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AR 21:22 - A silent universe that's "teeming with life?"

In this issue:

ALIEN LIFE - for a universe that is "teeming with life," things are pretty quiet out there

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - an eventual combination of "the insane power of deep learning" with a genetic-editing bridge?

Apologia Report 21:22 (1,295)

June 16, 2016

ALIEN LIFE

"NASA Finds 1,284 Alien Planets, Biggest Haul Yet, with Kepler Space Telescope" by Mike Wall (<www.goo.gl/6a8A3Y> May 11 '16) -- With each new pair of high-tech lenses scientists optimistically speculate about the meaning behind discoveries of seemingly infinite numbers of previously unknown heavenly bodies: "Other earth-like planets are bound to be out there!"

Not so fast.

In "Maybe Life in the Cosmos Is Rare After All" Paul Davies, Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science <beyond.asu.edu> at Arizona State University, reports that "The conclusion that the universe is teeming with biology is based on an unproved assumption. ...

"'The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle,' was the way Francis Crick described it, 'so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.' Jacques Monod concurred; in his 1976 book Chance and Necessity [1] he wrote, 'Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance.'

"Today the pendulum has swung decisively the other way. Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. The biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life 'a cosmic imperative.' Yet the science has hardly changed. ...

"Astronomers think there could be billions of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone. Clearly there is no lack of habitable real estate out there. But habitable implies inhabited only if life actually arises. ...

"[W]ith all its staggering complexity, it is impossible to calculate the probability that it will happen. You can’t estimate the odds of an unknown process. Astrobiologists, however, seem more preoccupied with the chances that microbial life will eventually evolve intelligence. ...

"But this is to put the cart before the horse. The biggest uncertainty surrounds the first step - getting the microbes in the first place. Carl Sagan once remarked that the origin of life can’t be that hard or it would not have popped up so quickly once Earth became hospitable. ...

"Unless life on Earth had started quickly, humans would not have evolved before the sun became too hot and fried our planet to a crisp. Because of this unavoidable selection bias, we can’t draw any statistical significance from a sample of one.

"Another common argument is that the universe is so vast there just has to be life out there somewhere. [This] is dwarfed by the odds against forming even simple organic molecules by random chance alone. If the pathway from chemistry to biology is long and complicated, it may well be that less than one in a trillion trillion planets ever spawns life. ...

"If life really does pop up readily, as Sagan suggested, then it should have started many times on our home planet." <blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog> May 23 '16.

You'll find a good deal of related material by both Mike Wall and Paul Davies in the above-noted Scientific American guest blog. A more dated option is Davies' book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence [2].

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code" by Jason Tanz -- "Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don't encode computers with instructions. They train them. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize a cat, for instance, you don't tell it to look for whiskers, ears, fur, and eyes. You simply show it thousands and thousands of photos of cats, and eventually it works things out. If it keeps misclassifying foxes as cats, you don't rewrite the code. You just keep coaching it.

"This approach is not new - it's been around for decades - but it has recently become immensely more powerful, thanks in part to the rise of deep neural networks, massively distributed computational systems that mimic the multilayered connections of neurons in the brain. And already, whether you realize it or not, machine learning powers large swaths of our online activity. ...

"If the rise of human-written software led to the cult of the engineer, and to the notion that human experience can ultimately be reduced to a series of comprehensible instructions, machine learning kicks the pendulum in the opposite direction. The code that runs the universe may defy human analysis. Right now Google, for example, is facing an antitrust investigation in Europe that accuses the company of exerting undue influence over its search results. Such a charge will be difficult to prove when even the company's own engineers can't say exactly how its search algorithms work in the first place.

"This explosion of indeterminacy has been a long time coming. It's not news that even simple algorithms can create unpredictable emergent behavior - an insight that goes back to chaos theory and random number generators. Over the past few years, as networks have grown more intertwined and their functions more complex, code has come to seem more like an alien force, the ghosts in the machine ever more elusive and ungovernable. ...

"These forces have led technologist Danny Hillis to declare the end of the age of Enlightenment, our centuries-long faith in logic, determinism, and control over nature. Hillis says we're shifting to what he calls the age of Entanglement. [The term "entanglement" is often associated with New Age interpretations of particle physics. - RP] 'As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed,' he wrote <www.goo.gl/VAOEK1> in the Journal of Design and Science. 'Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.' The rise of machine learning is the latest - and perhaps the last - step in this journey. ...

"To nerds of a certain bent, this all suggests a coming era in which we forfeit authority over our machines. 'One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,' wrote Stephen Hawking <www.goo.gl/4foYDA> - sentiments echoed by Elon Musk and Bill Gates, among others. 'Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.'

"But don't be too scared; this isn't the dawn of Skynet. We're just learning the rules of engagement with a new technology. Already, engineers are working out ways to visualize what's going on under the hood of a deep-learning system. But even if we never fully understand how these new machines think, that doesn't mean we'll be powerless before them. In the future, we won't concern ourselves as much with the underlying sources of their behavior; we'll learn to focus on the behavior itself. The code will become less important than the data we use to train it. ...

"In the long run, Thrun says, machine learning will have a democratizing influence. In the same way that you don't need to know HTML to build a website these days, you eventually won't need a PhD to tap into the insane power of deep learning. Programming won't be the sole domain of trained coders who have learned a series of arcane languages. ...

"Ultimately we will come to appreciate both the power of handwritten linear code and the power of machine-learning algorithms to adjust it - the give-and-take of design and emergence. It's possible that biologists have already started figuring this out. Gene-editing techniques like Crispr give them the kind of code-manipulating power that traditional software programmers have wielded. But discoveries in the field of epigenetics suggest that genetic material is not in fact an immutable set of instructions but rather a dynamic set of switches that adjusts depending on the environment and experiences of its host. Our code does not exist separate from the physical world; it is deeply influenced and transmogrified by it." Wired, Jun '16, pp74-79. <www.goo.gl/1eyzk9>

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