Global Future 2045 Conference Looks At Inadvertent Outcomes of Exponential Technological Change

By Frank Tobe, Editor/Publisher, The Robot Report

Dmitry Itskov, a wealthy Russian Internet entrepreneur, hosted and sponsored last weekend's Global Future 2045, an event organized to highlight the state of present day science and its relentless exponential march toward 2045, the year of the Singularity, the year when computers are expected to surpass the human brain.

Itskov, a couple of years back, had a “spiritual change” that made him question the values of wealth and spending on luxury items. Since then he has pursued what he calls a global initiative to create “a new species free from the limits of biology.” Hence GF2045.

2045 is a significant milestone because, according to inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (a keynote speaker at GF2045), it is the year when the power of the human brain will be surpassed by that of the computer and also when we may merge with our machines and biotech to live indefinitely.

The media have headlined the far out projections, claims and items included in GF2045's program - the androids, the prospect of brain enhancement, of life without death - instead of reporting Itskov's intended purpose for the conference: to raise awareness and concern about the unrelenting march of science without consideration for the prospect of a loss of humanity.

Headlines preceding the Global Future 2045 Congress proclaimed: WORLD’S MOST HUMAN-LIKE ANDROID TO BE UNVEILED AT GF2045.

“The Dmitry Avatar-A head represents the most expressive facial robot in history and far exceeds the life-like characteristics of previous robot portraits of humans in both technology and artistry,” stated Dr. David Hanson. “The Dmitry Avatar-A head can establish eye contact, recognize faces, and carries out natural spoken conversation.

In addition to the press releases, an in-depth NY Times article by David Segal described how it was being built, showed pictures of the work in progress, told what it was to do, and the personality and language characteristics that it was to incorporate.

Well it didn't happen. None of it. Hanson was late and Itskov didn't like the robot in it's unfinished state. So the robot, Hanson and his AI partner Dr. Ben Goertzel were dropped from the program. Read the details here.

But there was still Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro and his look-alike. Dr. Ishiguro showed off the little touches that make his androids so special: subconscious movement as well as reactive movement, e.g., the robot moves it's eyes, posture and gestures every once in a while - just like you do - as it sits idly.

Many of the speakers Itskov selected suggested that the public, our legislators, and our corporations have been flying 35,000 feet over their economic, environmental and other troubles. Global Future 2045 is therefore a call for a forced landing, with eyes wide open, and a willingness to see and talk about problems in their full context and inter-relatedness. In his opening remarks Itskov stated:

“We are really at the time when technology can affect human evolution. I want us to shape the future, bring it up for public discussion, and avoid any scenario that could damage it.”

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Day 1's keynote speaker was a thought-provoking talk by James Martin, the founder of the Oxford Martin School, in Oxford, UK. He described how we are faced with multiple extreme paradigm shifts as more and more of the world becomes digital and subject to software enhancements; shifts in the way we think about things that didn't previously have a software solution -- dangers that could just as easily thwart our growth -- or be antithetical to that growth.

Martin described the process leading to 2045 as supremely challenging and Darwinian and that serious crunches were coming. Crunches in long-term thinking: China has the discipline and history to think long term while the US and EU do not. Corporations do but their ethics are different. Only corporations could use manipulation to market "Coal is Clean" and other similar campaigns.

He talked about how the Oxford Martin School puts teams together for each critical global issue needing a solution... teams comprised of all the experts who are working toward that solution so that cross-pollination of disciplines and ideas occurs. Talking with him afterward, he steered me to a video about the process called "Revolution in Oxford." I highly recommend watching it.

Day 2's keynote was delivered by Ray Kurzweil under the banner "Immortality by 2045." He told of the grand transformation where biology and other medical technologies have become digital and therefore available to analysis and simulation. Some notable quotes:

"We are approaching a time when we can treat our biology as software and reprogram it." 

"There will be a time soon when we will add more time faster than time going by." 

"We are going to have to deal with the coexistence of open source and proprietary markets - as we do presently with books, music and college courses." 

"The world of physical things is now fully digital."

[As an aside, Kurzweil described what he is doing working as Director of Engineering at Google: developing a computer-simulation of the neo cortex to understand human queries. He is also working with pattern recognition modules (which he calls metaphor machines) to take a pattern from one field and apply it to many different inputs. Thus he's being asked to enable computers to understand and speak just like humans, in effect, creating machines that can think and reason like the human brain.]

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Other speakers included philosophers, ethicists, a man with a bionic arm, brain interface developers and neuro-prosthetics engineers, AI theorists, and a very colorful panel of global interfaith / spirituality leaders, all discussing the progress of, and implications and consequences of brain emulation, mapping and reverse engineering.

Bottom line of all of the interfaith / spiritual speakers was to emphasize that we are preoccupied with the "how" of change and not the "why." That it's not science fiction that is happening; it is real and needs our attention and focus on the future. That change needs to be balanced with the spirit of humanism and, most importantly, we need a strategy to handle this inevitable transition.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University, gave the best one-liner of the conference:

"The power to do great always comes with the power to do harm."

[This was the second GF2045; the first one was held in Moscow in 2012.]

Rethinking Singularity

I have concerns about Ray Kurzweil's Singularity.  The following three stories will show you where I'm coming from and give some background to what I want to say:

(1) In the '80s, Tom Axworthy, then Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (and now with the Center for the Study of Democracy at Queens U in Kingston, Canada and the Gordon Foundation), spoke before my group, the American Association of Political Consultants, and told why Canadians and other countries distinguished themselves from Americans and American political campaign technology.  He said that Americans pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a national credo whereas most other societies have as their goals peace, order, liberty and fraternity.  Fraternity being the sharing in the well-being of all of society.  Big difference between the individual pursuit of happiness to the altruistic sharing of the well-being of everyone.  And that difference translates into political orientation, campaign practices and social ethic.  In America elected officials have star status whereas most members of parliaments worldwide are part of the party and not well known.  They are often elected as the x-party member for the y area.  Hence there's less personality and more issue orientation.  Not Barney Frank versus Earl Sholley but instead Liberal versus Tory.  Axworthy's talk has stuck with me to this day because I strongly believe in his version of Fraternity and what it means for society and the future.  Also it was one of the many reasons I chose to sell off and quit my activities in politics.

(2) Ray Kurzweil's projections of logarithmic (exponentially accelerating) technological progress - particularly in the fields of robotics, biotechnology and nanotechnology - leading to a "singularity" or merging of these super-intelligent sciences sometime between 2040 and 2045, a merging where differentiating between a human with consciousness and a robot-like device acting as if it had consciousness, has been fascinating to me because I'm a technology enthusiast, particularly in the areas of computers, AI and robotics. I see it happening just as he says. In robots, genetics, longevity, artificial intelligence, aging, stem cells, and many more sciences, my vision of the future is similar to Kurtzweil's. And this is disturbing because his projections are leading to a conclusion that I don't want for society.

(3) While driving to and from Lake Tahoe last weekend, some friends and I listened to an audiobook entitled Death Match. Although it was a mystery, it was really about artificial intelligence. It involved a computer dating service that went beyond simple questionnaires and instead merged psychological, medical and financial data along with social data such as travel, movie and book preferences, phone call records, traffic tickets, etc. into a massive database which was then sliced and diced to provide information about the candidates well-beyond what they entered on their initial survey forms. Armed with all that data, the computer did it's match and was quite successful. A discussion occurred about individual boundaries, and computer capabilities. Coincidentally, I had recently listened to a podcast of an AI expert discussing how things were presently done (constructivist) and how they will be done shortly (software developing software). This shed light on what was fictional in the story. The discussion continued to include the fact that the story's software and manipulation of massive databases was available today but that it wasn't going to get too much better until more capable and extensive software could be developed and that was precluded because the present state of the art was constructivist (done by human programmers and limited by their time and capacity). Although software is used to create new computer chips, humans are still cranking out AI software. When AI software becomes self-generating, that's when robotics and other embedded sciences will grow - and the dangers I foresee begin.

This brings me to a long and old (2000) Wired Magazine article written by Bill Joy, co-founder and network computer scientist of Sun Microsystems, a VC at Kleiner Perkins Greentech and FOO (Friend of Obama).  In the article, Joy worked his way through his own history of thoughts about technology to an evening when he spent some time with Ray Kurzweil and learned, first-hand, what Kurzweil foresaw.

Ray was saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that and John [Searle, also at the meeting] countering that this couldn't happen because the robots couldn't be conscious.

I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction.  But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility.  I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future.  I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

Joy wrote pages of his history in thought from then until he met scholar and author Jacques Attali who described his interpretation of Fraternity.

Jacques helped me understand... Fraternity, whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.

This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.

I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.

We are getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable. 

It seems to me that Joy's seriousness and concern is well-deserved and appropriate.  I share his concerns fully.  What do you think?

Robotics 2009 - A Review

Singularity Hub, a website reporting advances in nanotechnology, genetics, biology, AI, aging and robotics, presented their 2009 Best Robots pictorial, a graphic review of some of the most interesting robots in the news in 2009.  A few of the entries were frivolous or  prototypes with no prospect of near-term commercialization, and there were some major omissions, but overall it gives a favorable impression of the progress made during 2009 - and prospects for the future - in robotics. It made me think that it might be time to review my own progress through 2009.

In June, 2008, I began to research the robotics industry - and the future of robotics - with an eye toward selectively investing in publicly-traded or privately held robotics businesses. I set up The Robot Report as an adjunct of my research - to share the data I've collected and to provide a visual method to track the business of robotics.  I've also been compiling a database of robotic companies and facilities worldwide and developed an industry chart (RoboStox™) of publicly-traded service and industrial robotic companies from which to compare their change to that of the NASDAQ and the DJIA indexes. RoboStox™is updated and recapped monthly on The Robot Report.

My research was necessary because my stock brokers didn't have a list of companies involved in robotics. They had a few stock tips but nothing comprehensive about the industry. Nor was there a fund or index for the industry.  Not even a knowledgeable specialist or quant. I realized that I had to do the legwork myself. It's been an intensive project that has taken me to Korea, Germany, Japan, and all over the Internet. My eyesight has suffered but not my mind. I love what I'm doing and discovering.

September 2008 was right about the time that the economic crisis really hit. Stocks took their second and biggest dive. People were on the edge of panic. Things hidden behind years of obfuscation became painfully visible in the media.

Robotic stocks tumbled that September. Fell like bricks. But I was still optimistic. I thought that by the time I really grasped the business of robotics, I'd be able to select the good from the chaff, and ride the wave back up, should it ever happen.

Thus far I've identified more than 600 companies (worldwide) that produce robotic products, 150 of which are publicly traded. Of the 600, many are conglomerates or companies where robotics aren't their primary business - ABB is an example. Less than 1/3 of ABB revenue is from robotics, yet ABB is one of the major robotics providers in the world.  Many of the companies aren't listed on American exchanges. My database has another 650 companies, some of which are public, that are ancillary to the industry providing everything from engineering, integration, software, vision systems and other necessary components to purely educational and research facilities. I have another 200 UAV providers on hold because many are unlikely to become commercially viable due to restrictions in airspace and the probability that countless years will pass before those limitations are lifted.

Observations from 2009:

• Strategic funding toward a robotics industry via a roadmap is non-existant in the U.S. but not in Korea, Japan and the EU. Their "roadmaps" have been designed, plotted out, funded, the public-private groups selected, and the tasks and research are underway.  Korea's $1.25 billion Frontier Program has an overall goal of a robot in every household and for Korea to become the primary worldwide provider of industrial robots by 2018. Japan's $100 million transition to service robotics is reflected in a variety of prototype elder and home care robots and smaller multi-functional assistance robots. The EU has funded (at least $600 million) for a variety of public-private consortiums in the area of cognitive systems, human-robot and robot-robot interaction.
• In America, we are many years behind.  Our "roadmap" was presented to a congressional caucus in February but has yet to be approved or funded.  If it does get approved and then funded, it is unlikely to get into the budget until FY 2013 or 2014.  As an American, I find this to be quite disturbing.
• Pragmatic funding for robotics does happen in the U.S. particularly for defense through DARPA, space, and from a select few individual entrepreneurs.
• Although there is and will be stimulus for high tech from the 2009 Economic Stimulus Bill, there is NONE for robotics; rather, there's money for healthcare digitization, enhancing the national broadband system and for energy efficiency (mostly in the form of grants and tax credits) and the ARPA-E grants for the development of enhanced battery technologies, carbon capture and other non-robotic research.
• Industrial robot producers have been diversifying and consolidating into the service sector and improving their products by making them lighter, more capable, less requiring of a safety cage, and easily trained.
• Like other companies suffering the economic crisis, orders have been down and employee cuts were necessary.  But that trend appears to be reversing in the services sector.
• Proof of this last point came from job offer information from LinkedIn and the Robotics-Worldwide mailing list - sources for monitoring such offerings.  One can see particular progress in the areas of bionics, motion vision, human-robot and robot-robot communication, motion flexibility, and artificial intelligence.  
  
• Worldwide robotics stocks - in anticipation of a return to economic normalcy - have recouped much of their losses from lows reached early this year.  Nevertheless, almost all are still lower than they were in 2008.
• Other researchers are getting on the robotics bandwagon in addition to The Robot Report.  Three new players offered pay-for material about the industry in 2009. The Robot Report, of course, is free.
  

Thus 2009 was a year of retrenchment for industrial robotic suppliers - product improvements and movement toward new products in the service robotics sector.  Industrial orders may have been down, but companies making the move to the service sector are hiring and marketing.  One exception to this has been in defense, space and surveillance where orders and sales are up.  Although news reports make it appear to be an American thing, it really is a worldwide phenomenon.  Countries from Israel to South Africa, from Brazil to China, are all developing security and defense bots of one type or another.

For me, 2009 was a year of research, database development and learning.  As the year progressed I began to focus on areas of particular appeal: rehabilitative robotics, agricultural robots, and medium-priced robotic toys to name a few.  People and companies began to discuss their financial needs with me and my collection of NDA's is growing.  Hopefully 2010 will be the year where everything robotic gels and we all have an exiting and prosperous robotics New Year.  One can only hope!

PS: 'Christmas Fun with Electronic Robots' was the cover story on the now-defunct Popular Electronics magazine back in December, 1958 - 51 years ago.  The issue sold for 35 cents!  I scanned and Photoshopped the cover into the graphic shown above.