Upload world science fiction

It is strange that there has not been more in-depth exploration in science fiction about what mind upload societies would be like. A few aspects are examined in books like Accelerando, the Golden Age, Permutation City, Diaspora and the Cassini Division. Many issues could play out in fun ways in science fiction.

Trust in an upload world
In a world where everyone has uploaded their minds into computer banks and experience is simulated in virtual reality, what is real? How will checks and balances be established for trust and security? How do you know you are not being hacked? How do you know you are getting the bandwidth and processing power promised by your service provider? If you instantiated into an embodied form to go off-bank to check, how would you know that this has really occurred and is not a simulation of an embodied download by the service provider?

A science fiction story could revolve around escaping the upload service provider, finding its deviance (it has shockingly slaved entire banks of human minds to its own nefarious purposes) and overthrowing it to restore order only to find an even more evil system, like a spam-protection unit gone awry with emerging AI, now has the upload society in its clutches. The discrimination practices of the future could be delivering slower run-time environments to certain groups. The thematic issues to examine are the integrity, influence and control of an upload society.

Motivation and activity
What is the nature of being in an upload world? Is the construct of the individual still relevant? What are the driving motivations? What are the activities? What do minds do with 24 hours of run-time each day? If individuals can make copies of themselves, what are the legal and practical issues? How can constructive behavior be incentivized instead of regulated? An interesting story could ensue as an extension to the Kiln People concept, where a copy of a person mutates and wants to kill the original to assume its legal status. An interesting branch of future law may deal with copies interaction.

Societal dynamics
It could be interesting to look at how society redesigns and reorganizes itself in an upload world. Different subgroups may edit their utility functions in different ways. What are the reproduction norms? Do types of gender proliferate? Which memeplexes would arise and predominate? In the Post-Scarcity Economy, what will be organizing factors for society?

Information evolution
How do the Internet and the individual and the group evolve? In one interpretation, they are all just collections of information. Does distinction become meaningless at some point? Are there other distinctions that would be more relevant in an upload world? What establishes who owns, controls and has permission to view and create different information, whether people bits or data bits?

Civilized transition to the post-scarcity economy

Contemplating a new era of bountiful resources compared to previous times, some call for a socialist, or equal, distribution of the new resources. Two examples of new eras would be those triggered by the advent of the molecular assembler and uploaded human minds; the resources would be, respectively, Earth and Solar System matter and processing capacity.

A socialist resource allocation is moot because:

1. At t+1 or t+n, there will have been a reallocation of resources based on individual skill, utility and Darwinism,
2. Capitalist forces will figure out how to attain more of the resources in other ways,
3. Ways of enforcing a socialist resource distribution will probably not exist or be desirable, and
4. Market mechanisms are likely to provide the most effective resource distribution.

Much more important than which post-scarcity economy resource allocation model to use is how to engender a smooth transition to the new era.

Presumably the rule of law will persist and the critical part will be adapting it to extend and protect rights in the new eras. What is going to happen when someone erects a Dyson sphere around newly terraformed Mars homesteads and starts levying a toll on IP traffic and physical egress? Law seems to be the most stable profession in the face of accelerating technology and new eras!

Absent UN AI Peacekeeping Forces, there should be a way to design incentives backed by consequences and force if necessary to reduce the claim-jumping, lawlessness and vigilanteism (its new guise: nano-weaponry arms races!) that has accompanied historical landgrabs.


Reference:
At the end of “Engine of Creation,” Eric Drexler discusses “Inheritance Day,” a time for “distributing ownership of the resources of space” in three possible scenarios:

1. (capitalist) First-come first-served, a landgrab as homesteading and mining claims have occurred traditionally. Dismissed since the first one to arrive with an appropriate molecular compiler could to re-work and thus claim as far as it could reach in the universe,
   
2. (socialist) Equal distribution and recalibration over time, and
   
3. (socialist) One-time equal distribution – the libertarian and most preferable approach

Data visualization in Second Life

Virtual worlds are the next generation of the Internet, its natural evolution as a communications, commerce and information platform. Buildings and exhibits have been built, but the medium is mainly only alive through avatars. Virtual worlds could be mirror worlds, comprised of live streaming data, ready for constant user interaction and manipulation.

Streaming data into virtual worlds and making tools for its visual display is an obvious next step.

Virtual world data visualization tools are needed
An open source data visualization tool suite for virtual worlds is needed, something to be the Many Eyes or Swivel of Second Life and other platforms.



There are some real-time interactive data displays (NOAA's real-time weather simulation, 3d stock charts, LAX air traffic data and IBM's virtual network operation centers) in Second Life but not tools for loading and manipulating custom data sets. Existing static exhibits of scientific and other tools could be enabled to accept data streams for real data analysis.

Standard web data formats like Google Docs spreadsheets could underlie virtual worlds data visualization tools. There should be web-based spreadsheets that can call data that updates in real-time. For example, stock portfolios calling real-time data can be made at various websites but a stock price data element cannot be called in a Google spreadsheet or a web-based data visualization tool like Many Eyes or Swivel. Please comment if you know of tools that do.

Advantageous properties of virtual worlds
The idea would be to use unique virtual world properties (real-time updating, data-streaming, camera zooming, interaction, 3d world aspects) to make data display and interaction tools that are complementary to traditional data visualization software. Some interesting uses could be:

• Sending microscopy results directly into virtual worlds to be digitally imaged; e.g.; have real SIMS microscopy data populate Second Life SIMS microscope displays in real-time as people are running experiments.

The SIMS microscope in the clean room on Nanotechnology Island in Second Life, why not feed real data to the microscope in real-time?

• Viewing hundreds of scientific experiment results simultaneously on massive data walls, using the zoom functionality to look closely or far away at multiple levels of detail

University of Michigan pharmacokinetics professor Gus Rosania's data walls, further described in his open science blog

• Running thousands of simultaneous simulated experiments more efficiently than in physical reality
• Allowing colleagues and classes around the world could observe the results, participate and collaborate in real-time.

More information is available at the SL Data Visualization wiki or feel free to email me if you are interested in data visualization in virtual worlds.

High resolution information

High quality data represented in helpful and manipulatable ways is making humans smarter and better able to understand and act more quickly and effectively.

It might seem like there is too much information available but in fact most of it is low resolution.

Web 2.0 tools are evolving to facilitate easy execution of the principles graphical display expert Edward Tufte has been exhorting for years:

• Information should be high resolution, presenting the most appropriate data possible in the most readable format possible.
  
• The efficient presentation of information should allow viewers to maximize their reasoning about the information and minimize their time understanding the interface.
  
• People should be able to discover the information and think about it on their own, not be directed in totalitarian ways with the data.
  
• Charts and images should be seamlessly embedded in text.
• Clarification should occur by ADDING information, in the same easy to read high resolution way.
  

1. IBM's Many Eyes
Many Eyes is a free data visualization platform where data sets can be uploaded (exclusively for the public domain) and visualizations generated in a variety of formats including tag clouds, word trees, histograms, bar charts, block histograms and bubble charts.

For example, it took a few minutes to analyze the main discussion topics in the 17,619 messages of the last eight years of activity on the SL4 Artificial Intelligence email list.

Many Eyes Visualization

2. Swivel
Swivel is a San Francisco-based startup also offering free data visualization services. The platform is less robust than Many Eyes, but the site appears to have over 1 million charts.

Swivel Graph

3. Google Charts API
The Google Charts API allows the seamless embedding of graphical data anywhere in an html page. Google Charts API and other web widgets have been developed to construct Edward Tufte's famous sparklines, and this functionality is being continually improved.

Google Charts API: example, homepage

4. Second Life 3D Real-time Data Streaming Tool
MS Futures Group has built a real-time on-demand 3D stock chart application for Second Life. The application is available open source and could be adapted for the 3D graphical display of any quantitative data.

3D Stock Charts in Second Life

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.