Humans (TV: Channel 4)

The 'synth' is the pretty one

From The Guardian review:

"Would you? Get one? That’s a discussion that will have been going on in the country’s living rooms during and after the first episode of Humans (Channel 4, Sunday). One meaning your own synthetic, or “synth”: a green-eyed humanoid robot.

On the plus side it will clean and iron and then cook you a nice chicken chasseur for tea, freeing you up for all the good stuff you never find time for. It might even provide some kind of companionship. Plus there are potential upgrades, including adult ones, if you know what I'm saying.

On the downside, there is a danger synths might make you, me, everyone redundant. They are already doing all the jobs people don’t really want to do, not just in the house, but street cleaning, handing out free newspapers, sex work etc (they are basically a bit like immigrants, I’m afraid). But it won’t be long before they’re doing the jobs you might want to do yourself – doctor, lawyer, politician, TV critic, footballer perhaps. The Singularity – when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence – isn't far off.

Also, returning to the basic domestic model, it might be a bit creepy having a machine that looks just like a person living in your house. It’s not good for the children either, it’ll mess with their heads. Plus you might be unlucky – like the Hawkins family – and get one, like Anita, that … who can think, and feel. Then things start to get really complicated.

One of the beauties of Humans is that, like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, it really isn't such a big leap, or ask. Only last week there was a story about Ocado creating an army of humanoids with artificial intelligence. The online supermarket robots might not be as pretty as Gemma Chan, who plays Anita (very convincing as a semi-humanoid), but this stuff is happening. Tellingly, Humans is set not some time in the future, but some time around now. It’s sci-fi for the non sci-fi fan, sci-fi that has more than a foot in sci-fact."

Here's the video showing the state-of-the-art in anthropoid robotics, from the DARPA Robotic Challenge last week.

My best guess is that 'synths' as portrayed are 20-30 years away. And then the human race will go extinct.

Jurassic World

I went without high expectations, expecting CGI on steroids and way too many dinosaurs. But this film is enormous! It must be doing something right!

That something is marrying a traditional fairy tale (feminist flavouring) with knowing. Ice-princess Claire (park operations manager with a serious spreadsheet addiction) tells shareholders on the tour that the public are bored with dinosaurs. Time to add some new DNA to the mix.

How I agreed with her. There is only one dinosaur plot: they get out and start ripping people to shreds. The CGI is so good now that none of us will ever need to pay and see actual engineered ones.

So this is not about so-yesterday dinosaurs fighting and killing, it's about how the handsome prince - velociraptor expert and trainer Owen Grady - can win the heart of feisty Claire Dearing, the park's operations manager. Forget the dinos, here's what he's up against.

No pushover, huh ...

A modern-day princess is meant to save her hunk-to-be from a pterodactyl or two and not just swoon as her hero takes down the dragon. Claire (to Owen's well-telegraphed chagrin) has a scene where she unloads a magazine into the winged monster as it has the hero pinned to the floor. Most of the time, though, she is running around in her super-high heels getting more and more dishevelled.

Claire at peak dishevelment

It all ends happily (unless you're a dinosaur).

Gym life

Hit the gym at nine am this morning with the usual collection of young men with large physiques and simulated boredom showing off their tattoos - preparing for later stints on doors I imagine. As I mounted the cross-trainer I was surprised to see a granny on the rowing machine. In her pants and perm she looked like a refugee from the bingo.

I thought I might be rowing next to her, but with a minute to go she stood up. As I moved across to the rowing machine myself, I noticed her heading off towards the weights ...

The badger family

What's better than a badger in your back garden?

Clare: "Was it wise to post this video on your blog? Aren't we going to find armed marksmen camped on our drive?"

I reassured her. No way ... but, perhaps we will all come down with TB.

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OK, you wanted more? What do you think - does this video show three badgers, or four?

Below, just watch the first 10 seconds. The fox appears, and grabs one of the uncooked waffles we'd thrown out .. and departs.

Such a surfeit of wildlife. The trail camera is going into store now till the winter.

Is quantum suicide allowed?

So here is my dilemma. I'm still reading "The Hollow Man" by Dan Simmons to Clare. The story starts with hero Jeremy losing his beloved wife Gail to the agonies of cancer. The hero and his wife are telepathic. (We are prepared thus far to suspend disbelief).

In one thread of the story, Jeremy falls apart in grief and descends into a hobo-existence (this is set in America) - there is a purposeful analogy to Dante. In the other thread, we get flashbacks to Jeremy's research as a mathematician, full of gobbledegook about personality/consciousness as hologram, the Schrödinger equation and populist quantum theory. It's the data dump from hell, riddled with spurious guff. This I don't read to Clare.

In the end, you sort of know that Jeremy and Gail are going to get reunited, but how can this be? The answer is a variant of quantum suicide. My question: do I dare read this to Clare; does it pass the suspension of disbelief test?

I can get away with the idea of a quantum superposition. Most people know that, for example, a particle's position can't be definitely localised - we say its wave function is spread out. This is equivalent to saying that it's in a superposition of location states. It's basic quantum mechanics, experimentally observed and not the least bit speculative.

We can also have discrete rather than continuous superpositions: the best known is Schrödinger's famous cat. This is also legitimate science though the fine details remain unresolved.

Now to quantum suicide (Wikipedia article). It's like you replace the cat and the radiation-triggered cyanide is replaced by a gun. You decide to shoot yourself. Now, there is some probability that the gun will misfire due to some unlikely outcome of events down at the quantum level. So the time-evolution of you with the gun evolves into a superposition like this:

|You and gun not fired>  =>  a|you-alive and gun-misfired> + b|you-dead and gun-fired>

a and b are coefficients expressing the relative amplitudes of these two states, with |b| expected to be enormously larger than |a| for a reasonably reliable gun.

In the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, this simply means that you'll most likely end up dead: end of story. The superposition quantum state 'collapses' to the

 |you-dead and gun-fired>

state with probability |b|² (or maybe you got lucky with probability |a|²) once somebody notices (these days we invoke decoherence).

But in the many-worlds interpretation there are no collapses. All states of a superposition are realised in separate versions of the universe. Since you have no consciousness when you're dead, your continuing sense of self will continue to exist in the universe with this state:

|you-alive and gun-misfired>

Immortality!

Quite a lot of physicists believe in the many-worlds interpretation: it seems the only way to make objective sense of quantum mechanics and to remove the subjective role of a 'collapse-inducing' observer. But would Clare, my proxy for 'the person in the street', believe it for the purposes of a plot denouement?

I don't think so. And that's why Dan Simmons novel just doesn't work and I continue with the challenging work of real-time editing!

The trouble with love-dolls; consciousness & zombies

This stuff is getting so mainstream.

Love Dolls at $50,000 a throw

The Times had an article in the Saturday Magazine about Matt McMullen's company, Realdoll (only click on this link if you're happy with hyper-realistic female nudity).

I was most interested in the following observation.

"McMullen has attempted to introduce robotic enhancements along the way. They’ve seldom worked, though. He has tried internal heating, to get past that cold, sticky feel of the rubber. “We had three different versions of a heater, but we haven’t released any of them. Either it’s not completely safe, or it didn’t get warm enough, or it got too hot.”

He even got his dolls to gyrate at one time – a step into the animatronic arena. He installed a motor in the chest cavity. There were various speeds and sequences. “I won’t say she’s fully twerking, but that kind of thing,” he says. “But the downside is the noise factor. You hear this rrr-rrr, rrr-rrr.” He sounds like an old windscreen wiper. “It’s just not a turn-on.”

And it's not just the noise.

“It would be great to give the face 45 points of articulation, and all these subtle points of expression,” says McMullen. “But it’s prohibitively expensive and it’s prone to breaking down, which just becomes an ordeal. Those robots at trade shows that interact with people? That’s because there’s a team there. When the cable breaks on the left eye blink, a man just opens up the back of the head and re-attaches it. But when it’s in your house and one eye’s stuck shut? Not a happy customer.”

You know, high-reliability silent engineering is not rocket science. Someone out there knows how to do this stuff. Mr McMullen. You are so undercapitalised!

I wrote something about this at sciencefiction.com a while back.

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Peter Watts, author of Blindsight and Echopraxia, takes some credit for his promotion of the idea that consciousness is a disposable epiphenomenon. Sufficiently-adapted space aliens should be the zombies of those Philosophy 'other minds' lectures, having the appearance of personalities but no inner lives.

His post is an interesting read but the idea that other people possess only the simulacrum of consciousness has a very long pedigree. I even recall (possibly mistakenly) encountering the concept from my Philosophy course at the University of Warwick back in 1970.

Could it be right? Don't think so. We're social animals spending our lives negotiating, having to give a sufficient, convincing and compelling account of ourselves to others. Our brain's social layers (those evolutionarily-modern cortical & limbic modules) fight with the selfish concerns of our reptilian hind-brains. Somewhere out of this endless internal battle comes consciousness. It's hard to see how social flexibility could do without it.

But ... our advanced machines need not be so conflicted. If those aliens were designed artifacts then consciousness might be a conflict-resolution function superfluous to their requirements.

Sequencing Dad

How much can you tell just from someone's genes?

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you could copy and recreate a person's genome pretty much exactly, give or take a few mutational errors. You could implant this genome-copy into an egg cell, bring the resulting foetus to term and allow it to grow into a full adult. How similar would the copy-person be to the original?

Of course, this is not a thought experiment. I'm simply describing the case of twins separated at birth. And how alike are these twins? Well, in appearance, personality, health and intelligence they are as alike as ... twins.

If we understood the human genome in all its SNP and copy-number variants, we wouldn't need to recreate a human copy, we would simply read off the attributes of the person with that genome. Police profilers can already do this for many traits (I mentioned recently facial reconstruction from DNA samples). In the future we will be able to know and do much, much more.

It's simplest if you donate a sample of your DNA to a gene-sequencing company. My mother and myself have sent our saliva kits to 23andMe (here's my report) and even with the restricted coverage currently offered there's lots to learn.

My father died in 2009, before the age of consumer genomics. If we had his DNA we would know quite a lot about his health and personal traits right now; and of course in the future we would know so much more. Personality, health and intelligence would be my interests.

Forensic techniques get better all the time. We have some of his clothing and other personal possessions; there must be traces of his DNA. If we wait a while till the prices come down, I think there is an excellent chance we will be able to find samples of his DNA and sequence them. Our family genetic history will take a further step forwards.

I wrote a little piece for sciencefiction.com about this a while back.

Badger vs. Cat

Not yet a major movie! As seen in our front garden yesterday evening.

After this stand-off, action moved to our back garden.

We've seen the badger before, through the trail camera, but that has limited resolution. Here the Nexus 6 camera gives us the HD experience. It probably came back afterwards but even for a badger, uncooked waffles are hard work!

Clare has instructed me to upload these videos to Springwatch - although I think our chances of air time would be greater if the badger and cat had actually come to blows ... .

How life got started from nothing at all

Our brains are wired to see life as something special, something fundamentally other than the rocks and stones we see in deserts, on the Moon and on Mars. Yet life is not beyond science, beyond rationality; in essence life is a special kind of chemistry, exploiting the physical properties of membranes, catalysts and energy flows. Yet it's always been hard to see how rocks and oceans on the early Earth could have produced self-replicating biochemical structures with a potential for complexity.

Nick Lane thinks he knows how it happened, written up in his new book "The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?".

Here is part of The Telegraph's review.

"The Vital Question ... consists of four parts: an exploration of the nature of life and living; a deep dive into life's origin and the emergence of cells; an account of how complex, or eukaryotic, cells arose and why sex and death are inevitable; and a final part that entertains some predictions as to life's future possibilities.

There's a well-known saying in biology: "nothing in life makes sense except in the light of evolution". Lane might amend that to "nothing in life makes sense except in the light of energetics". The discoveries of the structure of DNA, the genetic code and all that follows have been vital in building a better understanding of life and how it changes over time. But no less important, Lane argues, is the discovery - once described as "the most counterintuitive idea in biology since Darwin" - that cross-membrane proton gradients power all living cells. This may sound like a technical detail until one considers the power it unleashes: almost incredibly, it is, per gram, a factor of 10,000 more than the sun. Further, the fact that this mechanism is conserved across all life has vital implications for its origins, constraints and possibilities.

Lane works through these implications. He hypothesises that life originated at alkaline vents at the bottom of the ocean as early as four billion years ago. Lane and his colleagues have previously published on this subject in Nature magazine. Here it is set out with compelling clarity for the general reader.

He then explores the evolution of the eukaryotic cells that form all animals, plants, fungi and algae. "I challenge you to look at one of your cells down a microscope and distinguish it from the cells of a mushroom," writes Lane. "They are practically identical. I don't live much like a mushroom so why are my cells so similar?"

The answer, he argues, has a lot to do with our shared dependence on mitochondria, tiny organelles inside each of our cells that act like batteries, and which are descended from a bacterium that was once swallowed but not consumed by an archaeon. Lane argues that this union and subsequent symbiosis was a freak event. It took place only once, giving rise to virtually every living thing we can see.

Lane concludes that complex life is likely to be rare in the universe — "There is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other forms of complex life," he writes. "It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity." He adds that he cannot, however, put a statistical probability on that."

I am in two minds about this book. Lane has a compelling and convincing story to tell, and what could be more important than to see how life could emerge from the inanimate through plausible stages?

But that little biochemical nanomachine called a cell is very complex, much more complex than a car engine. You do have to delve into the details of the piece-parts to engage with this subject. For people without any background in cell biology how easy is that? It's the same problem in all areas of fundamental science: understanding isn't a simple extrapolation of everyone's common sense and experience - you really do have to learn something first and to concentrate.

So I doubt that all the people who generically 'would like to know how it is that life can get started on a planet' will actually engage with and complete this book. But with some degree of persistence (and, to be fair, some background) there is no end to the revelations in Nick Lane's analysis. I was reading along while periodically muttering under my breath things like 'Wow! So that's why we age.'

So recommended for those who really do want to know: you will finish the book and the world will be a different place.

After-dinner reading

Here are some of the books I've been reading to Clare (c. 30 minutes) after dinner.

1. "Me Before You" - Jojo Moyes

A working-class girl finds herself through caring for a tetraplegic hunk, bound for Dignitas. Well-written chick-lit.

2. "The Kind Worth Killing" - Peter Swanson

"Ted Severenson is on a flight home to Boston when he strikes up a conversation with his pretty seatmate Lily. He's had a few drinks in the lounge before boarding and the conversation takes an odd turn along the way ... it becomes a little more personal ... and a lot more dangerous. Ted's wife Miranda is cheating on him:

"What are you going to do about it?"
"What I'd really like to do is kill her."
"I think you should, she said."

Yes, we really liked that.

3. "Last Night in Montreal" - Emily St. John Mandel

"Lilia has been leaving people behind her entire life. Haunted by her inability to remember her early childhood, and by a mysterious shadow that seems to dog her wherever she goes, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and friends along the way. But then she meets Eli, and he's not ready to let her go, not without a fight.

"Gorgeously written, charged with tension and foreboding, Emily St. John Mandel's Last Night in Montreal is the story of a life spent at the centre of a criminal investigation. It is a novel about identity, love and amnesia, the depths and limits of family bonds and - ultimately - about the nature of obsession."

As a literary thriller it's pretty good - very atmospheric. Doesn't totally work for me as some of the more extreme psychological reactions of her characters seem a trifle implausible. I believe that her "Station Eleven", which we also have, is better. Will read it shortly.

4. "The Hollow Man" - Dan Simmons (1992)

Simmons is a hugely talented writer and I have been in awe of his 'Hyperion' quartet for years (though I still gag at John Keats' overwrought, self-indulgent and pretentious poetry). Simmons has no scientific education and makes the schoolboy authorial error in "The Hollow Man" of trying to fake a scientific theory of consciousness. Much hand waving about the Schrödinger equation, standing waves and Fourier transforms: I was embarrassed to be reading this stuff aloud and had to skip on to where the hero is stuck in the Everglades swamp with a gangster. That Simmons does know how to write about.

I took the opportunity to explain Fourier transforms to Clare, using the Taylor series as an auxiliary concept (she has met that concept in the past). I wish I could convey to you how interested she was in the mapping of a time -> volume function (e.g. a sound wave) into a frequency -> amplitude function.

As she has just ordered a 'top of the range' hearing aid (age!) I was then able to bore her with Fourier transforms all over again.