Sandy's Key Lesson Applies to More Than Bad Weather

The NY Times is out with a story today chronicling all the warnings about Gotham's vulnerability to storms and flooding.

Loss of life and economic devastation are made all the more tragic when we realize that these losses were at least in part preventable.

But as an anonymous source close the New York government officials put it:

"until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it".

Indeed.

As Nassim Taleb, et al have written about, there are deep psychological and evolutionary roots to our species' tendency to ignore seemingly low probability, catastrophic events until it is too late.

Explain this 'insurance' thing to me one more time?

Perhaps as the human species was evolving and facing a daily battle for survival there was a prohibitive cost to planning too far into the future. Now, however, with the hunting/foraging days long gone for most of us, we're still stuck traveling through life with the same 'Cave Man software' of our forefathers.

With Mother Nature having reminded us what she's capable of there will likely be some changes to storm protection systems along the East Coast. But unfortunately I'm not terribly optimistic that we can extrapolate the lessons of Sandy to other systemic risks, such as asteroid collision, climate change, and number one focus of this blog, financial crises.

Sadly, the Cave Man is still in charge of this joint.

Video: Ray Kurzweil on Bill Mahrer

Real Time With Bill Maher: Overtime - Episode... by HBO

Video: Ray Kurzweil on Jimmy Kimmel

Video: Transcendent Man Movie Trailer (Featuring Ray Kurzweil)

Podcast: The Immortalization Commission - Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Link to podcast here.

During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century science became the vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for faith.

John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he now writes full time. His selected writings, Gray’s Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009. The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is published in February 2011.

2045: The Year Science Makes Humans Immortal?

Ray Kurzweil

For my money it just doesn't get any more bleeding edge than the 'Singularity'.

A good read published in Time yesterday on this topic, and radical life-extension, featuring inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, Cambridge Professor Aubrey de Grey, investor Peter Thiel, and others at the forefront of this (for lack of a better term) movement.

From the article:

The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls? 

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English.

The idea of the Singularity first hit me like a lightning bolt a little over a decade ago when I read Sun Microsystem co-founder Bill Joy's alarming Wired article titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. I've been fascinated and trying to wrap my mind around the many potential implications of exponential technological development and living indefinitely ever since.

The Antithesis of Idle Chitchat

If you're looking for a way to spice up your next dinner party or bar conversation then I encourage you to trot out the idea of science making immortality a reality within your lifetime.

As noted by Kurzweil, people can more easily accept the idea of superhuman HAL-like computer artificial intelligence in the foreseeable future than banishing death. Based on limited anecdotal observations women in particular seem to have an almost viscerally negative, knee-jerk response when first confronted with the notion that the necessary technological advances could arrive in their lifetime.

In fact I have yet to encounter a single woman that responds positively at first blush to the idea of living forever. Perhaps the only thing this reveals is a homogeneity amongst my circle of female friends and acquaintances. But it has led me to wonder whether there is something fundamental to radical life extension which makes it more appealing to men?

Personally, I don't think so. Rather I think this is a case of a big, hard to fathom idea traumatically upending the perceived natural order of life's apple cart. Once you get passed initial concerns over things like quality of life (living long but as a gimp or vegetable) or what this means for romance (and concepts like soul mates) then some women soften up their initial distaste for life extension.

I for one love the idea of extending life indefinitely! There is so much I would love to learn, see, and do; to one day catch a sunrise on planet Mars and then climb Olympus Mons, a mountain almost three times as tall as Everest!

So far as I can imagine there is simply nothing else which would more profoundly alter life as we know it than the Singularity and radical life extension. However, their prospect raises tectonic moral, philosophical, socioeconomic, and security implications. Joy's concerns, which are shared by Kurzweil, must be addressed.

Below is a video of a 17-year old Kurzweil during his 1965 television appearance on I've Got a Secret, and here is a link to his most recent television interview on Charlie Rose where he describes the Singularity.