Simulated <3

When discussing artificial intelligence, futurists and computer scientists generally hold the Turing test as the ultimate qualifier for computer intelligence. According to the Turing test, if we can ever create a program that can fool a person into thinking their talking to a real person, then the computer can be considered intelligent. While this is valid for most interactions, recent developments seem to show that the rules need to be changed a bit for romantic programs. Specifically, one new japanese game for the DS called “Love Plus” looks like it might finally have passed a form of the Turing test, as a growing number of gamers are getting involved in real relationships with their Nintendo DS's.

Love Plus is not the first dating Sim, and it may not be the most realistic, but apparently it's the most powerful. The game is described in an interview from BoingBoing (check it out at http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/27/advisor-my-husband-h.html) and through Koh's words it's easy to see how much power this game holds. The game starts off slowly, but the relationship with your virtual girl doesn't take long to escalate to eerie levels. After only a week, Koh's virtual girlfriend was demanding he whisper “I love you” one hundred times into the microphone, and at one point even demanded a kiss. Luckily for Koh, he was able to keep his virtual girlfriend in proper context and stopped playing before it could deal any serious harm to his marriage, but other couples haven't been so luckily. Reportedly this game has been the cause of multiple breakups, as lovestruck players are convinced their virtual relationships feel “more real” then their physical counterparts.

How could this happen? How could a handheld game wield as much power as a real person? It's actually not too far fetched when you consider how much love can skew logic in regular. Many people have stories of blaring personality flaws and bad habits in their partners that they were completely blinded to during the course of a relationship. In more extreme cases, people have been known to fall into serious relationships with mannequins and sex dolls, and are unable to realize the objects of their affection as inanimate. It seems that despite being reasonably rational in most other areas of our lives, love can force us to accept an altered perception of reality. Thus, even though these digital girlfriends have obvious inhuman flaws and could never pass a real Turing test, as long as they are able to reach out and fulfill our emotional desires we can somehow overlook these digital anomalies and accept the program's love just as we would a real girlfriend.

Of course, Love Plus is strongly limited by it's platform, but the game isn't just what's significant—it's the programming. The Girlfriend A.I is the last piece of the puzzle to build the holy grail of nerds for the past 50 years: sexbots. We have the bodies, robotic scientists have made great strides in creating realistic autonomous face and body motions, and now we finally have a brain that can simulate the most important emotions. As a result of Love Plus, the idea of the android girlfriend has for the first time entered the realm of feasibility, and Stepford Wives could be just over the horizon.

The New Phrenology

So I finally started watching the new TED talks, and this one in particular caught me, not only because of it's content, but more what he seemed to describe in passing. Check it out if you want:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_killer.html

In this video, Dr.Fallon describes how there are actually physical differences and a specific sequence of events that can create a serial killer. To start off, there are a set of genes that can produce a homocidal psychopath, but like most genes they lie dormant until activated. These genes are apparently activated by witnessing repeated violent trauma (he references mirror neurons, briefly), and when activated they can cause a very specific brain damage, something that you can actually see on a PET that distinguishes the brains of normal, non serial killing folk.

That's really interesting! Not just the fact that they've found a physical distinction between serial killers and non, but the fact that they can prove any distinction at all! It's almost a throwback to phrenology, we're getting to the point in our scientific understanding of the mind that we can actually look at the brain and see exactly what someone's personality traits are. And this is just one project that happened to make it to the popular circuit. There is already so much research being done in this field, and their discoveries will only grow in importance as the fields of genetics, psychology, and neurology continue to develop and work together, just imagine what could be next. What if you can look at someone's brain, and read someone's genes, and see not just major flaws like a predisposition for killing people but rather subtle things. Character strengths and flaws, our personality. Somewhere combined between our brain and our DNA is written everything about us, and provides insight into everything we can grow into, it could only be a matter of time before neuroscientists decipher it.

Just imagine what this could mean for our future. Parents could look at their kids' genes and not only know whether or not they will be beautiful or powerful, like we worry about now, but they will be able to pinpoint specific gifts and flaws. We can know whether or not a kid has a potential to be an amazing musician, or a brilliant scientist, or a depressed slacker. None of these genetic signs are definitive, due to the trigger system of our DNA most of what we can unveil is just potential, but that wont matter. Parents will have a new paranoia of exposing their kids to that certain, genetic trigger that will cause that special brain damage which will make their kid unsuccessful in love and life. New schools of parenting will develop specifically designed to target your kids most powerful genes so your child can grow up to be genetically optimal. You could know before your kid ever said his first words exactly how you wanted to raise him and what profession he would excel and enjoy.

Who knows, this is a pretty big leap to make from just that one video, maybe the brain will always be too mysterious to garner anything that useful from. It's kind of unnerving to think that through science we can see and tweak all those parts of our selves that we like to think of as innate, as being part of our soul. But if there's one lesson to be learned from hundreds of years of scientific progress, it's that very few conventional limits haven't been broken by years of thought and experiments. Even if you don't believe that it's possible, it's at least neat to think about.

Organ Farming

It’s a story that we’ve heard all too often. On House, Scrubs, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and even sometimes in real life, a patient needs a liver but there’s no compatible donor on the list. The problem stems from the fact that even if every eligible body donated their organs, there will still always be a greater demand than there is a supply. We simply don’t have enough livers in this country to go around. This might not be a problem for long. Recent medical breakthroughs are showing great hope for organ “farming”, literally growing any necessary organ on demand.

Sometimes people don’t realize just how fast science is progressing, but look back twenty years ago when cloning was just a promise, when everyone imagined a future full of identical twins and Dolly was the most amazing symbol of scientific power since we put a man on the moon. Now it’s common enough that the FDA had to officially give their approval for the production of cloned beef. For the past decade scientists have regularly been not just been growing full test tube creatures but even tweaking their DNA to fit our needs. Goats are making spider silk, rabbits and pigs are glowing like fireflies, and now Professor Esmail Zanjani at the University of Nevada's School of Medicine has created what might be the most useful and the most eerie modified animal in the history of cloning: sheep that have human organs.

No, this isn’t some sort of half man, half sheep monster, what Dr.Zanjani has done is breed what is known among geneticists as a chimera. Chimerism is a genetic disorder that causes an organism to have two sets of genetically distinct organs. This condition has been known to cause hermaphrodites when the gonads are split between male and female, as well as causing many interesting custody trials. An interesting feature of chimerism, however, is that the two cell types don’t have to be from the same species. As long as the species lives, any combination is possible, which is what led Dr.Zanjani to consider growing human organs inside of a sheep. He makes these chimerae by injecting stem cells from bone marrow in specific places in a sheep fetus. You’ve probably heard about stem cells from the news, but if you haven’t stem cells are hailed as the current hot topic in biology. This is because they are incredibly versatile and can be coaxed to form basically any organ. Put them in the right places, and apparently, they can even grow human organs in sheep.

Now, this technology is still in its infancy. Currently the best organ in Dr.Zanjani’s sheep is only 15% human, and he hopes to make one soon that is 50%, but ideally we’d like to have one that is 100% Homo Sapien. Why not make it even better and have this organ be genetically identical to the one you had before?

Doctors at Wake forest have actually done just that. They have discovered a method that use the patient’s own cells to grow a custom organ that is a perfect, functioning duplicate of the his/her original. It was first performed a few years ago when medical scientists were able to grow new bladders for seven patients with myelomeningocele, a disorder that can lead to osteoporosis, kidney stones, and even cancer. Doctors at Wake Forest extracted small samples from the patients bladders and surround muscles and cultured them in a bladder-shaped mold. Eight weeks later, the patients had perfect bladders with no risk of blood mismatch that functioned flawlessly.

Theoretically, these methods could work with any organ, save the brain, and if it works as well as these researchers claim it might this could be one the most important scientific breakthroughs of all time. If we had the power to grow organs on demand, then their use wouldn’t be limited to just those who needed them, but those who wanted them. Wealthy men and women with weak bones or hearts could simply buy new organs to replace their aged ones. A new breed of plastic surgeons would develop who could actually cure aging, not with chemicals our nips and tucks but genuine youthful organs. Currently we don't know exactly how long the human brain can last, but if scientists find a way to keep it from degenerating into senility then the possibilities arelimitless. Immortality could be in our future.

http://www.payvand.com/news/07/apr/1009.html

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/40956.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

The Future has Arrived

People have always had romantic dreams of the future--dreams of flying cars, teleporters, and other technologies that reflect the ideals of the decade. But while these visions have been progressing at the same rate as the years, the rate of real technology has been increasing exponentially. The split between what can be imagined and what is real has been growing smaller and smaller with time, and now we’ve finally reached a point where the technology we are working on is matching or exceeding our “dreams of the future”. Few people understand exactly how advanced our science has become: we have researchers actively working on invisibility, creature resurrection, even rudimentary time travel! I don't think this amazing technology should stay in the dark, so in this blog I will be showcasing current research and new technologies the likes you've only seen on star trek. They say there’s no time like the present, and that’s true. Our reality has become stranger than science fiction.