On Transhumanism

Two years ago in 2010 for curiosity I immersed myself into a small computing project to study how evolution by natural selection works. As a result of this exercise the attached paper “Eight Queens with Evolutionary Computing” (aka Evocom) emerged. I wrote a program in Python language to solve Eight Queens problem using evolutionary computing. In due process I learned a lot about mechanics of natural selection. I could for instance simulate genetic drift by way of varying certain parameters; similarly I could study the effects of varying mutation probability and so on.

In this article I would like to demonstrate why Transhumanism would fail expectations if the lessons we learn from Nature is disregarded.  I am not going to analyse ethical implications, which is strictly out of my scope. I would like to propose a model in stead for being a precursor of further analysis in the area. I would like to draw our attention to population genetics.

Richard Dawkins makes a compelling argument in his debut, The Selfish Gene, stating we are mere vehicles of gene coalitions that use us as replicators. Genes themselves do not have consciousness but the net effect of them being cooperating in evolutionary scale certainly appears to be as such. So we are already robots, from an earthworm to humans.

Everyday more replicators are being created; the idea is to keep thriving in other bodies, until useful lifespan of the individual inevitably surrenders to entropy; the most fundamental property of our universe that is far grander and dominant than the natural selection.

Entropy (aka disorderedness of information) rises irreversibly and universally. Oddly enough life emerged as if to challenge and work against entropy. Each living being born is packed with densely ordered information. However almost instantly as the first cell division takes place, entropy starts rising until the death of the individual. In the end entropy wins.

So ultimately death is a necessity, or rather for the Selfish Gene a necessary compromise to cope with entropy. The Selfish Gene essentially buys time from irreversible entropy via replication. Consequently genes survive far longer than their carriers, albeit inevitable modifications due to copy errors or mutations of other origin.

Life is as much as about death as it is about life itself. There is a lot to be said in this area. For now it should suffice that extending the human lifespan without useful contribution to population would probably have an effect of pushing your limits against a proven model.

The most remarkable feature of evolution by natural selection comes from the fact that re-combination of genes and mutations occur in random fashion when a pair gives rise to an offspring. Randomness increases robustness of the algorithm and accelerates evolutionary process. However this is not sufficient for a given population to reach to a stable fitness peak. You also need diversity of genes in the gene pool, a sufficient initial population size where pairs are selected to breed, and number of generations participating a given evolutionary process spanned across time. Environmental conditions, distribution of and capabilities of predators and preys do not affect offspring selection, they merely affect survivor selection. This is explained in my attached paper to some extent.

For our purpose I would like you to focus on this simple picture, the model of evolution by natural selection.

I should confess I have not made an exhaustive analysis on theories surrounding Transhumanism, so my knowledge in the area is limited. However I have made some observations to convince me that they and we as humanity are not heading in the right direction.

Evolution by Natural Selection

Here are the fundamental problems I see in the light of what I learned about natural selection.  Please use the diagram I provided in relation to arguments given below.

1- Transhumanism focuses on architecture/charactersitics of a given individual. Whereas evolution acts upon populations not upon individuals. The individual is not selected by itself or for itself, it is selected from a population (see survivor selection branch in the diagram).

Note: strictly speaking for our species survivor selection has a broader meaning than life vs. death. It may mean for instance “become sufficiently successful in business despite GFC”.

2- Transhumanism invariable erases the randomness from recombination and mutation phase. This is problematic in terms of population genetics as it will create a major obstacle for stability. Random recombinations and mutations are essential ingredients for species’ long-term survival.  So far I have not seen anyone grasped this notion. Most Transhumanists seem to be fire dancing for the wrong reason.

3- Due to profit concerns Transhumanism will likely to create a heteregenous gene-scape at the very beginning. Islands of genetic pools will emerge, an island of “creative” genetic pool, and island of “martian” genetic pool (for manufacturing people who can withstand harsh environmental conditions) and so on. This sort of genetic fragmentation shall inevitably promote genetic drift, in other words it may push those islands to loose other genetically essential traits rapidly.  This will likely to happen because a genetic pool in its entirity has NP complexity. Regardless of your computational power there is no mathematical proof so far that NP-complex problems can be solved rapidly compared to the rate of problems emerging in such systems. For instance you may see a relatively sudden rise in Albino in “cerative” pool. Transhumanists may argue, those anomalies can easily be “patched up”.  But I doubt “patch management” will be a sustainable strategy for the long term success.

In summary I see Transhumanism as a failure of some sort if lessons learned from natural selection are not sufficiently factored in. I think the scientific community has an obligation to urge governments that policies must also include proper risk analysis of population genetics and its dire implications, should sufficent emphasis is not given into the matter, in addition to ethical concerns.

There is room for success if we control our indulgence for profit and focus on useful and sensibly limited areas, such as curing certain diseases and solving energy crisis.


References:

Evocom (my paper)
http://members.iinet.net.au/~coruh/evocom/Home.html

NP Complexity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity)

The Selfish Gene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

Compartments

Seek for compartments in design and in life.

Principles to adhere:

•  Each compartment needs to be identifiable, movable, self contained, and elegantly handled.
•  Attend, handle and enjoy each compartment in isolation.
•  Avoid clutter, inter-dependencies and dominating compartments.
•  Regularly visit, evaluate, re-order, downsize and clean up your compartments.
•  Remove the compartments that create too much stress on you.
• If the time allocated is up and it is obvious that you are not going to make it, reschedule and move to another compartment.

These principles apply to below and many other cases:

•  Your best friend
•  Your job 
•  Furniture
•  Your child's issues
•  Management of your money
•  Your garden
•  Friends   
•  Software, regardless of you design them or you use them
•  Book reading
•  Google+ surfing
•  Broken things, accidents, health (car, refrigerator, plumbing, illness and so on)  
•  etc.

Small business

Today I am in Darling Harbour for a conference. I usually arrive early to such occasions, find a place that sells hopefully good coffee, sit somewhere and enjoy my morning kick.

The idea is to avoid that dreadful filtered coffee served in luke warm containers outside the conference room. I have to have a proper cup of hot cappuccino to begin my day.

The shopping mall nearby is empty, there are cleaners, and few early starters but no morning rush yet. Inside the mall I had two choices, Gloria Jeans on the corner and that food stand in the middle with a sign “Bayside Gelato”.

I chose the gelato place and ordered my coffee to a man who looked like the owner, clearly a second generation Italian from Calabrese. A short, charming guy with pitch dark thick hair and larger than life big black eyes. We had a short friendly chat and I mentioned why I like supporting small businesses.

Global financial crisis and the effect of globalization had tough effect on everyone. If there is one way you wonder you may play a positive role in your community, consider supporting small businesses. Just avoid chain brands and buy your coffee or lunch from that guy around the corner.

How to become an IOS Programmer

If you are a proficient C/C++ programmer this is what it takes:

- Enrol to one or both of Apple Developer programs, each costs ~$100/year. There are two programs; Mac OS/X and/or IOS.

- Download/install XCode (yes it is nothing but an IDE.)

- Get yourself Stephen G. Kochan's "Programming in Objective-C 2.x" book. 

- Study/experiment with simple command line examples using the book (part time 1-2 weeks). Just focus on learning the Objective-C language not IOS or Cocoa (Mac OS/X stuff.)

- Get yourself an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad for development. There is a simulator that comes with XCode but sooner or later you would need to run your code on a real device. For instance iCloud stuff cannot be tested with a simulator.

- If you want to learn say IOS don't waste your money buying more books (I did and they are hopeless.) Simply download and follow Stanford University classes using UTunes (held by Paul Hegarty). Follow tutorials while coding. The great things about them, a) the material is organised efficiently (you would progress fast), b) you can pause the video while catching up. They'll take about 2-3 weeks part-time (1-3 hours a night). You can skip stuff you don't immediately need. eg. if you are writing a document based app don't waste your time learning graphics programming or accelerometer API. The most important bit: Learn MVC architecture and learn it thoroughly.

- Enrol to stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/


- Start your own project. When stuck Google your question. Start your question with "IOS...". Most definitely the answer will be in the first 3 of search results. 99% of the time the answer would be coming from stackoverflow. 99% of the time the answer would be correct.

- From time to time you would need to read Apple documentation to understand concepts more thoroughly. eg. If you want to learn iCloud there is a pdf, if you want to learn Undo Architecture there is a pdf, etc. Every developer documentation has high quality, to-the-point and concise content with simple code snippets. Download them, read them during your breaks or while commuting. 

-Don't waste your time asking questions on the Apple Developer forums. They are ghost towns. 

Finally writing for Apple eco-system is great fun. Objective-C is a great language, Apple architecture is amazing, Apple documentation is superb, and stackoverflow is awesome. From programming point of view Apple devices are easier to handle since the hardware and form-factor is strictly controlled by Apple. You don't need to wrestle with 100's of devices to adopt your app. 

Questions? Please ask.

New Readers

They installed new readers with a little screen on the automatic ticket gates in the North Sydney train station.  The former version of gate readers had no screens but were working ok. Some were responding slower than others but we commuters got used to their behaviour. Everything was in nearly perfect order for us, the field mice, in our dimly lit tunnels that smelled soil. 

New machines on the other hand worked 50% of the time, remaining times the screen showed "Invalid ticket" and the giant iron gate remained closed on our face.

For the last two days I have developed some sort of anxiety in my tiny body under my white-grey fur. My pea size heart palpitated horridly as the gates failed on me couple of times both in the morning and in the evening.

I had to try other gates but to my dismay I missed my train while trying to play Pavlov's mouse in the labyrinth. You must note I am no Pavlov's mouse.

In the mean time bunch of fat city-rail workers behind gates, rats who belong to rail workers union, were chatting about tonight's rugby game, arms crossed, and gazing us, exhausted mice with uninterested, pitying impressions, slightly disgusted even.