DNA - the real Identity 2.0

Right now is an exciting time with at least eleven advancing technologies that could have an even bigger impact than the Internet in the next fifty years. More than any other area, biotechnology is showing potential for revolutionary change with interesting recent developments in personal genome services, synthetic biology and online health portals.

Personal genome services
Genetically, humans are 99.9% the same. The variations can be referred to as SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms. Medical tests have existed to look for specific SNPs and there are now recently launched general tests, $1,000 personal DNA services from 23andme and deCODEme, to scan for up to 1 million known possible SNPs on an individual’s genome checking for 18 diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's. Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei writes an excellent blog tracking advances in DNA.

As with any new technology, reactions are myriad and stratified by age. Middle-aged and older people are far more reticent than younger people to try it. There are many open questions such as are we ready for the information? Will the information be substantive? What use is the information if it is not readily actionable? Given the high similarity of DNA amongst family members, is it most ethically appropriate to discuss the situation with relatives ahead of time? In any case, this is the first time the consumer can be in the driver's seat with their medical information in a powerful new way and

the appetite for personal genetic data may prove insatiable.

Of course it is always prudent and fun to consider the darker uses for new technology and one can imagine Identity Theft 2.0, when someone's DNA is stolen and a newly synthesized mix injected as a replacement, waking up and really not feeling like yourself...or worse, being injected with genes that cause all of your cells to de-differentiate back into stem cells!

Synthetic biology
Until last week, synthetic biologists had only been able to create small DNA segments from scratch using computer synthesizers but then genomic pioneer Craig Venter announced that his lab had synthesized the full genome of the smallest known bacterium. It contains 485 genes and has 582,970 base pairs making it roughly 2% the size of the human genome. So far, it has been difficult to synthesize full genomes because long strands of manufactured DNA have tended to break but this new method utilizes the DNA repair mechanism of yeast to stitch the full genome together. It also includes a watermark to tag the bacteria and a gene so that it won’t infect humans or animals.

There is considerable controversy about the future implications of the technology, somewhat similar to those at the advent of genetically-modified food. The desired endgame of Venter's synthetic biology and this advance is to create synthetic biofuels and organisms that could combat global warming by absorbing carbon emissions and other related high impact solutions to open challenges.

The potential applications could be wide-ranging as biological machines automatically persevere once set to task; clean water, nuclear and hazardous waste cleanup and food generation may also be within their purview, not to mention building repair and cleansing, human and animal grooming and nutrient and drug delivery, potentially rivaling the as yet not arrived nanotech mites in a multiplicity of tasks...

Online health portal
Microsoft launched its online health portal, HealthVault in October 2007, allowing people to centralize and store personal medical records and prescription history, manage records, upload data from medical devices such as blood pressure monitors, and analyze and manage the data. A similar offering from Google is expected sometime in 2008 and Adam Bosworth, formerly leading the Google health effort now how his own startup in the personal health services space, Keas.

These Web 2.0 information portals help people to aggregate and proactively manage their health information and will probably continue to add valuable services, especially mobile-device based; at a glance: news, stock tickers, blood pressure and caloric expenditure...

Pooled consciousness

There could be a future where individuals opt to pool all or parts of their consciousness, memory and processing power with those of others or in a central repository. Access could be permissioned only to select groups like family, friends or project teams, or to society as a whole. Pooling could be real-time or with a time lag (e.g.; initially people may prefer the increased privacy of uploading thoughts after several years). Pooled consciousness could lead to an interesting future in many ways, for example, consider the Freedom of Information Act extending to the thoughts of politicians while in office.

Greatest Benefit
There would be many benefits and risks to pooled consciousness, but perhaps the biggest advance would be having a repository of collective experience and perception knowledge, a library of experience, perception and analysis. As fact-based data revolutionized human progress, so too would measurable, manipulatable, researchable, aggregatable human experiences.

A small example of the value of pooling would be all of the witnesses to a traffic accident providing their mindfile excerpts of the situation to supplement the facts supplied by street, car and personal life cams with perception, understanding and analysis of the event. In addition to the basic functionality requirements, anonymizing and aggregation techniques, relevance filters and security would be key technical issues in implementing pooled consciousness.

The first phase of pooled consciousness would most likely be transmitting discrete experiences, memories or thoughts to others. It is hard to imagine permissioning one’s full consciousness stream, although before long some people will probably be offering a full neural RSS feed from their blogs or virtual world sims. A funny result could be that people subscribing to other people’s sex thought feeds might be substantially underwhelmed.

What are the benefits of pooled consciousness to society and individuals?

• more accurate and fully-represented history
• more representative democracy, inclusion of all views
• more efficiency, more progress, elephants in the room can not be ignored
  
• sociological data for real-time application and academic study
• rich AI training ground
• individuals feel acknowledged and heard
  
• the long-tail can meet, small groups of similar people can find each other
  
• productivity improvement - people stop worrying about what they think others are thinking, because they know what others are thinking
• learning, training and entertainment applications of experiencing another’s experience

What are the risks of pooled consciousness to society and individuals?

• possibility of groupthink, diminished diversity of thought
  
• spying, loss of personal liberty
• too much information, not wanting to really know
• thought shaping and management through legal and social pressure
  
• advent of thought crime (everyone is a Minority Report precog)
  
• people become slaves to public opinion, behave, have experiences because of what will go in their neural feed (already see this behavior in Facebook)
  

Capital markets 2.0

In the last few years, a variety of innovative capital markets have arisen to supplement and extend traditional large institutional capital markets. The new markets fill niches of demand for capital and investment, and allow greater granularity of investment information and capital direction. The currency may be money, reputation, ideas, social good or any combination of these. Some of the new capital market vehicles include:

• Virtual World Economies (Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, World of Warcraft),
• Peer-to-Peer Lending (Prosper, Zopa, Lending Club),
  
• Micro-Lending (Kiva, Grameen Bank, Accion),
• Social Capital Markets and Venture Philanthropy (GoodCap, Blended Value, New Profit),
• Ideagoras (Innocentive, The Point, Zooq) and
• Prediction Markets (Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, ZiiTrend).

The first category, virtual world economies, is burgeoning and complex and provokes an interesting debate about how these new market vehicles should evolve and integrate with traditional economies. The virtual worlds There and Entropia Universe have had a hands-on approach to economic regulation, for example approving parties for in-world banking licenses. On the other hand, the virtual world Second Life has been more laissez-faire at the outset but then stepped in with prohibitions where self-regulation has been inadequate. Gambling was outlawed in July 2007 and now banking activity has been effectively outlawed:

"As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment ... without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter. (Full text here)"

Risk, Cost of Capital and Acceptable Return
One value of the new markets is that they provide capital in cases that are less attractive or irrelevant to traditional financing entities. These situations often have dramatically different risk, growth and timescale profiles than traditional investments and are conceptually similar in many ways to doing business in a high risk country.

The risk is higher, so the return too must be higher in compensation. Looking at annualized interest rates may not make sense in the accelerated time environment of virtual worlds where the economy (as measured by land and money supply) is currently growing 6% per month in Second Life.

What is an appropriate cost of capital? Anecdotal interest rates on Second Life loans have ranged from 7% per month to nearly 50% per month, and experienced a 20-30% default rate. This is the cost of capital for people who do not want to declare their physical identity details or seek other means of capital. In the physical world, it is not unusual for payday lenders to charge 300%+ per year to cover their high default rates. Peer-to-peer lender Prosper found that U.S. state-based usury laws did not allow the site to charge enough interest to cover subprime borrower defaults.

Virtual economies are chided for not having sustainable interest rates at the same time as the subprime lending crisis is crescendoing through physical world capital markets, itself a reprise of the 1980s RTC crisis.

Law, Regulation and Jurisdiction
The appropriate norm is to comply with traditional governing entity rules and laws, including being flexible with business models in order to do so. Peer-to-peer lenders had to structure their businesses in specific ways to obtain licensing and comply with U.S. usury laws which vary by state.

Virtual world economies will likely need to be even more innovative to receive physical world approvals. The pervasively global and anonymous virtual world medium suggests that geographically-based physical world regulation will be challenging to apply in reasonable and effective ways. However, anonymity is probably less important as an attribute for virtual capital seekers, as when a benefit is conferred, people are generally willing to give up anonymity. For example, peer-to-peer lenders found that people are perfectly willing to have their credit reports posted publicly on the Internet in return for the ease of potentially obtaining a loan.

In addition to traditional law and regulation, new capital markets may face another layer of compliance in the form of specific in-medium practices that develop. Complying with in-medium practices is important both reputationally and in the instance of in-medium adjudication and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Long-term impact of the molecular assembler

As described in Molecular Assembler Adoption and Molecular Assembler Impact on Society, while the initial roll-out of molecular assemblers may be the usual multi-year S-curve of technology adoption followed by a period of slow social change for adjustment to the widespread presence of molecular assemblers, at some point, social and political change will likely become more radical.

'God assembler'
The initial simple molecular assemblers may only be able to provide for basic survival needs but would presumably give way to ‘god machine’ assemblers that could produce health diagnostics and remedies, nanotechnology, sophisticated electronics including self-aware robots and any other required or requested objects of the time, as well as recycle unwanted material.

Societal organization
Right now society is organized around a variety of cultural groupings: family, education, work, interests (hobbies, religion, sports, alumni, community activity), and per political and geographical boundaries. With molecular assemblers, virtual reality and nanotechnology, there is no reason for these traditional groupings to persist. The work imperative dissolves. Political and geographical boundaries may become meaningless. Anywhere interaction occurs, virtual reality environments will be indistinguishable from physical reality and perhaps preferable in many ways.

In a mature molecular assembler society, what happens to the basis of physical location?
Existing land would still be somewhat scarce, but it might be possible to create additional land or stable novel residential structures in oceans, rivers and bays. For example, the Pacific Garbage Patch could be collected into a foundation for a vacation destination and a transportation, trade and conference hub between the U.S. and Asia (“The PGP Convention and Visitors Center is pleased to host CES 2020”).

Molecular assemblers and super strong nano structures could create much denser comfortable habitation on existing land (kilometer high skyscrapers) allowing existing and new cities to flourish and grow. The improved technology could also be used to easily build and inhabit many more environments. Removing physical proximity requirements for work, education and activities would allow people to fan out across the globe and eventually into space.

Is it moral to kick a robot?

As long as robots are non-sentient, non-feeling beings, it would only be immoral to kick a robot in the sense of potential property damage to others. It would be like kicking a couch or a car.

If robots were sentient, emotional beings, it would certainly be immoral to kick one. It would be like kicking a human.

If a robot were sentient but non-emotional, non-feeling, would it be immoral to kick it? Yes, for both the potential physical damage and an as yet undefined area of implied morality amongst sentient beings. Even if the robot did not ‘feel’ a kick as physical pain in the same way a human or animal would, the robot would have some sort of sensor network awareness that perceived and coded the action as inappropriate and possibly dangerous and illegal. A sentient robot would likely be able to take some action against the mistreatment.

How sentient or feeling does a robot need to become for it to be immoral to kick it? There will be early stages as robots are in the beginnings of sentience and emotion. If the kicker knows that the robot is or could be sentient or emotion-feeling, then it would be immoral to kick the robot. This would be similar to situations between adults and children, the former are assumed to have an uneven control and influence advantage over the latter who may not be consciously aware and able enough to perceive damage and protect themselves.

Molecular assembler impact on society

A recent post postulated that molecular assembler adoption is not likely to be an overnight roll-out, but more like the S-curve uptake of any technology product (TiVo, iPod, etc.) due as usual to cost, availability (particularly of element canister refills) and application.

Once molecular assembler roll-out starts, how is it likely to impact society?

It is assumed that all items necessary for survival can be made with the molecular assembler: food, shelter, basic medicines, etc.

Does this mean everyone will immediately quit their jobs and the world will turn to chaos?

No. While survival basics will be available from the molecular assembler in its initial form, many items and premium versions of basic items will not. Like the S-curve of assembler roll-out and adoption, the capability of what can be manufactured is also likely to grow over time. Businesses (Ponoko is a current example) and communities will arise to provide product designs for sale and share via the Internet. Expansion cartridges with elements other than the basic CHON stream (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen) may be added or available at a community level for the construction of more exotic items.

How will the structure and activity of society change?

In the first phase, persisting for perhaps five years, society's structure and activity will slowly start changing. The norm is likely that people will continue to work for several reasons discussed below and that together with the static availability of land and locations of schools and universities will probably keep people organized around their traditional activities and groupings for some time.

• The post-scarcity economy (PSE) has not yet been fully realized. Many things must still be purchased: premium items, services, content, entertainment, non-assemblable items, designs and inputs for assemblable items, land
  
• Habit, risk aversion (unclear how the new phenomenon will unfold and whether it will persist), maintaining status quo while creating future plans, emotional reasons (static comfort in the face of great change)
  
• Work is a venue for garnering status, participating, engaging in productive activity, actualizing
  

In fact, professional focus, activities and responsibilities will be shifting in interesting ways to accommodate, create and take advantage of the new ways of controlling matter. The molecular assembler industry will spawn many businesses from the manufacture and distribution of assemblers to element canister supply to design creation and implementation. Information economy businesses will be impacted and all matter based businesses will need on-site reinvention. The service sectors of the economy will explode as even if basic materials become free, if AI and robotics have not evolved similarly, labor will not.

The multi-self team

Can you imagine yourself in competition for resources with ... yourself?

There are several future cases where multiple copies of people may be quite likely and normal. Multiple personal instances could arise to repair medical damage, to make a backup, to have a physical and a digital version, to extend the capability of an individual and because the technology exists, to name a few possibilities. Regulation and legal rights of multiple personal instances are interesting issues but not considered here.

It is likely that there will always be some scarcity of resources whether tangible (matter, energy, processing power, etc.) or intangible (status, reputation, attention, etc.). So it is likely that individuals and groups will always compete for resources.

Whether in the physical domain, digital domain or across domains, if you have copies of yourself, you will be competing with yourself for resources.

Initially, you will know exactly what your other self is thinking and strategizing and you might share resources effectively.

Then, although identical at the outset, any copies, if not mind-synced, will increasingly diverge. In situations of multiple personal instances, regular mind-syncing will probably be desirable but there will be many cases where this will not be possible or desired.

Even if two copies of the same entity are experiencing the same situation, it will not be equal in interpretation by both, the physical experience will not be completely equivalent and the mental experience will be even more different with the randomness of the brain and micro differences in cell chemical states triggering different experiences and interpretations.

Divergence in experience and interpretation could lead to divergence of goals. As with any current or historical examples of resource competition, divergent goals lead to destruction or collaboration.

The multi-self team
An optimal and evolutionarily superior final state would be one's selves coming together in a new entity, a multi-self team, a pool of many nuances of self and abilities, a borg being broader and more capable than any individual.

Virtual world killer apps

Virtual worlds seem to be distinct from the Internet but are really the natural evolution of the web as a communications, commerce, information and computation medium; a move to real-time 3D interaction from 2D text.

Virtual worlds are no longer exclusively recreational, they are becoming increasingly routine for a wide range of professional activities. Will Sun Microsystems be the first to announce their corporate earnings simultaneously in-world as they do now on CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog?

There are about 50 virtual worlds in various stages of funding, launch and adoption. Linden Lab’s Second Life is the largest and most complex with an economy in excess of $1.5m USD per day. With the surge in activity, killer apps are starting to emerge.

Consumer Killer App: 3D Immersive Shopping
Shopping could be the killer app of virtual worlds for consumers, just like email drew people to the Internet. Shopping, not in the sense of avatar couture, coiffeur and custom animation, although this is an important sector of the virtual world economy, but in the sense of physical-world retailers having virtual showrooms for customers to review and potentially purchase their products in a 3D visual immersive way, everything from cars to furniture to electronics to tax services to books and music.

Steelcase furniture showroom
Click here to teleport

EOLUS/SAP experimental shop
Click here to teleport

Business Killer App: the Interface
For businesses, it is not about the application but the interface, the interface is the application. Virtual worlds are the modern functionality-extending overlay for any existing application, a 3D real-time information-rich collaboration environment. Some examples include IBM's virtual NOC business, constructing VNOCs for their own and client operations, Intel's in-world Dev Zone developer network meetings and Coke's "Virtual Thirst," Cisco's "Connected Life" and Osram Lighting's "One Million Dollar Idea" virtual world creativity campaigns.

IBM Watson's VNOC (Virtual Network Operations Center)
Click here to teleport

Pervasiveness
Due to resource consumption, virtual worlds are not yet used pervasively by most people; they are an application to log into intermittently, just like the Internet was before broadband. It could be in five years that computer processing power and broadband speeds, including on the mobile platform, make virtual world pervasiveness possible. Even before then, it will probably be as natural to book an airline ticket in-world via a travel sim as it would be to go to Orbitz.

How could progress not be underway in an evolution from users to residents?

Molecular assembler adoption

What would the technology adoption curve for the molecular assembler look like? A molecular assembler is a home appliance which would sit on a countertop supplied by water, element canisters and electricity and make items on demand such as food, clothing or other objects personally created or generated from designs found on the Internet.

Molecular Assembler, e-Drexler.com

As with other technologies like the personal computer, cell phone, Internet, TIVO/DVR, iPod, etc., there would likely be a gap between launch and widespread adoption. Not everyone wants to or can be an early adopter. People watch new technologies as their friends and other people buy and use them; they assess the price point for value and killer app-ability and adopt when it becomes personally relevant and possible. Although the time curves are increasingly compressed, it is still taking a few years for technologies to reach mainstream penetration.

Theoretically, the molecular assembler adoption curve could be much quicker than with other technologies because the dream of a machine that can make anything is of course that it can make copies of itself so that everyone can have one. While this may be the ultimate result, it is unlikely in the first phase since the intricate nanoscale molecular machinery components of the molecular assembler will need to be manufactured and assembled at special nanotechnology facilities. The first molecular assemblers will likely quite expensive.

Even when molecular assemblers can be manufactured or copied with ease, the supply canisters need to be considered. The element cartridges for the main CHON stream, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, plus specialty element cartridges are conceptually similar to laser printer ink cartridges. The element cartridges will need to be manufactured and distributed (e.g.; head over to Fry’s for a hydrogen cartridge) or there will need to be local refilling stations, possible via the existing gas or food distribution channels. Eventually, there could be utility feeds into communities or houses with measured usage.

Governments, having every interest in a stable transition to the molecular assembler and the post-scarcity economy (PSE), would likely regulate or otherwise attempt to control the distribution and refilling of element cartridges and possibly the assemblers themselves. Providing assemblers and element cartridges would be big business, attracting corporate and entrepreneurial activity to find effective ways to supply the demand.

Another factor inhibiting the immediate widespread adoption of molecular assemblers would be the need to have a fully developed value chain or offering ecosystem, particularly having some sort of recycling mechanism for unwanted or waste material from the assembler.

In summary, the factors influencing molecular assembler adoption would be like those of any technology adoption: cost, availability and application.

Ethics of an Advanced Civilization

What kinds of policies is an advanced civilization likely to have regarding interacting with other societies it encounters?

Thinking of the most interesting case, a discretionary interaction, a more advanced society could probably easily identify ways of preventing pain or hardship in a less advanced society with their more advanced technology, spreading the smallpox vaccine would be an example in the human case.

If there were no existential risk to either civilization, and the more advanced society could adequately communicate with the lesser advanced society, to what degree if any should an advanced society be morally obligated to share their advanced technology with a less advanced society?

Presumably high up in the most likely example of an advanced society’s goals would be the furthering of knowledge and technology, and presumably this could be better accomplished with additional agents. So an advanced society would be more rather than less likely to share advanced technology, most likely overtly, even if it could adversely impact the culture of the less advanced society.

How the technology would be shared could be an interesting question, if the possessing society were advanced enough presumably it would be shared non-pecuniarily. Identifying which technologies should be shared could also be an interesting question as there will likely still be some competition for status and resources but probably nearly all technology could be shared as lesser advanced societies advanced to parity.

The foresightedness and cohesion required to consider the possibility of encountering other societies and have a universally agreed upon policy for this situation would seem to be one early mark of an advanced civilization.