TED Community » Luke Hutchison

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Computer Science
Computational Biology
The Earth System
Information theory and complexity theory
North Korea

An idea worth spreading

As much as 15% of the population of North Korea died of famine in the late 90s, and NOBODY NOTICED because it was the middle of the Asian financial crisis ("IMF shidae"), and everybody was worried about their wallets. What other country do you know of where 15% of the population dies and nobody notices?

Talk to me about

Algorithms; reverse engineering biology's fractal pattern language; machine learning; flying cars; humanoid robots; the power of information to transform society; the amazingness of the biosphere.

People don't know that I'm good at

Reading people.

My TED Story

TED is even more about people than ideas to me: although the content of the talks at TED Long Beach 2011 was mind-blowing, the best part about TED was the phenomenal people I had the chance to meet.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +79.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Is capitalism sustainable?

  Feb 27 2013: I think you made the assumption from the start that I was talking about the difference between the developing and developed world. If you read my question more closely, you'll see that it's much more focused on the fact that we can't even eliminate wealth disparity within the developed world (implying that therefore promises of eliminating poverty on a global scale are probably over-ambitious). Someone will always need to clean bathrooms and build roads in the developed world, but I doubt you would ever call those people "wealthy" within developed society. A laborer in the developed world would only be considered wealthy if you were to compare them to someone in the developing world.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Is capitalism sustainable?

  Feb 27 2013: Money is simply a proxy for wealth. If you are defining wealth as something like quality of life (and if not, please define it), I agree you can increase everybody's quality of life across an entire country, that is precisely what has happened in developed countries, and what is happening in developing countries. And yet there is still poverty in the USA or Europe. Nevertheless, wherever there is a significant disparity in money owned by individuals, there will be a significant difference in wealth, however you define it.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Is capitalism sustainable?

  Feb 27 2013: You state, Lawren, that "The aim of capitalism is to create wealth for all." But if everybody is wealthy, in a real sense nobody is wealthy. Take a population and increase everybody's income 10x, and inflation will reduce the value of the dollar by a factor of 10 quite quickly, so that everybody is right back where they started. And yet, create a society where everybody has the same level of wealth, and nobody will want to do the menial jobs unless you force them to.
• +4

  A comment on Talk: Melinda Gates: Let's put birth control back on the agenda

  May 19 2012: This is a ridiculously short-sighted and agenda-laden talk. Go watch something by Hans Rosling if you want a more sensical treatment of population issues. The proper solution to overpopulation is not just handing out birth control mechanisms, it is (1) education of women and children and (2) reduction of infant mortality through vaccination, access to clean water, and improved health care. Every single country that has undergone these two changes has seen a precipitous drop in birth rate (even below replacement rate in some cases).

• A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?

  Mar 8 2012: Ken: absolutely, the multicore dilemma is a very serious problem facing humanity. However I would say that the software issues (building languages that make it easier for programmers to make use of multiple cores with zero effort) are much more serious than the hardware issues (how to build a CPU with a massive number of cores). I am creating a new type of programming language to solve the software problem: http://www.flowlang.net/p/flow-manifesto.html (Sorry, that page is pretty theoretical, but there's some information about the general state of the multicore dilemma at the top..)
• +2

  A reply on Conversation: How does life/death manifest itself in the human brain? Is brain death the ultimate end stage of life?

  Mar 8 2012: George: actually, waking up a patient from cryo is at least as hard as waking them up from PVS -- you have to deal with not just rebooting the electrical activity in the brain, but rebooting everything else too. It's likely we would need some extra genes spliced into our genomes before this would even work -- I suspect, for example, that during thawing, most of our intracellular RNA would be degraded. Honestly, I don't think freezing a human now and waiting for some future day when we have the tech to properly thaw them out is actually a smart thing to do -- they have to be frozen in the right way in the first place.

• A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?

  Mar 8 2012: Ken -- most of my current thoughts are in the links above. Happy to discuss once you've had a chance to peruse them :-)
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?

  Mar 8 2012: I have written a number of blog posts on this and related questions. The topics below transition from where we are and why we're "not there yet" with creating humanlike AIs, through how to create non-intelligent machine learning systems that at least do useful things, through some views on what we should be doing to create humanlike intelligence, through to some musings on intelligence, entropy, the universe and everything. As far as the issue of consciousness, I try not to touch that with a 10-foot pole :-)
  
  "Watson's Jeopardy win, and a reality check on the future of AI":
  http://www.metalev.org/2011/02/reality-check-on-future-of-ai-and.html
  
  "Why we may not have intelligent computers by 2019":
  http://www.metalev.org/2010/12/why-we-may-not-have-intelligent.html
  
  "Machine intelligence: the earthmoving equipment of the information age, and the future of meaningful lives":
  http://www.metalev.org/2011/08/machine-intelligence-earthmoving.html
  
  "On hierarchical learning and building a brain":
  http://www.metalev.org/2011/08/on-hierarchical-learning-and-building.html
  
  "Life, Intelligence and the Second Law of Thermodynamics":
  http://www.metalev.org/2011/04/life-intelligence-and-second-law-of.html
  
  I hope some of this is at least thought-provoking!
  --Luke
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: How does life/death manifest itself in the human brain? Is brain death the ultimate end stage of life?

  Mar 8 2012: There is something to the fact that, to maintain a living state, the brain requires a pattern of oscillatory activity with the power distributed in certain frequency bands according to the type of activity that the brain is engaging in. (See Rhythms of the Brain by G. Buzsáki.) However, even after a massive epileptic seizure, which typically indicates a widespread state of electrical noise, the brain is usually able to recover these baseline rhythms.
  
  In PVS, the brain has very little normal electrical activity, but still, the activity is non-zero -- and the brain appears able to wake itself in some cases. There are stories of people waking up from PVS after several years. It's also curious that you can keep a person's body alive for a long time after their brain is declared "dead" as long as you keep blood flowing and oxygen and nutrients at the right levels. Personally I think that implies the organism couldn't really be declared dead to start with. I don't think it's possible to accurately declare an organism dead until rigor mortis sets in and its microbiome begins to consume it -- in my opinion, decay and the succumbing to entropy is the only true sign of death -- and these forces are set in motion very quickly once an organism "actually dies".
  
  Note that recent research has shown that administering an intravenous dose of Ritalin to a comatose mouse can cause the mouse to wake up almost instantly. They have yet to start human trials, but this may hold real hope for "rebooting the brain". http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ritalin-reverse-anesthesia-0922.html
  
  How long should we keep a PVS patient alive for though? Is it worth 20 years of stress on the family and untold cost of life support? I don't know, but I would say that we need a better understanding of the types of baseline electrical situations from which the brain is able to reboot before we can authoritatively say we know that a patient is actually "brain dead", i.e. beyond the chance of recovery.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future

  Mar 1 2012: Nice talk, Peter. I agree that there is very little reason for pessimism today -- however, we *must* increase in global consciousness of our need to be wise stewards over the earth. Conversations about pollution and ecological conservation that were prominent in the 70s and 80s all but died out over the deafening screaming match over global warming and CO2 emissions -- I think this is a grave mistake, *especially* in a world of abundance, due to the increase of waste that accompanies the increase in abundance and consumption.
  
  Also, I'm glad you mentioned that the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy -- this is the most important normalizing force in local and global growth of population, and the one factor most frequently ignored: No eugenics or forced population control of any sort is necessary for a population to reach equilibrium and even go into decline, you just have to raise the level of education (especially of women), quality of medical care and the standard of living, and the rest takes care of itself. I expect TED talks in 50 years to be talking about how on earth we're going to get women in the developed world to have more babies...
  
  It's also exciting that Dean Kamen's talks with Coca Cola to distribute the Slingshot have finally panned out. It has been a long time coming. It is extremely frustrating that Dean had this problem solved years ago, but economics and politics have kept this solution from those that need it while millions of children have continued to die per year of completely preventable water-borne illness.