Thanks to Oliver, who posted a comment linking to this series of videos by Peter Hadfield on the science of climate change. He nicely provides information without hysteria or obvious one-sidedness. Check out the first in the series below and let me know what you think.
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Astronomers have discovered a new solar system that appears to have almost as many planets as our own. They found up to seven planets orbiting a star that is of a similar type to the Sun, including one that is likely to be rocky and less than 1.5 times the size of the Earth.
Reporting his team’s discovery in France today, astronomer Christophe Lovis said: “We have found what is most likely the system with the most planets yet discovered. This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research – the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets.”
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I am fascinated by my brain. Not mine in particular, but the human brain. Human brains seem to be the most complex things we know of, and are thus devilishly difficult to understand, but it is possible that a complete copy of a human brain may be built in a silicon substrate in the next ten years. What follows is a brief description of the Blue Brain project, reported for the WSJ by Gautam Naik.
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The dream of futurists is to see everything from an apple (the red or green kind, not a Jobs creation, but that too) to a pencil built molecule by molecule in a nanotech factory the size of a breadbox. They envision one of these in every home. This is not that, but it exists today and has been in use by the military (why do they get everything first?).
From Global Guerrillas, August 16, 2010:
RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Forget Afghanistan, These are Needed in Detroit etc.
The US Military Special Operations Command is building eight "mobile factories" that fit into standard shipping containers. These factories are based on the successful experience the US Army has had with something similar called the MPH.
From Strategypage:
The MPH was developed when the army realized that the easiest way to get the many rarely requested, but vital, replacement parts to the troops, was to manufacture the parts in the combat zone. In short order, this led to the construction of a portable parts fabrication system, called MPH, that fit into a standard 8x8x20 foot shipping container. The original version used two containers, but smaller equipment and more powerful computers eventually made it possible to use one container.Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries. Read more...
A Slightly Different Take on Futurism from Douglas Hofstadter
Dr. Douglas Hofstadter, a noted American academic and author of the best-selling, Pulitzer-Prize winning book, "Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid," is also deeply involved in tracking Artificial Intelligence developments. As a cognitive scientist and general polymath with a background in physics, Hofstadter has played an instrumental role in discussions about the singularity and futurism in general.
While Kurzweil and his contemporaries approach the singularity as a very specific point in time that is close at hand considering the remarkably speedy technological developments of the last few years, Hofstadter takes a more conservative view. Regardless of who is right or wrong, Hofstadter has certainly substantively added to the exciting discussion of futurism.
Hofstadter does take issue with Kurzweil's and others' claims of the persistence of Moore's Law, which, if taken more figuratively than Moore himself intended, essentially undergirds the argument of the impending singularity. While it is true that we have seen quicker and quicker accelerations in change and technological advancement over the past few decades, as compared to relatively slow change in the distant past, Hofstadter points out that S curves, which demonstrate exponential growth that eventually levels off, could be just as possible in describing the future course of technological change.
Another point of contention that Hofstadter makes with several futurists is an ethical one. In an interview in the magazine American Scientist, Hofstadter noted, when asked about the singularity and advances in robotics:
"But the point is, there doesn't seem to be any discussion anywhere of "Is this good?" It's all "Let's go faster! Faster! Faster!" Well, where are you going? What are you trying to do? And I don't see any asking of these questions."
After having organized symposia at Stanford University to discuss these issues, Hofstadter was simply not satisfied with what he heard. As he put it in his interview, "the people [futurists at the symposia] didn't confront their own ideas."
While many consider Hofstadter to be a hard-line skeptic of the notion of a "singularity", nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Hofstadter does assert that many of Kurzweil's ideas are "impressive" and solid. Whatever Hofstadter's opinions, the futurist community is deeply indebted to Hofstadter's questioning, if only because every idea--no matter how well-supported--must constantly re-evaluate itself in order to gain serious intellectual standing.
For further thoughts on the Singularity, view the Singularity Summit at Stanford on Youtube.
By-line: This guest post is contributed by Roger Elmore, who writes on the topics of hospitality management degree. He welcomes your comments at his email Id: rogerelmore24@gmail.com.
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Clouds are wispy, ephemeral things, until you get inside one. The digital cloud sounds wispy and soft too, but its awesome power has already been felt on Android phones. That amazingly accurate and speedy voice recognition isn't being processed by your phone's CPU, but by the powerhouses in the cloud.
Google steps it up again with this:
Technology Review - 8.20.10 by Tom Simonite
From Amazon's product recommendations to Pandora's ability to find us new songs we like, the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events.
Now Google has launched a service that could bring such smarts to many more apps. Google Prediction API provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly.
Read more>>
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MercuryNews.com - 8.12.10 by Chris O'Brien
It can be easy to dismiss Singularity, an intellectual movement embraced by some of Silicon Valley's most celebrated thinkers, because of its more fantastic elements -- humans merging with machines, thousand-year life spans and predictions of a robot war that will wipe out humanity within a few decades.
But that misses the point at the heart of Singularity: The pace of change in technology and science is accelerating so rapidly that the world is completely unprepared to deal with the consequences. And the message from the people who champion Singularity: We need to prepare.
That will be at the heart of the two-day Singularity Summit in San Francisco that starts Saturday and will feature more than 500 people from various disciplines discussing how these changes will reshape our world.
To better understand Singularity, I talked to two people running the institutions that have become the public faces of this movement. Michael Vassar is president of the Singularity Institute in San Francisco, which conducts research and is organizing the summit; Salim Ismail is chief executive of Singularity University in Mountain View, which focuses on education and training about the topic.
Read more>>
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theglobalspiral - by Mark Walker
Transhumanism is the thesis that we can and ought to use technology to alter and improve human biology. Some likely targets for the technological makeover of human nature include making ourselves smarter, happier, longer-lived and more virtuous. The operative assumption here of course is that intelligence, moods, longevity and virtues each have deep roots in our biology. By altering biology transhumanists propose to improve human nature to the point of creating a new genus: such as posthumans.
Posthumans probably won’t have much more capacity for evil than we have, or are likely to have shortly. So, at least in terms of how many persons can be killed, posthumans will not outstrip us in this capacity. This is not to say that there are no new worries with the creation of posthumans, but the greatest evil, the destruction of civilization, is something which we now, or will soon, have. In other words, the most significant aspect that we should focus on with contemplating the creation of posthumans is their upside. They are not likely to distinguish themselves in their capacity for evil, since we have already pretty much hit the wall on that, but for their capacity for good.
naturenews - 7.21.10 by Janet Fang
NYT - 8.9.10 by Jaron Lanier
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Atlantic - 8.4.10 by Alexis Madrigal
Futurism's quote of the week:
“I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon.”
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