review of "Map of Heaven"

At Costco last week, I ran across the new bestseller "A Map of Heaven." Later, for various reasons, I decided to go ahead and buy the kindle edition, which I read on my Kindler paperwhite (A great product for me). Here is my review for Amazon, and then some further comment:

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This review is from: The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife (Kindle Edition)

This book could be very useful to some people in breaking free of restrictive illusions about life, but it really needs a bit of balancing as well.
It reminds me of what I tell some friends: "After all my work to understand many things, I feel as if I were a hundred miles up suspended on a huge ladder. When I look down, I feel as if I know and see so much co mpared to all the craziness and small scale confusion down there. as I look up, I still feel like a worm compared to what I don't know and the vastness of what is out there." This book, too, is somewhere in the middle, though it has its uses and the topic is very important.
If you are one of the many people who would be inspired by the book (legitimately), I would urge you not to stop there.The book has interesting references, but I would urge you to also read (in order) Connie Willis's book Passages, Steiger's In My Soul I am Free, Jane Roberts' trilogy of oversoul seven, and -- if you can find it -- Joel Whitton's last book. Above all, it's important to keep a sense of balance and not underestimate your uncertainty as you grope with these important issues. More can be said about the important topic of reconciling science and mysticism ( I have a little introduction on that myself up at the open online journal Rose-Croix), but that gets to be beyond the scope of a review. All of us have a lot more to learn here.

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In other words -- the book is half true in a very important way, and I might even follow up on a few of the things it says, but it is also half false in a very important way. 

The  book reminds me of the movie "What Dreams May Come"  which I was glad to see years ago. I even bought the video for my mother who is about 90 now. But it was a shock when Robin Williams, who played the lead in that movie, committed suicide. That's one of the things I think of when I say people need balance. (Hell, after Luda rightly got me to read Clancy's book Threat Vector, I very deliberately bought and reread Olaf Stapleton's First and Last Men, because I could tell I needed more balance; it was about $1 on kindle.)

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In my review, I didn't mention that quantum physics should be changing a whole lot this year from what it was last year. This book, like many others (Pribram and Neville?) tries to use quantum mechanics to try to reconcile the world of science and the world of our personal experience -- but it relies on semi-popularized versions of various strands of quantum mechanics from last year. My previous post gives a much more up to date account, which is quite different. It talks about consciousness and quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of someone who would build a conscious system. In a way, the issue is one of mathematics, and mathematics remains a valid language no matter what spiritual plane you could ascend to.  "Even in heaven, 1+1=2 in the realm of integers."

I have a more recent paper which addresses the relation between real, emerging quantum mechanics and the experience of spirit or soul in a much more definite and fine-grained way than this book could (given that the author is not aware of the new quantum mechanics), requested by Menas Kafatos collaborating with Deepak Chopra -- but for now I must wait; you don't want to hear all the details of where it sits. 

A key element of reconciling personal mystical or paranormal experience with hard core physics is a concept which serves as a bridge between those two worlds: the idea of a "noosphere," a kind of shared collective mind which we are part of. This is a very old concept (which raises its credibility in my view), but my new paper strengthens that bridge. The brain itself has a certain level of consciousness, but the noosphere has a higher level, fully incorporating all the principles in my previous post and some more which I left out because humans are not really ready for them yet at a scientific level of discourse.

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And so, I would claim that all this "travel in heaven" or "astral travel" that people have talked about for millennia is really just a kind of journey of the mind in the Mind, processed allegorically through constructs created by Mind.

If you have read vedas and upanishads and yoga  enough to have a map of THEM in your mind, you will immediately notice how familiar this view is.

Many groups talk about the ascent from lower levels of consciousness to higher levels. It is possible to reconcile and make sense of this diversity of views.

In a way -- the progression from "OOBE in this world" to etheric to astral to mental to cosmic is a progression from a part of the outer senses of the noosphere to more intermediate and abstract things (coded by constructed metaphor, just as brains use the hippocampus to encode stuff), moving on up to more direct contact with Mind as such. This book talks about that progression, from the author's personal experience -- but it is only a fuzzy introduction to the progression.

From late fall 1972 to about Christmas 1978, I experimented VERY intensely with my own personal experience, to try to get direct primary personal data on what goes on at the "spiritual" level. 

(Based on that experience, BEFORE I had the theory background I do now, I wrote a 100 page very simple manuscript which I showed some Rosicrucians. My understand is 'way past that now, but it gives a nice very comprehensible explanation  for experience, practical not theoretical, giving some of the real history of how I got where I am today. I scanned it into my computer a few weeks ago, and may eventually post it somewhere.) The period started when a suitemate of mine showed me a simple paperback book, called something like "How to Help Yourself with ESP," which I would have laughed at and ignored two years before. But then, in 1972, I wanted more data; I did not even ask whether I BELIEVED the book. I just tried the experiments it suggested, so that I could get data to find out for myself. When two of the experiments worked much better than I had really expected... that opened a door, and I explored many things. But in Christmas 1978, I started work for the US government, and had to change my schedule. I already had a lot of data to digest anyway. 

And... there are plenty of things which kept happening even when I did not have time for the specific kind of personal experimentation I had time for then. In a way, I mostly gave up the astral but developed more on what they call the cosmic consciousness level. That's serious.

Some people, when they first reach that level, get blown away with euphoria.

(That reminds me of another book I could have recommended, Voyage to Arcturus by Lindsay,

where he talks about a next-to-final stage where people get blissed out and need to move on.) Maybe some people feel that way about their first day away from home at college.  If they visit only one day, they can stay vague and blissed out forever. I guess it's good for them that they go through that stage (though my path was always a bit more balanced and steep).  It's also very good that they properly value their new life... and (as above so below) get down to work. Challenges never end for us here on earth.

But stages of life certainly do vary. On February 15 this coming year -- three months from now --- I am scheduled for the final break from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  THAT'S a complex and important story, but not for this morning. Maybe I'll start back more experiments then. The one resolution I have converged on is that I will go to Quaker meeting almost every Sunday -- NOT as part of an effort to "get into heaven" which sounds silly to me) but as a natural part of experimentation and growth, the most reliable vehicle I know of, robust with respect to the other fluctuations and uncertainties I know of. But that will account for only a few hours every week. There will be plenty of other stuff, which I will adapt from day to day in a way I could not before 2/15/15.

I am glad that one of the central people in the local Meeting is a long time mental health practitioner. From one quick, oversimplified viewpoint -- the most important spiritual task before us right now is to try to assist our noosphere to get into a state of greater "sanity," a concept which we can now understand much better than we could in earlier decades when we understood less about mind and intelligence in general. (My 2012 paper in the journal Neural Networks talks a lot about sanity or zhengqi for the individual human, but "as above, so below.")   

In fact -- in past years, many people have asked "Is God crazy?" The God of Luria's cabbalistic mysticism... is basically a schizophrenic. It is not sane just to run away and hide from the scary nature of that question.

Especially when someone might have a plausible answer.

When people ask "Is God (really, just our local noosphere) crazy?" --  I always think back to an event on our breakfast porch in College Park years ago, when I shared a house with the McGrath family and with Wedge Greene. We had a fun evening playing with the Losscher sp?) color card psychology test. The test said: "Do not use on children under 18."  But we did anyway, just for fun; we all did the test. When Katie (then quite young) took the test, it said something like:

"You feel so threatened by some younger and up and coming that you have really deep mental problems which need immediate treatment -- unless you are under 18, in which case it's just part of the normal development process." So, in a way, Gaia is like what Katie was. However, earth, unlike Katie at the time, really has the means of its own destruction at hand, already moving, and I see no guarantee that we will survive -- bodies OR souls. I have a lot more thoughts about where we are headed, and the difficult challenges we really need to face up to -- but we are NOT called to just assume that all will be well (or that we are doomed).

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I am tempted to go on a bit more and mention and encounter with a real big dragon a few weeks ago 

in "the astral plane" -- the first one like that in my life, despite decades of awareness of many metaphorical dragons of many types. But I suppose it would have to be too long, especially given the complex connections to politics in the US today. (And the US itself is of course not an isolated system.) Maybe later. Best of luck.

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Maybe I should be a bit more precise here, for those who seek the whole truth or prefer precision.

The first question may be: "Does heaven exist or not?" Yes or no?

Well, it doesn't have to be yes or no. Very often we humans create binary choices, in cases where the truth is something else altogether.

Could we say... that the "heaven" which Alexander has indeed experienced, and is indeed important, is as real and as important as an internet chatroom? Even more real, insofar as it engages more of our senses and feelings and has more powerful supporting hardware and apps?

In my view, the true map of this heaven is like unto a map of the contents of the internet... which is not the same as a map of the physical internet and underlying algorithms and architectures which support it.  Many Hindus would say that this heaven is totally an illusion, a construct of the mind. Some go further and say that the reality we call physical and material is itself just a hard part of the same coral reef of illusion. But I do not go that far.  Actually, I do not claim to know the answers to all the questions which arise at this level -- but it seems clear to me that internet chat rooms and
"heaven" as Alexander has experienced it are useful, respectable constructs created by our minds.
How could one possibly see a movie like What Dreams May Come (which is very close to what Alexander depicts) without understanding that one is looking at constructs of the mind in that place?

At a deeper level than the map of content in this internet of the mind... is the map of how it works,
of what it interfaces with, and of the dynamics which actually govern and change the content.

This is where the "noosphere" concept comes into it.  The noosphere is not just a very big mammal brain or human brain. It has at least two additional capabilities hardwired into how it works. One is a capability to send information forwards or backwards in time -- as in my other recent post on what can be done with quantum computing.  Another is what I call "multimodular architecture,' which is vey different from what computer scientists usually think about when they string a lot of fixed modules together. In essence, the noosphere is made up of lots and lots of "individual souls" or primary modules, along with matrix and miscellaneous types of support neurons.  The mathematical principle which underlies multimodular design is SYMMETRY.

Symmetry is important even in the design of less intelligent and less conscious systems, like mouse brains and even fish brains. Even fish brains have an ability to create mages of what the fish sees, images which somehow map from what the fish sees to an image of what is there. There is a surface in those brains, which contain "maps" representing an image.  Symmetry is crucial, because explains why and how these "maps" can actually represent DIFFERENT parts of what the fish sees. There is an old paper by Olshausen  (in Arbib's first compendium)  which gives  a beautiful simple mathematical sketch of that limited kind of symmetry.  They key idea here is this: the neurons in that part of the surface can handle images taken form DIFFERENT parts of what the fish sees; they can learn universal relations, applicable to all the different parts of what the fish sees.

The noosphere exploits the same principle, at a higher level. It includes a mechanism to map between what is seen by one individual soul and what is seen by another.  This is hugely important to understanding the "spiritual experience" of our lives.

Even human brains do include a very primitive version of this same noosphere symmetry mechanism, which helps us in understanding and strengthening the spiritual side of our nature. We have the most advanced form of "mirror neurons" to be found in organisms on earth. These neurons give us a capability for empathy, an ability to see or even imagine the direct experience of other people,
and to encode it into our memory as if it were our own experience. (Of course, in those memories, we can encode which subject is having the experience -- "I" or someone else.) When society encourages the exercise of empathy,  it raises the level of intelligence or consciousness of the society, and also assists in the evolution of the soul, all else equal. (Of course, if society does this by discouraging independent thinking, it may end up making things worse.)

But the noosphere system is much more powerful than the mirror neurons built into human brains.

For me, even after 1978, half or more of my spontaneous "astral type" experience has involved what Roscrucians call "assumption." Basically, I get to experience life directly from the viewpoint of another person, usually because that person calls out inside himself or herself for someone like me to come in and help out somehow. ( I do remember the old books Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick, and Players at the Game of People by Blish. Both books deviate in some major way from the reality, but they help a bit.) Sometimes I just observe. Sometimes I observe and comment to the person. Sometimes the person even asks me to come in further and actually speak or do something -- and sometimes they ask for more, while other times they recoil and I get out of there very quickly.

This relates to the old concept of "avatar" in India. It reminds me of the scene in Jane Robert's trilogy where there is character in a mental institution who says he is Jesus Christ. The odd thing, in her novel, is that he is and he isn't, both at the same time. He fills himself deeply enough with that "spirit" (soul or archetype?) that he can do amazing things with healing and positive feelings, real things, but he is not really the same person.

It is actually possible to stack these relations.  The most I have seen is A visiting B who visits C who visits D.

This is not just theory for me, by any means. I have had enough veridical stuff  to leave no doubt in my own mind.

But at the end of the day -- the earth and its noosphere is just a very, very tiny and mature part of a large galaxy, within a much larger universe, which may or may not be part of something even larger still.  We need to avoid delusions of grandeur -- delusions which have been the downfall of many many otherwise advanced minds. The earth itself presents enough  challenges to us.

Many followers of spiritual or mystical paths focus all their energy on trying to improve their personal soul. That is an extremely important activity, in my view.  Our ability to survive physically as a species on earth depends a lot on our mobilizing a higher level of sanity and consciousness than what I see right now in the dangerous politics of earth, and the spiritual side is essential to our hope of doing that. Yet it is also important to remember that "we are all one," that the soul of the earth as a whole  needs to rise. In fact -- it is meaningless in a way to say that an individual soul has attained a higher level, just as it is meaningless to say that an individual neuron in a brain has reached a higher level ITSELF; it is meaningful only in the context of the larger mind or brain of which it is a part. Governments have often abused this idea, by confusing our connections to the noosphere with connections to the commissars they appoint to foster the personal interests of a few people; such people are not devils, but they are a real threat to our survival and to their own survival as well.

I have mentioned a lot of worthwhile authors here -- but not yet Orson Scott Card. Card clearly has extremely deep and important spiritual experience, and I have even learned a few fundamental (veridical) things from some of his books -- yet some of his writings on politics worry me to the extreme. The higher we rise on some levels, the more essential it becomes not to accidentally "step on a big nail."

Best of luck,

    Paul

How to build a quantum brain more conscious and powerful than a human brain

To begin with -- why analog quantum computing is more powerful than digital quantum computing,
AND what we need to do to actually build it.

Last month, I was invited to give a keynote talk at the Pacific Rim AI conference (PRICAI) on how to combine intelligence and quantum computing. Thanks Eli! The Pacific Rim is now moving 'way ahead of the US in many aspects of machine learning -- and Queensland, Australia, the site of this conference, is an important world center in quantum computing.

In summary: to build the most powerful possible intelligent system, one combines brain-like learning WITH the inherent computing power of the most powerful possible quantum computing.

Long ago, we learned that we get more power and more potential for learning by moving from a digital way of thinking to an analog way of thinking, form Turing machines to neural networks.
The first step in building quantum intelligence is to move form digital quantum computing to analog quantum computing.

For the conference, I talk about this for 40 minutes. The audio file (a mov file) and the 14 slides which go with it (in pdf) are posted on the web:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BzYEn42Vg7DKMFZBanpMRmdESVU&usp=sharing

The key idea for analog quantum computing is very simple, in the end. Instead of using a spin
to represent a bit, |0> or |1>, use it to represent a continuous variable, |theta>.  That's just like modern neural networks, which get past 0 and 1, and make use of bounded continuous variables.

But.. we can't design computers until we can design, understand and model the basic logic elements they are made of. For classical computers, these are transistors  For quantum computers computing with spin instead of voltage, these are "spin gates." For analog quantum computing, these are TUNABLE spin gates -- basically just glorified polarizers. We can't understand how a big network of spin gates will work, when entangled particles flow through them.. unless we can at least predict how three or four entangled photons will behave, when they enter a simple network.

It turns out -- for all the talk about quantum computers with hundreds of qubits, there are only three groups in the world which have actually entangled three or more photons, with general spins theta.
No one on earth has actually done the crucial experiments with three photons which make it clear which model we should use in designing larger systems. the first key experiment is now underway
cited in my papers). And so... to get to analog quantum computing, the first necessary baby step is to really nail  down what happens in the full triphoton experiment I talk about at the conference.
And then... Shih has a new way to produce a hundred entangled photons; the pathway is open, if people are ready to take the next step.

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My talk also briefly mentions how we can get even further than analog quantum computing, but maybe for folks in teh mainstream.. the challenge at present is to nail down analog quantum computing. One revolutions at a time...

How to achieve human settlement of space -- from NSS to ASD to OSDTP and nonterrestrial materials

For many years, the space movement in Washington – including the National Space Society – was represented in Congress by an organization called the “Space Exploration Alliance,” which tended to be a spokesman for myopic efforts to raid the federal treasury without much concern about how to do the best we can for the grand vision of humanity really settling space. Do we really just want want a bigger collection of baseball cars of people who have touched the surface of the moon, o9r an expansion of “banana republic” kinds of narrow eocnomicd activities in space? Is tghere any chance of humans REALLY expanding into space, developing a solid eocnmic base which make sense without subsidy, and can grow economically without relying on a growth in spending by governments on earth?

Charles Miller, an activist with the Space Frontier Foundation, approached me one day, as I am formally the Executive Vice President for Policy of the National Space Society (at least until the lawyers and the big lobbyists catch up with me, as they have tried to squash him at times). He said: “Why don’t SFF and NSS get together and start a new alliance, an alliance for space development (ASD), to focus on the economic DEVELOPMENT of space? And why don’t we set up new sets of Congressional visits organized around that theme?” I strongly supported that idea and discussed it with the executive committee of NSS. They approved it… but I do not yet know whether the kinds of formal structures they have in place will really live up to the larger need and hope. There are still lots of folks who think that the job of a lobbyist is to instruct constituents on exactly which lone items should be supported in their institutions, without wasting time on why or on where we are headed in the bigger picture.

In any event, at the start, I proposed the following declaration to be the charter for such an alliance, if it ever really materializes as envisioned, and to guide constituents to talk about whatever part of the vision they feel most called to discuss with their representatives in Congress:

Proposed Declaration Defining the new Alliance for Space Development (ASD)

            Paul J. Werbos, 2014

ASD plans to develop, adapt and change a wide variety of position papers, in response to opportunities which come and go. But these specific opportunities will all be within the more fundamental goals of the organization.

The Alliance is dedicated to unifying the efforts of many groups towards one overriding goal, which guides all else: to achieve the economically sustainable human settlement of space. We don't oppose OTHER values on space and earth, but we agree to focus on trying to get to this one, to make it work. We know it is a difficult goal, but that makes it all the more important to focus our efforts and our consciousness to make it happen. This is the one unconditional commitment of ASD.

Why do we want humans in space? For the same reason we want humans on earth. As sane human beings, we will always fight for the survival and growth of humanity, both on earth and in space. We are fully aware of the many obstacles, challenges and risks to human survival and growth, both on earth and in space, but we will never hide from these challenges and will never forget the real bottom line.

To achieve this goal, we will support activities aimed at building the four pillars which our hopes here rest on:

1. NEW MARKETS from space to earth, large enough and tricky enough to create"multiplier" effects beyond what the existing applications in space provide. Space "tourism"  (which is sometimes just recreation and sometimes more serious) and energy from space are the two obvious possibilities, but we are open to others, such as higher levels of communication capabilities to bring better internet capabilities to the poorest people on earth. Whatever the risks in these markets, we need to do the best we can to open up the full potential of the new markets, both through changed regulation and technology development. That's a top priority.

2. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY will also be crucial to making space activities sustainable, affordable and profitable on a larger scale. Most urgent is the development of new technology to allow reusable access to space at minimum marginal) cost, designed with foresight, looking ahead to the hope of large launch volumes to serve new markets. DARPA's XS-1 project is a unique shining light in this space, but earlier projects at the height of the cold war (like Science dawn, RASV and TAV)  developed low-cost technology still essential to the possibilities before us. ASD will not advocate who develops this technology -- new space, old space or governments. Rather, it will try to provide encouragement and support for any player ready to do the serious advanced technology work. In addition to access to space, better technology for transportation beyond low earth orbit is also essential, and other elements of crucial economic infrastructure to improve cost-effectiveness of all efforts in space, even to the end of the solar system and beyond.  ASD will advocate upgrading almost ALL government space activities to take more time but do things right, at lower cost, by allocating effort to advanced technology development to do the mission better.

3. NONTERRESTRIAL materials are another basic pillar of humanity's hope for self-sustaining economic growth in space. This will take more time than the initial development of new markets, but it is an essential requirement which we must meet sooner or later. We have no interest in putting boots on the moon -- but we do have an interest in rational steps as part of a strategy to get real economic value form the moon and from the asteroids, and eventually Mars. The economics history of earth tells us that the best strategy is not to develop just one source of materials, but all of them, starting with what is easiest to get to,, and planning to phase the key decision making into market systems as they become able to take over.

4. HUMAN ABILITY to live and work in space, in the long term, is the fourth and final fundamental pillar of human settlement, and an other basic commitment. To make this real, we agree, at a minimum, that human presence in space should remain continuous and permanent, initially through ISS but through larger, expanded systems in the future, without any retreat.

For more on space solar power, see http://nss.org/EU, and my article on SSP in Ad Astra, summer 2014.

For more detail on some of these points, see my response (slightly edited) to the open request for comments from Tom Kalil of OSTP:

Dear Dr. Kalil and friends, 

On October 14, you quoted Phillip Metzger as saying: “If we want to create a robust civilization in our solar system, more of the energy, raw materials and equipment that we use in space has to come from space.” Then you ask how to do it. My friends and I believe we can help a lot in answering that question.  I attach two samples of aspects we have looked at.

First, let me thank you for posing such an important question. In many, many areas of science and technology, people waste huge amounts of money in efforts which do not keep returning to the big questions of what we are really trying to do. The US space program has certainly experienced a lot of that. While we did not communicate as well as Dr. Metzger this time, some of us have advocated exactly the same idea, and spent many years tying together some of the things which need to be tied together. We have lots and lots of backup material on all the points.  There is a lot of crucial (even urgent) work needed which has fallen between the cracks, due to myopic players in the game. 

Second, though I am not representing NSF in this email,  I have worked there for 25 years now and learned a lot about the key technologies. You probably know about the collaborations of Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge (who is under open attack from Lamar Smith). Bill edited a special issue of Futures in 2009, and asked me for an article which addresses your question in a more detailed, analytical way: P. Werbos, Towards a Rational Strategy for the Human Settlement of Space, Futures, Volume 41, Issue 8, October 2009. Since this was work of a government employee, I was able to legally post it on the web: http://www.werbos.com/E/Rational_Space_Policy.pdf.

We have looked intensively at all four “markets” in the one-pager. One of special interest is space solar power (SSP). A new design paradigm has arisen, based on Japanese funding and a one-time NASA project, which in my view has really serious potential. I say that as one of the directors of the NSF program in Energy, Power, Controls and Networks, with a prior background building energy econometric models and continuing involvement in activities such as the IEEE-USA energy policy committee, ourenergypolicy.org and others. Attached is a draft report on renewable energy research, highlighting SSP as one of four key options; this is not the official view of NSF, but since I wrote it and you are in the government I figure you entitled to full access. By the way, one of the things we should do, in an ideal world here, is add an item to Richard Voyles’ NRI solicitation using this SSP ALPHA assembly as a testbed challenge, perhaps  funding a preliminary effort to tighten up and refine the challenge. Dr. Abdul Kalam, former President of India, flew to the NSS annual meeting last year, and argued very hard for a new international effort to develop that technology, which he sees as very essential to the needs of India and other developing nations; we lost touch when he went on the campaign trail for Narendra Modi, but from OSTP the opportunity still exists. Of course, SSP would be an important energy source for use in space as well as to earth.

Most urgent of all, in my view, is the need for more effective work on lower cost access to space, as in the IEEE-USA position paper on that challenge. There is hope of bipartisan action there, given the strong support by people affiliated with the Marshall Institute and others more aligned with the Administration. http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/SpaceAccess0214.pdf

sort of dream of flight... with hints of out of body and DARPA

First the dream, then the analysis and some details…

I dreamed I was living in some community a few miles east of a river which my mind associated with the Potomac.

I discovered a new “technology” or technique of flying… somehow, there was a way I could hold onto a small child’s balloon, and use it to rise up into the air, to some degree. Initially, I had several interesting experiences with it, moving west in the direction of the river. Then I encountered a very large building in my way, and learned some tricks about how to actually use tis technology… not just riding over the building, but through, noticing the people living there, and out a big opening to the western side. Then I could see grassy, meadowy patches of land below me, between me and the river, and initially I was planning to go to the river, and come back.

But as I approached the river, I noticed a kind of big bus stop or metro station (or both) which I used to use a lot, when I lived north instead of east. I also remembered a DARPA complex which was basically part of this transportation hub, which I used to have dealings with. I decided it would be good and patriotic to show them this new technology, to prove it was real and maybe get them interested. So I flew ahead down to where they were – mainly in two long brick buildings just a few stories high, with no barriers I could see between them and the bus station area. Not a restricted area, so far as I could see. I was curious how they would respond to see someone (obviously harmless) just floating in the air nearby.

The first episode  was positive. One guy (a bright program officer) did notice, and his curiosity was aroused. He said something to himself about how maybe he should check into this, and get something going in his program. But I kept going. Along the long south side of the second brick building (away form the bus stop side), I saw a big full-room window on the second or third floor, where the window, though slightly smoky, was clear enough to show a meeting with several people – several people to witness the new technology, enough that they wouldn’t just assume it was one person’s momentary illusion. So I floated up calmly near the window, and they did turn to look – but they looked very uptight and worried. And then… next step… poof. I was out of the dream.

So what in the world could this mean, and why would I bother to write it down?

Actually, I had been thinking this morning of exploring certain new “next topics” in physics, within the scope of the four-level plan I posted here recently.  And maybe I still will. But after my paper on the internet of things, after the really bad map of political consequences I have been aware of since July 14… should I? Would the very REAL technology I could be working on right now be acceptable activities for me at all? Earth versus galaxy. I decided just now that I WILL get on to the new technology, but in illegible handwriting only partially written down… and give this writeup more priority today.

One area which hard core Freudians and hardcore Rosicrucians agree on is that dreams should not be ignored – and that if one can, one should even maintain a dream diary near bed to try to write them up immediately and elicit memory as one writes. Things which may seem meaningless and then forgotten may equally well turn out to have important meaning as one looks closely. Somehow I am also reminded of LaBerge from the Stanford sleep research center, whose transcripts and records are well worth looking at twice.

This one has an obvious surface interpretation. I have in fact written about a number of new possibilities for technology, knowing full well that they are “visible”  to some important players. Should I stop that kind of thing, because key people may feel more threatened than interested? To some degree, probably yes. I have often underestimated how much people get upset and even actively in opposition for so many things which seemed ever so gentle and harmless to me.

The message seems to be: if people don’t want to hear anything new, don’t give it to them.

But there is more to be said. 

There is a very tricky line between what is a dream and what is an out of body experience. In fact, in my view, it is more like a continuum (with additional dimensions of category relevant) rather than a binary situation where all experiences fit into one category or the other. The question is: what is the DEGREE to which the images you see come form your personal brain subconscious, versus the degree to which they come from outside? Even with the most mundane of dreams, I have heard that people will heard an alarm clock, and incorporate it into their dream as a nasty rock band trying to force its attention on you.  It is possible, for example, that the river in the dream was some other river, in the inputs I received form elsewhere, and that my mind reconstructed the idea of the Potomac (a very gentle association in this case) in much the same way as people reconstruct an alarm clock as a rock band, filling in the image, via the well-known mechanisms of associative memory.

But: was there anything from the outside here, or was it just a normal dream dream? Usually I can tell which it is – and lately, especially when it’s near wake-up time, it usually ISN’T just a dream dream for me. But this time… I don’t feel like bothering to analyze the probabilities of which it might be. It is an instructive example in a way, just because it IS so much closer to what normal people experience.

There was a time, from fall of 1972 to about Christmas 1978, when I was EXTREMELY active in personal experimentation, to try to get more data on what could possibly be going on with the strange stuff people call psychic or spiritual experiences. (I have written about that in lots of places; see my earlier posting on wishes for Alex and Kallie for a few citations, and there is a new one in press in Cosmology they told me yesterday.)

At that time, I was very intrigued by the literature on out of body experience (OOBE). That was less well validated than other things in the regular parapsychology literature, which I drilled through very quickly in the fall of 1972 when I had access to the Harvard library of medicine nearby.  (It didn’t take all that long. I spent much more time there slogging through things like a many-volume book on comparative functional neuroanatomy… for example.) For example, I read through the stuff by Munro and Fox and others. It seemed to me that if I could manage to do something like THAT, it would provide a whole lot more data on how such things really work.

I didn’t really manage it until I returned to Harvard proper, to the nice co-educational graduate dorm I spent two years in. It was quite an experience. It was discrete enough at times. And I did learn a few things.

But part of what I learned was how much it is a matter of degree … and how easily people can get frozen forever through rigid thought and overreliance on expectations, and insufficient attention to what is coming from inside themselves.  But I had less problems with such things than most people do, for a variety of reasons.  Also, I think it really helped that Harvard  or Boston had a nice new age radio station at that time, which I would turn on every night.

On the whole, I would say that of things I read on OOBE… the one most resonant with my own experience was the science fiction trilogy, the trilogy of Oversoul Seven, by Jane Roberts. It seemed to be true, as she said, that LOTS of people have OOBE experience, without really knowing it, floating through “the astral plane” in a kind of semiconscious daze with being aware of where they were, and without much memory later. As Gurdjieff might have said, the challenge was NOT to achieve things like OOBE, but to develop the level of consciousness and awareness to able to do something with it (and with yourself).  I also noted how Fox’s accounts (more credible to me than Munro’s in some ways) do include bits of “the mind filling in,” requiring vigilance in discerning which element of the experience is which.

People who claim to have had a lot of OOBE tend to day that there are “levels and “levels” or even “planes” one can visit. I have had experience tracking ordinary mundane life VERY closely – enough to see that wandering down route one n Maryland in the dark at night doesn’t present a whole lot of excitement and new information after one or two shots at it. And the “inner self” is very much driven by issues of what it finds interesting, such that it takes a lot more than ordinary discipline to do that even a couple of times.

Such people often talk about “near earth astral” levels, which map reasonably well to ordinary geography and even laws of physics, but with major slight changes. Dreams of flight are a very classic example of things which are often near-earth astral experiences.  So many people have so many dreams of flight that it is a major subtopic in lots of psychology (though I couldn’t give a scholarly review of them all right now).

In my own previous dreams of flight, it has usually NOT been like the one last night. Usually… the dynamics have been a lot closer to what a lot of Chinese folks might expect. The key was to pull in an influx of some kind of qi or energy, lightening the (astral) body, so that it can float up… and sometime s it is very easy, and sometimes it is a struggle requiring effort.  Tales of people flying with qi are rampant in southern China, and reflected in modern movies like flying dragon, crouching tiger (or did I get that backwards?).  This one, a kind of children’s image, was the first I have had of THAT kind, hinting at a lesser probability of it being near-earth astral (whatever else it might or might not be, and whatever else the other data suggest).

Actually, I should immediately note that I do not believe there is such a physical thing  as an astral plane or an astral body. Exactly as LaBerge says in his books, I agree that that is “just a Construct of Mind” – Mind with a capital M, as in the Upanishads, which I think he cites. (That or something more or less equivalent.)  Our brains construct images and memories and prototypes and ideas and possibilities to help it organize itself – and so too does the Noosphere.  Issues like the maintenance of sparsity and “garbage collection’ are important n the ordinary computational intelligence of building and understanding things like mouse brains; they very much apply at this level to.

By the way, it is interesting how so many of the most pious and rigid of religious fanatics are among the very closest likely targets of the garbage collection systems, for full spiritual dissolution. That’s what happens to spiritual couch potatoes, who sit on the couch screaming support for Their Team even as their own eyes remain blind and they rot away inside. I take the final “poof” of this dream as one piece of evidence more in favor of “near earth” astral aspects... due to the usual sparsity mechanisms; something like privacy applies even at these levels.

All for now.

 

how can we make sure the internet does not grow into a living hell?

Back before 9/11, the internet was one thing we could count on to make human life steadily better and more fun for everyone. Or so it seemed. It seems clear that the internet we knew will grow into something much larger, which people call the "internet of things" (IOT).  But will it liberate us and free our spirits and minds ever more -- or will it be the instrument of a gulag existence or cyberpunk warfare, ultimately draining and threatening the human spirit to the point where the very existence of humans comes into question? The hopes and the dangers are both quite real, and we may heading towards the worst right now if we don't think hard and see the ways to do better,,,

Mainstream futurologists spend a lot of time talking abut the future of work and the future of the internet -- for good reason, since they are major parts of regular life. But how much do they really know about what the IoT actually is, and is becoming?

At NSF, some folks recently asked me to write a little piece on the IoT, where it is going and what we could do to affect where it is going. This is just my personal reaction to that question, not anything at all official... yes, I see major threats, opportunities and needs for action in new directions. I wrote it for NSF, but it certainly goes well beyond NSF.

So first I copy over the draft, and then add some comments about tricky aspects beyond the draft.
At the end, I later add a follow-on paper, formally on "smart cities", which gets a bit deeper into some of these issues -- such as health care, privacy, sequestration...

==========================
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New Directions at NSF for the Internet of Things (IoT)

 

Paul J. Werbos, Oct. 30, 2014

 

1. Summary

 

NSF already funds substantial research related to most of the many, complex requirements of the IoT. For example, many of the potential important benefits to the nation lie in three key application domains: (1) energy; (2) healthcare; and (3) education and human potential. Conscious attention to long-term transformative national needs and opportunities possible through the IOT could be enhanced in all three areas, but important efforts are already being made. Likewise, the enabling technologies of data analytics, prediction, control, low power radio communication,  machine intelligence, human-computer interface  and associated large-scale internet technology are all receiving attention. There is growing attention to cloud computing, with large centrally maintained server farms,  as one approach to implement new algorithms and cope with the growing deluge of data from IOT and other sources.

 

The opportunities for doing even better in this area come in three main possible areas: (1) technical improvements and better, more forward looking integration of the existing efforts; (2)  improved translational work connecting these to downstream users; and (3) new directions to address the growing concerns about security and privacy, and strengthening the free market of ideas which underlies the unique productivity of America’s university system and economy in general.

 

Because so much attention has already been given to (1) and (2), the many unmet possibilities for positive benefit in IOT as such are relatively technical, and hard to summarize at the “300,000 foot” level. Most striking perhaps are: (1) developing ways for teams of humans and robots to work together in coordinated tasks, which have often been discussed, but which could become more concrete by addressing testbeds of an X prize flavor in remote mining, in assembly of a well-defined family of large space structures [1], or in assembly of large CPS solar farms (for which construction labor is the main cost, unlike PV farms); (2) expansion of immersive experience, including remote laboratory experience and student health monitoring, connected to a cross-cutting new effort in improving education of the Other 3 Billion (O3B, in Google’s terms) connected to other expansions in the internet as such both on earth and in space. Both of these would require NSF to work in greater partnership with others. NSF efforts on (3) are relatively new [3], and offer more opportunities for new directions, as well as new basic intellectual challenges and dilemmas of great importance to national needs.  Unresolved issues about privacy and security are perhaps the major barrier today facing vendors of IoT and cloud services [2].

 

2. Basic Background on IoT—What It is and How it is Seen

 

Wikipedia [4] defines the IoT as “the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices within the existing internet infrastructure.” In practice, it also entails the development of new technology for the devices themselves, and expansion of the existing Internet to make better use of them.

 In May 2013, McKinsey Institute published a widely cited evaluation of 12 new disruptive technologies, including IoT, and predicted that the global economic impact of IoT could reach $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion per year by 2025 [5,6]. An IBM viewpoint [7] states: “The industry predicts that by 2010 possibly 50 billion devices will be connected, which is 10 times the number of all current Internet hosts, including connected mobile phones.”

                McKinsey [8] envisions two types of market or application. First, there are three markets for new information and analysis opened up by IoT: (1) the tracking of behavior; (2) enhanced situational awareness; and (3) sensor-driven decision analytics. There are three markets for automation and control: (1) process optimization; (2) optimized resource consumption; and (3) complex autonomous systems. Goldman Sachs [9] partitions the same markets in a more concrete way, as five segments: (1) wearable electronics; (2) connected cars; (3) connected homes; (4) connected cities; and (5) industries, such as intelligent power grid and healthcare.

                A thorough review by Wikipedia [4] discusses many such applications, but focuses on the key enabling technologies such as the required new protocols, architectures, security and privacy, without which it could all tank.

                All three levels of analysis (McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Wikipedia) give important insights and are relevant to assessing the portfolio and potential of NSF work.

 

3. Issues of Security and Privacy

 

Since the 9/11 event, the world has been facing a growing difficulty in trying to do justice to three major values:

(1)     Security vis-à-vis growing risks from terrorism, particularly considering the possibility of escalation of terrorism to weapons of mass destruction (WMD);

(2)     Cybersecurity, in the face of rising threats, including a greater ability by hackers to locate and exploit all kinds of back doors, and to use control of physical devices to cause physical destruction;

(3)     Protection of privacy and intellectual property, which is essential to systems of trust and confidentiality like the NSF review process, and to intellectual creativity and productivity in general.

The tension between these  three values is analogous in a way to the tension between creating jobs and reducing national debt (while accounting for economic growth and sustainability).  It will play out on a global stage much larger than anything NSF can decide.  However, in both cases, technical creativity could be useful in offering better choices or tradeoffs, to require less damage to one value while pursuing another.

This section will discuss each of these three values in more detail.

 

3.1. Terrorism and Monitoring

 

                With regards to (1), NSF partnership with DHS [10] brought us some awareness of just how severe and how real some of the challenges are, looking forward. At one meeting, it was said that the United States is like a house with 20 doors, 10 locked tight with lots of opportunities to strengthen the locks, and 10 open and swinging wide for all the world to see with no realistic ideas in sight for how to close them.  For the case of “dirty bombs” (radioactivity but not fission), the main reason we have not seen major scares yet is that the supply of such materials is very limited at the source. However, as the world energy economy goes through major transformations, the availability of nuclear material and technology now seems likely to grow substantially, in all parts of the world, stable and unstable.  (Breakthroughs in renewable energy technology could possibly help reduce that factor, but on the present path they are not moving fast enough.) 

In recent discussions with DNDO/DHS, they were shifting towards more reliance on human intelligence and deterrence (as can be seen by inspecting the last funding announcement, in comparison with earlier ones) to cope with this threat. However, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and the global response to them, many have said that the old methods of human intelligence are no longer working so well. This poses one dilemma, and one value which needs to be considered.

 

3.2. Cybersecurity and IoT

 

On the other hand,  many view the emerging cybersecurity threats as even more serious than WMD terrorism.  In IEEE-USA meetings and other venues, leaders from the electric utility industry have told us again and again that they view cybersecurity and electromagnetic pulses (EMP) as the two biggest threats to the working of the power grid. Congressional legislation has reflected those concerns. The number of cyberattacks has been rising at a very rapid rate, and has also grown more sophisticated. At a meeting at the National Defense University in 2009, Sandia researchers showed how big generators can be taken out by a cyberattack – enough perhaps to send the entire US back to the dark ages, due to system of system effects. Of course, the Internet of Things includes embedded control systems, which are the front lines of any attack intended to cause physical damage. Putting those things on the Internet does create serious new risks. 

                Cybersecurity has also become a large and profitable industry for many consulting firms. This has mixed benefits and costs.  On the one hand, a growing workforce has emerged of real-time operations people, monitoring threats, and expanding capabilities for intrusion detection and isolation. However, as the tide of attacks grows larger and larger, beyond the ability of this workforce to cope with well enough, many financial institutions hope to be saved by a combination of better intrusion detection and “sandboxing” to test suspicious software. Alongside these capabilities have evolved additional protections involving identity authentication, procedures and so on. Recent NSF research [3] has shown ways to improve password protection systems. Research in China has been especially active in biometric methods, and may possibly be ahead of the US in that area. Consulting firms do tend to have a vested interest in maintaining the sales and credibility of the limited capabilities they now have to offer.

                However, many involved in really critical physical infrastructure argue that all of these methods combined still are not enough. After all, just one explosion of a major generator would be a huge problem, even if the responsible attack was only one success out of a million attempts (not an unrealistic number for what is coming). Thus, when the “things” are critical generators or other critical embedded systems, much of the front line power industry uses a different type of operating system, Security Enhanced (SE) Linux , developed in part with help from the NSA.

                SE Linux is grounded in important capabilities initially developed in university research [11,12] but hardly ever discussed by the consulting industry or its representatives. In essence, it relies on research in the 1970’s which fed into the development of the Multics operating system (which I once worked with, albeit for data analytic apps, but with direct contact with the Pl/1 core programming four floors away in the same building at MIT). It involves a very strict adherence to formal rules about the use of privileged access and ring brackets. Theorems were proven offering absolute unbreakability of the operating system, if the rules were adhered to.

                Recent versions of Microsoft operating systems included some effort to apply the same principles, but adherence to rules was not quite so strict and backdoors compromise the theorems to some degree. Apple and Linux operating systems have been much more strict in following what is now called “the Unix model,” but relatively recently it turned out that back doors were found and exploited by malicious hackers for Apple as well. Most shocking of all was the very recent discovery of  ShellShock vulnerability in most Linux and Apple systems – which includes the embedded systems at the forefront of the IoT.

                Industry sources are understandably reluctant to go too public about their concerns for the vulnerability of embedded systems. The most advanced industry researcher I have contact with there says that the plan now is to move to a kind of “patch” model for embedded systems, very different from the frozen mode used in the past for the sake of verification and validation (V&V), more similar to Microsoft mass products, but how to do that for billions of small embedded systems mainly communicating by wireless is something of a challenge – to some extent a research challenge, but to some extent just a problem.

                An additional problem comes from the update cycle for electric utility software. The operations manager of one of the major power systems has told me that yes, like his counterparts elsewhere, he relies on SE Linux, but he actually gets his software from one of the three or four big vendors (like AB&B). They promise full compliance with SE standards of unbreakability, but with some delay. Since it takes some time to ensure compliance, but new software capabilities are needed all the time, they are always behind and never fully compliant in practice.

                In summary, detecting and getting rid of backdoors (and insecurities from outright bugs noncompliant with SE rules)  for all embedded systems and critical infrastructure would be a huge step forward.  Important work has been done recently on automated systems to detect dangerous bugs [3,13], but university researchers could go further. It should be possible to develop open, transparent compliance checking codes, which could be trusted by a wide range of users, grounded in the original theorems [11,12].  Of course, to protect wireless embedded systems, this would also require that hard encryption be part of enhanced standards.   

 

3.3. Privacy Versus Transparency

 

The protection of intellectual property and private information is another value of the highest importance. For example, at a recent conference organized by Federal Computer Week, Keith Alexander (recent Director of NSA) stated that theft of intellectual property by China and others is very much at the top of his list of global concerns. He agreed that monitoring to detect terrorism is unavoidable by all major powers, but intellectual theft and sabotage rise to an extremely high level of concern.

                This concern is very relevant to NSF, since we receive some of the most advanced ideas in technology considered anywhere, well before they reach the slow deployment process in US industry. Certainly there are cases where Japan and China have deployed technologies developed in the US before the US did, because of the general speed of some of their systems. Some of that was based on ideas in the open literature, but one could argue that NSF (and other government agencies and technology firms and universities) should have  much more solid protection, as great as what could be had for embedded systems. Security and confidentiality are essential concern of NSF PIs. I have even encountered cases where PIs were wiling to submit ideas to NSF, but not to DOE, because with NSF they felt more secure that systems managed by people with university values would protect them from premature leaks to big stakeholder corporations.                 

            Should NSF and a wide variety of other organizations have access to SE compliant operating systems, backed up by open transparent compliance checking software? Should this be managed at the level of local area networks, or applied individually to servers, PCs, and mobile devices, with secure communication between them?  There is room for considerable research on the relevant tradeoffs.

                Perhaps the most sticky tradeoff is the tradeoff between unbreakability and security at the PC level, versus monitoring for terrorism and such (section 3.1). In the past, limited backdoors may have seemed to offer the best of both worlds (as with Apple operating systems), where “Unix standards” offered unbreakability to normal hackers but transparency to those with the information. But the events of the past year or two show that this does not work so well as some may have hoped, and other factors have made monitoring more difficult in any case.

                Likewise, communication technology plays a central role here. NSF and the US have in the past been leaders in the quantum technologies most relevant here, but it is not clear how long they can retain that leadership, which requires strengthening the culture of discovery, and not only innovation as such. In general, distributed systems under central management have less security than systems where the nodes themselves are secure, especially when there is heavy reliance on wireless communication; however, for many small embedded systems, one has little choice. The implications for economic interactions and corporate culture are also important.

                There is room for considerable research on all these tradeoffs and options.

 

4. Selected Examples of Possible Areas for IoT Application and Research

 

NSF probably has awarded something like 10,000 or more grants related to core issues of the IoT. That very crude estimate comes from considering the ten or so areas of NSF research mentioned in sections 1 and 2, and the many years over which NSF has funded work in those areas.  Of course, it is impossible for a brief review written over two weeks to do full justice to that very wide range of work. Therefore, for this draft, I will mention just four of the areas I have looked into, starting with what look like the most interesting unmet open opportunities:

(1)     More focus on human-robotic teams for selected assembly tasks (space solar power SSP, mining, solar farm construction);

(2)     Enlargement of cross-disciplinary global education efforts aimed at the Other 3 Billion (O3B);

(3)     Intelligent Power Grid;

(4)     Connected Cars.

This discussion will build heavily on my previous report on renewable energy [14]. In essence, for each of the possible markets for IoT, it is important to consider where the real large opportunities are to better meet the ultimate national needs.

 

4.1. Human-Robotic Teams

 

In 2002, the Engineering Directorate of NSF the senior managing partner of the last open call from the US government for research related to space solar power (SSP) [1,14].  NASA and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) also participated. At the time, many of the earlier problems had been solved, but it was still considered an area for high risk research, mainly because of cost issues with the current designs. Even at the time, it was recognized that the sheer assembly of large structures in space would be one of the three toughest challenges – one of the three areas where new research was most essential to reduce risks and be more certain about likely costs.

                Because of the importance of robotic assembly to that task, robotic assembly was a major topic in the program announcement. It also received the largest number of proposals from the community. As we held a joint workshop, and surveyed the community, we found that “teleautonomy” was the most promising way to solve the real world challenges here.

                “Teleautonomy” is an outgrowth of the earlier important concept of telerobotics. In telerobotics (as in UAV control), a human still makes real-time decisions, but manages some kind of robotics body, typically far away, in a hazardous location. Teleautonomy is essentially the same, except that the robots have just enough intelligence or skill to perform a number of recurrent basic tasks, such that one human can control, say, ten robots. Rhett Whittaker of Carnegie-Mellon (CMU) was the best know spokesman for this, but a Canadian, Baiden, of Laurentian University, had developed the most impressive working systems, used in underground mining.

                The challenge then is to expand the fundamental tools for teleautonomy, by developing repertoires of skills (and bodies) for robots used in tasks like large-scale assembly in space or construction or solar farms, and, even trickier, developing ways to coordinate whole teams of humans coordinating larger teams or robots, aimed at well-defined construction goals.  In principle, this is already within the scope of the National Robotics Initiative, but focus on specific testbed challenge with large potential benefits would stimulate more thinking and proposals, and make comparison easier, in the spirit of X prize.

                I suggest two testbeds, one related to recent designs for SSP and one to solar farms, because they bring out different aspects of the new technology possible, and because they happen to address critical bottlenecks or uncertainties in the two technologies which seem most important to me for affordable, global renewable energy [14]. In both cases, coordinating teams of humans in charge of many robots is the core issue.

                For the case of solar farms, I am excited by the realistic possibilities for using dish style solar energy to get down to 5-10 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). New research into Stirling engines might itself be enough to get us there, when combined with things going on in the firms which best understand this technology.  However, use of automated construction of solar farms could reduce the cost and the risk. In [14], I estimated that every ten cents per kwh equates to about $2 trillion per year in the global electricity market. A deep reduction in cost and risk would be worth it.

                The chief scientist of STM (the firm which produced the six demo dishes operating still at Sandia) estimates that 90% of the cost of building that type of solar farm is the cost of labor in construction. Unlike PVs, there is no need to import solar cells from China, or pay for expensive DC-to-AC converters; power comes out as AC directly.  Thus reduction in construction cost could be very important. Also, this kind of “solar farm” is actually more like an “orchard,” where each tree is about as high as a two-story building but far less heavy and complicated.  Construction robotics has addressed much larger structures already in Japan, but the US has yet to catch up with Japan in this area; open research, starting with a reasonable sized testbed, could be very useful. A team at MIT already studied solar farm construction, under EFRI, but much more is needed, including use of intelligent control at the level of the individual robot (which is much safer and easier than totally automated, truly intelligent network-wide control). One tricky aspect, however, is that partnership might be needed with a US manufacturer like Caterpillar well equipped to produce this type of mobile robotic assembly platform. On the plus side, one might hope this would fit with the OSTP interest in getting DOE more involved with NRI.

                For the case of SSP, much smaller robots, in free space, are called for. The latest new work on SSP [1,14] shows real promise now in getting down to 9 cents per kwh anywhere on earth, 24 hours per day, switchable from hour to hour to places of greatest need (price).  The new designs call for a highly modular, “lego kit,” style of system, such that assembly of the many pieces in space is essential. Sketch designs exist for the robot bodies, and eight other small elements, but the coordination of hundreds or robots to build one large structure out of little pieces is the essential intellectual challenge. Fabrication and testing of the “lego pieces’ themselves is also a valid area for university research; it is hope that design of a good enough simulator could be a key step in enabling lots of competition here on earth, between multiple teams, addressing teleautonomous assembly in simulation.

                For SSP the SSP topic, partnership would be needed (or a large scale integrator grant) to develop the key testbed for competitive smaller scale teams.

                As I type this, I have received information that Abdul Kalam (former President of India, with links to the new Prime Minister) , is excited by a new international meeting on global collaboration on SSP, which Japan and China are already funding. The potential benefits to economic development (and reducing the need for nuclear proliferation) could be enormous.  However, though I was invited to come and represent the US, I have responded that I personally probably do not have the kind of mandate they would need. Still, if NSF becomes active, many partners could become available. 

 

4.2 Expanded Education for the Other 3 Billion

 

Education for the poorest three billion people of earth is a huge potential new market, but is also an area of enormous strategic importance for the entire world. China, for example, has shown how high levels of effort in education can have huge benefits to economic growth and stability in the present world economy. The hope is that new technology might reduce the cost and delay in getting higher levels of education and empowerment out to all the rest of the poorest three billion people of earth.

 

One of the key requirements here is for expanded internet access as such. Wireless technology has played a central role in this, and ECCS research has been at the cutting edge of developing new wireless technology. However, ECCS and US university research has tended to reflect the existing markets in the US, which gives huge weight to the richer 3 billion. There have been a few discussions in past years of  an NSF push into O3B, but they never got very far – though the EARS people and Jerry Tian did seem to want to move us that way, before their departures.

 

But in the meantime, the private sector has started to respond to the huge market potential here. Personally, I have heard more about the Facebook and google efforts, which are extremely high priorities for those companies, but major competitors are also putting money into the area.

 

What could NSF do above and beyond what they are already doing? The NSF has certain special areas of leverage which could help here: (1) ability to look even further into the future, towards higher-risk higher benefit technology; (2) a strong connection to educational technology, which is by far the most important internet service that could be provided here; and (3)  advanced physical device technology, which could be important to the quality (and cost) of experience of the end user, in the “last mile.”  All three link nicely with areas of NSF research, which could play a key role in any new cross-cutting partnership.

 

Educational technology has been discussed at such great length already at NSF that I would hesitate to get  deeper into it in this review. However, it is interesting that the choice of end user devices to develop should reflect what is being learned about what benefits education. Education research needs to be an integral part of this. But technologies like wearable devices for health monitoring bring device technology to education as well. For example, I was very impressed by research for the Science of Learning Centers which showed  that some elementary school teachers, when shifting to teaching arithmetic, would suddenly experience spurts of adrenalin worse than what they would get being attacked by a dog. Monitoring of such reactions could be useful in presentation of curricular material. And of course, immersive experience is relevant.

 

Several major private sector players have told me that costs of the nodes in poor countries could be reduced enormously, and quality improved, if we could study the option of designing and orbiting really large new communication satellites, perhaps even as a testbed for solar power collection in space. In an ideal world, we should include such possibilities in any new O3B partnership.

 

4.3. The Intelligent Grid

 

The intelligent grid is often cited as the lead example of IoT benefits to the industry sector, because the use of internet and system-wide intelligent systems has been explored in greater depth for the power grid than for other sectors.

 

As with all experience confronting the real world and the real needs, there has been a mix of lessons, some more encouraging, some less encouraging. All were discussed to some degree in this year’s ISGT smart grid conference in Washington DC, and also in the Clemson power conference which got quite a bit deeper into the use of new intelligent systems technology (led by Venayagamoorthy, one of the ECCS PIs).

 

On the positive side, Venayagamoorthy’s group has demonstrated new world class breakthroughs in situational awareness using IoT technologies, with considerable industry support adding to the original NSF support. With Harley and Liang, they have outlined a strategy by which intelligent technologies could reduce the effective cost of renewable electricity to the end user by a factor of 50% or more [14].  This certainly counts as a major national need. Deepak Divan, a collaborator of Harley (also ECCS-funded) developed new actuators (a key type of embedded device) with enormous implications for our ability to absorb plug-in hybrid cars in power distribution systems without going unstable, another major national need; he has incorporated his inventions, and received important follow-on funding form ARPA-E and form industry.

 

On the negative side, critics have gone carefully over the twenty or so benefits which were promised as part of the billions of dollars spent on smart grid under the stimulus act. Much of that money enabled the industry to catch up on woefully overdue needs of system maintenance and modernization, of great value with or without the IoT part. However, the primary “showcase” arguing for the IoT smart grid work at ISGT (not counting ARPAE) was an effort to lower voltage in distribution systems, “saving energy” by getting people to operate at lower power. The community spoke out rather clearly about that; their feedback is a strong warning to any investment in these areas, not to lose side of  the areas of larger need, even when they are more futuristic and impose greater requirements for high risk R&D and for IT, including deployed intelligence. The opportunities are real in this market, but we could easily lose them if we are not clear and imaginative enough.

 

 

4.4. Smart Cars

 

Intelligent transportation and smart cars have been a major theme of research for many decades now.

 

For many years, auto industry leaders were quietly very skeptical of that research. They saw little chance that individual car drivers would want to give up so much autonomy, or that cities would spend so much money as required for most of the schemes for smart controlled roadways. Marketing studies showed that reliability was number on, two and three in what consumers wanted, not automation.

 

Before the economic collapse of 2008,  this had changed to some degree. More and more, car companies saw on-board electronics (especially GPS and diagnostics) as vital ways to differentiate their products, and onboard electronics for individual cars became a great priority. It is amusing that China’s most potent new competitor, BYD Qin (guided by Buffet’s suggestions), actually has a small robot dancing on the dashboard to humanize some of those services.

 

However, after the economic collapse, and the rise in oil prices up to that collapse, issues of fuel security and basic have risen in priority. Oil prices are currently low, perhaps due to a special effort by the Saudis more than the promising decade of oil fracking ahead of us; however, long-term markets will still be heavily influenced by the new conditions.  From the viewpoint of national need, one might argue that toys like dancing robots on the dashboard are matters for the private sector, whereas management of new propulsion plants (as funded on-again off-again at ECCS) is more crucial. Domain expertise and vehicle-level intelligent control and embodied chips play a crucial role, but the need for internet connectivity is not as clear. Changes in the power grid are needed, to accommodate new cars (section 4.3), but the car itself need not be complicated.

 

IoT has two other important new aspects in the smart car area.

 

One is the greater development of “On Star” kinds of systems. Industry is already working hard to deploy such systems, to exploit the internet for what consumers care about most – reliability. Ford Motor formerly had a major intelligent systems group focused on new technology to support such systems, but its director, Kenneth Marko, migrated first to Bosch and then to retirement, and I do not have as much access now to what is under the hood. There are many unmet opportunities in that sector. On the other hand, IEEE Spectrum has run a story on just how serious the vulnerability of all modern cars is to really strong, central cyberattacks.

Self-driving cars are also now very popular as an idea in much of the “new adopter” and curious public. This area has a long history, but, as with the dancing robot, it is not clear how vital these cars would be to national security; again, some things are best left to the private sector, except for the military applications, which are being actively pursued at DOD.

  

References

 

1.       P. Werbos, Reviewing space solar power policy, Ad Astra, Vol. 26, No. 2, summer 2014

2.       Mike Kavis, The internet of things will radically change your big data strategy, Forbes magazine, June 26, 2014.

        3. NSF, Leading researchers to discuss privacy and security in a connected age

//www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=133147&org=ENG&from=home

       4. Wikipedia, Internet of things, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things

5.       James Manyika, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Peter Misson and Alex Marrs, Disruptive technologies: advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy. www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/disruptive_technologies

6.       M2M, Internet of things (IoT) companies gear up for $6 trillion market demand, http://mesh-systems.com/news/iot-companies

7.       Brad Bech, James Jamison, Ling Shao and Glenn Wightwick, The interconnecting of everything, IBM Academy of Technology, RedBooks, 2013

8.       Michael Chui, Markus Loffler and Roger Roberts, The Internet of Things, McKinsey, March 2010, www.mckinset.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_internet_of_things

9.       Simona Jankowski, James Covello, Heather Bellini, Joe Ritchie and Daniela Cost,IoT primer: the

Internet of things: making sense of the next mega-trend, Global Investment Research, Goldman Sachs http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/outlook/internet-of-things/iot-report.pdf

10.    NSF, Joint Domestic Nuclear Detection Office-National Science Foundation: Academic Research

Initiative  (ARI), http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503223

111.    David D. Clark and David R. Wilson, A Comparison of Commercial and Military Computer

Security Policies, www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/1987/0771/00/07710184.pdf

112.    Chen, Yanpei, Vern Paxson, and Randy H. Katz. "What’s new about cloud computing security."

University of Calif., Berkeley Report No. UCB/EECS-2010-5 January 20.2010 (2010): 2010-5.

13.    Gary McGraw, Technology transfer: a software security marketplace case study, IEEE Software,

September/October 2011.

14.    Paul Werbos, Research in Renewable Energy – Emerging Opportunities for NSF, August 2014,

draft in this previous series

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There are a few tricky bits I did not choose to include, because everyone on earth has limited bandwidth and emotional constraints. Luda has said: "You somehow seem to have the ability to drive even robots crazy..." unless I take care very consciously to try to limit what I say. Then again, she is that person who was once kicked out of arxiv.org, when it said: No human could possibly read so fast; you must be a robot, so we are denying you access.

One tricky bit -- machine compliance verification for standards involves defining and agreeing to standards. Unbreakability and strong encryption should be clear enough, for PCs and servers, folks who know [11] and [12].

But should the standard also require something in the operating system which sends stuff to a backup cache, giving the user a choice of a useful local backup and a mandate that data will go to a central cloud repository with an internally agreed procedure for control, to allow some kind of monitoring for terrorism? In my view, such things need to be agreed to in the open and understood and limited and controlled -- but whether they should exist at all is a matter for debate "above my pay grade." The R&D should analyze what options exist on those lines. If nuclear terrorism can threaten our very existence, it is discussable.

Another tricky bit -- what about HARDWARE backdoors? Let me just raise that as a question. It depends a lot on who designs and makes the chips, and what they know how to do in that process, and on quality control technology.

In the paper, I skirted the issues of true machine intelligence, which I have discussed before on this blog. (Search on "terminator".) Decent control of individual vehicles and such can be done with what I call "vector intelligence," a level of intelligence far below that of a mouse and far above the old PID kind of control used in the Orbital rocket which blew up about two days ago. The paper does call for more use of vector intelligence, but skirts the kinds of things which could be more threatening on their own or in the wrong hands, which have been a growing concern for me since July 14, a major personal watershed I might write about more in the future. 

One Lifeboat guy tells me this all may be necessary but not sufficient. True. Radia type software,
with no integrity in the individual PC, can still be used to make life a living hell more and more.
Conversely, for legitimate international agreed open monitoring of terrorism
(cache with agreed distribution), encryption still enters; my physics posting today (as I add this paragraph in update) suggests that requires a level of quantum technology now not in sight (i.e. more than risky, though objectively quite doable)  for the US, due to recent political fluctuations.


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Smart Cities: A High Risk Opportunity

 

Paul J. Werbos, Nov. 20, 2014

 

1. Summary

 

The term “smart cities” means very different things to different people [1]. This paper will address smart cities defined as new approaches to applying information and communication technology (ICT) to challenges faced by the city governments of the world.

The IBM evaluation of smart cities [2, p.7] argues that the important concrete opportunities in this area boil down to four sectors:

 

(1)    Reducing congestion in the transport system;

(2)    Improve emergency response and reduce crime;

(3)    Improve education delivery and state government services;

(4)    Improve access-to patient-centered healthcare

 

Prominent critics of centralized smart city systems [1,3] argue that more attention is needed, instead, on core political and cultural issues of cities, and that systems defined primarily by engineers (even systems engineers) may do more harm than good, by neglecting larger social system issues beyond the scope of engineering as such. Even in high technology Boston, where MIT is working on smart cities and is well-connected to the city government, there is considerable skepticism about large scale smart city packaged systems [3].

This being so, I would envision three major priorities for engineering of smart cities in the US, where compelling social needs are strong enough to outweigh public skepticism:

 

(1)    The health care venue, where the national growth in costs is still a crisis, and where political impasse at the national level creates an opening for solutions at the local level;

(2)    Ordinary business process re-engineering, for ordinary and emergency services, which may or may not call for intelligent systems as such;

(3)    Systems to improve dialogue, in the spirit of open government and university-style deep discussion, to support more effective information economies [4,5].

 

Only (1) and (3) require substantial new challenging research. Thus only (1) and (3) offer substantial new opportunities specifically for those who are strong in advanced research.

The remainder of this paper will discuss (1) and (3) in order.

 

2. The Opportunity for Smart Healthcare

 

The President has often said that the explosive growth in healthcare costs in the US is a major crisis. Even after the passage of Obamacare, his best effort to date to address this crisis, the Congressional Budget Office [6] projects that federal spending on healthcare will rise from under 4% of GDP, as at present, to about 8% by 2038 – not counting spending on healthcare at other levels of the economy. Federal spending on healthcare is projected to be greater than all other noninterest spending in the federal budget.

Another way to look at this is that the sequestration bill passed two years ago, requiring that civilian and military agencies from NASA and NSF to DOD get their budgets cut in half over about ten years, remains in effect. The temporary easing of sequestration passed last year basically runs out at the end of this year, and continued rises in medical costs cast doubt on the claims by lobbyists for all agencies that they will somehow avoid the big crunch for their agency.

Yet another way to look at this is that the efficiency of medical technology is not decreasing, that the present level of medical care is not a crisis, and that many other nations seem to be able to do more with less. In principle, a substantial improvement in cost-effectiveness ought to be possible, and we should be able to zero out the threat of a cost crisis without reducing the quality of medical care.

In principle, a quiet backdoor agreement between political parties should be able to improve efficiency beyond what Obamacare already provides for. The President has repeatedly said that he is open to such constructive changes. However,  it does not seem to be on the horizon at present. Some of the Republicans suspicious of healthcare reform have argued that it should be at the local level in any case, and show respect for the private sector. This being so, there may be a huge opening at present for ICT-based solutions at the municipal level which meet these concerns, if powerful enough new systems/solutions can be developed.

However, the R&D challenge is quite formidable here. There is a need for a whole-systems solution, which would be based on a combination of social science understanding of the healthcare system, ICT systems design, and exploitation of new devices such as low cost diagnostic systems available directly to patients. NSF research has developed many promising possibilities at the device level here, especially in the CBET division (but with significant ECCS presence as well). However, the connection both to new devices and to social reality in the ICT level could be enhanced. The politics of empowering patients may be tractable, but needs special attention, in the face of special interests. Places like the Harvard School of Health and Wharton have provided a great deal of analysis relatively independent of the vested interests which tend to limit the creativity and cost reduction potential of new approaches.

In the end, more efficiency in this sector does imply a loss of some jobs – or at least a loss in the rate of growth of jobs and markets which many medical equipment makers are now counting on. It will be essential to develop new interfaces for patients which, unlike today’s voicemail systems and medical clerks, provide maximum real assistance to them, respecting recent research [7].  Pathways for a smooth transition are also important.

 

3. Opportunities for Open Government and Dialogue

 

The IBM report on smart cities stresses the importance of open systems, creativity and the information economy in the introduction [2].  However, it does not translate that into areas for immediate effort.  That is understandable, in a way, since it is a great challenge to try to devise ICT systems which directly address these grand challenges. Yet in the end, the challenges in education and law enforcement are even greater, if one fully accounts for the full dimensions of those issues, without which  public skepticism would be well justified. In some ways, systems for more open government and deeper dialogue in general in the urban areas  may even be important steppingstones to useful progress in the two other areas, in the US.  (Some cities in other parts of the world may have emergencies in those areas, like the crime problem in Rio, calling for different approaches and more deployment of the limited tools now available.)

One way to approach the development of such ICT tools is to consider the tools being developed for engineering researchers, such as tools for finding collaborators and supporting collaborations, and trying to make them more available, not only for paid activities but for volunteer activities and civic activities which are vital both to the happiness [8] and to the productivity [4,5] of modern communities. Another way is to consider how tools like the Watson debate-viewpoint search engine might also be brought in somehow. Deep search engines and deep dialogue have some relation with each other. It may be essential here to bite the bullet, and find ways to account for the deepest insights from social science, from economics and even from serious ethical philosophy when designing systems people are asked to live with.

One important part of this research would be to develop the types of AI system which would be most effective in supporting (and earning) the full creativity, diversity and trust of the human participants. Systems based on scalar measures of trust and best guess estimates could possibly degrade dialogue, even compared with more naive systems, because of the multidimensional nature of trust, uncertainty, values (which are crucial if any optimization tools are used) and emotional filters. All the considerations discussed in my recent report on the Internet of Things, involving privacy and security, are also important here.

 

References

 

1.     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city

2.     Susanne Dirks, Constantin Gurdgiev and Mary Keeling, Smarter cities for smarter growth, IBM Global Business Services. Highlighted at www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/smarter-cities.html

3.     Courtney Humphries, The too-smart city, Boston Globe, May 18, 2013

4.     Edward D. Hess, Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization

5.     Neal M. Ashkanasy, Celeste P. M. Wilderom and Mark F. Peterson , The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (Washington DC: Sage, 2011)

6.     Congressional Budget Office,  The 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44521

7.     hepsychreport.com/current-events/head-of-white-house-nudge-unit-maya-shankar-speaks-about-newly-formed-us-social-and-behavioral-sciences-team/

8.     OECD, Work and Well-Being: Insights from Happiness Research http://www.oecd.org/site/worldforum06/38657262.pdf