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Scooped by Szabolcs Kósa onto Tracking the Future |
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== Grouches versus Pollyannas... spare us! ==
Economics-pundit Niall Ferguson has weighed in again. This time, in Don't Believe the Techno-Utopian Hype, he rails against the super-optimists -- those who believe that eternal rapid progress will be the natural, even teleologically ordained, result of ever-rising information technology and connectivity.
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Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has proposed that our ability to awe was biologically selected for by evolution because it imbues our lives with sense of cosmic significance that has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive.
Join Jason Silva every week as he freestyles his way into the complex systems of society, technology and human existence and discusses the truth and beauty of science in a form of existential jazz. New episodes every Tuesday.
Watch More Shots of Awe on TestTubehttp://testtube.com/shotsofawe
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Some engineers are dusting off an old idea for storing energy—using electricity to liquefy air by cooling it down to nearly 200 °C below zero. When power is needed, the liquefied air is allowed to warm up and expand to drive a steam turbine and generator.
The concept is being evaluated by a handful of companies that produce liquefied nitrogen as a way to store energy from intermittent renewable energy sources. Liquefied air might also be used to drive pistons in the engines of low-emission vehicles.
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Computers aren’t just getting better, they’re getting smarter. Sixteen years ago, a software program beat the reigning chess champion. IBM had spent seven years creating it, and it was time well spent. The victory got the world’s attention and proved that superior computation skills could at least sometimes add up to superior performance.
Two years ago, IBM’s Watson software beat the world’s two best players in the television game show “Jeopardy!” Although “Jeopardy!” is a test of trivia, the victory was anything but trivial. It showed how well artificial intelligence researchers could process ordinary language and extract knowledge from unstructured databases.
Since then, Watson has been put to work learning something a lot less trivial—medical diagnosis. But that’s still a very limited domain—in fact, it’s restricted to cancer diagnoses so far.
But IBM is also looking to the long term. It has given one of the world’s leading AI researchers, at a leading university for AI, an open-ended three-year charter to make Watson smarter.
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Robots began replacing human brawn long ago—now they’re poised to replace human brains. Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University, thinks that by 2045 artificially intelligent machines may be capable of “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”
So, he asks, what then will humans do?
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Kristie Lu Stout and NewYorker.com's Nicholas Thompson discuss the potential of 3D printing to change our lives
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Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells.
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Biologists have successfully extended the life spans of some mice by as much as 70%, leading many to believe that ongoing experimentation on our mammalian cousins will eventually lead to life-extending therapies in humans. But how reliable are these studies? And do they really apply to humans?
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Amon Kalkin is a cognitive scientist, electronic artist and founder of Zero State. He is 40 years old, born in New Zealand and living in the UK, where he spends his time raising a young family and gardening when he isn’t working to create a sphere of influence for positive futurist values.
an interview by @singularityblog
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Danish scientists are hoping for results that will show that “finding a mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible”.
They are conducting a clinical trial to test a “novel strategy” in which the HIV virus is "reactivated" from its hiding place within human DNA and potentially destroyed permanently by the immune system.
The move would represent a step forward in the attempt to find a cure for the virus, which causes Aids.
The scientists are currently conducting human trials on their treatment, in the hope of proving that it is effective. It has already been found to work in laboratory tests.
The technique involves unmasking the “reservoirs” formed by the HIV virus inside resting immune cells, bringing it to the surface of the cells. Once it comes to the surface, the body’s natural immune system may be able to kill the virus.
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This is a really scary article. It is becoming more and more apparent that the footprint humans are leaving in the earth is bigger than we thought. something must be done to slow it down.
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Professor Paul Newman discusses the present and future state of robotics: asking how the state of the discipline measures up to science fiction, and discussing how Robots can learn to navigate our world, with profound consequences for society
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Australian scientists have developed a breakthrough technique to read information stored on single atoms that will significantly improve the accuracy of future quantum computers.
The University of NSW-led team is the first in the world to use light combined with electrical signals to detect and read information stored on single atoms - the atomic structures that will form the basic storage and processing units of super-powerful quantum computers.
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This video maps out Kurzweil's SIX EPOCHS OF EVOLUTION showing the exponential progression in the way the universe stores and processes information... what we see is a bootstrapping recursive complexification leading us towards some kind of intelligence singularity.
"Part Timothy Leary, part Ray Kurzweil, and part Neo from 'The Matrix.'..."
JASON SILVA is an extraordinary new breed of philosopher who meshes philosophical wisdom of the ages with an infectious optimism for the future. Combining intriguing insights and a mastery of digital filmmaking, Jason delivers philosophical shots of espresso, which unravel the incredible possibilities the future has to offer the human race.
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Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.
A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.
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IBM’s question-answering Watson supercomputer is building quite the résumé. First it won a much-publicized showdownagainst the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, then it went to medical school and emerged as a budding oncologist. Now Watson has a new job–as a customer-service agent with the mostest. The help desk is a bit of a step down from fighting cancer, but IBM is nothing if not pragmatic. U.S. organizations spend $112 billion on call center labor and software, yet half of the 270 billion customer-service calls go unresolved each year, presenting a fairly sizable opening for an enhanced cognitive computer. Let’s face it: Rare is the occasion when you a) reach a live person and b) they know what they’re talking about. Why not give silicon a chance?
Watson is learning fast
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Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.
The device being tested, called by Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now. While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.
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Though establishing a basic income was once at the forefront of politics, it has since become more of a Utopian, abstract project. But sometimes it is helpful to step back from the day-to-day wonk work and think Utopian.
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As we begin to scratch at the basic workings of life, we’ll also inevitably come up against the mechanics of death. Real life extension science is on the horizon, and we should have a belief in place about how to approach these areas of science, because progress is not going to wait while we grapple with imponderables.
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There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.
The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.
About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”
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Rethink doesn't want to be just a robot maker. It wants to use Baxter as platform that anyone can use to improve on existing applications as well as develop completely new ones. To achieve that, Rethink needs to open up its technology, and last week, the company announced a major step in that direction: a version of Baxter designed for researchers.
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It's not an accredited university, and it doesn't actually teach the singuarity, the supposed superintelligence that will result when man merges with machine, due (according to prolific inventor and author Ray Kurzweil) sometime around 2045. Still, the official welcome at Singularity University's (SU) opening executive-programme class this fresh December afternoon in Nasa's Ames research campus, at Moffett Federal Airfield, California, is delivered -- appropriately -- by a 60cm-tall NAO humanoid robot. "I am so excited to see you all here," the robot beams to about 80 investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and otherwise future-curious students who have committed up to $12,000 (£7,650) each to spend seven days here exploring advances in biotech, nanotech, AI, robotics, neuroscience, energy systems and other accelerating technologies. The week's takeaways, declares SU's CEO Rob Nail, will be the opportunities offered by abundance, disruptive convergence, "109 thinking", problem-solving and "exponential technological challenges". "It gets really interesting," Nail says, "at the borders of, say, robotics and medicine, or nanotech and neuroscience." Even the course Wi-Fi password is "12481632" -- chosen because "it's exponential".
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While we can measure the degree to which technologies transcend physical and physiological boundaries, we can merely speculate about the ethical consequences of these developments and about their effect on human self-perception. The merging of human consciousness and technology changes not only the latter, but also the former. And the question is whether technology will become more human in the long run, or whether humans will become more technical.
The human body sits squarely at the center of this debate. Until today, we have largely conceived of technology as a collection of external objects. Now, technology enters the body, merges with it, becomes a constitutive part of its host. This presents us with a unique moment in evolutionary history. The biggest drivers of change can be found in the military and the pharmaceutical sectors of the economy. And the big unknown is whether we will be able to put the new possibilities to good use.
New ideologies have emerged that frame the techno-narrative and justify its propagation. The most influential among them is the ideology of transhumanism, a worldview predicated on the notion of transcendence. By merging man and machine, transhumanists hope to open up new avenues of human development. A core group of transhumanist thinkers has found a home at Oxford University, from where they fight against the humanist desire to protect and examine humanity in its current form...
Man, machine, industry
This changes everything: Not only our human self-perception (which has always been important for our conception of present and future) but also our definition of civilization. Some of these developments proceed at a breathtaking pace, and it’s only justified to ask whether members of the transhumanist vanguard and advocates of “inversive” technologies actually grasp the consequences of their work.
Hence the following assertion: The emerging global neuro-technological industry is more significant than all current political uprisings and military conflicts. Experiments are good. Careless tinkering with human nature is not.
The crucial point is that we simply don’t know enough about ourselves to speedily abandon our current view of humanity and to turn ourselves – as some transhumanists desire – into cyborg creatures. Our confusion starts at the fundamental level: For example, what does it mean to “know”? Is it possible to transfer all knowledge online if we can develop algorithms with adequate levels of sophistication? Can knowledge become de-corporealized?
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An exciting new study published in the prestigious journal Nature shows for the first time that manipulation of a brain chemical in a single region influences lifespan.
The authors conclude:
"To summarize, our study using several mouse models demonstrates that the hypothalamus is important for systemic ageing and lifespan control. This hypothalamic role is significantly mediated by IKK-band NF-kB-directed hypothalamic innate immunity involving microglia–neuron crosstalk. The underlying basis includes integration between immunity and neuroendocrine of the hypothalamus, and immune inhibition and GnRH restoration in the hypothalamus or the brain represent two potential strategies for combating ageing-related health problems."
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A group at Tokyo Institute of Technology, led by Dr. Osamu Hasegawa, has succeeded in making further advances with SOINN, their machine learning algorithm, which can now use the internet to learn how to perform new tasks. The system, which is under development as an artificial brain for autonomous mental development robots, is currently being used to learn about objects in photos using image searches on the internet. It can also take aspects of other known objects and combine them to make guesses about objects it doesn't yet recognize.
Once that all AI's will be able to not only parse and recognize data from internet but also efficiently communicate with each other and share the results programmers will become obsolete. Well let's have a good time while it lasts.
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