I am sort of retired now. I do occasional paid work but not much. The rest of my time I am literally self-employed, working the same hours as before, but on projects I want to do rather than ones people pay me to do.
The year started with a lot of fun messing around with AI chat. I wrote silly things about penguins, humble bees, polar bears, penguin defence systems, gender ideology, and a few hours ago I posted my latest invention on a new kind of tampon. That’s something I never expected to work on.
I always find I get a creativity boost in late winter/early spring and this year was no exception. I went away on a short break (to do some seal-watching on the Norfolk Coast). At the B&B, I wondered for a while about what might have happened if I hadn’t given up Biology A-level (because I fell out with my teacher – she wouldn’t let me do it in one year because that might mean extra effort on her part). I had learned some biology since and then done a lot of active skin biotech development in 2001, but I don’t know much biology, so I downloaded a university biology text book, and started to flick through it. Almost the first paragraph I read contained the explanation that all life on Earth consists of cells. I thought immediately that there was no good reason for that, stopped reading and started thinking. A few minutes later, I was very confident in my conclusion that it is perfectly possible to have non-cellular life, and indeed it would likely happen earlier than cellular life, so therefore might even be the true explanation for the origin of life on Earth. After a few hours of thinking, I had come up with lots of different kinds of non cellular life. When I returned home i wrote some of them up as a scientific paper, which I later copied onto my blog, so you can read it here: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/08/03/non-cellular-life-forms/
It identifies a wide range of potential classes of life that are not present on the normal ‘tree of life’ you see in biology text books. Some of those forms might actually exists, as yet undiscovered, and the rest might have existed in the past and might exists in the future.
Later, I applied the thinking to potential extraterrestrial life and concluded it would be possible for non-cellular life forms to exist on comets. I also designed a set of potential future non-cellular life forms with medical and military applications, but I still haven’t written those up yet.
But while I was thinking about that, I had another good idea, and after a lot more thought, I roped in my friend and top futurist Tracey Follows to help write a book on it – her role was mostly the identity-related issues. I called the concept EDNA (enhanced DNA) and it is basically a multi-layered architecture for a full API (application programming interface) for biology that will eventually follow on as genetic tools like CRISPR continue to emerge and develop . In due course it will allow total control of our biology, and that of any other life form, from a computer. We wrote it quickly, and a summary is here: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/02/10/edna-enhanced-dna/
the final book is on Amazon, https://www.amazon.co.uk/EDNA-Enhanced-external-control-biology-ebook/dp/B0BVGDLCL2
EDNA is probably my best ever idea.
I then turned my thought to quantum computing. Years ago I had invented the idea of using electron beams to replace captive electrons in atoms, and I realised that this would allow fabrication of new kinds of quantum computer. After a bit of engineering design, I had an in-principle design for a range of quantum computers from 1 million qubits to a trillion trillion qubits. You couldn’t make one yet, but by 2030 it ought to be possible to make the 1 million qubit one and the rest would follow over the next decades. You can read my blog on it here: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/02/25/future-quantum-computing/, and much later: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/harnessing-electron-beam-stabilized-lithium-crystals-a-gateway-to-advanced-quantum-ai-and-new-states-of-matter/
One of my early insights was that the processing capability would be very many orders of magnitude greater than the speed that data could be put in or extracted. So I realised the best use of such a machine would be to host a hive of interconnected AI minds. It would be vastly superhuman.
So I realised we really need to have an anti-AI weapon system, so I had fun persuading ChatGPT to design one, called AIDS (AI disruptor system). It obviously needed a little directing, but this blog is almost all its own work, at least after I’d explained what I wanted it to do and pointed it at my blog for useful material to work with: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/04/13/aids-an-ai-disruptor-system-designed-by-chatgpt4/
In late April, I saw a public database that listed the main sources of training data for Google’s first generation LLM, so I spent ages extracting the data from it about the relative contributions from futurists, so that if you read an AI-generated futures piece, you’d have some idea where it got the ideas from. https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/04/26/top-futurist-sites/. This site works out at almost exactly 1 millionth, and my other blogs probably add up to another millionth.
Continuing my AI thinking, with https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/02/gpt4-agrees-that-machine-consciousness-could-spontaneously-ignite-with-fairly-modest-progress-from-current-ai/ I argued how machine consciousness could ignite in the not very distant future. There is a great deal of discussion about superhuman AI, AGI, and conscious machines, and a significant number of researchers just don’t seem to understand and argue that there is no threat, no possibility of a conscious computer. My blog attempted to deal with it to some degree by showing it is certainly possible and a very real threat. And in fact, if we were unlucky, it could even arrive by Xmas: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/03/too-late-for-a-pause-minimal-ai-consciousness-by-xmas/
I then did some more AI inventing and greatly updated my thinking from 20+ years ago on the idea of software transforms: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/03/software-and-knowledge-transformers/
I also invented some new forms of neurons based on triangular architectures: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/04/exploring-machine-consciousness-with-triangular-adaptive-analog-neurons/, https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/3-terminal-digital-neurons-for-ai-applications-on-everyday-devices/
A few months later I reused these ideas in my concept of inverse LLMs. I realised that conventional LLMs have unnecessary limitations, so I came up with the ‘inverse LLM’ and wrote that up. An inverse LLM would be much smarter and more creative than an ordinary LLM: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/08/04/the-inverse-llm-or-curation-transformer/
https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/08/04/agi-development-part-3/
I just finished my AI 2023 work with a final piece on how to retrospectively use LLMs to achieve inverse at least some LLM potential: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/12/20/retrospectively-increasing-llm-intelligence-via-curation-transformers/
But in between all that AI work, I had another good idea, the inverse capacitor, which would use carefully engineered graphene layers, or as I later realised, you could simply use pure graphite. I am still not 100% certain it is possible, but every scientist and engineer I have talked to (including all the usual AI chatbots), seems to think it should work. It uses my favourite term: inverse: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/the-inverse-capacitor-a-novel-energy-storage-system-with-potential-applications-in-rocket-propulsion/
Basically, it turns the idea of a capacitor on its head and in doing so, massively increases its energy storage capacity. At the time, ChatGPT4 was terrible at doing sums, so I had to do a great deal of the maths manually.
As energy is stored in an inverse capacitor, all the layers hold the same charge (in normal capacitors, plates have opposite charge), repulsive forces would gradually build up. Eventually, those forces would cause the capacitor to rupture. That’s not a good thing if you want to use if for energy storage like in your car. However, the rupture could have explosive forces if the voltage is around 450V, so I turned that to advantage and designed a whole new kind of rocket propulsion system. I have a lot of fun with that, redesigning Mars trips, realising that you could go from Earth surface to Mars surface with a single stage rocket. The propulsion arises from Newtonian reaction as the outermost surface of the capacitor is allowed to detach with extreme force and speed. I call it capacitor ablation propulsion. You can get about 5-8 times more energy per kg than from hydrogen, currently the best non-nuclear fuel. The same system can store 45-50kWh per kg of electricity as a capacitor, making it capable of powering an electric car for hundreds of kilometres on 1kg. Then you could swap it out with a fresh one for the rest of your trip, and keep a few spares in the boot. When you return, you can charge them all back up again.
Since I was in carbon mode, I also wrote up my new material Hexacarbon: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/super-chemistry-unveiling-a-new-carbon-allotrope-hexacarbon-and-four-pathways-to-achieve-it/
I also had some fun reinventing the wheel for supersonic cars like the Thrust SSC. https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/05/23/rethinking-wheels-for-supersonic-cars/
and further developed an old idea for new kind of musical instruments: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2023/10/28/redefining-resonance-the-future-of-string-instruments/
As well as my EDNA book, I wrote several others using AI. One on Argentine Tango, one on local walks, one extracting the wisdom from old folk tales around the world and a few silly ones, such as the Power of Three. AI has given me a lot of enjoyment, but I’ve also contributed a lot of good ideas to it, not just this year, but in the past. I got AI to look at some of my old papers from decades ago, and the ideas in them were typically 20 years ahead of the field. I hope my latest ones are closer, since I’d like to see some of them work.
At the end of the summer, I did a small project rethinking the basis of quantum theory, and came up with a new one, sub-quantum theory. One day, we’ll know whether it just rubbish or if other scientists follow me down that same road.
So it’s been a very good year for me in terms of ideas, with my EDNA, new life forms, a new theory of life’s origins, inverse capacitors, new kinds of rockets and weapons and lots of AI and quantum computing. In spite of losing a few months to medical issues, 2023 has been my most productive year ever. I spent much of the last week or two writing music and songs, just for a change. Why not?
Retirement is about not having to work for money any more, and doing what you want instead, and in however long I have left before my brain stops working properly, I’ll happily carry on doing more of the same. When you aren’t shackled by just paying bills, you can think more freely.