Memia on Sunday 22-May-22: Budget 2022 explorer💰// TranshumanOS🤖// centaurs🧍🦌and matrioshka brains🧠// bionic reading🔠// 4D Minecraft🧱// peak Dubya🩸
Faster. Better. More focused.
Kia ora,
Welcome to Memia on Sunday - your regular weekly collection of longer reads and deeper thinks with one eye on what’s been happening in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I hope you’re having a relaxing weekend! I’m coming to you from the great city of Ōtepoti - having a #prouddad moment attending my daughter’s graduation from Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou / University of Otago yesterday.
Overnight, Australia got a new government, with a strong showing from the Green party but most significantly a substantial number of new female “Teal” independent candidates, focused on climate policy, look like they have seized the balance of power. Australia’s stance on a number of key issues will change pretty quickly I reckon.
In today’s edition:
The best visual representation of this week’s Budget 2022 came from Stuff.
Musings on a TranshumanOS - what does the software operating system for cognitive enhancement look like?
Plus…the usual set of Weekend exploring links
Vitalik Buterin’s contradictions in his thoughts and values
A theory of Justice for Web3
Minecraft in 4D
Weekenders including George W. Bush’s peak moment which will be his legacy forever.
Enjoy your Sunday,
ngā mihi
Ben
💰Budget 2022 explorer
This week’s Budget 2022 announcement as usual is covered in the mainstream media with pundits talking over each other about policies in isolation, winners and losers… almost like a horse race, while the big picture of the numbers is usually impossible to access.
So kudos to Stuff’s political reporter Henry Cooke (soon to be departing to the UK I gather) - for by far the best communication of the numbers of Budget 2022 I’ve seen to date - an interactive hierarchy chart representation of the budget:
Just look at Superannuation vs….. well, everything else. (Particularly Student Loans: somehow our young people have inherited a political system where Super works on the basis of a UBI but student living expenses are treated as a loan to be paid back. Blatantly, a system optimised for the gerontocracy.
Explore here: Budget 2022: $350 middle-class living cost payout for 2.1m people, huge boost to health.
Ideally the government themselves would start to produce these kinds of interactive data charts as part of all major policy announcements - good for more transparency and enables way deeper accessible exploration of the data.
Other charts I’d like to see: (if these already exist, please point me to them…!)
An animation of these budget hierarchy charts over time
A graphical representation of how the budget bidding process arrived at these numbers (I still struggle to understand the “Vote Health”, “Vote Defence” etc process… very opaque.
Actual spending vs. budget, month by month
Here’s the loss/surplus and net debt prediction model from the Budget itself: current government aiming to keep debt low relative to “countries that we compare ourselves against”… just don’t mention the infrastructure deficit.
🤖TranshumanOS
On to higher things…
As regular readers will know, I’ve been deeply interested in the concept of human augmentation with technology since… well, since I was much younger! Elise Bohan’s new book Future Superhuman, covered in Wednesday’s newsletter, triggered some new thoughts…
(Recap from Wikipedia:)
“Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates for the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.”
The problem is that the technology to achieve cognitive enhancement has always seemed to exist way off in the distant future… but actually recent significant advances give a hint of what might be coming soon.
My own mental model of how transhuman intelligence might evolve has been based largely on the sci-fi novels I’ve read over time… mostly a mix of augmentation with ever-more powerful brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) combined with various forms of telepathy between human brains.
Quick rollcall of the usual suspects:
Charles Stross - Accelerando
Neal Asher - The Owner Trilogy
Zoltan Istvan - The Transhumanist Wager
Ramez Naam - Nexus Trilogy
(Also Anne Leckie’s lyrical Ancillary Trilogy explores some of the darker concepts of superhuman AIs “puppeting” human brains and bodies… (and singing chants together too).
Most of these books posit fast-evolving directly implanted BCI technology sometime in the mid-late 21st century - from direct neural “mesh” interfaces through to a swarm of nanobots which float around inside the brain cavity.
Personally, I suspect that foreseeable commercial BCI tech is only going to be “wearable”: I’m not alone in preferring the non-invasive approach of Bryan Johnson’s brain-reading Kernel helmet or Meta Reality Labs’ wrist-based input devices over than a surgically-implanted Neuralink brain interface - especially with recent cautionary tales of tech firms going bust leaving unsupported “bionic eye” implants in their patients…! (And don;t mention hacking…)
(At base here is the principle of individual sovereignty - to be able to disconnect one’s brain from all computing devices and go walking in the mountains away from it all…)
More interesting than the hardware for me is what the software would look like which would run between these BCIs. (A “TranshumanOS”, if you like) My essay from 2017 (five years ago…wow), Why Neuralink and Kernel are trying to solve the right problem at the wrong time, discussed the software constraints around getting brains to talk directly to other brains… positing the requirement for a platform-neutral “Human Intelligence Markup Language” to enable translation of mindstates from one brain / AI to another…
“HIML” — essentially a richly expressive machine-readable vocabulary of the full range of the human brain’s functionality and content.
🧍🦌Centaurs
So how far along the TranshumanOS journey are we right now?
My sense is that we’re just entering the “Centaur” evolutionary stage - where “Human + AI” becomes the dominant form of intelligence. When I look at my daily toolset my ape brain is augmented by a suite of sophisticated software tools which give me productivity and reach way beyond what I could have had 10-20 years ago. My primary stack looks something like this:
(The last year has seen me move almost all of my personal note-taking and task management to Roam Research after many years using paper-and-pen together with Trello…which has been revolutionary for productivity. Sharing a Roam graph to encapsulate a structured mind-state is my understanding of the cutting edge of “HIML” mentioned above).
Otherwise, my mostly Google-based stack hasn’t really changed substantially in 15 years on the face of it).
Of course, what has changed massively is that behind each of the productivity applications there are now layers and layers of data-driven machine learning algorithms which are actually what enable the step change in productivity. (Think: email autocomplete, personalised Google search results, Twitter/Linkedin feed algorithms). Arguably, when we’re jacked in to the internet these days, we are already all Centaurs.
*Except*, we don’t yet have complete functional control of these AI algorithms - we’re still mediated by Web 2.0 software companies motivated to catch our attention and show us advertising.
Where to from here? I think that the next iteration will be the merging of new generative AI tools such as DALL-E and GPT3/4 into our common user interfaces. At that point, we’ll be able to explore / imagine / create using far richer conceptual HIML “mind messages” - as easy as writing an email but with 10X the content and absorption speed. (See also “Bionic Reading” below for an example of a simple hack to improve readability today…)
Combine that with advances in VR headsets to replace phone / laptop, and (debatable) maybe decentralised Web3 computing platforms may come right… perhaps my updated tech stack in 2025 will look something like this:
🧠Emulated brains, hive minds and Matrioshka brains
How long might the Centaur stage last?
This Reddit comment from 2018 feels about right: There is no chance that any useful man+machine combination will work together for more than 10 years, as humans soon will be only a liability. This ties in with my thesis from 2017.
But what comes after the Centaur stage? At that point, so theory goes, we will have machine intelligence which is way more powerful than biological human brains… and which is able to carry out human-brain emulation as an afterthought. From then on, we move into speculative scenarios outlined by Robin Hanson in The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, where perhaps emulated human minds compete for computing resources in massive data centres around the planet… and maybe new “hive mind” collaborations start to evolve.
The logical final destination of computational immortality is the Matrioshka Brain:
A Matrioshka brain consists of a series of energy collection units arranged in concentric shells or swarms, so that the waste radiation produced by the inner shell or swarm is utilized by the collectors of the next shell out.
The inner swarms receive a high energy flux, while the outer shells are cooler; each layer powers an appropriate recipe of computronium, tailor-made for that operating temperature. Processing elements near the stars could be nearly as hot as the star itself, while the outer layer of the swarm could be nearly as cool as interstellar space. The whole array comprises a highly efficient Dyson swarm with vast processing power.
If the outermost shell of a Matrioshka brain is very large (many astronomical units in radius), it may radiate at a similar temperature to the Cosmic Microwave Background and be effectively invisible at interstellar distances, except as an occulting object.
Can’t wait.
Weekend exploring
A few more links I’ve been sifting for onward reading and watching…
🤔More thoughts from a thoughtful human
As I wrote in Memia on Sunday 20-Mar-2022, Vitalik Buterin is a *very thoughtful human*. This thread of the tensions in his evolving rationality vs values goes deep into the modern condition.
🪛New Framework
Hardware is hard. Upgrading hardware is harder.
This may now be changing - the Framework Laptop is a modular and upgradeable kit laptop which is also simple to expand and repair. (When we are staring down the barrel of looming supply chain challenges like we haven’t seen yet, this model makes a lot of sense for Aotearoa’s laptop fleet).
⚖️A theory of Justice for Web3
Li Jin is co-founder and GP at Variant, an early-stage VC firm. She channels the philospher John Rawls’ work to explore A theory of Justice for Web3:
“web2 started with a similar promise of empowering individual creators and removing intermediaries — a promise left unfulfilled. Now, standing at the precipice of a new era of the internet, we should ask ourselves: Is web3 actually democratizing opportunity? And if not, how can we better design platforms and governance systems to promote fairness?”
“The social and political philosopher John Rawls’ thought experiment known as the “veil of ignorance,” proposed in his influential 1971 work A Theory of Justice, provides a useful framework for these questions. When creating the foundations for an ideal society, Rawls contends, we should imagine that we do not know where we ourselves would fall within it — that is, we should adopt a veil of ignorance. A just society is one “that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.”
Bionic reading
Spreading like wildfire on the internet this week, the patented (good luck with that…) theory of Bionic Reading, substantially increasing reading and comprehension rates of ingesting text by implementing bolding of certain letters in a text to achieve:
Faster.
Better.
More focused.
Reading.
The theory behind it is based upon analysis of variations in fixation, saccade and opacity - it works, check out the example below.
(Should be an easy enough browser plugin, eh… - a number of open source projects have sprung up in the last few weeks… but be careful of your security when installing any browser plugin....)
🧱4D Minecraft
Minecraft developer Mashpoe made a demo of Minecraft in 4 dimensions.🤯
PC Gamer tries to explain:4-dimensional Minecraft broke my brain
Weekender
🩸Peak Dubya
I’ll just leave this one here. (If you haven’t seen this clip already, you may want to sit down first). A truly iconic moment.
Tackle!
That’s probably too dark a note to end on… so here’s outgoing Aussie PM Scott Morrison playing soccer (rugby?) on the campaign trail earlier this week.
What’s your password?
And finally I think everyone can relate to this (from the very funny Irish comedy trio Foil Arms and Hog):
Catch you again on Wednesday…
ngā mihi
Ben
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