Five Dangerous Ideas from Edge.Org

*Image source: pixabay.com, licensed under CC0, Public Domain

Introduction

One of my favorite things from the Internet every year is the annual Edge.Org question of the year. And my favorite question was the one back in 2006: What is Your Dangerous Idea? So, I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane, revisit some of the responses, and take a look at where things stand in 2016.

Freeman Dyson - Physicist

The first thing I did was to look for Freeman Dyson, one of my favorite authors. He has answered most, if not all, of Edge.Org's annual questions. In 2006, his dangerous idea was that:

Biotechnology will be domesticated in the next fifty years as thoroughly as computer technology was in the last fifty years...

I'd say that it looks like he's right on target.

Douglas Rushkoff - Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Next, I scrolled up a screen and found Douglas Rushkoff. No idea who he is, but I was stunned to see his idea published in 2006, almost 3 years before the bitcoin whitepaper:

Open Source Currency

Turning currency into an collaborative phenomenon is the final frontier in the open source movement. It's what would allow for an economic model that could support a renewable energies industry, a way for companies such as Wal-Mart to add value to the communities it currently drains, and a way of working with money that doesn't have bankruptcy built in as a given circumstance.

Not only did he imagine bitcoin, but he was on the brink of imagining steemit. So far, the Edge.Org authors were two for two in their imaginings.

Jaron Lanier - Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future?

Next, I looked for another of my favorite authors, Jaron Lanier. His dangerous idea was:

Homuncular Flexibility

Now I had no idea what "homuncular" even meant, so here's a description.

The homunculus is an approximate mapping of the human body in the cortex.

And here's what "homuncular flexibility" means:

It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. I became curious how weird the body could get before the mind would become disoriented.

Well, it turns out that Lanier published a 2015 paper on the topic, Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality. Here is the Abstract

Immersive virtual reality allows people to inhabit avatar bodies that differ from their own, and this can produce significant psychological and physiological effects. The concept of homuncular flexibility (Lanier, 2006) proposes that users can learn to control bodies different from their own by changing the relationship between tracked and rendered motion. We examine the effects of remapping movements in the real world onto an avatar that moves in novel ways. In Experiment 1, participants moved their legs more than their arms in conditions where leg movements were more effective for the task. In Experiment 2, participants controlling 3-armed avatars learned to hit more targets than participants in 2-armed avatars. We discuss the implications of embodiment in novel bodies.

So, by my count, it's now three for three. At this point, I was out of names to search for, so I started scrolling around for two more topics that seemed particularly interesting.

Philip W. Anderson - Nobel Laureatte and Physicist

Dark Energy might not exist

Finally, of course there is Dark Energy, that is if there is. On that we can't even guess if it is quanta at all, but again we note that if it is it probably doesn't add up in numbers to the CBR. The very strange coincidence is that when we add this in there isn't any total gravitation at all, and the universe as a whole is flat, as it would be, incidentally, if all of the heavy parts were distributed everywhere according to some random, fractal distribution like that of the matter we can see — because on the largest scale, a fractal's density extrapolates to zero. That suggestion, implying that Dark Energy might not exist, is considered very dangerously radical.

But as of 2012, this dangerous idea seems to be close to retirement. "Dark Energy is Real: There's Now Clear Evidence" -- International Team of Astronomers:

"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn't surprising that so many researchers question its existence. But now, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Portsmouth and LMU University Munich, led by Tommaso Giannantonio and Robert Crittenden, the scientists the likelihood of the existence of dark matter stands at 99.996 per cent.

This puts the Edge.Org panel on track for 3 out of 4 with one idea remaining.

Stanislas Dehaene - Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, The Number Sense; Reading In the Brain

Touching and pushing the limits of the human brain
...
There are still a few domains where the human brain maintains an apparent superiority. Visual recognition used to be one — but already, superb face recognition software is appearing, capable of storing and recognizing thousands of faces with close to human performance. Robotics is another. No robot to date is capable of navigating smoothly through a complicated 3-D world. Yet a third area of human superiority is high-level semantics and creativity: the human ability to make sense of a story, to pull out the relevant knowledge from a vast store of potentially useful facts, remains unequalled.

Suppose that, for the next 50 years, those are the main areas in which engineers will remain unable to match the performance of the human brain. Are we ready for a world in which the human contributions are binary, either at the highest level (thinkers, engineers, artists…) or at the lowest level, where human workforce remains cheaper than mechanization?

Then, in 2011, Watson won at Jeopardy

this year, AlphaGo beat 9-Dan ranked Lee Sedol at Go, and just today, Budweiser announced the first product delivery in a self driving truck.

It would appear that if anything, Dehaene underestimated the ability of machines to take over tasks from humans.

Not bad Edge.Org! Not quite 12 years later, four out of five of these dangerous ideas are still on the table.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go read through 114 more dangerous ideas. ; -)

Update (October 27, 2016): After reading this post, by @williambanks, it appears that Anderson's idea about dark energy might be back on the table. That means 5 out of 5 may still be in the running. Even more impressive!
Update (October 28, 2016): Added source links to each author's idea on edge.org.

---

@remlaps is an Information Technology professional with three decades of business experience working with telecommunications and computing technologies. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and is currently completing a doctoral degree in information technology.