Before the memristor, it would have been impossible to create something with the form factor of a brain, the low power requirements, and the instantaneous internal communications. Turns out that those three things are key to making anything that resembles the brain and thus can be trained and coaxed to behave like a brain. In this case, form is function, or more accurately, function is hopeless without form. [...]

A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that’s applied to it. But here’s the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power. That’s different from a dynamic RAM cell, which requires regular charge to maintain its state. The upshot is that thousands of memristors could substitute for massive banks of power-hogging memory. Just to be clear, the memristor is not magic—its memristive state does decay over time. That decay can take hours or centuries depending on the material, and stability must often be traded for energy requirements—which is one of the major research reasons memristors aren’t flooding the market yet. [...]

A biological brain is able to quickly execute this massive simultaneous information orgy—and do it in a small package—because it has evolved a number of stupendous shortcuts. Here’s what happens in a brain: Neuron 1 spits out an impulse, and the resultant information is sent down the axon to the synapse of its target, Neuron 2. The synapse of Neuron 2, having stored its own state locally, evaluates the importance of the information coming from Neuron 1 by integrating it with its own previous state and the strength of its connection to Neuron 1. Then, these two pieces of information—the information from Neuron 1 and the state of Neuron 2′s synapse—flow toward the body of Neuron 2 over the dendrites. And here is the important part: By the time that information reaches the body of Neuron 2, there is only a single value—all processing has already taken place during the information transfer. There is never any need for the brain to take information out of one neuron, spend time processing it, and then return it to a different set of neurons. Instead, in the mammalian brain, storage and processing happen at the same time and in the same place.

That difference is the main reason the human brain can run on the same power budget as a 20-watt lightbulb. [...]

To build a brain, you need to throw away the conceit of separate hardware and software because the brain doesn’t work that way. In the brain it’s all just wetware. If you really wanted to replicate a mammalian brain, software and hardware would need to be inextricable. We have no idea how to build such a system at the moment, but the memristor has allowed us to take a big step closer by approximating the biological form factor: hardware that can be both small and ultralow power. [...]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0

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Kader Arif, rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament

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Charles Johnson

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“Quantum physics enables perfectly secure cloud computing: Researchers have succeeded in combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography and have shown that perfectly secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics. They have performed an experimental demonstration of quantum computation in which the input, the data processing, and the output remain unknown to the quantum computer.
[...] current trend of cloud computing: central remote servers are used to store and process data – everything is done in the “cloud.” The obvious challenge is to make globalized computing safe and ensure that users’ data stays private.
The latest research, to appear in Science, reveals that quantum computers can provide an answer to that challenge. “Quantum physics solves one of the key challenges in distributed computing. It can preserve data privacy when users interact with remote computing centers [...]
The scientists in the Vienna research group have demonstrated the concept of “blind quantum computing” in an experiment: they performed the first known quantum computation during which the user’s data stayed perfectly encrypted. The experimental demonstration uses photons, or “light particles” to encode the data. Photonic systems are well-suited to the task because quantum computation operations can be performed on them, and they can be transmitted over long distances.
The process works in the following manner. The user prepares qubits – the fundamental units of quantum computers – in a state known only to himself and sends these qubits to the quantum computer. The quantum computer entangles the qubits according to a standard scheme. The actual computation is measurement-based: the processing of quantum information is implemented by simple measurements on qubits. The user tailors measurement instructions to the particular state of each qubit and sends them to the quantum server. Finally, the results of the computation are sent back to the user who can interpret and utilize the results of the computation. Even if the quantum computer or an eavesdropper tries to read the qubits, they gain no useful information, without knowing the initial state; they are “blind.”" http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uov-qpe011612.php

Publication: “Demonstration of Blind Quantum Computing” Stefanie Barz, Elham Kashefi, Anne Broadbent, Joseph Fitzsimons, Anton Zeilinger, Philip Walther. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214707

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1381

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[...] USA is increasing its commitment to drone warfare without regard for the risks these weapons pose to our security and moral standing in the world. Drone technology is spreading rapidly, with dozens of countries and even nonstate actors such as Hezbollah now developing or purchasing these systems. Military planners are developing autonomous drones that could make their own decisions on when to unleash lethal force. If other nations follow our example as they often do, we will soon face the prospect of a world in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning. There is no long-term benefit to the United States in the unchecked proliferation of drone weapons or in the absence of agreed standards for limiting their use. [...]

The United States should work through the United Nations to convene an international conference for developing legal standards on the use of unmanned weapons. The goal should be to ensure that any military use of these systems complies fully with the laws of war, including international humanitarian law and human rights law. This would enhance our moral standing and strengthen U.S. and international security.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/01/09/david-cortright/license-to-kill

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/world/europe/rare-opposition-protests-in-hungary.html

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Why We Are In Political Gridlock: The Private Sector Is Dying http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/21/why-we-are-in-political-gridlock-the-private-sector-is-dying/

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Fukuyama on the absent left:

[...] It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been
able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the
structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and,
second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting a
middle-class society.

The main trends in left-wing thought in the last two generations have
been, frankly, disastrous as either conceptual frameworks or tools for
mobilization. Marxism died many years ago, and the few old believers
still around are ready for nursing homes. The academic left replaced
it with postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, critical theory,
and a host of other fragmented intellectual trends that are more
cultural than economic in focus. Postmodernism begins with a denial of
the possibility of any master narrative of history or society,
undercutting its own authority as a voice for the majority of citizens
who feel betrayed by their elites. Multiculturalism validates the
victimhood of virtually every out-group. It is impossible to generate
a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition:
most of the working- and lower-middle-class citizens victimized by the
system are culturally conservative and would be embarrassed to be seen
in the presence of allies like this.

Whatever the theoretical justifications underlying the left’s agenda,
its biggest problem is a lack of credibility. Over the past two
generations, the mainstream left has followed a social democratic
program that centers on the state provision of a variety of services,
such as pensions, health care, and education. That model is now
exhausted: welfare states have become big, bureaucratic, and
inflexible; they are often captured by the very organizations that
administer them, through public-sector unions; and, most important,
they are fiscally unsustainable given the aging of populations
virtually everywhere in the developed world. Thus, when existing
social democratic parties come to power, they no longer aspire to be
more than custodians of a welfare state that was created decades ago;
none has a new, exciting agenda around which to rally the masses.

AN IDEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE

Imagine, for a moment, an obscure scribbler today in a garret
somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could
provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class
societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?

[...] the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not
simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The
ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it
from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new,
technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have
to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic
route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics. [...]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history

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The Strong Free Will Theorem

[...] our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.
[...] It may well be true that classically stochastic processes such as tossing a (true) coin do not help in explaining free will, but [...] adding randomness also does not explain the quantum mechanical effects described in our theorem. It is precisely the “semi-free” nature of twinned particles, and more generally of entanglement, that shows that something very different from classical stochasticism is at play here.
Although the FWT [Free Will Theorem] suggests to us that determinism is not a viable option, it nevertheless enables us to agree with Einstein that “God does not play dice with the Universe.” In the present state of knowledge, it is certainly beyond our capabilities to understand the connection between the free decisions of particles and humans, but the free will of neither of these is accounted for by mere randomness.
[...] determinism may formally be shown to be consistent, there is no longer any evidence that supports it, in view of the fact that classical physics has been superseded by quantum mechanics, a non-deterministic theory. The import of the free will theorem is that it is not only current quantum theory, but the world itself that is non-deterministic, so that no future theory can return us to a clockwork universe.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf

Cf. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Math_Trek__Do_subatomic_particles_have_free_will%3F

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“And yet, even though useful quantum computers might still be decades away, many of their payoffs are already arriving. For example, the mere possibility of quantum computers has all but overthrown a conception of the universe that scientists like Stephen Wolfram have championed. That conception holds that, as in the “Matrix” movies, the universe itself is basically a giant computer, twiddling an array of 1’s and 0’s in essentially the same way any desktop PC does.

Quantum computing has challenged that vision by showing that if “the universe is a computer,” then even at a hard-nosed theoretical level, it’s a vastly more powerful kind of computer than any yet constructed by humankind. Indeed, the only ways to evade that conclusion seem even crazier than quantum computing itself: One would have to overturn quantum mechanics, or else find a fast way to simulate quantum mechanics using today’s computers.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/scott-aaronson-quantum-computing-promises-new-insights.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=all

“Carson Chow Says:
Comment #2 December 5th, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Nice article but I am confused about this paragraph:

“For example, the mere possibility of quantum computers has all but overthrown a conception of the universe that scientists like Stephen Wolfram have championed. That conception holds that, as in the “Matrix” movies, the universe itself is basically a giant computer, twiddling an array of 1’s and 0’s in essentially the same way any desktop PC does.”

A quantum universe or a classical universe are both computable aren’t they? It’s just that the quantum universe is exponentially “bigger”. In principle, you could have a classical computer just chug away painfully slowly and simulate the quantum universe, no? There is nothing in the “Matrix” universe that says the computation must be efficient is there? There are still just a countable number of possible quantum universes right?”

“Scott Says:
Comment #5 December 5th, 2011 at 10:59 pm
Carson #2: Yes, as the tagline of my blog says, quantum computers can be simulated classically but with exponential slowdown.

What we learn from quantum computing is that, if both quantum mechanics and the prevailing conjectures in complexity theory are valid, then the physical universe can’t be feasibly simulated by a computer that “twiddles an array of 1’s and 0’s in essentially the same way any desktop PC does.”

(That last clause was meant to indicate that I was talking about efficient simulation by conventional computers — i.e., the Extended Church-Turing Thesis, or what Wikipedia calls the Feasibility Thesis. I wish I knew how to put the point more clearly within the constraints of this article, since you’re right that it might be misinterpreted!)

For what it’s worth, Stephen Wolfram, Ed Fredkin, and other believers in “digital physics,” have been very explicit in saying that they think the universe is a classical cellular automaton—basically, a three-dimensional array of pixels—and that their view would preclude exponential speedups from quantum computation. (Wolfram believes that quantum mechanics is wrong, whereas Fredkin believes that quantum mechanics can be efficiently simulated classically.) So, these viewpoints would indeed be ruled out under the assumptions I mentioned above.

A last remark: the Matrix movies aren’t very clear about what type of computer is being used, other than that it’s powered by human bodies! But since they never mention anything about quantum computing, and since the simulation clearly isn’t astronomically slow, it seems reasonable to assume that Keanu Reeves was trapped in some sort of classical simulation. So maybe he could’ve caused the simulation to crash by building a quantum computer and trying to run Shor’s factoring algorithm! For the version where Keanu is trapped in a quantum computation, we might need to wait for the followup trilogy, “The Unitary Matrix” (har, har).”

“Jiav Says:
Comment #8 December 6th, 2011 at 12:59 am
Nice essay Scott, but how could we know our simulation is not astronomically slow?

I’m curious to see if Greg Egan will comment this one ”

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=871

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/if-the-answer-is-42-what-is-the-question

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Curiosity Rover Animation:

Nuclear Mars Rover:

11 Amazing Things NASA’s Huge Mars Rover Can Do: http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html

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John Stuart Mill, 1879: Socialism http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38138

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“The proposed General Anti-Avoidance Rule [UK] [...] attacks arrangements with one or more of these qualities:

(a) arrangements that would result in receipts being taken into account for tax purposes which are significantly less than the true economic income, profit or gain;

(b) arrangements that would result in deductions being taken into account for tax purposes which are significantly greater than the true economic cost or loss;

(c) arrangements that includes a transaction at a value significantly different from market value, or otherwise on non-commercial terms;

(d) arrangements, or any element of it, inconsistent with the legal duties of the parties to it;

(e) arrangements including a person, a transaction, a document or significant terms in a document, which would not be included if the arrangement were not designed to achieve an abusive tax result;

(f) arrangements that omit a person, a transaction, a document or significant terms in a document, which would not be omitted if the arrangement were not designed to achieve an abusive tax result; and

(g) arrangements that include the location of an asset or a transaction, or of the place of residence of a person, which would not be so located if the arrangement were not designed to achieve an abusive tax result.” http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/11/21/making-aggressive-tax-avoidance-illegal-what-a-new-gaar-might-do/

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Stephen Hawking

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“tribal communities are the default system of human social nature. Humanity evolved that way for millennia after exiting the hunter-gatherer band stage of social life. Many of the planet’s diverse societies have since moved on toward becoming modern states, but not all of them have. And even for those that have, the shadowy emotional residues of the distant past remain; we never lose anything in evolution, but instead add new developments to older ones. That is Fox’s central idea and the theme running through The Tribal Imagination.

It is also a truth, Fox believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in far-away strange places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. The pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights with respect to the state, whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan.

This truth, he says, sheds a harsh light on instances when “our leaders make claims about human nature and the natural state of human society as justifications for political action, armed intervention included.” These leaders, more often than not, suggests Fox, simply refuse to understand the essentially tribal nature of the lands they hope to remake. They are reluctant to grasp that

there is no ‘Iraqi People’. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical. . . . What is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe and sect command major allegiance. The idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our own systems, is relatively foreign.

Numerous unforeseen events during the Iraq occupation have illustrated the priority of tribal authority. When men came out and stole copper wire connecting hospitals to the electricity grid, indignant U.S. soldiers tried to make the thieves see that their actions would hurt “the Iraqi people.” True to form, the thieves responded just as Aouda had a hundred years before: Who were these “Iraqi people”, they wanted to know, whose claims outranked those of their own needy relatives? The thieving clansmen felt no responsibility for some mythical collectivity called “the people” that, as far as they knew, did not include them and that, in any case, foreigners had invented without their approval. In contrast, they were absolutely bound by customary law to help their kin” http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=990

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