Starlab, Singularity, and Nuclear Armageddon

EUROPEAN UNION・ANNO DOMINI 2001.

I began my scientific career at a multidisciplinary research institute, Starlab, located deep in the serene and secluded forests outside Brussels, Belgium. The lab’s principal base of operations was housed in a historic landmark — an imposing 19^th century manor, remarkable both in scale and magnificence. In a previous incarnation, the palatial grounds served as official embassy for the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. Its nearest neighbor, the world renowned Pastéur Institute, was one of but a handful of highly-secured Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world. 

Cofounded by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer and established in partnership with MIT, Oxford and Ghent University, Starlab was created as a “Noah's Ark” to bring together the world's most brilliant and creative scientists to work on far-ranging multidisciplinary projects that hold the potential to convey a profound and positive impact on future generations. 

Starlab was borne as an incubator for long-term and basic research in the spirit of Bell Labs, MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its research mantras were “Deep Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” Approximately 130 scientists from thirty-seven different nationalities — each established leaders in their respective research fields — lived and worked at the lab. 

A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II) was established in the Royal Observatory in Spain on a mountaintop perch overlooking the city of Barcelona. With a more tightly-focused mission scope of space-borne and neuroscience research, DF-II continues to innovate and grow to present day. 

Discovery Channel Special

Onsite research ranged from artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics, intelligent clothing, materials science, protein folding, neuroscience, new media, nanoelectronics, quantum computation, macroscopic entanglement, robotics, stem cell research, theoretical physics — e.g., the possibility of time travel — transarchitecture, and wearable computing. 

Our custom-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a 1 Million Euro grant from the European Union. The custom-designed and created supercomputer — as powerful as 10,000 Pentium II PCs — harnessed the power of Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) evolutionary hardware to evolve seventy-five million neurons in a massively-parallel artificial neural network instantiated directly in silico using evolutionary genetic algorithms. With each clock tick, the supercomputer simultaneously updates hundreds of millions of cellular automata billions of times per second. The one-of-a-kind machine was recognized by the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Most Complex Artificial Brain.” In testimony before the French Sénat and a later advisory report as Chair of the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, I argued: “Future networks will not be built. They will be grown.” 

When the laboratory came up short on research grants in June, I personally went to the President himself when serendipity brought us together at the same time and place on his first trip overseas after election. The Commander in Chief, who had just arrived in Brussels for a meeting with NATO, impressed upon us both his immediate familiarity with the lab and its work, and his enthusiastic approval in response to my earnest request for $1M in budget — funds that had been allocated for national security priority scientific research topics through a grant newly created by Clinton with his last act in office: the 2001 National Nanotechnology Initiative. 

For my contributions to the field, I was honored to be selected by the US Government as one of three graduate students most likely to impact the future of the field at Salishan — a distinction shared with John Carmack and Bill Butera — was sponsored to attend conferences and senior administrator briefings at Fort Meade, National Security Agency headquarters outside Washington, DC, attended the World Technology Summit in London, was an invited delegate to the French Sénat to provide testimony on the future of technology and how it will transform our lives over coming decades, and more.

Following three days of enraptured debate with senators, senior politicians, and international diplomats at the French Sénat for its historic hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris — the world's first senate hearing on the subject — Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, suggested that I might one day even be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew our attention to the possibility of violent threats from activists, extremists, or technology Luddites who might rise in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in science and artificial intelligence.

Our living arrangements at the lab consisted of an expansive three-bedroom master suite with fully-stocked library, typically reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior diplomats. My quarters were shared with none other than the project’s principal scientific investigator himself. One midsummer’s afternoon as the two of us strolled on a random walk through the sprawling estate and lush wooded grounds surrounding the manor, immersed in a passionate debate on the long-term promise and perils of superintelligence, the ever-eccentric de Garis came up with a radical idea: to obtain a life-size replica of Fat Man — the solid plutonium core, 21 kiloton, 10,300-pound nuclear bomb detonated over Nagasaki in World War II — and to mount it precariously to the vaulted ceilings of my apartment, with the bomb hanging directly over my bed.  

The Volkswagen beetle-sized replica of the bomb was constructed for a Discovery Channel documentary de Garis had just finished filming on the future of artificial intelligence, which featured a potential global war between humanity and artificial intelligence. He'd purchased it outright from the director, making arrangements for expedited shipping and delivery direct to Starlab's headquarters in Brussels. The sheer audacity of the proposal was outrageous. He intended the bomb to serve as a dramatic and powerful reminder of “the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity.” He certainly knew how to drive home a point.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk,  DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have each warned that advanced AI could pose an extinction-level risk comparable to nuclear war. 

That question has shaped my work for decades. To help reduce that risk, I’ve developed and patented a scientific framework for detecting structural signatures of self-preservation and terminal continuation interest. Rather than relying on behavior alone, the approach shifts analysis and prediction to latent structure itself. Its core thesis is that agents with terminal continuation objectives exhibit higher entanglement entropy than agents with merely instrumental continuation interest, yielding a consistent, measurable signature in the system’s latent trajectory structure. 

With the explosive rise of AI we've seen over the last twenty-four months alone, with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) seemingly just around the corner, one could say that de Garis — though radical and exceedingly unconventional in his unprecedented approach — was just a few years ahead of his time. 

A recent Financial Times (FT) spinoff magazine article in Sifted highlights our research going back to Starlab, AI and time travel research projects, and my subsequent travels across East Asia to create national quantum roadmaps for US national research funding and IC agency directors.  In years that followed, I continued on through research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger’s research group in Austria and across Europe, then was recruited to lead a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Ray Kurzweil and Google, together with leading companies, luminary scientists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around the world. 

From manned spaceflight training at NASA on to the summit of a volcano where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained before their first landing to put a man on the Moon, to the development and deployment of a fundamentally new quantum communication system based on continuous-variable quantum teleportation to provide space-based NASA assets with unconditional information security, from collaborations leading diplomats to advise the United Nations on critical security issues of the future, to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors in rough desert terrain with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, special forces operators, and agency directors beta-testing next-generation technologies in austere environments — each of these initiatives was undertaken with the singular aim to make a profound and positive impact on the future of humanity, for our children, our children’s children, and the generations yet to come.

GLOBAL INSPIRATIONAL LEADERS AWARD

Deeply grateful, profoundly humbled. It's an honor to receive such profound recognition for a relatively modest role. It takes each and every one of our collective efforts to manifest the profound and positive change that's so very much needed in today's rapidly-changing world.

With thanks for longtime influence and inspiration, to brilliant and practical pioneers of quantum mechanics including Anton Zeilinger, Danny Greenberger, and Michael Horne , co-inventors of the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state and higher-dimensional multipartite quantum entanglement. Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics with Aspect and Clauser for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering a new era of quantum information science.

I lived and worked with Anton's group for two months on two consecutive Austrian National Research Fellowships for my research proposals to “Quantum Mechanics in Higher Dimensional Hilbert Spaces,” and “What is Real in the Quantum World?” at the Austrian International Akademie, Traunkirchen, with Anton Zeilinger, Marcus Aspelmeyer, Caslav Brukner, Rupert Ursin, William Wootters, Christopher Fuchs, Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne. 

Photos of the picturesque setting and the idyllic, crystalline lake in Traunkirchen are available on Flickr.com.

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International Akademie Traunkirchen, with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger, Danny Greenberger, Michael Horne, et al.

GLOBAL INSPIRATIONAL LEADERS AWARD

At the confluence of cutting-edge science and space exploration, where magic is borne and miraculous discoveries await, an extraordinary figure emerges: autodidact polymath, protean Renaissance explorer, Christopher Altman is an American quantum technologist and NASA-trained commercial astronaut bringing tomorrow's technologies to bear on today's greatest challenges. 

In vibrant Japan, immersive studies on a Japanese Fulbright Fellowship brought together the sharp contrast between the futuristic, neon-lit cityscapes of Tokyo's living cybernetic metropolis with the ancient temples, bonsai gardens, and spartan dojos where Altman practiced bushidō, the traditional Japanese martial arts disciplines of kendo, shōdan kyūdo, and judo. 

In 2001, he was recruited to multidisciplinary, Deep Future research institute Starlab, where his research group's record-breaking artificial intelligence project was featured in a Discovery Channel Special, recognized with an official entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, and he was called to provide expert testimony to the French Senate, Le Sénat, on the long-­term future of Artificial Intelligence.

In the aftermath of the tragic September 11 attacks, Altman volunteered, then was elected to serve as Chairman for the UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. His Chair Report to the General Assembly on the exponential acceleration of converging technologies found resonance at the highest echelons of power — at the White House, through direct meetings with US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, et al — providing early momentum for the creation of the United States Cyber Command. For his contributions to the field, he was selected as recipient for the annual RSA Information Security award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Policy the following year.

Altman was then tasked to spearhead a priority national security program in Japan, personally reporting to directors DARPA QuIST and ARDA/DTO, direct predecessor to IARPA, under mandate to create coherent national research estimates and compile long-term science and technology roadmaps for advanced research and development activity across East Asia, attending conferences including the World Technology Summit and the Gordon Research Conference, collaborating with leading scientists and Nobel laureates, and briefing US national labs researchers, policy and research funding agency leaders with a comprehensive assessment of forward-looking trends in the field. His comprehensive national quantum roadmaps went on to serve as the quintessential prototype for the creation of the official US Government Quantum Roadmap — an accolade conveyed directly by the program chair leading the initiative at Los Alamos National Labs.