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#434235 The Milestones of Human Progress We ...
When you look back at 2018, do you see a good or a bad year? Chances are, your perception of the year involves fixating on all the global and personal challenges it brought. In fact, every year, we tend to look back at the previous year as “one of the most difficult” and hope that the following year is more exciting and fruitful.
But in the grander context of human history, 2018 was an extraordinarily positive year. In fact, every year has been getting progressively better.
Before we dive into some of the highlights of human progress from 2018, let’s make one thing clear. There is no doubt that there are many overwhelming global challenges facing our species. From climate change to growing wealth inequality, we are far from living in a utopia.
Yet it’s important to recognize that both our news outlets and audiences have been disproportionately fixated on negative news. This emphasis on bad news is detrimental to our sense of empowerment as a species.
So let’s take a break from all the disproportionate negativity and have a look back on how humanity pushed boundaries in 2018.
On Track to Becoming an Interplanetary Species
We often forget how far we’ve come since the very first humans left the African savanna, populated the entire planet, and developed powerful technological capabilities. Our desire to explore the unknown has shaped the course of human evolution and will continue to do so.
This year, we continued to push the boundaries of space exploration. As depicted in the enchanting short film Wanderers, humanity’s destiny is the stars. We are born to be wanderers of the cosmos and the everlasting unknown.
SpaceX had 21 successful launches in 2018 and closed the year with a successful GPS launch. The latest test flight by Virgin Galactic was also an incredible milestone, as SpaceShipTwo was welcomed into space. Richard Branson and his team expect that space tourism will be a reality within the next 18 months.
Our understanding of the cosmos is also moving forward with continuous breakthroughs in astrophysics and astronomy. One notable example is the MARS InSight Mission, which uses cutting-edge instruments to study Mars’ interior structure and has even given us the first recordings of sound on Mars.
Understanding and Tackling Disease
Thanks to advancements in science and medicine, we are currently living longer, healthier, and wealthier lives than at any other point in human history. In fact, for most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today it is more than 70 worldwide, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80.
Brilliant researchers around the world are pushing for even better health outcomes. This year, we saw promising treatments emerge against Alzheimers disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple scleroris, and even the flu.
The deadliest disease of them all, cancer, is also being tackled. According to the American Association of Cancer Research, 22 revolutionary treatments for cancer were approved in the last year, and the death rate in adults is also in decline. Advancements in immunotherapy, genetic engineering, stem cells, and nanotechnology are all powerful resources to tackle killer diseases.
Breakthrough Mental Health Therapy
While cleaner energy, access to education, and higher employment rates can improve quality of life, they do not guarantee happiness and inner peace. According to the World Economic Forum, mental health disorders affect one in four people globally, and in many places they are significantly under-reported. More people are beginning to realize that our mental health is just as important as our physical health, and that we ought to take care of our minds just as much as our bodies.
We are seeing the rise of applications that put mental well-being at their center. Breakthrough advancements in genetics are allowing us to better understand the genetic makeup of disorders like clinical depression or Schizophrenia, and paving the way for personalized medical treatment. We are also seeing the rise of increasingly effective therapeutic treatments for anxiety.
This year saw many milestones for a whole new revolutionary area in mental health: psychedelic therapy. Earlier this summer, the FDA granted breakthrough therapy designation to MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, after several phases of successful trails. Similar research has discovered that Psilocybin (also known as magic mushrooms) combined with therapy is far more effective than traditional forms of treatment for depression and anxiety.
Moral and Social Progress
Innovation is often associated with economic and technological progress. However, we also need leaps of progress in our morality, values, and policies. Throughout the 21st century, we’ve made massive strides in rights for women and children, civil rights, LGBT rights, animal rights, and beyond. However, with rising nationalism and xenophobia in many parts of the developed world, there is significant work to be done on this front.
All hope is not lost, as we saw many noteworthy milestones this year. In January 2018, Iceland introduced the equal wage law, bringing an end to the gender wage gap. On September 6th, the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality, marking a historical moment. Earlier in December, the European Commission released a draft of ethics guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence. Such are just a few examples of positive progress in social justice, ethics, and policy.
We are also seeing a global rise in social impact entrepreneurship. Emerging startups are no longer valued simply based on their profits and revenue, but also on the level of positive impact they are having on the world at large. The world’s leading innovators are not asking themselves “How can I become rich?” but rather “How can I solve this global challenge?”
Intelligently Optimistic for 2019
It’s becoming more and more clear that we are living in the most exciting time in human history. Even more, we mustn’t be afraid to be optimistic about 2019.
An optimistic mindset can be grounded in rationality and evidence. Intelligent optimism is all about being excited about the future in an informed and rational way. The mindset is critical if we are to get everyone excited about the future by highlighting the rapid progress we have made and recognizing the tremendous potential humans have to find solutions to our problems.
In his latest TED talk, Steven Pinker points out, “Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving. Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn.”
Let us not forget that in cosmic time scales, our entire species’ lifetime, including all of human history, is the equivalent of the blink of an eye. The probability of us existing both as an intelligent species and as individuals is so astoundingly low that it’s practically non-existent. We are the products of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution and extraordinarily good fortune. Let’s recognize and leverage this wondrous opportunity, and pave an exciting way forward.
Image Credit: Virgin Galactic / Virgin Galactic 2018. Continue reading
#433901 The SpiNNaker Supercomputer, Modeled ...
We’ve long used the brain as inspiration for computers, but the SpiNNaker supercomputer, switched on this month, is probably the closest we’ve come to recreating it in silicon. Now scientists hope to use the supercomputer to model the very thing that inspired its design.
The brain is the most complex machine in the known universe, but that complexity comes primarily from its architecture rather than the individual components that make it up. Its highly interconnected structure means that relatively simple messages exchanged between billions of individual neurons add up to carry out highly complex computations.
That’s the paradigm that has inspired the ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture” (SpiNNaker) supercomputer at the University of Manchester in the UK. The project is the brainchild of Steve Furber, the designer of the original ARM processor. After a decade of development, a million-core version of the machine that will eventually be able to simulate up to a billion neurons was switched on earlier this month.
The idea of splitting computation into very small chunks and spreading them over many processors is already the leading approach to supercomputing. But even the most parallel systems require a lot of communication, and messages may have to pack in a lot of information, such as the task that needs to be completed or the data that needs to be processed.
In contrast, messages in the brain consist of simple electrochemical impulses, or spikes, passed between neurons, with information encoded primarily in the timing or rate of those spikes (which is more important is a topic of debate among neuroscientists). Each neuron is connected to thousands of others via synapses, and complex computation relies on how spikes cascade through these highly-connected networks.
The SpiNNaker machine attempts to replicate this using a model called Address Event Representation. Each of the million cores can simulate roughly a million synapses, so depending on the model, 1,000 neurons with 1,000 connections or 100 neurons with 10,000 connections. Information is encoded in the timing of spikes and the identity of the neuron sending them. When a neuron is activated it broadcasts a tiny packet of data that contains its address, and spike timing is implicitly conveyed.
By modeling their machine on the architecture of the brain, the researchers hope to be able to simulate more biological neurons in real time than any other machine on the planet. The project is funded by the European Human Brain Project, a ten-year science mega-project aimed at bringing together neuroscientists and computer scientists to understand the brain, and researchers will be able to apply for time on the machine to run their simulations.
Importantly, it’s possible to implement various different neuronal models on the machine. The operation of neurons involves a variety of complex biological processes, and it’s still unclear whether this complexity is an artefact of evolution or central to the brain’s ability to process information. The ability to simulate up to a billion simple neurons or millions of more complex ones on the same machine should help to slowly tease out the answer.
Even at a billion neurons, that still only represents about one percent of the human brain, so it’s still going to be limited to investigating isolated networks of neurons. But the previous 500,000-core machine has already been used to do useful simulations of the Basal Ganglia—an area affected in Parkinson’s disease—and an outer layer of the brain that processes sensory information.
The full-scale supercomputer will make it possible to study even larger networks previously out of reach, which could lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of both the healthy and unhealthy functioning of the brain.
And while neurological simulation is the main goal for the machine, it could also provide a useful research tool for roboticists. Previous research has already shown a small board of SpiNNaker chips can be used to control a simple wheeled robot, but Furber thinks the SpiNNaker supercomputer could also be used to run large-scale networks that can process sensory input and generate motor output in real time and at low power.
That low power operation is of particular promise for robotics. The brain is dramatically more power-efficient than conventional supercomputers, and by borrowing from its principles SpiNNaker has managed to capture some of that efficiency. That could be important for running mobile robotic platforms that need to carry their own juice around.
This ability to run complex neural networks at low power has been one of the main commercial drivers for so-called neuromorphic computing devices that are physically modeled on the brain, such as IBM’s TrueNorth chip and Intel’s Loihi. The hope is that complex artificial intelligence applications normally run in massive data centers could be run on edge devices like smartphones, cars, and robots.
But these devices, including SpiNNaker, operate very differently from the leading AI approaches, and its not clear how easy it would be to transfer between the two. The need to adopt an entirely new programming paradigm is likely to limit widespread adoption, and the lack of commercial traction for the aforementioned devices seems to back that up.
At the same time, though, this new paradigm could potentially lead to dramatic breakthroughs in massively parallel computing. SpiNNaker overturns many of the foundational principles of how supercomputers work that make it much more flexible and error-tolerant.
For now, the machine is likely to be firmly focused on accelerating our understanding of how the brain works. But its designers also hope those findings could in turn point the way to more efficient and powerful approaches to computing.
Image Credit: Adrian Grosu / Shutterstock.com Continue reading