Mavenvision : STORM OF THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE

By Maven Stark
December 1, 2016 Los Angeles

Storm Of Thoughts:

— Trying to change someone is like grafting an oak tree into a cherry tree; you get cherry branches but the trunk remains the same, not to mention you end up with freaky cherries.
—Only humans are capable of delusional expectations; there's always going to be rich and poor in the world; have and have nots; nature calls it stupid and smart; capable and incapable; everyone is given a different (limited) brain and does act accordingly. Not even two Guinea pigs have the same brain: one can have personality other cuteness.
—There can't be a society without rich and poor; successful and unsuccessful is part of natural processes; there will always going to be rich and poor people, greed and hunger as long as humans exist.
—Climate change is the least of human problem; and, actually, it IS not a problem but a product of human arrogance mixed with anxiety and paranoia: always the ever morbid and dramatic human nature. The earth is 5 billion years old (I know this number is too big for your brain but think in decimal fraction; 10s and 20s and 100s;) and humans have been on earth for only 100.000 (hundred thousand) years; The earth, this means, survived for 4 billion and 999 million and 900.000 years before you; Ice Age had ended without you interfering and for unknown reasons to you. Our modern technology is 100 years old, after being limited to 1/5 horsepower for countless of millenia; our Industrial Revolution started 300 years ago. Oh, wait! Our smart phones are less than 10 years old.
As how big the universe is compared to our insignificant planet Earth, watch the video below:

—Finally, we are in 10 years old "information age " still limited to dead plants (that is, oil and coal) energy which is, "still", (despite the heaven of rockets), limited to a planet which hundreds of years away from *StarTrek*s United Federation Of Planets, and forever far from Empire of *Star Wars*s saga colonizing the galaxies (think of fish colonizing the oceans but would only survive in artificial environments on the surface of the earth; that's us humans in outer space). All species, including humans, are created with limited physical capacity and ability; Ants can form colonies that range in size from a few dozen predatory individuals living in small natural cavities to highly organised colonies that may occupy large territories and consist of millions of individuals of Queens and workers and soldiers; They can be described as superorganisms, but not a single one can play the violin. What ants to humans are to other higher levels of intelligence and life form; humans will never be able to to travel intergalactically since we cannot travel with the speed of light; human arrogance and imagination, however, will in theory. We can go to Mars and other planets maybe just like ants can travel to other Kingdom of Ants but never to the moon or beyond. It's an ant, stupid, just like you are only human.
—There will always be wars in the future. As Prussian military theorist once said, "War is politics by other means." Although we will have wars, the nature will change as democracy is spread and new technologies emerge around the world.
—We will never be able to completely stop Illiegal immigration." Nations will weaken but will still exist in 2100," says renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "They will still be need to pass laws and fix local problems."
—Time travel is not possible. For imagination 's sake, let's say it's possible; but you can't go back to a time you didn't exist; that means you can't go back in time to kill Hitler because YOU didn't exist when Hitler did. So, visiting your grandma is also out of the question since you weren't still born in her time. Jumping through dimensions and other time lines where you never existed is only possible in Hollywood movies.
We talk arrogantly about warping spacetime to travel back in time like folding a carpet in the living room; black holes like some travel destinations in tropical islands.
Warping spacetime would be to acknowledge that time is linear and we can go through the black hole by taking the short cut. Time, however, is not linear and exists in all directions which makes warping and short cutting spacetime is like trying to navigate in a giant jelly blob...

—There will always be terrorism.

Terrorism is a "stubborn ignorance" and "terrorists" is only a word to describe those who are instinctively resist the trend toward a more advanced planetary civilization, because they know that it is progressive (not to be confused with nowadays democratic progressive movement: each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, that is, as long as it doesn't interfere and violates other's natural right to life, liberty and property), free, scientific, prosperous, and educated. These forces behind terrorism may not be conscious of the fact and cannot articulate it, but they are in effect struggling against the "trend of change" and advancement.

—There will always be savagery, racism, fundamentalism and so on in the future millenia. To expect otherwise is to wipe out human species all together; to expect otherwise would be like to expect monkeys to stop being mischievous, curious, and clever, which make them monkeys.

—Nature has given us a brain we have no control over.

In hundred years, we will be able to control computers directly with our minds; like Greek Gods, but we will never be able to completely control our own minds (brain). Knowing that the brain based on electricity moving through its neurons and by placing electrodes around a person's head, recording changes in the brain, such when it is sleeping, moods, such as anger and agitation (and raising a Ping-Pong ball inside a cylinder by sheer thought) etc., doesn't mean we know how the brain works! If we did, trust me, we'd be already using and abusing it.

—We, humans, will never be "outsmarted by AI machines" just like we will never "outsmart nature" which created us. As in a scene from a Hollywood movie, delegates asked probing questions, such as, what happens if a robot becomes as intelligent as your spouse? If it becomes as intelligent as a spouse, then I would have no problem with unintelligent. That is a joke, of course, but to answer the question: it won't; an AI will never be a problem for humans, although, as compelling evidence of this robotic evolution, people pointed to the Predator drone, a pilotless robot plane that is targeting terrorists with deadly accuracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan; cars that can drive themselves. AI Pundits lazer shooting us with questions, such as this: "Will we become lapdogs to our creations?

No. The Predator is still controlled by a human with a joystick. The human, not the Predator, is calling the shots. And the cars that drive themselves are not making independent decisions as they scan the horizon and turn the steering wheel; they are following a GPS map stored in their memory. So the nightmare of fully autonomous, conscious and murderous robots are still in the distant future —or never.

Some, however, will point to the truly autonomous future robots, the ones that think for themselves and requires no input from humans. It is these autonomous robots that have eluded scientists for the past half century.

Honda's robot Asimo can realistically walk, run, climb stairs, and talk. It can wonder about the room, pick up cups and trays, responds to simple commands, and even recognize some faces.

Okay, let's fast forward fifty years in the future and Asimo can hold a real conversation and has become smarter than your typical dozen Harward professors, can drive around any car... you got the point: smarter and more capable than a human being, and can display love and affection and all the human intelligence; but, Asimo will never be able to produce organic feelings; here, we will encounter the separation between emotion and cognition. Think of the Borg from Star Trek: Individuals are assimilated and become part of a cold and calculating collective that seeks to further assimilate more individuals. Or, also from Star Trek, there is Spock, the logical Vulcan whose civilization gave up hot emotions for cold logic so that it would not destroy itself.

Asimo would perform well on tests of cognitive ability as well as reasoning, moral judgment, and problem solving. What he would never be able to do is to feel, whether that feeling would be stress, impatience, frustration, sadness, or anything else.

Why is this very important? Because, only a feeling robot can harbor greed, envy and hate. And without these feelings, Asimov would never have the "feeling" of, say, betrayal. When Asimo starts harboring these kinds of feelings, it would be no longer a machine, but a human being.

Another field where Asimo would fail to compete is "immediate recognition": our uncanny ability to instantly recognize an object even before we are aware of it. (Immediate recognition was important for our evolution, since our ancestors had only a split second to determine if a tiger was lurking even before they were fully aware of it). Asimo also cannot perform all the feats of pattern recognition that we take for granted, such as visualizing objects in 3-D, recognizing thousands of objects from different angles. Recently, I've tested EyeEmVision in some images in which it failed to recognize the drop pattern amongst other things in the image below:(click on image to view larger)

EyeEmVision: green color, background, full frame, close up, no people (duh!), texture, textured, beauty in nature (really?), day, indoors.

It even failed to determine between nature and indoors; fooled simply by the green color.

—For humans to find the "echoes" of gravitational waves coming from blackhole would be like ants receiving waves of human voice and music and be able to interpret them. Three physicists have predicted that finding ‘echoes g813’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole mergers might be signs of a theory (it's still a theory: not good enough to technically be considered evidence (3 sigma), let alone proof of any kind (5 sigma). And when tested for each event, the odds are lower: they max out at 2 sigma in the case of the merger known as GW150914, the first one that LIGO detected) that finally unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity. And the discovery would be stunning because GR, created by Albert Einstein 101 years ago, doesn’t allow space to have any constituent ‘atoms’. For GR, space is smooth. And it is this fundamental conflict that has prevented the theories from being reconciled into a single ‘quantum gravity’ theory.

—Advances in computer technology (remember, nothing lasts forever) will begin to slow down and might even stop around 2025—30.

Again, even if computer can calculate at incredible speeds like

10¹⁶^{per second}this does not necessarily mean that it's smarter than us. For example, Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing machine, could analyze 200 million positions per second, beating the world champion. But Deep Blue, for all its speed and raw computing, cannot do anything else. True intelligence, we should know by now, is more than calculating chess moves.

There's another problem for AI robots: software. Although, hardware may progress exponentially, software may not. While hardware has grown by the ability to etch smaller and smaller transistors onto a wafer, software is totally different; it requires a human, rather than an automated machine system, to sit down with a pen and paper and write a code. That is the bottleneck: human. A machine, for example, wouldn't have the idea to sit down and type this Storm Of Thoughts, although it may have greater ideas on other topics.
Software, like all human creative activity, progresses in fits and starts, with brilliant insights and long stretches of drudgery and stagnation. Unlike simply etching more transistors onto silicon, which has grown like clockwork, software depends on the unpredictable nature of human creativity and whim. Therefore all predictions of a steady, exponential growth in computer power have to be qualified. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the weakest link is software and programming done by humans.

—Cloning an endangered species of an ox or human embriyo are astonishing, although inevitable, breakthrough in genome and DNA, but biotechnology is far from, if ever, creating a "zygote"; a genome that is a combination of the DNA in each gamete, and contains all of the genetic information necessary to form a new individual; a new life.
Today, we have come long way from the notion that there's some mysterious spirit, or life force that animated living things and we think we have found the code of life by sequencing the DNA. The fact, however, is still beyond our understanding life that is encoded on a molecule. The question remains: just what is life and how many atoms and molecules needded to create a life form? How much of carbon atoms [CO2] ( or plumule, radicle, one or two (?) cotydlones) needed to be breathed into a part of a seed to grow a live tree?

Yes, trees do grow out of air!