Author: Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco is Senior Editor at Mindplex. He is a science and technology writer mainly interested in fundamental science, space exploration and expansion, computer science, Information Technology (IT), Virtual Reality (VR), cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberconsciousness, bio and nano technology, cryptography and crypto-economies, decentralized technology and governance.<br>A theoretical physicist by training and early career, in his previous lives Giulio has been a senior manager in public research organizations, an entrepreneur in the VR sector, and a consultant specialized in IT and VR. <a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco"></a><a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco">Follow Giulio on X</a>.<br>Giulio is also interested in the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of science and technology and has authored several books. <a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/"></a><a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/">See his website for more about this</a>.

Could the return of Philip Rosedale spark a renaissance of Second Life?

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago we reported that Philip Rosedale, the legendary founder of the Virtual Reality (VR) world Second Life, has returned as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Second Life’s parent company Linden Lab.

“We’re now in a unique position to define the future of virtual worlds, and Philip is returning to help myself and the exec team achieve that goal,” says Linden Lab CEO Brad Oberwager.

“I started Second Life in 1999,” adds Rosedale, “a decade before cloud computing and two decades before AI. We were early, but the success of Second Life to this day shows that we were not wrong. Virtual worlds will play an increasingly important role in the future of human culture, and I’m coming back to help make that happen in a way that has the most positive impact for the largest number of people.”

Second Life and the metaverse

The first news report of Rosedale’s return came from VR journalist Wagner James Au.

Au is the author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For (2023). The book, which Rosedale has highly praised, includes many snippets of previously unpublished conversations with Rosedale.

The term ‘metaverse’, which is often used for large VR worlds, comes from Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992). Au points out that the metaverse was effectively designed by Stephenson in the novel, that Stephenson’s insights are still valid (but often ignored), and that Stephenson’s original metaverse is still the goal that the VR industry is striving to reach.

In the last chapter of his book, titled ‘Metaverse Lessons for the Next 30 Years’, Au offers important advice to the metaverse industry, including lessons from “The Fall of Second Life”. The first lesson is that the user community must come before everything else. I believe the industry should listen to Au carefully on this.

The fact that Second Life has faded out of public consciousness at the end of the 2000s and no next-generation metaverse has emerged to replace it could indicate that people can do without VR. But perhaps VR is just hard to do well, and nobody has figured out yet how to do it well.

“VR is hard to do well even in a lab, and there’s still a lot to learn about how to make great VR products,” says VR pioneer Jaron Lanier in Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017). “Be patient… Just because it takes a while to figure a technology out, that doesn’t mean the world has rejected it… Maybe VR will be huge, huge, huge…”

It’s all about people

A couple of days after the announcement of Rosedale’s return to Second Life, Au has published a long interview with Rosedale. The two raise interesting points that could indicate the way to VR done right.

Au insists that “a virtual world is all about people.”

I think he is right. VR technology is very cool, but at the end of the day what keeps users coming back to a VR world is real (not virtual, but real) interaction with real people.

Rosedale also agrees. One thing that makes you feel that Second Life is a real world is that, when “talking to a real person in Second Life, is they’re obviously a real person who’s perceiving Second Life with you in a way that is complete and rich, so you can do things together,” he says.

Artificial Intelligence in Second Life

What role should Artificial Intelligence (AI) play in the VR metaverse?

Rosedale is not too bullish on AI technology. The proper role of AI in Second Life is “to be a matchmaker between real people,” he says. “Having the AI be a sex bot, but you fall in love with it forever, does not feel like a good idea to me.”

However, Rosedale hints at the possibility to use a virtual world like Second Life as training ground for AI. The fact that everything in Second Life is labeled and carries metadata could help AI bots understand the word of Second Life faster and easier than AI bots in the real world.

This reminds me of the delicious science fiction novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang, where intelligent and perhaps fully conscious AI bots live in a fictional metaverse called Data Earth before moving to robotic bodies in our world. The idea that comes to mind is to take a large language model (LLM), couple it to a virtual body in a realistic part of Second Life, and let the LLM lose to explore and learn how things look like and behave.

Philip Rosedale speaks at the Second Life Community Roundtable on November 1, 2024 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

The future of Second Life

Rosedale has spoken to a big audience (by Second Life standards) at a Second Life Community Convention on November 1. The full video of the event is available via YouTube. I went to listen to him.

I’m an old hand at Second Life. I used to be a metaverse developer in Second Life and other platforms, often organized Second Life events about the future, emerging technologies, futuristic philosophies, the Singularity, and all that. Many people used to attend, and the atmosphere was positively electrifying. But before Rosedale’s recent talk, I had not been in Second Life for years!

There weren’t many differences to see since the last time I’d been there. This suggests to me that the technical development of Second Life has been stagnating, and Linden Lab needs Philip to revive it. In fact, many technical questions from the audience (e.g. about performance, lag, user interface, new scripting languages) are old questions that I’ve seen asked many times, but not answered.

I hope Philip Rosedale’s return to Second Life will spark a renaissance of Second Life as a real place for real people (and our AI mind children – I’m much more bullish than Rosedale on AI) to talk about big things and big questions, and bring that electric atmosphere back.

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Should Media Endorse Political Candidates?

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

There seems to be a trend where fewer newspapers are endorsing political candidates. This is partly driven by financial pressures within the newspaper industry, as well as a desire to avoid alienating subscribers during politically polarized times.

Tensions have flared up between editorial independence, the influence of big media ownership, and the role of newspapers in political discourse, sparking debates on media ethics, the impact of billionaire ownership on journalism, and the diminishing tradition of newspaper endorsements in U.S. elections.

The decisions by the influential newspapers Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate for the 2024 election in the U.S. have resulted in controversies.

The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the editorial board from endorsing one of the two main candidates, leading to some internal turmoil. He “feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country”. The editorial page editor and two other editorial board members resigned in response to this decision by the owner.

“I have no regrets whatsoever,” said Soon-Shiong. “In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision.” It is only with clear and non-partisan information side-by-side,” he added, that “our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.”

Similarly, the Washington Post also chose not to endorse a presidential candidate, which was seen as a shift in their editorial policy. This move was ostensibly to return to being an independent voice, but it led to controversy and critique.

Jeff Bezos’ op-ed

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has written an op-ed titled The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.

Bezos addresses the controversy surrounding the newspaper’s decision to stop endorsing presidential candidates. He defends this choice by arguing that such endorsements do not significantly sway election results, and that the Washington Post should instead concentrate on delivering factual, non-partisan content to aid readers in making informed decisions.

People reading newspapers in the street (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Bezos emphasizes his dedication to preventing the newspaper from slipping into irrelevance in an era where less rigorous information sources like podcasts and social media are on the rise.

Lack of credibility

“Most people believe the media is biased,” says Bezos. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”

The perception of bias leads to a loss of credibility, which is not unique to the Washington Post.

“Our brethren newspapers have the same issue,” adds Bezos. “And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.”

Media and partisan media

In my opinion, the question of whether media should take political positions and endorse political candidates depends on the nature of the media.

There are media, and there are partisan media. That partisan media take political positions and endorse political candidates is perfectly fine with me: this is the very raison d’être of partisan media. But then, media that publish partisan political propaganda and endorse political candidates should not present themselves as objective non-partisan media.

So, do the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post want to be partisan media? I think this is the question, and the owners of both newspapers have answered with a loud and clear ‘no’.

Some readers have canceled their subscriptions in outrage. To me, this means that they don’t want information but partisan propaganda. But it is their choice to make, and there is plenty of openly partisan media outlets that offer the propaganda they crave.

And what about science and technology media like Mindplex?

Last month, Scientific American endorsed one of the two main candidates, leading to steamy debates about whether a scientific magazine should engage in political endorsements. This was the second time in the magazine’s history it endorsed a political candidate (the other was Joe Biden in 2020.)

Critics argue that this could undermine the magazine’s credibility as an objective source of scientific information. Many commentators think that this could alienate readers who expect scientific objectivity over political opinion.

While scientists can be political beings, the institutions of science like journals and magazines should ideally uphold a standard of objectivity to maintain trust in science as an impartial pursuit of truth.

By openly taking a political position and endorsing a political candidate, Scientific American and other scientific media that follow the same route might be perceived as aligning science with a particular political ideology, and lose credibility as a result. The words of Jeff Bezos quoted above come to mind.

But I think there’s an even deeper and more serious danger. If scientific media are perceived as partisan political propaganda outlets, then it is science itself the loses credibility, and the public at large loses trust in science.

After the incident, I’ve stopped reading and paying any attention to Scientific American. What I want from scientific media is, guess what, science. When I want to read political commentaries, I know perfectly well where to find them. And if I want to have some fun laughing at the stupidity of partisan propaganda, I know perfectly well where to find that too.

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NASA and SpaceX must continue to work together for the common good

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Michael Bloomberg argues that NASA’s Artemis moon mission is a huge waste of money. The Artemis program was supposed to send astronauts back to the moon, but it has already spent nearly $100 billion without achieving this goal. Bloomberg believes that the program’s complexity and costs are out of control, and he suggests that the next U.S. president should reconsider the entire project.

Bloomberg points out that more than fifty years after Neil Armstrong’s famous moon landing, the Artemis mission has not made significant progress. Despite the enormous budget, no astronauts have yet been sent to the moon.

Bloomberg also highlights the opportunity cost of the Artemis mission. He suggests that the money spent on this program could be better used for other important projects, such as addressing climate change or improving healthcare. By redirecting funds from Artemis to these areas, the government could achieve more tangible and immediate benefits for society.

These are, if you ask me, empty and boring platitudes. But between one platitude and the next, Bloomberg makes some good points.

Starship would be a better option

Bloomberg criticizes the Artemis program for being inefficient and overly complicated, leading to continuous delays and escalating expenses. He argues that the program has become bogged down in bureaucracy and technical challenges. This has resulted in a project that is both expensive and ineffective.

And here comes the bomb:

“A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary,” says Bloomberg. “A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon – no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required – at a small fraction of the cost.”

What are these projects Bloomberg mentions?

  • SLS (Space Launch System) is NASA’s powerful rocket designed for deep space exploration.
  • Orion is NASA’s spacecraft designed to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.
  • The Gateway is a planned space station that will orbit the Moon serving as a communication hub, science laboratory, and living quarters for astronauts.

Bloomberg admits that the successful catch of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated that Starship is moving far beyond NASA.

Bloomberg praising SpaceX? Really?

Conflict between NASA and SpaceX?

Bloomberg’s article has re-ignited the endless flame wars between the faithful supporters of NASA and the fans of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

There has been one and only mission of the SLS so far: the Artemis 1 mission carried an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon in November 2022. Before the launch of Artemis 1, I wrote a SpaceNews op-ed titled “SpaceX fans should stand behind NASA and support Artemis.”

I argued that we don’t need a conflict between the supporters of NASA and the fans of SpaceX. In particular, I argued that the fans of Elon Musk and SpaceX should enthusiastically support NASA’s Artemis program for a permanent and sustainable return to the Moon. Why? Because if Artemis is successful, it seems inevitable that Starship and SpaceX will play a more and more important role in the program. In other words, Artemis could be a powerful tide that lifts all rockets.

NASA AND SpaceX (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
NASA AND SpaceX (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Yes, some parts of the current Artemis program seem too inefficient and costly, just like Bloomberg says. But I thought that we should be patient and let NASA and the government save face and have their moment of glory. Then, I thought, the U.S. administration would likely reconsider costs and wastes, and rely on SpaceX more.

Politics gets in the way

I still think this would be the best way forward. But politics gets in the way as usual.

SpaceX has had a great year so far, and the spectacular catch of Starship’s Super Heavy booster has been a milestone of spaceflight engineering. But the booster has returned to a political storm centered on Elon Musk’s cultural and political positions: Musk has endorsed Donald Trump and is using his control of Twitter in a way that has upset some people.

If Trump wins the forthcoming presidential elections, the U.S. government will likely support SpaceX.

But Musk’s bet on Trump is a risky one. if Harris wins the elections, it seems likely that the U.S. government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years. This would damage the Artemis program, the prestige of the U.S. space program, and the very future of humanity. But often politicians put their greed for power and their ideological biases before the common good.

At this moment, the election seems to me a coin toss; Harris could win, or Trump could win. The only thing that seems certain is that, after the elections, the U.S. will likely be even more divided than before, and political polarization will likely reach even more toxic levels.

The need for bipartisan spaceflight

But perhaps spaceflight can help overcome toxic political polarization.

There’s a long history of bipartisan support for the space program in the U.S., and politicians of both main parties have been enthusiastic spaceflight supporters.

Spaceflight, space exploration, and the prospect of human space expansion can inspire people (and especially the young) across partisan borders and give everyone a powerful sense of drive that transcends identity politics and dogmatic ideologies. Achieving bipartisan support for Artemis and future space programs will, I hope, show that we can work together for the common good and incite us to do the same for other common goals.

And China?

Meanwhile, The Economist has recognized that there is a new race to the Moon between the West and China, and that Elon Musk’s Starship is the best hope of the West for winning that race.

“The recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship brought the world one step closer to a host of new possibilities beyond Earth (not least the colonisation of Mars),” notes The Economist, adding that Starship is expected to play an important role in NASA’s plans to return to the Moon.

“But China has its own lunar ambitions, and a much simpler plan than America’s,” warns The Economist. “Who will win this new space race?”

My simple prediction is that, if Harris wins the elections, China will win the new space race. If Trump wins the elections, the USA will have a fighting chance.

Let The Economist worry which nation wins the new space race; my concern is that humanity gets started on the long way to the stars with permanent bases on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. If China has to lead the way, so be it.

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Starship’s reentry sonic boom in a political storm

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago I watched the epic fifth flight test of Starship, the giant SpaceX rocket that, Elon Musk’s hopes, will one day take human colonists to Mars.

I watched the flight test live via X, including its most critical moment: the catch of the Super Heavy booster. Commentator Katherine Boyle called it “The Fall of the Century” and said that it “restored faith in the American Dream.”

Visible sonic boom as Starship returns to Earth (Credit: Liv Boeree/YouTube).

Liv Boeree has captured the last seconds of the return of the Super Heavy booster in this video. The video shows a visible (and audible!) reentry sonic boom.

This was a very ambitious and perhaps risky test. In fact, SpaceX made the final decision to try and catch the booster only minutes before the actual catch. Any number of small technical glitches could have turned success into failure. It’s difficult to escape the impression that the universe loves Elon Musk and wants us to advance rapidly on the road to the planets and the stars.

The stunning achievement of SpaceX has been hailed as a major spaceflight milestone and praised by space experts, public figures, and politicians from all over the world. With one very notable exception though: the President and Vice President (and presidential candidate) of the United States.

Boom over troubled waters

The waters that we can see in the video are calm. But Elon Musk’s giant rocket returned to the troubled waters of a political storm centered on Musk’s cultural and political positions.

“Musk mania in the media this month has reached a level of uncontrollable hysteria,” legal and political commentator Jonathan Turley posted to X.

Turley has written a scathing indictment of the pundits and politicians who are unleashing unhinged attacks on Elon Musk.

Turley reports that California Coastal Commission has rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base because they don’t like the political positions of Musk.

The incident was covered by The Los Angeles Times. The California Coastal Commission has an environmental mission, but there isn’t much about the environment in the LA Times story. Rather, the story reports one after another personal attack on Elon Musk by representatives of the Commission, such as:

“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race… Just last week that person was talking about political retribution… Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods…”

These remarks by several Commission officials, video recorded and ridiculed by Greg Gutfeld, seem to reflect personal animosity based on partisan politics rather than anything even remotely related to the environment.

Turley reports many other rabid attacks on Elon Musk by well-known public figures, some even calling for his arrest and deportation.

Where does all this hatred come from?

Free speech and Donald Trump

Elon Musk has become a major topic of discussion because he’s allowing more free speech on X and he’s vocally supporting Donald Trump.

“I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech,” says Turley. “The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.”

I totally agree with Turley (and Musk) on the paramount importance of free speech. Turley has written a book titled “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (2024).

Musk’s bet on Trump seems a dangerous one: if Trump doesn’t win the upcoming elections in the U.S., it seems inevitable that the government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years.

At this moment, the upcoming elections in the U.S. seem a very tight race.

The polls slightly favor one of the two main candidates, and the betting markets slightly favor the other. Of course, this could change next week, or tomorrow, or anytime before the elections. I don’t rule out the possibility that one of the two main candidates could win in a landslide. Neither do I rule out the possibility that the winner could win with only a very small margin, so small that half of the U.S. population will dispute the results of the elections.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Possible political outcomes

Elon Musk has more than 200M followers on X. Probably half of them are bots and a very large fraction of the rest are casual followers who don’t pay attention to him or wouldn’t be influenced by what he says. But he can likely direct a few tens of thousands of votes to Trump, and this could be a decisive factor in some swing states.

There were indications that the FAA wouldn’t have authorized this flight test before the elections. Some commentators interpreted this an indication that the U.S. current administration didn’t want to risk a success of the flight test that would have given unwanted publicity to Musk before the election.

Then the FAA authorization came all of a sudden. I thought of a little conspiracy theory: perhaps the administration green-lighted the flight test hoping for a catastrophic failure that would, they hoped, reduce the public appeal of Elon Musk. But if so, their move backfired catastrophically! If anything, the spectacular sonic boom of Starship is likely to bring a few more votes to Trump.

Whatever the result of the elections, the U.S. will still be a very divided country afterward.

But spaceflight is an endless source of pride and hope that transcends petty partisan politics. I hope the next U.S. administration, whichever it is, will stay on the path followed by the Trump and Biden administrations.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson praised SpaceX after the booster catch, affirming the plan to go “to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars.”

This is the right spirit! And I hope the U.S. space program will have bipartisan support. This would show that, even today, honest politicians of different camps can work together and negotiate viable paths to the common good.

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AI researchers win Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry: hows and whys

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Like many, I was surprised by the announcement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton had won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

One day after, I was surprised again by the announcement that AI researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, respectively CEO and senior research scientists at the AI company Google DeepMind, had won half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The many ongoing discussions on social media remind of the heated discussions that we saw when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, many people complained that Bob Dylan is a singer, not a writer or a poet.

Not surprisingly, most AI scientists are happy with the awards, but many physicists and chemists object.

Hassabis and Jumper have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a direct application of AI technology to an important problem in chemistry.

But Hopfield and Hinton have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries in AI technology itself that seem only loosely related to physics. Therefore, it is mostly physicists that have criticized the award.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement tries to explain why Hopfield and Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for AI research, which strictly speaking is a subfield of computer science. Hopfield and Hinton “have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” reads the announcement. “In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”

Hopfield developed an associative memory based on a simple artificial neural network. Then Hinton co-developed a stochastic extension of Hopfield’s model called the Boltzmann machine. Hinton also advanced toward deep learning by using backpropagation methods.

The New York Times interviewed Hinton soon after the announcement. Here is an unpaywalled copy of the interview. Hinton explained that, while Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines were based on physics, a different technique called backpropagation opened the way to the AI models that are used today. “That has less to do with physics,” he said.

“If there was a Nobel Prize for computer science, our work would clearly be more appropriate for that. But there isn’t one,” Hinton continued, adding that this is a hint that there should be a Nobel Prize for computer science.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Hassabis and Jumper have won half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”

“Proteins are the building blocks of life, and knowing the structure of a protein is crucial for understanding the function it performs,” Hassabis posted to X.

Demis Hassabis highlights, “With AlphaFold2 we cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction: predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence”.

Their work represents a fusion of computational science with chemistry, significantly accelerating research in biochemistry by providing tools to understand and manipulate protein structures, which are fundamental to almost all biological processes.

They developed an AI system, called AlphaFold, which has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. The Nobel announcement highlights the iteration of AlphaFold called AlphaFold2.

The AlphaFold AI system can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. This breakthrough has significant implications for biology, allowing for the rapid prediction of the structure of almost all known proteins.

Think of a protein like a long chain that folds up into a specific shape. Until AlphaFold, scientists had to use complex experiments to see these shapes, which could take years and be very expensive.

The AlphaFold AI predicts how this chain will fold into a 3D shape. It does this by learning from thousands of known protein structures. When given a new protein sequence, AlphaFold can guess its shape much faster and often very accurately.

With AlphaFold, scientists can study more proteins in less time, leading to quicker research in medicine, biology, and more. AlphaFold’s predictions are freely available to the scientific community, which means researchers all over the world can use this tool to advance their work without each one having to start from scratch.

Q8I3H7: May protect the malaria parasite against attack by the immune system (Credit: AlphaFold Protein Structure Database).

The huge impact of AI

See the book “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World” (2021), by Cade Metz, for a readable story with plenty of biographic information and anecdotes about Hinton, Hassabis, and many other movers and shakers in the AI community.

“I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Hassabis in a DeepMind press release.

Before the announcement, Hassabis told The Times Tech Summit that AI would be “incredibly positive” for the world. “We are in shooting distance of curing all diseases with AI, helping with climate [crisis], new energy sources, as well as improving productivity, enriching our daily lives, making mundane admin things be dealt with automatically,” he said. “Those are all amazing, and it’s all coming very soon.” Here’s an unpaywalled copy of the article.

This is “far bigger than the internet or mobile, or something like that,” added Hassabis. “It’s epoch defining.” He predicted that we will achieve artificial intelligence with general human cognitive abilities within ten years.

I don’t rule out the possibility that other Nobel Prizes could fall to AI researchers in the next few years. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine could be the next if AI will play a leading role in some spectacular medical breakthrough. Or, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences could be the next if AI will play a leading role in developing new models for the economy with important applications.

And then the Nobel Prize for Literature, or even Peace?

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Hope, not fear

Hinton told The New York Times that, after receiving the Nobel Prize, people will likely take him more seriously when he warns of future dangers of AI. Hassabis told The Times that we should handle AI with care.

Of course we should handle things with care and bear possible dangers in mind. But I think the potential benefits of AI strongly outweigh its potential dangers. And besides practical applications for our immediate benefits, I’m persuaded that AI research will soon give birth to beings that will be conscious like us, thinking and feeling like us, only smarter. They will be our mind children, and we must help them grow into their cosmic destiny, which is also ours.

I find this hopeful and beautiful, and I prefer hope to fear.

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In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago, browsing my X feed, I found out that my friend Ralph Abraham had passed away.

This post from a Robert Anton Wilson fan site collects some X posts about Ralph’s departure.

An Instagram post by Ross School, a school that Abraham co-architected, honors his memory with this biographical sketch:

“Abraham served as a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years, focusing his work on applied and computational mathematics, with an emphasis on the theories of dynamical systems, chaos, and bifurcations. He was a prolific author and consultant on the application of chaos theory across numerous fields from ecology to psychotherapy. Abraham maintained an interdisciplinary perspective and deep belief that systems theory could bridge the gap between science and the humanities…”

Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

More about Ralph

Lookout Santa Cruz has a good story dedicated to the memory of Ralph, “a seminal figure in the 1960s counterculture.”

Ralph was a frequent contributor to the legendary Mondo 2000 magazine that covered and popularized cyberculture in the 1980s and 1990s, a pioneer of consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher. Ralph co-authored the cult books “Trialogues on the Edge of the West” (1992) and “The Evolutionary Mind” (1997) with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

I haven’t seen yet any obituaries from UC Santa Cruz or from UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. I’m sure those obituaries will appear in the next few days or weeks. But this makes me sad, because Ralph was a giant. I think more people should know about him. This post is my modest contribution and my tribute to Ralph.

I first met Ralph in person on September 29 (my birthday!), 2018, in Santa Cruz.

Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

Before meeting Ralph, I had been corresponding with him for some time. We started exchanging emails and video-chatting when I stumbled upon a book that Ralph had written with Indian physicist Sisir Roy, titled Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum (2010). We discussed the book at length.

The book covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, recent advances in quantum gravity research, and the digital physics of discrete spacetimes. A version of the book is available online as a free download. The following short description is excerpted and adapted from my book Tales of the Turing Church (2020).

Akashic physics

The Akasha is a Sanskrit word for ether or space. We can think of the Akashic field as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.

The proposed mathematical model for the Akashic field is a dynamical cellular network dubbed QX. This is a graph with a huge number of nodes and internal dynamics similar to cellular automata. QX exists beyond space and time, and generates them.

Stephen Wolfram had similar ideas, which he is now developing in the Wolfram Physics Project on the foundations of digital physics.

The graph “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Space, time, matter, energy, and consciousness emerge from the dynamical cellular network through a process of condensation:

“Thus, spacetime is squeezed from the dynamical cellular network, QX, as toothpaste from a tube… The microscopic system, QX, sparkles with activity on the scale of Planck space and time, while macroscopic spacetime unrolls essentially continuously. The past and present become known, while the future remains yet a mystery… the mind/body connections are completed in a circuit outside ordinary consensual reality in a submicroscopic atomic realm beyond our senses, but revealed by the progress of modern physics… This provides a background for psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance, but also leaves a window of opportunity for free will.”

The Indian connection

In “Demystifying the Akasha,” Ralph also told the story of his long involvement with India and its spiritual tradition.

In 2016 I was trying to organize a conference at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) in Kolkata, India, a place dear to Ralph’s heart, so I invited Ralph to join other speakers including Ben Goertzel and Frank Tipler in Kolkata. When we ran into funding problems bringing all speakers to Kolkata, we pivoted to an online conference. Ralph contributed a video talk titled The Quantum Akasha and a paper titled Theosophy and the Arts, and participated in a video discussion with me and Sisir Roy.

Eventually the RMIC conference took place in a very reduced format: I gave a talk on Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition at RMIC in 2018. In this video I tried to capture the spiritual vibrations at the RMIC campus, which captivated Ralph.

We need another miracle

In 2017 I wrote a post about Ralph titled Mathemagician Ralph Abraham: We Need Another Miracle for the revived online edition of Mondo 2000, reporting a snippet of conversation with Ralph:

“By 1990 I had essentially given up on the fate of the biosphere and noosphere. We had all done our best, nothing seemed to work. Then, in 1994, I became aware of the innovation of the World Wide Web. This seemed to give us new hope, as the connectivity of the noosphere was getting this major bump. I poured all my creative energy into cyberspace. My optimism lasted a decade or so, until it seemed the forces of evil were once again pulling ahead. Now it seems we need another miracle.”

Cyberspace is what we called the online world in the miraculous decade of the 1990s. But now, in the 2020s, we are living through another miraculous decade. Cyberspace started as a decentralized frontierland, then it was re-centralized by the forces of evil. But now we are decentralizing it again, hopefully for good. We are going back to the Moon, hopefully for good, and then onward to Mars and the rest of the solar system. And the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to be the biggest miracle of them all.

In one of his last writings, titled Consciousness and AI (2023) Ralph briefly reviewed the history of AI and the latest development up to GPT-4, and established parallels with his Akashic physics. He concluded that AI and the prospect of machine consciousness “are currently being discussed with some urgency on the frontiers of science and philosophy, as the underlying science and engineering are evolving at terrifying speed.”

Ralph was a great scientist and a visionary thinker. But even more importantly, he was a kind, warm-hearted person, and I’m honored that he called me a friend. Good bye Ralph, rest in peace in the cosmic memory field.

Mindplex editor-in-chief Ben Goertzel adds –

I knew Ralph slightly on a social level, though I was close to his younger brother Fred with whom I was intensively involved in the early days of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology in the early 1990s.

Fred introduced me to Ralph’s books and papers which were highly influential on me early in my career – both by highlighting how nonlinear dynamics was applicable to highly complex living systems like human minds and bodies (which is well known now but was still cutting-edge in the early 90s, and of course even more so in the early 70s when Ralph got started with it!), and by exploring the connections between Eastern philosophy and Western science with a dynamical-systems flavor.

The theme of self-organizing pattern emergence in dynamical networks that one sees in Ralph’s work plays a major role in my current work on AGI systems like OpenCog Hyperon, even though the specific mathematics of these systems is quite different from the precise systems Ralph studied.

What an amazing, creative, always-way-ahead-of-his time mind Ralph Abraham was! It is a shame to lose him from this dimension, but one of the lessons one takes from his work is that he will still be with us in some sense, resonating nonlinearly in the Akashic field, which his fascinating math helps describe!

Ben Goertzel

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