Caprica: Birth of the Cylons Jonathan Lethem & P.K
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magazine CAPRICA: Birth of the Cylons JONATHAN LETHEM & P.K. DICK DIY Transhumanism KURZWEIL The Ray Kurzweil Interview The Chinese Singularity WINTER 2009 Table of Contents DIYBio A Growing Movement Takes on Aging 46 Ray Kurzweil The h+ Interview 36 12 Nanoscale Robot Arm Places Atoms and 22 FOREVER YOUNG: I‘m as Serious as Cancer: Molecules With 100% Accuracy 10 Rules are Life Enhancers 13 EEG with BCI is A-OK! 24 BIO: Monkey See or Is One Man‘s Fix Another Man‘s Enhancement 13 Triggerfish Monitors Your Eyes 26 ENHANCED: Sports Enhancement and Life 4 14 Project Offset Creates Graphical Magic Enhancement: Different Rules Apply 15 Onlive: Sign of a Revolution, or Dead Before Release? 28 Nanophotonics May Save Us From Breaking Moore‘s Law 16 Top 5 Technology Panics of 2009 29 Nanoprobe is Golden 18 AI The Chinese Singularity WINTER 2009 Chronic Citizen: Jonathan Lethem and Erik Davis on P.K. Dick 70 Prosthetic Head 76 Meets p-Zombie Down To Earth: An interview with Caprica Executive Producer Jane Espenson 66 30 Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno: Paradigm for the Future 64 Birth of the Cylons 50 Why DIY Bio? 82 NANO: Singularity: Nanotech or AI? 52 Re-Engineering the Human Immune System 83 NEURO: Cognitive Commodities 54 Slicing Brains DIY 84 Battle Angel: The Cameron Epic That Might Have Been (and Might Still Be) 5 56 Self Tracking: The Quantified Life is Worth Living 85 You‘re Such a Toolkit: Review of Drive by Daniel Pink 59 Scrapheap Transhumanism 86 HUMOR: Disgracebook 60 Big Bang from a Small Package: Can Vancouver‘s General Fusion Bring About an Energy Breakthrough? WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM Publisher Betterhumans LLC Dan Stoicescu - Co-Founder James Clement - Co-Founder Editor-in-Chief R.U. Sirius Managing Editor Jay Cornell Contributing Editor Surfdaddy Orca Design Infoswell Media, Inc Contact [email protected] Snail Mail h+ Magazine 385 Vista Roma Way, #115 San Jose, CA 95136 Unsolicited manuscripts give us hives Letters to the Editor Please email the editor at [email protected] All materials © Betterhumans LLC 2009 unless otherwise indicated. All copyrights for text revert to writers 90 days after publication. Date of publication November 2009. 8 ON THE COVER Cover photo of Ray Kurzweil was provided courtesy of: Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. WINTER 2009 DO IT YOURSELFERS, THE NEW NATURALISTS Before science became so specialized, professors taught courses in the general field of Natural History and their students often went out as amateurs to carry out exploration of the Natural World. These amateurs were referred to as Naturalists. The seventeenth century‘s Age of Reason produced some of the greatest Naturalists of all time, including some of our personal heroes — Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Descartes, Thomas Boyle, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Amateur collectors and natural history entrepreneurs played an important role in building the large natural history collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Smithsonian Institution‘s National Museum of Natural History. Dan Stoicescu We have reached a stage again, partially because of the proliferation of knowledge Co-Founder via the internet, and partially because the availability of second-hand equipment on eBay, Dove, etc., whereby a new type of amateur scientist/Naturalist is gaining ground. The DIY‘ers are setting up labs in their homes and garages and conducting experiments for fun and (hopefully) profit. They work on everything from genetic sequencing, to anti-aging (see “DIYBio: A Growing Movement Takes On Aging”), to synthetic biology (see “Why DIY Bio?”), and robotics. We think this trend is highly encouraging, and portends the rise of many new innovations in these fields. We will provide references at the end of our articles for organizations which serve as resources and rallying points for such DIY‘ers. We would like to encourage “The New Naturalists” to not only push forward, but to strive to get to know their fellow DIYers and collaborate on experiments, ideas, lab space, and equipment. We need orders of magnitude more individuals doing OPEN DIY Bio, SynBio, AI, Robotics, Nano, and Neuro research in order to make the kinds of breakthroughs which will bring about radical life-extension, human-level intelligent machines, and cheap fuels. Now go out there and get to work! James Clement Co-Founder Best wishes, Dan Stoicescu & James Clement 9 WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM OUR MEMEPLEX RU SIRIUS Stealing for a moment from Wikipedia (and why not, since this seems to nail it?), a meme is “postulated as a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.” Richard Dawkins, of course, initially introduced the idea in his seminal book The Selfish Gene, in which he postulated that ideas and cultural trends spread in many ways that mimic the evolution of biological organisms. A memeplex is a belief system: a group of ideas or memes that together form a sort of worldview. One memeplex, for example, may include belief in a coming biblical apocalypse; that abortion is murder; that homosexuality is an abomination; and that government social programs are by nature totalitarian. Rationally, it may seem a random coincidence that these views — moralizing and possibly intervening in social behaviors but not in the economy — have gathered together. Evolutionary memetic theory would argue that each of these views has somehow found it useful for its survival to gather with these other views to form a memeplex h+ magazine — as a collection of articles and design elements bundled between a front and back page — presents a sort of memeplex. It is a memeplex that, on the whole, recognizes a humanity increasingly altered and/or enhanced by technology. Working within this context, h+ casts its net wide. For example, in this edition, the specificity and optimism of Ray Kurzweil rubs up against the complexity and paranoia of novelist Philip K. Dick‘s vision of the individual‘s plight in a world of neural interpenetration and intelligent machines. Stelarc‘s ongoing self-experimentation with the increasing cyborgization of his self in the name of art rubs up against the emergence of Do It Yourself biotechnology for curing diseases and even aging itself. NBIC (Nano Bio Info Cogno) offers a hopeful vision of resolving most major human problems, while a review of a book by Daniel Pink reminds us that all the glitzy corporate newspeak about positive thinking doesn‘t mean shit to the huddled and newly unemployed masses. Taken together — with columns on AI, nanotech, biotech, longevity, self-enhancement, and neurotechnology — the articles collected between the covers of h+ magazine continue to inform and make a statement on behalf of those who 10 have been drawn into the memeplex sometimes called transhumanism. But beyond reaching our “target audience,” it is our hope that this magazine and its website can reach out and bring more people into the memeplex. Our purpose is not to turn them into fanatics or “true believers,” but to provide an interesting and useful way of understanding a very fast-changing world. And hopefully, we will inspire some to get on with the actual work of changing the human situation for the better. WINTER 2009 vWHAT’S ONLINE check out the latest at hplusmagazine.com h+ Magazine Products The h+ Magazine Store is Have Arrived! Now Available! A variety of products are now for sale at our online store. Purchase for yourself, or as a gift! items include : [+] T-Shirts [+] Mugs [+] Mousepads [+] and much more coming soon! visit hplusmagazine.com for more info. DON‘T MISS THIS Are You a h+ Magazine EXCLUSIVE online content Community Member? check out hplusmagazine.com for EXCLUSIVE online content that you won‘t find in the magazine check out the latest forums posted by other h+ readers, and post your own thoughts! If you haven‘t signed up, go online today and start socializing with From BigDog to PETMAN When Death is an Outlaw Love Thy Surrogate Self? other h+ enthusiasts. By: Surfdaddy Orca By: R.U. Sirius and By: Chris Hudak hpluscommunity.com Surfdaddy Orca 11 STAY follow h+ at become a fan at CONNECTED twitter.com/hplusmagazine facebook.com/hplusmagazine WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM NANOSCALE Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy MICHAEL ANISSIMOV UNTIL THE MID-1990S, THE TERM “NANOTECHNOlOGY” REFERRED TO THE GOAL OF CREATING VAST ARRAYS OF NANOSCALE ASSEMBLERS TO FABRICATE USEFUL HUMAN-SCALE PRODUCTS FROM SCRATCH IN AN ENTIRELY AUTOMATED PROCESS AND WITH ATOMIC PRECISION. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman. In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy. Earlier trials had yielded only 60-80% accuracy. The nanorobotic arm is built out of DNA origami: large strands of DNA gently encouraged to fold in precise ways by interaction with a few hundred short DNA strands. The products, around 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be built with a simple crystalline DNA array, vastly expanding the space of possible structures.