Sunday, October 21, 2012

Humanity's Revolutionary Pursuits


Note: This post is and will continue to be a work in progress.
  1. Cheap Renewable Energy - The cost of energy is a limiting factor in the development of nearly any new technology. Currently, about 90% of the world's energy is supplied by the burning the world's limited supply of fossil fuels. At our projected consumption rate, the current fossil fuel supply is predicted to last about around 50 years. The laws of thermodynamics are almost universally understood to rule out the existence of any indefinitely renewable energy source. Fortunately, nature has provided several  resources that have potential to last billions of years. For practical purposes, we can define a 'renewable energy source' as a source that is projected to last at least a million years. Given that energy itself is primarily useful for driving development and implementation of other technologies, we can phrase the revolutionary energy goal as follows: Satisfy the world's energy demand with renewable sources at a marginal cost of less than 5% of the world GDP. Several avenues of research have been identified which hold promise for meeting this energy goal:
    1. Controlled Fusion
    2. Efficient Solar Energy Collection 
  2. Transportation - 
    1. On Earth - Much like energy, cost of transportation infrastructure is fundamental in the development of other technologies as well as in the consumer services industry.  Human navigators pilot an overwhelming majority of our current transportation infrastructure.  This arrangement is inefficient and unrealistic. The next revolutionary milestone of the transportation industry is: Safely automate all transportation. This accomplish will eliminate provide three key benefits:
      1. Virtual elimination of accidents caused by human error.
      2. Overall efficiency boost due to heuristic planning algorithms.
      3. Elimination of need for a driver's attention.  On average, Americans spend about 1 hour driving each day which could instead be re-applied to other activities.
    2. Of People Into Space  - Although space tourism is a worthy cause, the primary rational motivation of transporting humans into space is to prevent against extinction of humanity given a disaster resulting in loss of all human life on earth. The goal is fairly simple: Establish a self sustainable presence on another world. 
    3. Of Goods Into Space - The primary motivations for transporting materials into space is to facilitate scientific research. Although 
  3. Theoretical Physic - Physics is the bridge between the world of  mathematical certainty and the  other sciences. The primary goal of the physics community is well understood: Develop a consistent axiomatic system to that explains all known physical phenomena.
  4. Quantum Computation - Currently, the limit of humanity's computational ability is generally accepted to be problems solvable in polynomial time with a turing machine*. Development of a programmable quantum computer would effectively raise humanity's computational limit and conceivably pave the way for breakthroughs in other fields. Current known applications of a quantum computing system are largely limited to cryptography and quantum simulations.  At the very least, the development of efficient quantum computers would necessitate a large scale re-architecture of the internet for security purposes. This milestone may provide a convenient release mechanism for other well understood but currently unimplemented enhancements.  Develop a quantum computer capable efficiently cracking public key encryption techniques. For those few who are pessimistic about the utility of quantum computers, I provide an alternative goal: Provide a proof of the practical uselessness of quantum computation and a provably quantum-safe encryption algorithm.
  5. Artificial Intelligence - Many experts seem to believe the human brain is fundamentally no more than an advanced, highly paralleled, biological computer. However, as of yet there has been virtually no success in reproducing human level intelligence in a man made device. There are at least three plausible explanations for lack human-level breakthroughs in AI technology: First, the brain is far more powerful than any existing computer. Second, researchers have yet to either engineer or reverse-engineer techniques capable of human-level reasoning. Third, the human brain is fundamentally more complex than existing technology. One proposed mechanism for this additional complexity is the somewhat far-fetched theory of quantum mind. Regardless of how the human brain functions, the primary goal of AI research is to develop artificial methods for generating human-level intelligence. One proposed formulation of this milestone is the Turing Test. However, this test has several intrinsic flaws which have lead to claims of several controversial claims of success by non-intelligent agents. An improved reformulation of the Turing Test might require the judges be knowledgeable in the inner workings of the artificial agent.  For the purposes of this discussion, the ultimate revolutionary goal of AI research is: Develop an artificial agent capable of outperforming any human on any human-level reasoning task. From a utility perspective, this formulation is arguably maximal.  Additionally, this formulation does not explicitly require a human-level understanding of human specific traits like emotion or humor.  The development of a higher-level intelligence would certainly assist with other developments. 
  6. Extraterrestrial Intelligence - coming soon
  7. Disaster Prevention - Scientists have developed an extensive yet incomplete understanding of commonly observed natural phenomena.  Many of these phenomena have potential to cause loss of life or devastating economic loss. For the purposes of this discussion, we can formulate this goal as follows; Develop a strategy to prevent loss of life from all commonly occurring natural phenomena.  Once this goal is satisfied, the same technological advancements would likely be applied to limit potential for economic loss.

This discussion outlines key domains for where humanity is poised to make technological and/or economic breakthroughs within the next century. A set of key milestones for achievement have been identified in each of these domains. Unfortunately, many of the milestones are are necessarily defined using somewhat arbitrary parameters. In general, an attempt has been made to formulate each milestones in way that its satisfaction would provide a revolutionary benefit to humanity and to select milestones conceivably achievable in the next century. However, the author does implicitly claim that each goal is practically or fundamentally achievable, but rather that no fundamental complications have currently been identified. Further analysis of the complex inter-dependencies between these goals is worthy of additional discussion, as is further discussion of the potential moral and political impact of each goal.