DarkGovernment

The Computational Singularity

Take a cross section of any class, religion or culture and you will find the wish to transcend death.

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.

At that point, we will have been sucked well beyond the event horizon of the singularity. It might be nice there, on the other side—by definition, you can’t know for sure. Sci-fi writers, though, have served up lots of scenarios in which humankind becomes the prey, rather than the privileged beneficiaries, of synthetic savants.

But the singularity is much more than a sci-fi subgenre. A lot of smart people buy into it in one form or another—there are versions that dispense with the life-everlasting stuff. There are academic gatherings and an annual conference at Stanford. There are best-selling books, audiotapes, and videos. Scheduled for release this summer is a motion picture, The Singularity Is Near, starring the actress Pauley Perrette and a ­gaggle of aging boffins who’ve never acted in a movie. (Without any apparent irony, the picture’s producers call it “a true story about the future.”)

There’s also a drumbeat of respectful and essentially credulous articles in the science press. Unlike stories about UFOs or zero-pollution energy sources, singularity stories don’t exact from editors a steep payment in self-respect. That’s because of the impressive attainments—albeit usually in fields unrelated to neuro­science or biology—of some of the people who chirp about mind uploading and nanomachine organ repair. The leading spokesman for the life-everlasting version of the singularity is the entrepreneur and inventor Ray Kurzweil, who’s also behind the movie The Singularity Is Near and a recent book of the same title.

Why should a mere journalist question Kurzweil’s conclusion that some of us alive today will live indefinitely? Because we all know it’s wrong. We can sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-for-it extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who subscribe to this form of the singularity argument. Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience, human physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note the willingness of these people to predict fabulous technological advances in a period so conveniently short it offers themselves hope of life everlasting.

This has all gone on too long. The emperor isn’t wearing anything, for heaven’s sake.

The singularity debate is too rarely a real argument. There’s too much fixation on death avoidance. That’s a shame, because in the coming years, as ­computers become stupendously powerful—really and truly ridiculously powerful—and as electronics and other technologies begin to enhance and fuse with biology, life really is going to get more interesting.

With a few exceptions, we found people who are not on record as either embracing singularity dogma or rejecting it.

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Tags: brain, computers, computing, consciousness, singularity

Oxytocin Spray Keeps them Trusting

Spray said to turn people into pushovers

Imagine all the possible implications of this technology, i.e., keeping the populace trusting in its government.

Re­search­ers have iden­ti­fied brain cen­ters acti­vated by be­tray­al of trust—and a way to keep them quiet.

A spray of a oxytocin, a hormone, makes peo­ple keep trust­ing even some­one who has be­trayed them, the scientists ex­plained. They presented the findings not as a trick for, say, cheat­ing spouses to keep their part­ners coop­erative, but as an in­sight into the mind with possible cli­ni­cal value.

Thom­as Baum­gart­ner of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Zu­rich and col­leagues said their work could help re­veal the brain wir­ing be­hind trust and pos­sibly the ba­sis of so­cial dis­or­ders such as pho­bias and au­tism. The find­ings are re­ported in the May 22 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Neu­ron.

Amygdala activation, shown in red in a cross-sec­tion of the brain in an fMRI image. (Cou­rtesy NIMH Cli­n­i­cal Brain Dis­ord­ers Branch)
The in­ves­ti­ga­tors asked vol­un­teers to play a “trust game” in which they con­tri­but­ed mon­ey to a hu­man trus­tee, who would ei­ther in­vest it and re­turn the prof­it­s—or be­tray them and keep it all.

Some play­ers al­so re­ceived a na­sal spray con­tain­ing the brain chem­i­cal and hor­mon ox­y­to­cin, found in pre­vi­ous stud­ies to make peo­ple more trust­ing.

The re­search­ers found that stiffed play­ers who had re­ceived ox­y­to­cin went on trust­ing their treach­er­ous part­ners. Play­ers who had re­ceived an in­ac­tive spray in­stead of ox­y­to­cin did not.

Ox­y­to­cin was al­so found to re­duce ac­ti­vity in two brain re­gions: the amyg­da­la, which pro­cesses fear, dan­ger and pos­sibly risk of so­cial be­tray­al; and an ar­ea of the stria­tum, part of the cir­cuit­ry that guides and ad­justs fu­ture be­hav­ior based on re­ward feed­back.

These ox­y­to­cin-as­so­ci­at­ed changes, re­search­ers said, oc­curred only when play­ers be­lieved an ac­tu­al per­son was mak­ing the de­ci­sions about their mon­ey. The changes did­n’t oc­cur in a sep­a­rate “risk game,” where sub­jects were told a com­put­er would ran­domly de­cide wheth­er their mon­ey would be re­paid or not.

Play­ers’ brains were scanned us­ing func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance im­ag­ing, or fMRI, a tech­nique in which harm­less mag­net­ic fields and ra­dio waves are used to mon­i­tor brain ac­ti­vity by map­ping blood flow in the organ.

“Our in­sights in­to the neu­ral cir­cuit­ry of trust adapta­t­ion, and ox­y­to­cin’s role in trust adapta­t­ion, may al­so con­trib­ute to a deeper un­der­stand­ing of men­tal dis­or­ders such as so­cial pho­bia or au­tism that are as­so­ci­at­ed with so­cial deficits,” the re­search­ers wrote. “In par­tic­u­lar, so­cial pho­bia (which is the third most com­mon men­tal health dis­or­der) is char­ac­ter­ized by per­sist­ent fear and avoid­ance of so­cial in­ter­ac­tions.”

The work “has sig­nif­i­cant im­plica­t­ions for un­der­stand­ing men­tal dis­or­ders where deficits in so­cial be­hav­ior are ob­served,” wrote psy­cholo­g­ist Mauri­cio Del­ga­do of Rut­gers Uni­ver­s­ity in New Jer­sey, who was not in­volved in the re­search, in a pre­view in the same is­sue of the jour­nal. Fear of be­trayal, for ex­am­ple, “could serve as a pre­cur­sor to so­cial pho­bia,” he con­tin­ued, adding that the ox­y­to­cin find­ing sug­gests “po­ten­tial clin­i­cal ap­plica­t­ions.”

Tags: brain, oxytocin, psychology, science, trust