Monday 30 October 2006

Climate Economics

As I'd expected, it's taken a realistic long term economic forecast for the UK government to start taking a serious stance against climate change. This was provided by Sir Nicholas Stern in a big ole report suggesting that a single stitch today could save between 5 and 20 in the coming century (so to speak)... reported at BBC & Slashdot

I distinctly remember the Blairster casually laughing off a suggestion of fuel taxes on aviation fuel/airplanes (on some documentary or other) as not being in the interests of the country's economy. Irritating as it is and was clear that the continued growth of fossil fuel power flight clearly needs to be curved to even stabilise GHG emissions and this can only be done by increasing it's cost.

Even though I do largely agree with weighting all decisions of a capitalist government heavily on what will achieve the most economic growth (leading to prosperity) politicians have long maintained a facade of smug ignorance to the realistic cost/impact of human contributed climate change.

As usual, the people at the top are several steps behind on what's best to do: after letting ailing nuclear power stations, well, ail for decades, too afraid of the bad PR a pro nuclear stance would have, they're finally coming round to the idea of using nuclear as a power source with no atmospheric detriment: the lesser of 2 evils. This comes now that I’m convinced that the Lib Dem approach of: no fission as the only option (their only policy i used to disagree with on grounds of practicality) now make more sense to me. Typical.

The approach the enlightened German governance currently seems to be taking would be the way to go: big state investment in renewable energy technology (mainly solar - photovoltaic) to reduce manufacturing costs and make renewables outright competitive on the energy market. It wouldn't even take a supper-scale multi billion pound engineering project like a tidal damned estuary! (even though one on the seven estuary would provide 1/4 of the nations electricity!).

Sigh...


PS: Guardian Article tells of the UK recruiting Al Gore in an attempt to lobby the US to take said report seriously. No chance of anything happening before the Bush ousting of full elections in 2008.

Tuesday 24 October 2006

A world-brain called Google

"Assuming that you keep your schedule in Google Calendar (and really, who doesn't these days?)" from an article on Engadget brought to my attention a feature of the ever diversifying Google that i'd failed to notice and may now use!


Then this BBC article pointed me to an even more significant development: customised Google Search. Provided i can login easily on remote machines this could be particularly handy, as it incorporates a whole shed load of customizable content: GMail inbox, to-do lists, local weather, RSS news feeds from my favourite sites + quick search boxes for Wikipedia and so on.... I've not even made any new searches to test out main feature of this new service!


At first glance this service appears altruistically helpful, though i'm sure the profit will continue to pour in as usual back at Google headquarters. I'd guess the service is mostly to encourage use of the custom search facilities that will allow higher paying, even more directed ads. However, Google’s expansionist efforts have been touted as being far less successful than it's root interest. Add to this the much squawked about $1.6B for YouTube, that seems a little puzzling in itself (given the potential copyright issues), and it looks a little like the big G's vying for a monopoly on the worlds information! (though this is Google’s first big purchase, and take-overs have been rife in big business for ages. Any hot new company with a new hold on a service gets snapped up, probably by a bigger fish that came to popularity in a previous wave of success).

Which brings me to an article by George Dyson (Son of physicist/intellectual/extraordinaire Freeman Dyson, whose books have been a big influence for me) on the Edge that i've been meaning to blog for a little while:

TURING'S CATHEDRAL (by George Dyson):

The main meme of the feature is speculation on the possibility of strong A.I. having been created and already
existing in some form within the Google computer equipment. Naturally this sounds entirely fanciful at first, given that the limited power of computers, for the moment, inhibits the simulating/emulating anything nearly as complicated as a human brain. Then again, if anywhere was able to support a true A.I. it would be within those estimated 450,000 servers spread around the world potentially using some of the masses of dark fibre bandwidth it wanted to/did purchase some time ago (Link 1 | 2).

Here are a selection of quotes from the article (higlighted in red) that i think are enlightening, starting with a little mitigation against those who may think creating artificial consiousness would be as good as trying to steal God's powers:

Alan Turing - Computing Machinery and Intelligence: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children...Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

Google Employee: "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
A pretty direct statement! One that does make me excited like the little child that i am. Of course, having that vast amount of accumulated information is one thing, processing and 'understanding' it is another! Then there's the question: in what way is this potential intelligence observable? What capabilities will it control? Mearly a textual input/output on a secret terminal screen somewhere?

H. G. Wells - World Brain (1938 ); "The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual...This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba."
Google is perhaps already doing a fair approximation of a 'world brain', even bowing to censorship demands to ensure it's pressence in china. A search engine accessible by practically the globe in any language, that can understand and answer all requests is almost explicitly the goal of Google, so it seems, and is almost exactly the description of a 'Hub/orbital/rock mind' from Ian M Banks. Read "Look to Windward" for a detailed description of a hub mind within a brilliant story!

I'm going to finish on this thought provoking note:

Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI.

Wednesday 4 October 2006

Variably imutable rules

Re: "Never say Always" - New Scientist (23/sept/2006-p31)

The main idea communicated in this long article seems to be: how can we be sure that any 'laws' of physics are true in eternity? Therefore the implicitly accepted notion, that physics can and is working towards actual, fundamental laws that govern everything at all times, may be flawed. Perhaps a setup which more closely mirrors evolution of life will turn out more appropriate (though, quite how this would work is not discussed).

Personally, i think this idea seems quite powerful. It has at least helped me to question the validity of my perceptions ultimate theories. Good, as doubt is always appropriate in my opinion. I felt that the current form of physics seems messy, incomplete and sometimes unnecessary throughout my BSc at Nottingham (though, that could be biased by my apparent inability to latch on to what was being taught - memorisation of abstract maths formulas coming from unclear and mostly arbitrary derivation, so it seemed). Evolution, however, is clearly evident and powerfully simple!

A concept of physical laws being evolved is forwarded. The physics laws we currently experience would then be equivalent to the 'law' of sexual selection, or such like, in a parallel to natural selection. Here, the matter in the universe would interact and determine the course and nature of the evolution of the physical laws that in turn govern it's behaviour. The Stumbling block that is brought up several times in the article, but never resolved, is the question of what laws then govern the evolution of the laws themselves?!...

Like asking: what came before the big bang? What caused it?! This my be an out of context question, that appears to flaw the idea, but only because it come from certain working assumptions of human minds that are not appropriate. I.e. there was no 'before' the 'Big Bang' as time was created at that time also.