If you doubt this, take a few hours to study what Transformational Technologies Portfolio holdings Orbital Sciences (ORB: NYSE) and SpaceDev (SPDV.OB: OTC BB) have done with budgets in the millions of dollars in the satellite and launch arenas, then compare it with NASA projects.

You’ll gag.

So I’m especially pleased to report that at least one Federal agency seems to be doing something right. Actually, it’s doing a lot of things right.

I’m talking about DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration). It’s the Pentagon’s “gee whiz” arm. It’s charged with identifying and funding development of truly revolutionary technologies to empower tomorrow’s military.

At DARPATech, the agency’s annual tech trade show-cum-conference, they showcase a lot of this stuff. However, they don’t take themselves too seriously, which is perhaps a reason for their success. (When much of work is really play, people seem more productive.)

I saw military officers in full dress regalia doffing black eyeshades and pantomiming Men in Black (you know, the ultra high-tech uber-agency profiled in the Will Smith comedy of the same name).

It wasn’t a bad analogy. Not when you consider what these “uber-geeks” are REALLY working on…

One mathematician-in-uniform, Dr. Benjamin Mann, cheerfully announced that his program has discovered a new foundation for ALL OF MATHEMATICS. Specifically, he said that they’ve “proved” (that’s a very significant word amongst mathematicians) that all of math can be recast with data sets, rather than numbers, as its fundamental building blocks.

The good doctor cheerfully skipped over what this signifies in real-world applications. (He did express confidence that a whole new mathematics would arise sometime in the 21st century.) He has that privilege; in pure mathematics, it’s almost an indicator of superiority if one’s work is divorced from “reality.”

However, it’s not necessarily so. Consider Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, the great 19th century mathematician (by the 20th century, most folks had decided that two names were sufficient). Riemann went to his grave proudly proclaiming that he had never done anything practical.

Guess what? His “non-Euclidean geometry” became central to understanding Albert Einstein’s curved space-time.

Since then, other “pure mathematical systems” have found surprising real-world applications.

So, when Dr. Mann tells us he’s going to recast all of mathematics on a new foundation, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know what it means. Probably, neither does anyone else. But if there were a futures exchange for mathematical discoveries, I’d be aggressively long on this one.

DARPATech probably had more PhD’s per capita amongst the 2,500 participants than anywhere I’ve been outside MIT. Not all of them were looking ahead a century.

How about something practicable in the next decade or so? Dr. Ralph Chatham spoke of how new developments in software and user interfaces have ushered in the era of the “virtual co-pilot.”

It’s expensive and often logistically difficult to arrange for fighter pilots to train with actual wingmen and controllers. Now DARPA has developed “virtual,” artificially intelligent actors who are so good in flight simulators that they pass the Turing Test.

The Turing Test is attributed to the famous 20th century mathematician Alan Turing, who didn’t mind doing practical things. Essentially, what the test says is that if you can have a conversation with a computer, and are unable to distinguish it from a person, then it is truly intelligent.

Some have objected to the general nature of this statement. Who is conversing, and what is the subject? A computer might fool a layman on the subject of medicine, but not a doctor. Or it might be expert enough in medicine to fool even the doctor, yet know nothing of baseball (an ignorance which, however, many of us humans share).

Critics agree that a well-designed Turing Test would focus on a specific field of knowledge wherein the computer is “knowledgeable” and articulate enough to fool an expert practitioner. By this standard, various programs are now intelligent. (For instance, go play chess at a local game store and ask the program its opinions of positions on the board — many grandmasters do.)

Now, DARPA has taken this into a whole new realm. Artificially intelligent programs simulate wingmen and controllers in flight simulators so well that the trainee pilots cannot distinguish real people communicating with them through the console from the software doing the same.

Think about that. In principle, we are at the dawn of a time in which the whole field of air traffic control can be automated. Logically — though DARPA didn’t go here, perhaps for political reasons — the fully automated plane and battlefield vehicle should soon be feasible.

Closer to home, there’s no reason why this can’t enable automated driving of cars within the next 10 years. Wouldn’t you prefer to get into your car with a cup of coffee and read or enjoy broadcast media while your vehicle navigates the morning “traffic creep?”

Some of us who’ve sworn abstinence might even be willing to once again drive between the hours of 6:30 and 9:30am.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
September 06, 2006

Your Tax Dollars, Actually at Work was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

Recently, I caught a few episodes of the “Twilight Zone Marathon” on the Sci-Fi Channel. I had no idea why I was watching it; I’ve probably seen every episode of the series at one time or another. However, I’ve learned in my life that many “coincidences” are significant.

The last episode I watched was about an android named “Grandma” who comes to live with three young children. She stays with them until they’re ready for college. She provides for all of their education needs, as well as clothing and feeding them in whatever ways are necessary or helpful. She is the embodiment of selfless love and devotion.

At the end of the episode, Rod Serling mused about whether such a robot might ever exist. He implied that if such a thing were to happen, it would be in the far distant future.

Far distant?

Last year, I “met” the Philip K. Dick robot at the annual NextFest Festival of Technology and Innovation in Chicago. As I explained in a recent e-mail update to my Emerging Capital Report subscribers, this robot displayed sufficiently human mannerisms and facial expressions that it enthralled and captivated the audience. People spent up to an hour waiting in line to meet it. At one moment while watching it converse, I had the eerie impression that I was actually watching a human being.

The gentleman behind the software assured me that the robot converses in the same manner as Mr. Dick about 90% of the time. That, it seems to me, would be sufficient to pass the Turing Test
– a now-famous benchmark by which one can supposedly determine whether machines are truly intelligent or not. The essence of the test is that if you can’t distinguish the party you’re conversing with from a person, for all intents and purposes it is a person.

While I consider that definition to be superficial (Who judges, and how thorough is the test?), the very fact that we’re able to build something that starts to resemble a human being in 2005 gives me confidence that, by the year 2025 at latest, companions such as “Grandma” will be real and probably mass manufactured.

In this world of transient relationships, ever more rapid change and great uncertainty, I expect that many people will take great comfort from having an unconditionally loving, extremely wise companion who stays with them from birth to death (in the Twilight Zone, Grandma had to leave when the kids went off to college. In real life, there’s no reason why that would be so).

On the other hand, advances in life extension now blossoming from laboratories such as University of California San Francisco’s Dr. Cynthia Kenyon are such that serious scientists now agree that physical immortality may soon be attainable. (Check out her company, ElixirPharm.com.)

Some of these advances are already commercially available. Our Transformational Technologies Portfolio holding Lifeline (LFLT.OB: OTC BB) has developed a pill that extends healthy lifespan 20% in rodents and appears to do the same for people. It’s based on a breakthrough from the University of Colorado’s Webb Waring Institute for Antioxidant Research.

Other supplements have shown remarkable promise in dealing with atherosclerosis, cancer and other serious conditions. A product with the exotic name Maharishi Amrit Kalash has been proven in multiple university studies to benefit all these conditions and more. (Visit MAPI.com. Note that neither Agora nor I have any financial interest in this company.)

Meanwhile, I’m watching a couple of small companies that are making great progress in developing commercially available intelligent robotics. One of these may soon become a Transformational Technologies Pick of the Month.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
August 09, 2006

Musings on Androids and Immortality was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.