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Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
By Aubrey
de Grey
A long life
in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been
one of humanity’s
greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted
diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will
enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging. Nearly
all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday
be able to substantially
slow down the aging process, extending our productive,
youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such
researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging
from 60 Minutes to The New York
Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required
to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely – technology
that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related
physiological decay, leaving us
biologically young into an indefinite future – is now within reach.
In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe
the details of this
biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human
body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation
of various
types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically
be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully
functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We
already know what
types of damage
accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive
development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging
and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically
dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the
efforts
of medical science. |
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Creation: Life and How to Make It
By Steve Grand
Blending aspects of philosophy,
computer science, artificial intelligence, biology and computer
gaming, Grand
attempts to define life, discuss the nature of the human
soul and demonstrate how it is possible to create entities
that demand to be called both living and intelligent. A tall
order indeed, and to wonderful effect, Grand draws heavily
on his experience writing computer code (he developed the
popular computer game Creatures, in which cyberbeings "live," learn
and reproduce). He is at his best describing the problems
encountered and the solutions used to animate his virtual
universe. While at first glance Grand's definitions of life
("patterns that persist by metabolizing and reproducing" or "high-order
persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction
with their environment") might be off-putting, he explains
his terms clearly and carefully, guiding the reader comfortably
through various levels of discussion. He argues persuasively
that life, both real and artificial, is an emergent property,
arising inevitably from the interactions of its component
parts and, as such, is something much greater than and qualitatively
different from the sum of its parts. This view leads Grand
to assert that most scientists working in the field of artificial
intelligence are taking the wrong tack when they attempt
to program intelligence into machines. |
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Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps
By Steve Grand
"The first time I created
life, I did it the easy way... this time I'm attempting to
make a baby the hard way: one piece at a time." Artificial
intelligence is the Holy Grail for many scientists. But will
we ever be able to build machines that can bring together
the knowledge, skills and ideas that would be needed to make
up a complete human being? This was the question that fascinated
Steve Grand when he decided to set about building 'Lucy'.
Called an unscientific charlatan by some, a naive fool by
others, this 'self-taught tinkerer' deliberately eschewed
large public grants and laboratory affiliations to give himself
as much freedom as possible to pursue his revolutionary ideas.
In this compelling story of perseverance and despair, of
frustration and elation, we live through the birth pains
as Steve Grand defies the scientific establishment to create
one of the most advanced robots in existence. |
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At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
By Stuart Kaufman
A major scientific revolution
has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in
importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that
lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin
of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise
and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else,
this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman,
a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science
of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman
brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual
discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general
reader a fascinating look at this new science – and
at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We
all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature – an
oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold
symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says,
is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater
than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great
undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous
order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers
self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that
if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of
complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity – a
living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons
on a rug – join two buttons randomly with thread, then
another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs;
later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition,
a remarkable transformation occurs – much like the
phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice – and
the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life
may have originated when the mix of different molecules in
the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity
and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life
is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable).
Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to
illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a
single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism
with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how
the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution
by natural selection: that self-organization, selection,
and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain
insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new
frontier of genetic engineering – generating trillions
of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes,
biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems,
economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve
according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra
cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly
spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues,
life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable
accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order,
then we truly are at home in the universe. |
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Artificial Life: A Report From the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology
By Steven Levy
The effort to create artificial
life is occurring primarily within computer science, although
it brings together
physicists, microbiologists, mathematicians, ethologists,
and others in addition to computer scientists. The computer's
ability to simulate system development is being generalized
to study evolution and reproduction. Neural networks, while
also used for applications other than artificial life simulation,
are the primary form considered. As in his earlier book on
computer hackers, Levy paints vivid images of the people
involved in this work and puts a lot of effort into explanation
of technical details, but this book is not easy reading. |
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