the New York Times...

... ran an excellent primer for anyone not overly familiar with the singularity. Give it a read or just email it along to your friends so they know wtf nerds everywhere are talking about.

Now if we could only get some real economists talking about what I'm worried about- the inevitable layoffs as the result of decent AI and decent robotics...

I reject many of her points while accepting the larger ones.

Some very good points here. I frequently argue against the use of teleportation for exactly the reason she lays out- I would be continuous to everyone but me (and this includes the clone of me). I do not, however, agree with her about other upgrades. We might as well say that then education destroys the self. How Tao. How silly. As long as we are choosing our upgrades we are guiding our own development and there's a continuity.

It's like the ship that sailed around the world losing bits of itself in every storm and squall it encountered and replacing them little by little. By the time it returned to its original port not a single plank or piece of rigging remained unchanged. Is it the same ship? Yes it is. Continuity isn't magical. When a plank is replaced that plank becomes the newest part of the original ship, not the first part of a new ship. As the rigging and planks get battered about and slowly replaced that first plank may become the oldest piece of the ship. To think otherwise would be to suggest that each plank becomes the first piece of a unique ship, that these unique ships inhabit the same space should be problematic to that view point.

Are there ways we could 'lose' our personhood? Yes there are. My gaining a spell checker in my mind or your ability to download the skills of a helicopter pilot are not chief among them. The divide is likely to be in the vicinity of when you can't be distinguished from anyone else who has upgraded to the same extent, or is that enough? Personally, I'm starting to think that it isn't.

Surge in AI stories makes me think its arrival may be sooner than expected.

IBM has announced Watson will begin sparring humans this year leading up to a final contest sometime in 2010. Steve Wolfram has announced Wolfram Alpha will launch in May. The good folks over at Caltech have 'trained' a computer to analyze the behavior of fruit flies... in real time, something it takes a human close to 100 hours to do. A Program, dubbed Adam, has also been developed capable of making, and testing, a hypothesis has produced modest, though publishable results. A group at Cornell has created an AI that can derive the laws of physics from data of the natural world, with some refinement, it should be able to extract tons of information from the massive amounts of data we already have. The University of Southerland, meanwhile, is working on CASSANDRA, a program to monitor stock markets and guard against insider trading and spin.

When we look at these news stories we see a trend emerging, programs able to understand natural human language, recognize patterns, make inferences... what happens when we have computers as powerful as bluegene available for tens of thousands of dollars (rather than hundreds of millions), a program like Watson, which can read texts and 'understand' them, *and,* unlike Watson, you hook it up to a search engine like Wolfram Alpha? Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot, HAL really can read lips...

This brings me back to the point I keep trying to hammer home, it doesn't take true sentience for a program to displace a person from a job. If your job is monotonous, highly technical, or requires you to have command over vast amounts of information, your job will be among the first to go. Doubly so if it's also high paying.

For me, a rare moment of optimism about the future.

There's an expression I like, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." It seems to fit here.

Of course, he doesn't take into consideration ai... but that's another topic.

The good news: No more outsourcing factory jobs!

The bad news: No more factory jobs.

FTA: Scottish scientists yesterday claimed we are only five years away from a generation of robots capable of putting together wardrobes, beds and chairs.

The article's headline is about Robot Butlers but the obvious downside is that any robot capable of being a butler is (likely as not) capable of being virtually anything else. Add in a pinch of this and a dash of that, maybe a smidge of this and boom, this is what you get....



This is serious. We all like the fantasy of our having robot butlers but we fail to realize the reality of how this technology would impact our world. Robot butlers, once they hit the appropriate price point, will simply gut the jobs of the unskilled. By dramatically increasing the labor supply labor wages will free fall... essentially, if a robot can do a job 24 hrs a day for X dollars a day(maintenance, fuel, depreciation of value), and a human can do the same job 16 hours a day, but not quite as well, than they will have to take approximately (or less than) x/2 dollars a day. (Cost of a robot/years until replacement is needed)+(robots annual maintenance)+(robot's fuel expenditures)= (total annual salary of all workers needed to do the same job) + (amount needed to compensate for losses due to human inefficiency).

There are circumstances that could mitigate the problem: a strong public backlash, (bad) deflation due to lowered buying power of the large number of unemployed, (good) deflation due to the cheaper manufacturing costs, government intervention and safety nets.

Now, all that being said, I totally want one. The world is going to go through some extremely interesting changes. They're already happening. It doesn't take huge leaps in our technological capabilities to see amazing changes- just look at how the internet is still changing our business world.

Nanoparticle Assembly: the Holy Grail

FTA: Because of its reliability and precision control, Brookhaven’s nano-assembly method would be scalable for the kind of high-throughput production that would be essential for commercial applications.

This is a game changing technology. This could radically boost the efficiency of dozens of our technologies- notably photovoltaic solar. Early commercial applications will likely just be nanocoatings for existing industrial materials, then new industrial materials... then new products using those materials. Perhaps materials like this gas storage nanomaterial, 'Just 1/30th of an ounce of the material has the approximate surface area of a football field,' which makes storing vast amounts of hydrogen far easier...

Theory is nice. Practice is better. That's what this break through promises us.

And it's only the beginning.

PW Singer... on our march towards a robotic military

No Job is Safe, not even those of research scientists.

FTA: A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.
Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast.
Ross King, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, said that Adam's results were modest, but real. "It's certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable," he says.

Of note here, the more specialized a task is, the easier it is to automate. Interesting times ahead.

And some more.... this from another article about another lab AI.

FTA: The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that become established laws – yet without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.

Pew! Pew!

FTA: "WE'RE doing our part to make gunpowder a 20th-century technology." So says Dan Wildt of Northrop Grumman, whose battlefield laser weapon passed another milestone last week.
In tests, it fired a 105-kilowatt beam - enough to destroy rockets, mortars and artillery shells - at a stationary target for 5 minutes. Unlike weapons such as Boeing's huge Airborne Laser, which burns chemical fuel, the solid-state laser consists of semiconductors that emit light when a voltage is applied. This makes them much smaller, allowing them to fit on the back of a "ruggedised" truck. They can also run on electricity from a diesel generator.

Lasers. This should end well. Haven't these guys seen Moonraker? Oh... they have. Huh. Yeah, I haven't. I'm just saying if you think Laser pointers are annoying in movie theaters now, just wait a few years.

Not discussed enough… or, 'Crap, Missed Call's talking about robots again!'

Futurists who speak of Artificial Intelligence don’t focus enough of their attention on the fact that this intelligence will be ALIEN (unless we arrive at AI through brain simulations, in which case it will be exactly like humans). That the intelligence is would be alien doesn’t mean there isn’t anything we can say about how it’s likely to contrast our own intelligence.

1) Common Law : Statutory Law : : Biological Brain : Artificial Intelligence

What do I mean by this? Our brains have been cobbled together over the millennia through an evolutionary process that built new structures on top of old structures on top of ancient structures. We still have parts of our brain that function in much the same way as that of an ape or, perhaps, even a fish. In this respect our brains are sort of like common law.

Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, if it’s built up from scratch and mostly uses algorithms, won’t necessarily have the same redundancies. There’s no reason to think that we’ll code part of the brain using C, then another part using C+, before moving onto HTML or what have you.

What does this mean?

Well for starters, AI is likely to differ from humans on the two fronts that are the most basic needs of all organisms; survival and reproduction. There’s no guarantee that our AI will have any survival instinct whatsoever. We could program it to have one, but there’s no reason to assume that it would have one (unless you happen to be thinking of AI more as a man in a robot costume).

We’ve all grown up with images of robots and computers that have acquired intelligence struggling against an antagonistic force trying to shut them down. Some have been intelligent depictions, where the AI has a diagetic reason to struggle; others have been less intelligent, where it is just assumed the AI would 1) care and 2) that caring would take the form of opposition to being turned off. The later category is almost entirely bunk and more an example of ‘Didn’t do the research,’ or ‘oven logic,’ than it is a good model for our thinking about AI.

On the flipside, we could say that there is an advantage to AI wanting to survive, particularly if the AI serves a purpose that makes it especially human-like or otherwise valuable, and thus it is reasonable to think that it would be programmed into the AI’s operating system (its only unreasonable to assume that it would be there purely as a consequence of the AI having intelligence). That being said, it is unreasonable to assume that the survival instinct of AI will take on the same form as a human survival instinct. Humans are animals, AI’s are not. Humans are, for the time being at least, trapped within their bodies, AI, in all likeliness, will not be. Humans require certain resources to survive, AI would also require certain resources but these resources do not overlap, at least in the short term, as much as the survival needs of humans and any other animal species.

AI might need water, but it more likely requires a substance that will perform the same role as water in manufacturing or cooling systems. They can therefore use a variety of other substances. Humans, meanwhile, simply need water. Humans die if they are eaten by a shark. They die and they do not return. AI might also ‘die,’ but it will be more akin to death in video game terms, with the AI returning from its last save point. Although I personally enjoy using electricity, I can’t claim that it is key to my personal survival. For the foreseeable future, it would be key to the survival of AI’s.

Many of our emotions have evolved to help us survive (and/or reproduce). There’s no reason to assume that AI will have the same emotions. Will the robot envy my house? Not likely, as its needs for shelter would be far different from my own. Would an AI feel pride in the accomplishment of other algorithms? Be moved by music? Covet more USB ports? Probably not, unlikely, and perhaps.

As far as reproduction we must also question the drive of a non-biological agent having the desire to reproduce. If there is no survival instinct, it’s unlikely to reproduce without a reason to. Anissimov over at Accelerating Future has written about AI’s taking on multiple jobs, reproducing themselves (even on rented space if need be), completing those jobs for a profit, then folding those extra AI’s down…

“Anyway, say that I’m an AI looking at craigslist. I see 100 contract jobs that pay $50/hr, all in my field of expertise, and I want to do them all, but if I don’t do them now, the employers will hire somebody else. What to do? Well, if I have the money, I can rent 100 computers to run temporary copies of myself until the jobs are all done. I take complete advantage of the available tasks, and I didn’t have to spend huge amounts of money to buy and cool and maintain 100 me-equivalents of computing power. As long as the jobs I did are enough to pay for the rental costs and then some, I can keep making money this way.”

(I’d like to note at this point that I’m just using this as an example of a scenario that I can contrast my ideas against. I’m not suggesting that anything Anissimov does or does not say contradicts what I’m talking about, nor am I taking issue with his wonderful blog in anyway.)

It’s reasonable to assume that if an artificial intelligence is operating under someone else’s direction it will be compelled to maximize its own profitability. If, however, the AI is left to its own devices it’s only reasonable to assume that it will maximize its own profitability if doing so will both enhance its chances of survival and if the AI has some form of survival instinct. The first condition is easy to satisfy. Yes, having money will increase the odds of the AI’s survival even if the AI isn’t spending its money on the same resources as humans the money will still be useful. The second is not a given, but it could happen.

Ignoring the economic consequences of AI’s making copies of themselves to corner whole swaths of the job market, there is another issue. If the AI makes a full copy of itself (and I should note, much to his credit, Anissimov does suggest the possibility that the copies might only be fractional parts of the program itself) we would have to assume that the other copies all have the same agency and the same survival instincts. This would mean that those copies would not voluntarily shut themselves down, they would want to keep their ‘fair share,’ of the work they’d done and to allow the original program to destroy the copies would be allowing the original program to inflict some degree of distress onto the copies. (I should note here that there is not particular reason why I’m assuming that an AI couldn’t have survival instinct while simultaneously feeling dispassionate about its own survival. Such a situation would greatly complicate the question of a program making a copy of itself and then later shutting down that copy.)

Continuing on the theme of reproduction, the purpose of reproduction is the survival not of the individual, but of the species. AI is not mortal. AI might become obsolete but it would never ‘die’ of ‘natural causes’ in any traditional senses. Would there be an advantage for AI to reproduce?

Well, if the AI has a survival instinct than there might be a disadvantage for the AI to reproduce. With each copy (assuming it works within our economic system) it is diminishing the returns that it gets for its skill sets. If the performance of job in a normal labor market is worth $50 dollars an hour, than the performance of that same job in a labor market flooded with potential workers will be worth considerably less. An AI’s ability to copy itself an unlimited amount of times creates the potentially for super exponential growth of the labor pool which in turn causes a commensurate drop in the odds that any given AI will get the job it desires.

Anissimov has suggested that an AI might form a sort of homogenous AI corporation, and, indeed, it might. But all of the other AI’s in that corporation may also have the idea to subcontract to homogenous corporations of there own, or, quit and splinter off into their little AI Inc’s. Anyway you slice it, it’s an economic nightmare.

AI might ‘reproduce,’ if it’s programmed to reproduce. If Super Intelligent AI is truly desirable, than an AI might be programmed to reproduce by making copies of itself that it has slightly improved upon before activating them, but since the AI isn’t going to ‘die,’ this too comes at a survival cost. An AI is disadvantaged by any form of reproduction unless that reproduction reproduces *lesser* offspring (if we are still assuming the AI to be trying to survive within our economic frame work).

If it also stands to reason, particularly if I’m correct that the only reproductive advantage for an AI would come from reproducing incomplete copies of itself, that an AI would completely lack any maternal instinct. Its ‘offspring’ would not need rearing as they would spring into being with all the experiences and abilities of their ‘parent’ fully formed and intact. Were something to happen to that ‘offspring’ the cost to the parent in survival terms (or, perhaps even, in resources) would be negligible. Only if there was an existential risk to all of the AI’s would they likely act cooperatively (as a survival method) and even then the ‘destruction’ of individuals would likely result in indifference to the survivors (unless they are specifically programmed to respond otherwise).

In a way, this is good for us. If we look at one of the biggest worries about the singularity, the threat of an unfriendly super intelligence, the threat is greatest if it comes in the form of a quickly replicating enemy with a desire for the same resources that we need to survive. An unfriendly super intelligence, indifferent to our material needs could easily satisfy its own material needs if it didn’t have a desire to reproduce. An unfriendly super intelligence could, potentially, be overcome if it didn’t have any particular desire to survive. And a super intelligence without agency would be no more or less friendly or unfriendly than the agent deploying it.

To be continued…

Human Brain Simulations by 2018

Nine years seems optimistic to me, but Dharmendra Modha's one of those guys you have to take seriously. He's leading the DARPA funded SyNPASE team and the IMB Almaden Research Center. He's also the guy who a few years ago created a simulation of a rat's brain. It's also important to note that though a simulation would be incredible, its not necessarily AGI. Its fairly unclear to me what the outputs of the simulation would be, if any. I think this is purely for modelling purposes. None-the-less it would be an amazing feat that would seem to line up with Kurzwiel's predictions for AI breaking in the 2020's.

FTA: Although the brain is still not well understood, Modha said, "there is enough quantitative data for us to be able to begin putting together the pieces." He predicted that by 2018 computers will be able to simulate the workings of the human brain, a breakthrough that will provide researchers with unprecedented insight into how the complex organ operates.

And the same article also provides a little shout out to BMI/BCI: In addition to boosting computer performance, enhanced understanding of the brain will enable people to communicate directly with machines, whether they are robots or mechanized prosthetic limbs. Primates have already proved that such brain-machine interfaces are possible, Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of Duke University Medical Center's Center for Neuroengineering, said during the conference. The researcher and his colleagues last year successfully implanted electrodes in the brain of a monkey in North Carolina that enabled him to control a robot on a treadmill in Kyoto, Japan.

Nicolelis and his team have developed a microchip they expect will allow human brains to communicate with robots using only brain signals and enables the bots to return messages directly to the brain, without the use of sight or touch. Nicolelis said that he hopes the technology will be sophisticated enough to implant into a human brain by 2012 and enable a completely quadriplegic patient to walk again.

No Job is Safe... not even those of mathematicians

Wait, mathematicians, really? Yes, even the educated classes are going to get hit and hit hard by the AI revolution. In all honesty, some white collar or academic jobs are much easier to automate than jobs that involve a lot of physical movement.

Anyway, math makes sense as a target for AI, after all we all know Computers are good at sums, but there are aspects, major aspects, of being a mathematician that have more to do with the way you approach a problem than crunching numbers.

A particularly interesting note FTA, a program called HR was developed by a man named Simon Colton to look for interesting number sequences and well: Some of HR's discoveries have even been published - and HR, rather than Colton, got the credit.

'Daddy, what's a store?'

'History, sweetie, ancient history.'

As a boy, when dragged with my folks to the local mall, I used to take refuge in the videogame stores. (This was, of course, in the days before cell phones, which meant I actually had to be where I said I was going to be when I said I would be there... but that's another story.) I used to look at the video game magazines, browse their new and used titles, and ask questions about release dates... I liked it. It satisfied that primitive hunter-gatherer instinct. It's also dead in the water. One of the few remaining reasons to go to a video game store, to buy used games, is gone.... Amazon is entering the used game market. Oh, Funcoland, we hardly knew ye.

This should surprise no one. The video store, the video game store, the record store... these are all doomed. Also, grocery stores are likely going to continue to trend towards specialization. Freshdirect is just better. And all this, all this is old tech that's replacing what we used to know. We're still seeing the effects of the internet on society. Forget AI, forget Robots- something that I've been using since I was 14 isn't done changing the world yet.

Holy Florking Schnit! Cure For Cancer.... and some other stuff too.

FTA: LA JOLLA, Calif., March 4 (UPI) -- A new type of vaccination could be used to provide instantaneous protection against viruses, bacteria, cancers and virulent toxins, U.S. researchers say.

You want the nutshell version? Chemicals injected into the blood trigger an immune reaction that can be programed. Other chemicals injected into the blood can recognize cancer (or presumably other targets). These other chemicals hook up with antibodies. They then circulate until they get the kill signal from the first chemicals.

Part of the problem with cancer is that our bodies immune system doesn't recognize the cancer as being harmful- or rather, the cancer, being from us, is ignored by our immune system. You could have the second chemical floating round in your blood, hooked up with your antibodies and then, once diagnosised, inject the first chemical which tells the second chemical what its after.

Pretty damn cool stuff.

Gattaca: It begins.

I don't know if the movie spawned the discussion or the discussion spawned the movie. Either way its a series and legitimate problem. If you're not familiar with Gattaca- as a movie I give it a solid B (maybe even B+)- you should check it out. Or, if you prefer, here's a link to the Gattaca argument (also known as the genetic divide).

From that link: Some critics of libertarian transhumanism have focused on its likely socioeconomic consequences in societies in which divisions between rich and poor are on the rise. Bill McKibben, for example, suggests that emerging human enhancement technologies would be disproportionately available to those with greater financial resources, thereby exacerbating the gap between rich and poor and creating a "genetic divide".[95] Lee M. Silver, a biologist and science writer who coined the term "reprogenetics" and supports its applications, has nonetheless expressed concern that these methods could create a two-tiered society of genetically-engineered "haves" and "have nots" if social democratic reforms lag behind implementation of enhancement technologies.[97]

And so it begins...

FTA: A U.S. fertility clinic has announced that within six months it will begin offering couples the option to have tailor-made babies, selecting not only their offspring's gender but also cosmetic traits such as hair and eye color. The Fertility Institutes, an organization which has offices in New York City, Los Angeles and Mexico, says it can provide this service using a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, according to the New York Daily News.

Today its just hair and eye color. Gender and, perhaps, screening for markers of genetic disorders. Some (and the article does a good job noting) believe that even the eye color is impossible today. But it won't be for long. And when the tech breaks we face the very real possibility of people being improved upon at a rate similar to computers- the very real possibility that a child will be rendered 'obsolete' by children born just a few years after it. Imagine if each year more geniuses where born with higher IQ's than the year before...

Of course its all moot as AI will have bitchwhipped us all by then.

Damn, wrong already!

Headline: First Virtual Reality Technology To Let You See, Hear, Smell, Taste And Touch

FTA: ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2009) — The first virtual reality headset that can stimulate all five senses has been developed. What was it really like to live in Ancient Egypt? What did the streets there actually look, sound and smell like? For decades, Virtual Reality has held out the hope that, one day, we might be able visit all kinds of places and periods as 'virtual' tourists.

The article's headline and lead paragraph over sell it a little. Really research teams from the Universities of York and Warwick have pinpointed what *needs* to be done. Still there are some very interesting bits such as:

"Smell will be generated electronically via a new technique being pioneered by Alan Chalmers and his team at Warwick which will deliver a pre-determined smell recipe on-demand. Taste and smell are closely linked but we intend to provide a texture sensation relating to something being in the mouth. Tactile devices will provide touch."

and then there was this line: There has been considerable public debate on health & safety as well as on ethical issues surrounding Real Virtuality, since this kind of technology fundamentally involves immersing users in virtual environments that separate them from the real world.

Really? Considerable you say? And where has this debate taken place? Oh... right... Europe. Yeah we prefer not to think of you socialist pinkos here in the Amurica! This is a perfect example of why I hate so many of my countrymen. They're slowing us down.

And a second link about the same break through.

My completely unsubstantiated opinions

The Future Will Come in this Order:
1) Cure for Cancer is announced. A real cure. None of this chemo, 85% survival rate Bullshit. I'm talking out patient procedure. I'm talking you miss half a day of work, max, getting your lung cancer cleared up.
2) The Nano revolution. Robots in the Fucking Blood.
3) Robots running a handful of narrow AI programs gut the armed forces. (I mean GUT it. Its begun, but this will change the face of the army- no more lame commercials.)
4) People understand what I mean by AR. Early AR, though not as awesome as it will be in a couple of years, is handy and, relatively, cheap.
5) RapRep's common. The idea of buying plastic crap from Walmart becomes unthinkable.
6) Better RapRep's. Things are starting to seem like Star Trek... and by that I mean TNG, none of that Enterprise BS. (Honestly, a Southern chief engineer? What're we building a theme park?)
7) Fully immersive VR. Likely it will have become technically feasible before this point, but this is when those alpha consumer types will start buying it. I would, in all honesty, rather have this than literate children. As dumb as my kids would be, effe 'em, I'm going to Hawaii be back in an hour.
8) Aubrey De Grey seems less crazy (provided he's either a) shaved or b) purchased some reasonable clothes). Life extension finally all comes together. By this point Doctors will have done wonders replacing or even reversing the aging process of organs, but til this point it's been confined to the stopping light in a frozen bromide matrix field of science- neat tricks but not much good to us commoners.
9) The Cubs win the World Series.
10) Strong AI. Deal with it nerds! It's coming last!

How did I reach these conclusions? I read every science headline I can find. I built the order based on the amount of ink each topic gets. The one exception, Life Extension, could easily happen sooner, after all, curing cancer is, in a way, life extension. Everything health related becomes a form of life extension.

AI, and particularly strong AI, just doesn't make a lot of headlines. In fact, it makes very, very few. Because, near as I can tell, there isn't a lot directly happening. Still, for me, the stuff I'm worried about doesn't take strong AI...

A great example of why timelines and projections are always off...

Japan, (arguably) the world's leaders in robotics, is getting hit by our financial melt down harder than we are.

FTA: In his "Daily Notes on the Global Economy," Carl B. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics notes Japan's drop in exports last month -- down 45.7 percent from the previous January.

How will this impact the projections of singulatarians and robotopians? Well, the news isn't great. Its bad enough Bush did everything he could to delay the benefits of stem cell research, now economic failures on his watch are going to delay everything else as well.

Film trailer for Kurzweil's "Transcendent Man"

For me, Kurzweil's money in the bank... up to a point. All prediction models break down past the singularity- yet he continues to make predictions about what will come after it. Now, all that being said, I think he's broadly right. We stand at the cusp of three major revolutions (see my post about Juan Enriquez) all of which are likely to break in the next ten to twenty years. Anyone of them could fundamentally change the world. All three of them definitely will.

What kind of world will our grandkids live in? To us, it will truly seem like magic- especially on the holodeck.

Juan Enriquez: Take twenty minutes to listen to this man talk.

FHWP: Juan Enriquez was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. His work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, and the The New York Times. He is the author of As the Future Catches You and The Untied States of America. He works in business, science, and domestic/international politics.
Juan Enriquez is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. He is currently Chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm.

Juan Enriquez is on the short list of people that when they speak I shut up and listen. His prior TED talks have been interesting, this is no exception. Ideally, you should watch all of them, but in a pinch this will do.

PZ Myers slammed the part of his talk where he JE discusses speciation of humans, but personally I think PZ was losing the forest for the trees. JE's point wasn't that we will literally be another species, but rather that the very rules governing what a selective pressure is is going to entirely change- and then continue to change at an exponential rate.