Molecular Nanotechnology Is Not (Just) Biology

I occasionally come across a curious statement: 

"We already have molecular nanotechnology. It's called biology."

This is typically meant to be a skeptical response to some claim about the potential of molecular nanotech (MNT). And it's strictly true, biology is a specific example of MNT. However, the statement is really meant to imply that MNT is somehow limited because of biology. Here's my intuitive rejection:

"We already have molecular nanotechnology. It's called biology."

Is similar to 

"We already have powered flight. It's called flapping wings."

Image from Kevin Cole

The Peregrine Falcon is one of the fastest animals on Earth. It can reach speeds in excess of 200 mph.

The X-43 is one of the fastest machines on Earth. It can reach speeds in excess of 7,500 mph.

Evolution and engineering are different processes entirely. It seems obvious to me that every possible evolved organism is a subset of every possible engineered system. In the short-term, machines will exceed organisms in a few narrow domains. Given enough time, engineering must exceed evolution in all domains.

tDCS in the Press

Nature News is running a piece on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS):

Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia, hopes to develop "a thinking cap", a tDCS device that corporate executives or advertising copywriters might use to bump up their creativity before walking into a brainstorming meeting. Snyder is cagey about how far he is in product development — but his latest demonstration, published this February¹⁴, garnered plenty of attention. Snyder claims to have boosted people's flair for sudden insight by stimulating their anterior temporal lobes. People who received tDCS were two to three times more likely than those receiving sham stimulation to solve a creativity problem in which they raced against the clock to spell out maths equations with matchsticks.

I've posted previously about Snyder's research. Any tech that makes humans smarter is hugely exciting to me, and doubly so when it is cheap and nearly ubiquitous. tDCS probably qualifies as low-hanging fruit, so long as efficacy and safety can be demonstrated with chronic use.

Cancer Complexity

This, from the always excellent Derek Lowe:

A new study, one of those things that could only be done with modern sequencing techniques, has given us the hardest data yet on the genomic basis of cancerous cells. This massive effort completely sequenced the tumors from 50 different breast cancer patients, along with nearby healthy cells as controls for each case.

Over 1700 mutations were found - but only three of them showed up in as many as 10% of the patients. The great majority were unique to each patient, and they were all over the place: deletions, frame shifts, translocations, what have you. The lead author of the study told Nature News that the results were "complex and somewhat alarming", and I second that, only pausing to drop the "somewhat". I add that qualification because these patients were already more homogeneous than the normal run of breast cancer cases - they were all estrogen-receptor positive, picked for trials of an aromatase inhibitor.

Astonishing. I had encountered the "cancer is not a single disease" idea before, but these new findings are way beyond what I had imagined. Personalized treatment for all but the earliest stage cancers may be a dead end.

On a larger scale, I think public education is a huge problem. Most folks still think of cancer as a singular disease, and one that must have a cure. While this may be technically correct, I doubt that the average person is thinking of advanced molecular nanotechnology when he or she considers charities to cure cancer.

The Representativeness Heuristic Strikes Again

Researchers at Brown University have demonstrated that people given weak positive evidence may judge a statement as less likely than people given no evidence at all. The experimenters provided some participants with weak evidence (the "conditional" condition), and gave other participants no evidence (the "marginal" condition):

Participants were [...] randomly assigned to one of the conditions. In the conditional condition they read the following:

Mid-term elections for the House of Representatives are coming up in November. Recently, Ryan Frazier, a Republican candidate in Colorado’s hotly contested 7th district House race won the endorsement of the Denver Post, Colorado’s largest newspaper.

They were then asked to judge the likelihood that the ‘‘Republicans will win control of the House of Representatives’’ on a 0–100 scale. After making the likelihood judgment, they were asked to choose whether they wanted to gamble on the Republicans winning the House as below:

Please Choose One Option:

1. You get 10 dollars no matter what happens.
2. You get 30 dollars if the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in mid-term elections.

The order of response options was randomized. The marginal condition was identical except that the sentence about the newspaper endorsement was omitted.

The results are fairly horrific. The people who had evidence in support of the wager were far less likely to take the wager than those who had no evidence:

The researchers are calling this the "weak evidence effect". The likely cause of the bizarre inversion is the representativeness heuristic. In this case, I think the heuristic is causing us to conflate weak evidence with a weak hypothesis.

Cognition, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.01.013

Attention Span by Google

The rise of Twitter and tl;dr may seem to presage an ever shrinking attention span. However, Anders Sandberg suggests that our attention spans are simply becoming over-saturated with an excess of interesting content:

So my theory is that we can still pay attention for a long time - but we want a lot more to happen per unit of time too. We want faster rewards, more action.

Why? Perhaps because there is so much stuff out there, so the alternative cost of spending a lot of time on something that does not turn out to be worthwhile is higher. In the time you have spent reading this post (and I writing it) we could have read several RSS entries and short blog posts, watched a YouTube clip, browsed Wikipedia or run a calculation in our favourite math program.

[...]

If this model is true, then we should expect the trend to continue. In the future, we are going to have far more good books, films, comics, papers and other documents instantly available.

It is rational to demand quick and reliable evidence that whatever we have in front of us is relevant or interesting. Spending a lot of time finding out if it actually is by just consuming it would mean we would often waste precious time and attention on things that are not as good.

There is of course a trade-off here, since some important things do not look inviting (since they were made before the current attention economy) and some unimportant things masquerade as important. Smart agents balance the exploration with exploitation.

This is why reliable filtering and reviewing actually are key transhuman technologies. And why training to recognize the real cost and value of what you are doing is such a key transhuman virtue.

This is (to me) an intuitively correct notion. I'm also struck by how extraordinarily bad we are at filtering our various incoming data streams. We're accessing ever larger portion's of the world's information output, without a commensurate boost in discrimination.

In fact, we're so incapable of filtering that we often rely on our peers to do the job for us. Social networks are a useful but nonetheless inefficient way to sift for valuable information. Word of mouth can be hit or miss, possibly because of cognitive biases that make us believe our friends are more similar to us than they may be.

Google continues to work in the field of "attention management". Unfortunately the killer app has yet to be invented. Increasing privacy concerns may hinder Google's efforts to gather the kind of highly personalized information required for the task.

I, for one, would gladly trade away most of my privacy for an effective service to guide my attention.

Dreamers Mostly Fail

A 2002 study finds that positive expectations predict success, while positive fantasies correlate with failure. From PsyBlog:

Across four studies the researchers examined how people thought about each of these challenges. They measured how much they fantasised about a positive outcome and how much they expected a positive outcome.

[...]

Take those looking for a job. Those who spent more time dreaming about getting a job, performed worse. Two years after leaving college the dreamers:

• had applied for fewer job,
• unsurprisingly had been offered fewer jobs,
• and, if they were in work, had lower salaries.

On the other hand those who entertained more negative future fantasies were more likely to achieve their goals. Similar results were seen for the other goals.

This seems to be yet another warning about the dangers of excessive far thinking.

HT: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198

A Gentle Touch For Space Junk Removal

Radiation pressure is the minuscule force exerted by a photon when it strikes an object. We don't experience radiation pressure in our everyday lives because it is drowned out by much, much larger forces. But in the vacuum of space, the feeble push of radiation pressure isn't opposed by significant aerodynamic drag. Over time, it can do real work.

A NASA study aims to do just that. The authors propose using a commercial, off-the-shelf telescope and laser to point a 5-10kW beam at potentially dangerous space debris. The radiation pressure won't be enough to de-orbit the debris, but according to simulations it should alter the debris' orbits enough to avoid a collision. And at orbital speeds, a collision is catastrophic.

The authors also suggest the telescope-and-laser system could be employed to boost the orbits of small satellites. This is an intriguing notion to me. Nano- and pico-satellites are a relatively recent development, but they're limited by a lack of thrusters. Without thrust, the orbits of tiny satellites inevitably decay and the vehicle burns up as it reenters the atmosphere.

But imagine if the satellite operators could purchase time on a ground-based laser facility. The laser would push their satellite to a higher orbit, provided it has the correct mass-to-area ratio. This sounds promising because it provides thrust "on demand", without much additional capital cost on the part of the satellite operator.