Clipmarks | wildcat's singularity collection

Building 'The Matrix'

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:57:09 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Feynman envisioned, a general purpose, programmable quantum computer could itself carry out quantum simulations. But such machines are still decades away, most researchers say, while machines designed only for quantum simulations may become available sooner.

Clip Source: www.sciencenews.org

Simulating the complexity of quantum physics would quickly overwhelm even the most advanced of today’s computers.

If The Matrix really existed, it would probably have to be a quantum simulator. The fictional computer in that story can create virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real one and project them into people’s minds. But the real world includes quantum phenomena, something ordinary computers can’t fully simulate.

Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can't make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don't yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example.

Tags: complexity, quantum mechanics, matrix

Grid of 100,000 computers heralds new internet dawn

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:14:00 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The Grid is coming

Clip Source: technology.timesonline.co.uk

A network of 100,000 computers providing the greatest data processing capacity yet unleashed has been created to cope with information pouring from the world’s largest machine.

The Grid is the latest evolution of the internet and the world wide web and computer scientists will announce on Friday that it is ready to be connected to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

It is designed for schemes where huge quantities of data need crunching, such as large research and engineering projects. The Grid has the kind of power required to download movies in seconds, and the ability to make high-definition video phone calls for the same price as a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases. However, it is unlikely to be directly available to most internet users until telecoms providers build the fibre-optic network required to use it.

Tags: grid, computing, cern

The Landscape of Possible Intelligences

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:50:30 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: If we imagine the levels of intelligence as a ladder with unevenly spaced rungs, there may be jumps that some intelligences are not able to complete, or their derivatives are not able to jump. So a type 3 mind may be able to jump up four levels of bootstrapping intelligence, but not five. Since I don't believe intelligence is linear (that is I believe intelligence grows in many dimensions), a better illustration may be to view the problem of bootstrapping super intelligence as navigating across a rugged evolutionary landscape.

Clip Source: www.kk.org

We can distinguish several categories of elementary minds in relation to bootstrapping:

1) A mind capable of imagining, or identifying a greater mind.
2) A mind capable of imaging but incapable of designing a greater mind.
3) A mind capable of designing a greater mind.

We fit the first criteria, but it is unclear whether we are of the second or third type of mind. There is also a fourth type, which follows the third:

4) A mind capable of generating a greater mind which in turn itself creates a greater mind, and so on.

This is an cascading, bootstrapping mind. Once a mind reaches this level, the recursive mind-enlargement can either keep going ad infinitum, or it might reach some limit. On the other hand, there may be more than one threshold in intelligence. Think of it as quantum levels. A mind may be able to make a mind smarter than itself, but the offspring mind may not be smart enough to make the next leap, and so gets stuck.

Tags: intelligence, limits, smarts, minds

The Coming Convergence

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:13:34 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The message is clear: the choices we make now will converge to create a near and distant future that will be almost unbelievably wonderful or unimaginably catastrophic, or both. This knowledgeable, fascinating glimpse into the future is a must read for everyone interested in technology, upcoming innovations in business, science fiction, and the future.

Clip Source: www.sfwa.org

The Coming Convergence
The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future

Imagine direct communication links between the human brain and machines, or tailored materials capable of adapting by themselves to changing environmental conditions, or computer chips and environmental sensors embedded into everyday clothing, or medical technologies that eliminate currently untreatable conditions such as blindness and paralysis. Now imagine all of these developments occurring at the same time. The stuff of science fiction?

Not So. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future based on the rapid pace of innovation.

Longer, healthier lives

Cheap, generally available food, energy, and technology

Reduced pollution and environmental stress

Economic disruption during transitional periods

Excessive power in too few hands

Increased vulnerability from overdependence on technology.

Tags: convergence, technologies, future, singularity

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:08:58 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Video games are reshaping how we perform and promote science. A review by Seed Mag

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

The digital revolution now engulfing our world emerged from the events during and immediately after the Second World War, when intellectual titans such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon roamed the Earth. Many of the predictions they made for the future in those early days are now reality, or something close to it. Turing foresaw computers as artificial intelligences. Neumann imagined machines that could reproduce themselves. Wiener guessed at a merging of biology and technology, and Shannon predicted the primacy of pure information over physical matter. But were these "founding fathers" to somehow see the state of modern computer science, they might be surprised that some of their wildest dreams are being fulfilled not under the explicit auspice of research, but of recreation

Emergence & Complexity
Spore

www.spore.com

Brain-Computer Interaction
Emotiv Systems' EPOC headset

Crowdsourcing
Foldit

Science Education
Immune Attack

3D Virtual Creature Evolution

Tags: video games, digital revolution

One hundred tesla without self-destructing

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:40:36 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Why would anyone need a magnet that strong? Greg Boebinger, director of the Magnet Lab, says that this magnetic field strength is the only way to test the properties of newly discovered high-temperature superconductors like iron oxyarsenide, which may improve the performance of MRI machines and high-voltage power lines while lowering their cost. A 100‑T magnet would also let you conduct certain zero-gravity experiments without traveling into space and let you develop magnetic propulsion systems that could eventually replace those that burn rocket fuel.

Clip Source: spectrum.ieee.org

World's Most Powerful Magnet Under Construction By Willie D. Jones

First Published September 2008

Magnetic Moment: Engineers are readying a supercooled, record-setting 100-tesla magnet at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The magnet will have to withstand forces equivalent to 200 sticks of dynamite.

Multiply the magnetic field strength of a refrigerator magnet by 2 million and you'll be in the ballpark of the strength of the magnet that researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, based near Florida State University in Tallahassee, are trying to create. When completed later this year, the pulsed electromagnet, located at the lab's facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, will reach 100 tesla, the holy grail of magnetic field strength. And in another first, if all goes according to plan it will reach that level—about 67 times as high as a typical MRI—without blowing itself to smithereens.

Tags: tesla, magnet, physics

Telepresence Robot TiLR at the X PRIZE Foundation

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:21:36 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: revolutionary technology

Clip Source: www.prweb.com

RoboDynamics is an innovative robotics company that develops enterprise Robotic Telepresence platforms such as TiLR. By using TiLR the X Prize Foundation is shifting the paradigm of face to face communications whereby a person can now transport himself instantly to their offices without actually being at their office. This new mode of collaboration will dramatically reduce downtime, increase productivity, and eliminate travel. The robot is installed at the Google Lunar X Prize offices within the X Prize Foundation.

Robotic Telepresence provides the ability to instantly transport a person to a remote location without the person actually going there. Robotic Telepresence is similar to video conferencing in that there is a real time audio/video link, but also provides the means for the user to commandeer the robot and move about the remote location as though the user was actually there.

For more information please visit www.robodynamics.com

Tags: telepresence, robot, tilr, x prize foundation

The Coming Death Shortage

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:33:49 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Why the longevity boom will make us sorry to be alive" a must read.
Though I fail to agree with many of the premises of this article, the critical views it presents are important and the issues need be taken into consideration seriously

Clip Source: www.theatlantic.com

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."

The critical issue, in Goldman's view, will be not the costs per se but determining who will pay them. "We're going to have a very public debate about whether this will be covered by insurance," he says

Tags: longevity, death, economy, future, public debate

Toward a Type 1 civilization

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:59:25 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Along with energy policy, political and economic systems must also evolve.
Michael Shermer, one of the most trusted voices in todays world.

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

By Michael Shermer
July 22, 2008

Our civilization is fast approaching a tipping point. Humans will need to make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make that transformation will doom us to the endless political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for the last half-millennium.

We need new technologies to be sure, but without evolved political and economic systems, we cannot become what we must. And what is that? A Type 1 civilization. Let me explain.

Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.)

Tags: michael shermer, civilization, transformation

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) A Talk By Mark Pesce

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:21:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

"we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"

"where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

Tags: hyperpolitics, talk, digital ethnology

Thought control: it's the computer world's latest game plan

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:44:22 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: “This is the tip of the iceberg for what is possible,” said Tan Le, another of Emotiv's co-founders, during a recent press demonstration. “There will be a convergence of gesture-based technology and the brain as a new interface - the Holy Grail is the mind.”

Clip Source: technology.timesonline.co.uk

First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. Now get ready for another radical and rather unsettling leap in video games technology: thought control.

Satoru Iwata, the president and chief executive of Nintendo - which is expected to sell about 25million units of its successful Wii video games console this financial year - has no doubts about the next gaming boom. “As soon as we think something in our brain, it will appear within a video game,” he told The Times in an exclusive interview.

“You'll probably need to wear some kind of hat or helmet or something.”

As far-fetched as it sounds, Mr Iwata's claim - which brings to mind the plot of Craig Thomas's bestselling 1977 novel Firefox, about a mind-reading Soviet fighter aircraft - is already coming true: the world's first thought-controlled game is expected to be launched by the Sydney company Emotiv by the end of this year.

Tags: gaming, neuroscience, mind, emotiv

New Memory Technologies

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:41:54 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Considering the recent advances in Brain-Machine interface, and the development of new neural implants, it is quite clear that Memory management is only the tip of the iceberg, I definitely agree with D.Peletier that the main effect of these new technologies will be to vastly improve our wellbeing

Clip Source: www.positivefuturist.com

By Dick Pelletier

If there was a pill that could immediately improve your memory, enabling you to recall any selected event in your past with sharp detail, would you take it? How about a pill that would erase an unwanted memory, like a traumatic childhood event that still bothers you in adult life?

And even more radical, would you like to download knowledge directly into your brain enabling you to immediately speak and understand a new language, or instantly learn any new subject matter, without suffering through the lengthy process of learning from scratch?

Memory-managing drugs hold promise to change the boundaries of freedom of thought similar to how the Internet is changing freedom of speech

As we enter into what positive futurists refer to as a “magical future” time, we realize that science and technologies can do more than just repair sick people; they can raise our standard of living, add to our happiness, and greatly improve how we interact with the world around us

Tags: memory, technologies, mind upgrade

The Death of HAL –the Evolving Digital Ecosystem

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:07:58 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

One of the greatest fears of many is the underlying knowledge that, all the wonderful advances of technology, the internet and robotics is simply bringing us closer to being subservient to our robotic overlords. It is essentially a historical imperative, and we can see it coming a mile away.

However British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt, believes differently.

Instead of intelligence that is a “brain in a box”, we are seeing intelligence that is assistive, adaptive and flexible. They are helping us “drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.”
In other words, instead of an intelligence that is “…agonizing about their existence or whether we are about to switch them off” we are seeing the growth of intelligence that, in years to come, will immerse us and center around humans, rather than feel the need to enslave humans.

“What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem,’

Tags: ai, evolution, digital ecosystem, the net, the grid

The Future

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:50:40 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: This is a special report that appeared on Forbes on 10.15.07 and has an impressive list of visionaries talking about the future. highly recommended reading. click the names to read the visions

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

hat happened to the future? Weren't things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons -- but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

The truth is that people simply aren't very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we're still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.

Visionaries

What were you sure would happen, but didn't? What totally surprised you?

Joel A. Barker
Wendell Bell
Stuart Brand
David Brin
Pat Cadigan
James Canton
Ed Cornish
Esther Dyson
Scott W. Erickson
Frank Feather
Jacque Fresco
Harry Harrison
Hazel Henderson

Sohail Inayatullah
William Knoke
Richard Lamb
John Mahaffie
Syd Mead
John Naisbitt
Nicholas Negroponte
Bob Rogers
Rudy Rucker
Paul Saffo
Robert Sawyer
Stephen Wolfram

Tags: visionaries, future

Artificial Intelligence under the spotlight at BA Festival

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:34:25 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: ‘Computers are now one million times more powerful than when I started my research career – no field has come close to this rate of development,’ he says. ‘If transport had progressed at the same rate we would be flying from London to New York in less than a tenth of second.’

Clip Source: www.ecs.soton.ac.uk

Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt.

Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future.

‘AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science – it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,’ says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Tags: ai, the net, robotics