Futurismic

You can’t so much as turn sideways without stumbling over this story, especially in the transhumanist and Singularitarian neighbourhoods of the web, and with good reason. So let’s just cut straight to the meat of it:

Scientists, at IBM Research – Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. [via KurzweilAI]

(And I’ll tell you, much as I love the web and the young crazy companies that throng through it, no one writes a press release like the guys from IBM.)

Additionally, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, IBM scientists have developed an algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene® supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

These advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions. The team’s work stands to break the mold of conventional von Neumann computing, in order to meet the system requirements of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow.

All the pomp and majesty of the best publicity material, but still somehow stately, dignified. You’ll have to forgive me, but I see a whole lot of press releases on a daily basis, and when I see one this well crafted, I just have to sit back and admire it (or envy it) for a moment.

But delivery systems aside, what’s the story here? Basically, IBM have built a computer that simulates the complexity and interconnection of a cat’s brain, which is significantly more complex than previous neuro-cortical simulations. Why does that matter? Well, because for those who theorise that the human mind is an entirely emergent property of the brain (that there’s no such thing as a soul or spirit, in other words) the ability to simulate the hardware that the mind runs on should provide us the ability to simulate the mind itself. And once we can simulate it, we can probably record, transfer, tweak and tamper with it. Think human-level artificial intelligence; think Technological Singularity predicated on a point where intelligent machine become intelligent enough to redesign themselves. Think brain uploading, Moravec cyborg bodies, a panoply of simulated virtual universes… think hard and crazy science fictional stuff, in other words.

Of course, there’s no certainty that any of these things will result from IBM’s simulated cat brain, but it’s another proof-of-concept step along that road. Now all they have to do is keep the BlueGene computer from chasing dust motes in sunbeams and taking a nap every time they want to run some tests. [image by avatar-1]

Remember all the fuss last year about Oscar ‘Bladerunner’ Pistorius, the amputee athlete who was banned from competing against able-bodied runners in the Olympics because the authorities were concerned that his prosthetics might give him an unfair advantage? Well, it turns out that the authorities guessed wrong – recent research suggests that, far from conferring a performance edge, Pistorius’ blades are more likely to be putting him at a disadvantage:

Simon Choppin, a sports engineer at Sheffield Hallam University, said the Pistorius controversy rested on whether his prosthetics increased the efficiency of his limbs, allowing him to achieve higher speeds for less effort.

“So, simply, you can move the prosthetic quicker and you’re ready for the next step faster than someone who has a leg,” said Choppin. Another possible advantage was that the prosthetics might allow the athlete to get back more of the energy they put into the track compared with able-bodied athletes. “But this [Grabowski] paper suggests you’re at a disadvantage if you’ve got one of these blades.”

We can hope that the competition authorities will look at research like this and allow transhuman athletes to compete alongside everyone else, at least until more advanced prosthetics confer a genuine and insuperable advantage (which is bound to happen eventually). But given competitive sport’s strong role in maintaining the mythology of the perfect conformist human body image – think back to the disgusting treatment of Caster Semenya, for example – I suspect they’ll find some other reason to keep the Olympics “pure” and “fair”.

Almost every short fiction venue worth its salt will have some sort of guidelines as to what sort of material they’re looking for… but I suspect almost every editor will confess that, when the story is good enough, the guidelines can flex a little to allow it through.

That’s exactly what happened with “Spider’s Moon” by globe-trotting star-ascendant Lavie Tidhar, which is set in a slightly deeper future than we usually deal with here at Futurismic. But its core concerns are closer to home, and it’s a strong tale well told – so we’re proud to be publishing it for you to read. Enjoy!

Spider’s Moon

By Lavie Tidhar

Night, a full spider’s moon in the sky; hundreds of lanterns hung along the river, and the smell of saffron and garlic and dried lemongrass filled the air; a warm night, candles burning on street corners with offerings of rum and cooked rice, the hum of electric motorbikes, the murmur of a sugarcane machine as it crushed stalks to make the juice.

Ice tinkling in glasses; on small plastic chairs people sat by the river, drinking, talking. A hushed reverie, yet festive. Hoi An under the spider’s moon, French backpackers singing, badly but with enthusiasm, while one of their number played a guitar.

Save me from the raven and the frog, and show me safely to the river’s mouth, O Naga, he thought. Frogs had never been his favourites. Green and slimy, and always too loud. Like rats, almost. Like green, belligerent rats. Continue reading “NEW FICTION: SPIDER’S MOON by Lavie Tidhar”

Science writer Quinn Norton tests a new sense, that of always knowing what direction North is via an ankle-attached bracelet that indicates true north using vibrations from eight internal buzzers:

The Northpaw is based on the Feelspace, a project organized by the Cognitive Psychology department of Universität Osnabrück in Germany. The principle is simple and elegant. The buzzers signal north to the wearer. The wearer gets used to it, often forgetting it’s there. They just start getting a better idea of where they are through a kind of subconscious dead reckoning.

Quinn has written about similar direction-sensing enabling technologies before.

I recall something like this in Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. PTerry gifts his elves with “poise” – the ability always to know where they are.

[via Slashdot, from h+ Magazine][image from ★lex on flickr]

You’d have had to be living under a metaphorical rock not to have heard about the story of Caster Semenya, the record-breaking athlete whose superior performance caused the regulatory bodies of the athletics world to have her tested thoroughly – not for performance-enhancing drugs, but to determine her gender.

The results indicated that Semenya is in fact intersexed – a natural (if rare) state wherein she possesses both male and female sexual organs – and as such has a higher level of testosterone than the “average” woman. The media coverage has been a deeply unpleasant display of almost Puritanical horror with an undertone of carnival freakshow; the implicit racism was bad enough, but to have the biological status of a teenager discussed in terms of her “abnormality” on the pages of newspapers across the world is – at the very least – deeply insensitive. I guess there’s no way that the tests and inquiry could have been kept secret, but even so: the story doesn’t say nice things about our attitudes to difference.

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky takes that ball and runs with it in a post that asks whether postgendered athletes should be allowed to compete alongside “normal” male and female athletes:

The IAAF has already admitted that Semenya is not at fault here. This is not a doping issue. According to the IAAF, “These tests do not suggest any suspicion of deliberate misconduct but seek to assess the possibility of a potential medical condition which would give Semenya an unfair advantage over her competitors. There is no automatic disqualification of results in a case like this.”

Their decision will be an important one because it will determine whether or not intersexed persons will be able to compete against regular males and females. If they rule that Semenya cannot compete, the IAAF will essentially be saying that there are some ‘natural’ physical conditions that have to be sanctioned against.

[...] it may also set a precedent for a prohibition against the deliberate blurring of male and female traits for competitive advantage. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that some professional athletes — women in particular– may willingly adopt traits of the opposite sex to give them an edge. And as medical biotechnologies continue to advance, there’s a very distinct possibility that such interventions may become more available.

If you’re thinking “hang on there, George, that’s a bit of a sweeping discriminatory statement,” you’d be quite correct. But it’s a rhetorical play – Dvorsky’s point is that the target of that discrimination will shift. Resentment of postgendered humans – a term that I think Dvorsky is using here to differentiate between those born with intersex characteristics and those who choose to blur the lines within themselves – will be huge… not just in sports, but in general.

It has been my contention that, as the human species enters into a transhuman condition, strictly stratified gender designations will begin to blur. Men and women will consciously trade-off advantageous gender-specific traits (both physical and cognitive), while discarding some gendered traits altogether. Gender may eventually become a thing of the past — a legacy of our biological heritage.

Now, should the IAAF rule against intersexed persons, and by logical extension postgendered humans (including transgendered individuals), it would appear that the future has no place for these type of athletes.

This will clearly become a problem of discrimination. And it will likely be compounded by all the other ‘enhancement’ related interventions that future holds.

Indeed it will… just look at the polarised attitudes to simple present-day enhancements like cognitive performance drugs. Where is the line between doing as you please with your body and giving yourself an “unfair advantage” over others? Should the law control that line, enforce it? Is enforcing that line a defence of the median or a suppression of a minority? How is self-enhancement any different to being born with a natural advantage by comparison to the human baseline?