what hath god wrought

just spent the last few days in a local conference where there was some science and quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth. the latter because, despite singapore giving us 16 billion dollars a year to spend on research, we can't actually really spend it on what we want, which is sort of like giving a little girl a pony and then telling her she can only watch it through the window as it poops in the yard.

the science though was cool, and demonstrated (sort of) that once in a (very long) while, it is ok to condescend to speak of what the practical significance of ones research is. in the case of neuroscience, i give you one word: robots. if you're one of the unfortunate people who watched surrogates last year*, you'll know that science-fiction writers/hollywood hacks think that the robopocalypse is soon to be upon us, and well, they may actually be right. dr. ishiguro of osaka university, for one, has already created fairly lifelike androids/gemenoids that can controlled from anywhere in the world, so that he can use them to give a talk in poland while sipping sake in the comfort of his own home. these things are apparently so good that they no longer freak people out because of falling within the uncanny valley. in fact, they arouse extremely empathy in people, so much so that there have been plays written in japan with gemenoid roles. also, launching next year, a (rather scary) phone with a humanoid shape that wriggles and talks and will probably soon kill us all much like the baby aliens in alien

there was, of course, the usual-hand-wringing about are we playing god, and what about asimov's laws, and what about robots that create copies of themselves and go all cylon on our asses. my sense is that, much like with climate change, the dialogue on this topic is already starting way too late, that this technology is going to be upon us with a velocity unimaginable, and that (for the general public anyway), surrogates is going to be the nearest thing anyone's going to have to thinking through the ethical implications of creating autonomous systems. quite frankly, even playing with the very basic brain-computer interface devices in our lab, one gets the feeling that this shit is remarkable. i think i'm a little scared of what it's going to look like in a couple of decades.