The Allen Institute for Brain Science recently announced that Paul Allen has committed an additional three hundred million dollars, bringing his total investment in their brain mapping work to five hundred million dollars:

. . . Allen has charged the Institute with tackling some of the most fundamental and complex questions in brain science today. The answers to these questions are essential for achieving a complete understanding of how the brain works, what goes wrong in brain-related diseases and disorders, and how best to treat them.

This huge outlay only covers the first four years of an ambitious 10-year plan of neuroscience research, allowing for a doubling of the Institute’s staff and launching three new and complementary scientific initiatives addressing critical questions central to understanding how the brain works:

• How does the brain store, encode and process information?
• What are the cellular building blocks that underlie all brain function, and are often targets of disease?
• How do those cells develop, and then create the circuits that drive behavior, thought and brain dysfunction?

While this knowledge will certainly help understanding “brain-related diseases and disorders” it provides for other applications as well, including direct neural interfaces and uploading–two subjects at the core of transhumanist singularity scenarios.

While Mr. Allen is undoubtable rich enough to afford even such a princely sum, one has to wonder if his motives are related more to the latter than the former. After all, what good is being a billionaire if you can’t use it to live forever?

Wired has an interesting interview with Vernor Vinge, purportedly on the subject of of civilization collapse but actually spending a lot of space covering Vinge’s view of the Singularity. Much of it is nothing new for those of us familiar with Vinge’s ideas, but it does serve as a good entry-point for those unfamiliar with concept of a Technological Singularity or who think it originated in the fertile brain of Ray Kurzweil.

There is also a shout-out from Vinge to Charlie Stross for his novel Accelerando and to Nassim Taleb for The Black Swan. Not to mention a discussion of Kurzweil’s ideas about life extension and the possible outcomes from living 100,000 years or more.

Other subjects in the interview include WMDs in space, his recent novels, and (yes) civilizational collapse. Definitely a must-read!

Vinge concludes the interview with a comment about upcoming projects that includes this nugget of pure Vingism:

Every time I turn around now, you know, it’s 2012! We are going into the middle of things, and maybe it’s my imagination, but I think there are all sorts of things that are visible now that were not so visible before, and I think that there’s all sorts of really cool science fiction that folks could write, and I hope to be one of those folks.

Richard Jones looks at the recent Oxford Nanopore DNA ‘strand sequencing’ announcement and comes to the conclusion that a billion dollars valuation for Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. might be enough to bootstrap an entire nanotech industry:

The impact on the investment markets for nanotechnology is likely to be substantial. Existing commercialisation efforts around nanotechnology have been disappointing so far, but a company success on the scale now being talked about would undoubtedly attract more money into the area – perhaps it might also persuade some of the companies currently sitting on huge piles of cash that they might usefully invest some of this in a little more research and development. What’s significant about Oxford Nanopore is that it is operating in a sweet spot between the mundane and the far-fetched. It’s not a nanomaterials company, essentially competing in relatively low margin speciality chemicals, nor is it trying to make a nanofactory or nanoscale submarine or one of the other more radical visions of the nanofuturists.

In an article in the World Policy Journal, noted SF writer Neal Stephenson says we are experiencing ‘Innovation Starvation’:

This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad.  I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness.  Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself . . . Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.

Stephenson goes on to describe a futurist conference he attended in 2011 where scientists and engineers told him Science Fiction had a role in this.

. . . The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance—even utility—in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place . . .

And that it was the Science Fiction writers who had dropped the ball!

“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow. . . He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense.

Stephenson intends to address the issue via what he calls the Hieroglyph project, “An effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.”

Of course there is plenty of criticism of the Stephenson article. While Analee Newitz of the Smithsonian is generally supportive, others think his focus on Getting Big Stuff Done is rubbish. And, even if the goal of the Hieroglyph project is a right and proper, can it actually succeed? Wouldn’t it take more than an SF anthology (even one filled with stories by big names) to shift engineering and scientific dollars into the kinds of Big Stuff he is talking about? Even accepting that Stephenson’s article is mostly hyperbole intended to provoke discussion, the idea that he (with the help of his friends) can have that kind of effect by writing a book seems like braggadocio and hubris.

Isn’t it more likely that the shoe is on the other foot? That the current crop of SF writers is more affected by contemporary cultural attitudes than the other way around? That the entertainment focus on apocalyptic visions and nihilism is a result of demand, not supply?

Moreover, accelerating change, the very factor leading to a possible Technological Singularity event within the next generation or two, is driven more by Small Things like shrinking computer chips than it is by Big Things like space stations. In fact, assuming a Technological Singularity does occur, it seems likely any attempt at creating a spaceborne civilization of humans (as we know them) will run out of time even if we made it a priority right now.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how Stephenson’s Hieroglyph project goes forward. Will it just be a flash-in-the-pan book or will it have a more enduring effect on cultural attitudes towards science?

Nikki Olsen has a provocative article (pun intended) taking a latter-day look at David Levy’s 2007 book about robot-human relations: Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships.

Fast forward 4 years (and almost 3 Moore’s Law cycles) and it seems as though his predictions are no nearer coming true than they were when he made them. David Hanson’s skin has gotten more realistic and more people know about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s real looking androids, but many important developments stand in the way of our considering robots something we could one day fall in love with.

While it is true robot lovers are pretty scarce on the ground right now, it seems unreasonable to think either technology or society are changing fast enough to accomodate sex, much less the emotion of love, with a machine in the space of only four years. While Nikki’s expectations may be unrealistic, her conclusion certainly is not:

As counter-intuitive human-robot relationships might seem today, there are many reasons to think that love and sex with robots will happen. Robots are already better in math, logic, chess, jeopardy and many other activities. Is it not probable that eventually, as Levy says, a robot companion will provide much more than a human companion in every conceivable way?

And yet she completely misses the real question! in the long run it might not be whether machines can be better lovers than humans, but instead whether humans can be good enough lovers for the machines.