I’m not ashamed to gush when it’s justified: this work is nothing short of breathtaking, from that perspective. Congrats to all on a real achievement, worthy of a decade’s contemplation. As for the good suggestion that medicine should be more prominently depicted, I think one could suggest that Engineering Evolution includes all of medicine. This isn’t a 100,000 ft. perspective, it’s a 100,000 mile outlook; a global meta perspective on present and emerging human activities already defining the present century. Adaptive Futuretechture at it’s best. Thank you IFTF team for this CC gift to the spirit and practice of human discovery.

Penrose first really pushed the concept as an argument against near future strong AI in “The Emporer’s New Mind” in the early 90′s.  

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper … in fact, Penrose and Hameroff propose something called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) as a model of consciousness, based on quantum physics.

It seems unnecessary to me, but that’s because I don’t think consciousness is a big leap, but rather a muddy continuum of modelling and predictive adaptation.

Go engineered evolution! I want superpowers already! Now to plan if I’ll get mind reading, flight or super strenght (invisibility comes luckily from Strange Matter)..

On what basis is this being envisioned?  It sounds like an indulgence in the fantasy of consciousness as a phenomena (needlessly) more exotic than how we understand it today.  I don’t think we will ever truly understand consciousness, nor the “why” of quantum uncertainty for that matter, but it seems like pure “gut” thinking to seek enlightenment of the one through the other by simple virtue of the common strangeness of the two.

That said, please email your mailing address to david -at- pesco.net and I’d be happy to send you a few of the professionally-printed maps. They’re small poster size and the colors look terrific.

Ironically, a reliance on the power of science to solve issues of sustainability, though due recognition may be given through it to the urgency of action, is a rejection of the Malthusian model of ecological collapse that gives it that very urgency.  Salvation through science is akin to a faith in the infinite potential of resource substitution.  These aren’t scientific problems, they are political ones.  Scientific solutions without parallel innovation in resource economics and governance of the commons only delays catastrophe, it doesn’t prevent it.

I think this map would be a wonderful inspiration for my daughter’s 8th grade engineering concepts class. Is there any way we can order it poster-size? It does not seem to be available yet at the IFTF store, and I imagine there would be a copyright issue if I were to take it to a large-format printer.

Thanks to David and his colleagues for all the hard work in putting this together.

In fact, several of the nexus points in the chart connect to work in his “New Kind of Science” grimoire.

We can feed the world – and in the process free up most of the people now laboring too hard to feed too few – in large part due to changing our ways of doing things. Which is clearly part of what this all is. Letting go of the need to maintain artificial scarcities and distributive bottlenecks for everything from grain to scientific information to libraries of technique. 

Part of all of this is that our current socio-economic systems are failing to scale. We need to address that, and if we do, the rest of the good stuff follows. Or we can all starve in the dark, and the 1%s will die fighting over the last few candles rendered from human fat. 

We could make that scenario come true as well… but it seems undesirable.

Expect the best and prepare for the worst. Not the other way around.  

Though, I think it would be much more specific than executable code is. What’s needed is an automated way to find facts (equations or statements), find relationships between facts and experimental data, and find relationships between facts and other facts. On top of that, every fact and relationship discovered would have a confidence value derived from how closely the fact fits the data. Then, after digesting a paper, this magic system would dump out a list of facts and relationships that it has derived, ordered by confidence.

The first issue here is the symbol grounding problem that most AI systems have. This means you have to teach such a system what everything means – from simple algebra all the way up to a complete unambiguous definition of every English (or whatever your local poison) word used in the document, and do so in the language that this system speaks: facts and relationships.

On top of that little gem, you have an algorithm search. Like Genetic Algorithms or Genetic Programming – a system that can derive a mathematical formula from black box data.

Also, like a game of chess, such a system would have to explore many paths of possibility to make discoveries. This means CPU horsepower which is thankfully getting nice and cheap.

This is actually considerably more complex than code which just executes instructions without understanding.

Maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe scientists need to *become* programmers and input everything into this massive learning system. There’s probably projects like that out there already right?

Of course, I do recall Gibson’s statement that “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Those congratulating themselves for so pithily dismissing the aspirations of our best selves may find echo across the constituency of despair, but I, for one, happily find inspiration and hope in works such as this.

I assume that’s the message in the quote “find the others.” Vast forces press on us the claim that we live in the age of spiraling diminishment, but all it takes to begin the process of breaking free is to know it’s possible, to remember that we still do live in the age of miracle and wonder.

The report from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, an incredibly well regarded and cutting-edge institution that has been thinking quite hard about these problems at the human-environment interface.  These are problems that would dwarf many of the issues in the report.  What good would it be to plumb the secrets of the human mind, ‘hack’ space, or simulate the universe if hundreds of millions of people are starving?

These are not concerns to be dismissed so lightly.  And these are concerns that fall squarely within the purview of things that Science can help solve.  It’s not as fun, instantly gratifying, grounds for optimistic speculation, or just plain neat.  But it is important, real, and damned near the most difficult challenge we’ve had to face both as a species and as a community of Scientists.

[Edit: Wikipedia has a page for “Interactomics” (ack) … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactomics

“we do not consider this to be “creating life from scratch” but rather we are creating new life out of already existing life using synthetic DNA to reprogram the cells to form new cells that are specified by the synthetic DNA”

http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/faq

And yes, protein folding is a huge and important challenge. There is a ton of material that didn’t make it on the map. It’s certainly not meant to be comprehensive.

There are personal satellites available for $9k ( http://interorbital.com/TubeSat_1.htm ) so we’re only an order of magnitude off.  (Though, these personal satellites also have orbits that decay within a couple months.)

Science has already been gamified to some extent, but can definitely be done more!

I think that an important step to include in “Engineering Evolution” would be “Discovering a quick* algorithm for how proteins fold.”  David Baker’s lab is working on something like that.  (Where ‘quick’ is something like: ”can give a solution on a typical computer within 24 hours”.)

I recovered from the overdose with an injection of cold reality here:
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries
Of course, it’s not sexy. But this is what important and useful science looks like.

It is seeing things like this that make me proud to be a scientist, and especially proud to be working on a problem related to one of those mentioned.

Every time the wonder at scientific progress makes someone smile, we feel twice the gratification (especially with the increasingly science-phobic society).  If you see a scientist today, hug them; this stuff ain’t easy!

(And posts like this and Maggie’s are the reason I love BB).

I had just read this, too, and so was primed for Type 1+ civilization engineering concepts seeming part of our future:

http://www.amazon.com/Interstellar-Migration-Human-Experience-Finney/dp/052005878X

This is most definitely, NOT what democracy should look like.

And about that jet pack……..