can easily do all of this and more, testing a wide range of "out-of-the-box" domains and applying inverse or orthogonal analysis to incorporate human creativity by trial and error.

It is not clear that humans have any positive aspect that cannot be replicated or superseded by an alternative intelligence/machine. Therefore, nothing appears to be lost in the potential extinguishment of the human form as intelligence evolves to non-biological substrates.

Reducing US greenhouse emissions

The Kyoto Protocol, the developed world's effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions relative to their 1990 levels, has largely failed. Only the UK and Germany have managed to reduce their emissions, in part due to the implementation of market mechanisms via a cap-and-trade system.

The US has increased emissions 16% since 1990 and China and India, while not precisely covered by the Kyoto Protocol, have been increasing emissions and are together with the US the biggest three polluters. The International Energy Agency predicts that China will surpass the US as the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter in 2009.

What is the lowest handing fruit in the US for reducing emissions?
Petroleum is responsible for the majority of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Of the four energy-using sectors; transportation, industrial, commercial and residential, transportation contributes a disproportionately large share of the US's carbon dioxide emissions. The chart below from the US Department of Energy shows expected emissions by sector and fuel type.

Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/

Industrial and Commercial Sectors not appropriate to address
According to Stanford energy economist and policy advisor, James Sweeney, the industrial sector has a complex energy usage mix and is not the best area to address first. Commercial energy use, with an emphasis on fluorescent lighting, is also not an obvious area for initial pursuit since the sector is one of the most efficient.

Transportation restructuring - the biggest impact
The single biggest impact on reducing US carbon dioxide emissions would be a redesign of motor vehicles, in particular, incorporating more stringent fuel efficiency requirements and redefining “truck” to not apply to passenger vehicles such as PT Cruisers, SUVs, etc.

Residential sector - additional gains
In the residential segment, a substantial improvement in energy efficiency can be gained by switching from incandescent bulb lighting to compact fluorescent bulb lighting. It appears likely that California and other forward-thinking states will pass compact fluorescent lighting legislation and that more efficient mercury-free bulbs will be introduced in the next few years.

End of religion

The positive aspect of religion seems to encompass three things: 1. Offering an explanation for the unknown, the as yet scientifically unproven, 2. (most impactfully) Providing comfort in uncomfortable matters such as death, one's own and the deaths of others and in other unpleasantries; war, pestilence, disease, misfortune, etc. and 3. Providing a moral code of behavioral conduct.

It is easy to see many ways in which religion could become evolutionarily outcompeted, eventually disappearing. First, as science's accelerating advances continue, the unexplained territory shrinks to asymptotically small proportions. Second, if death becomes obsolescent through life extension, there is no longer a need to postulate anything that might occur after death and no need to comfort the non-dying. Third, there are many appropriate moral behavioral norms, particularly those which do not involve religious models or the introduction of artificiality (for example, sinning exonerated by confessing).

It will become increasing difficult for religion to persist in the face of radical life extension and eventual immortality. Everyone is their own Jesus in this new empowered age of agency. Implicit shifts away from religion are codified in the recent publication of books bringing scrutiny and analysis to religion: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, "God is not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, "Breaking the Spell" by Daniel Dennett and others.

Cryonics and the art of the long view

How surprising it is that those with a long view in thinking and behavior are not those with traditional religious beliefs but include sponsors and supporters of the Long Now Foundation and cryonicists. The Long Now Foundation has trans-millennial views on the order of 10,000 years, roughly the forward counterbalance to the history to date of human civilization. Cryonicists, in general, have a practical stance, simultaneously acknowledging the unproven nature of reanimation and assessing and focusing on contributing to the key challenges of the next 200-400 years, as opposed to the 20-50 year (or less) timeframe that appears to be implicit in current individual and political thinking.

Erstwhile cryonicists will do well to remain practically absorbed. It is easy to imagine a long-distanced future visit to the Met, where alongside the Egyptian tombs and mummies, dewars have been emptied to display frozen heads, bodies and pets. Excited expedition excavators from the three key sites, Alcor/Arizona, Cryonics Institute/Michigan and Suspended Animation/Florida pose next to their digs.

Stored possessions and artifacts of the time are neatly arranged in an exhibit with terse placards. "Little is known about the belief systems of these peoples. Middle-era Americans carried many nonmalleable gadgets though it is not clear how useful they were to daily life. It was not atypical for one person to carry cell phones, MP3 players, laptops, power cords, PDAs, cameras, recording devices, cords, batteries and recharging units at all times. [Portable lightweight inexhaustible energy source] was not yet available and devices were not yet appropriately nano-miniaturized and physically embedded."