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Category: computing – Page 946

Transhumanism Solving Violence and Improving the Human Condition: IQ, EQi, and Intelligence Upgrades

Can we end violence? Can we create greater emotional well being and intellectual equality for the greater well being of humanity? Will we be able to keep up with machines? How can we augment our intelligence? Could we cure mental illness? After advancements in aging the next major area of research from a standpoint of eliminating personal and global suffering would be upgrades in intelligence. Transhumanist values at their core want to eliminate suffering and existential risk to people’s lives. With well founded logic, these goals are not completely out of reach, it is possible but as usual, we will have to take the complex issue from many angles and from the standpoint of a systems engineer, but let’s look at some fun stuff before we get into the heavy stuff.

The Benefits of Intelligence Upgrades

So, what is the benefit for intelligence upgrades for every day people? We live in a time of exponential technology and vast amounts of face paced information, breakthroughs and invention. So, the most obvious answer to what is the benefit of intelligence upgrade is dealing with the massive amount of information one needs to keep up with daily to be on top of the game for work, for research or for business. Sometimes it can be our mere storage capacity that limits us in our abilities to interact with this information, at other times it is our processing speed, and most fundamentally the rate at which we can interact with new information. In 2012, a prosthetic chip was invented that uses electrodes to expand one’s memory storage. Now, with biotechnology predicted to move more quickly in 2016 and Google ready to back more companies in biotechnology, it may be possible to augment or program selective photographic memory. This is just an example of what one could imagine and begin working with, when combining electronics and gene editing. Many big breakthroughs in enhanced intelligence could be achieved in the future. The implications for business professionals, scientists, and the progress of technology would be astounding if upgrades like these were available. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when me and my personal A.I. through my Google Glass or some sort of eye wear or ear piece could read my brainwaves so I can type and do all my work through what would be a virtual form of telepathy. I could store everything I will need later instantly in the cloud and exactly where I want on my computer, there would be almost no delay because, well, how could there be? Time is everything.

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IBM to develop hardware to wipe out errors in quantum computing

(Image: IBM)

The race to build a full-blown quantum computer is heating up. Tech giant IBM has been working on error-correcting techniques for quantum hardware, and has now won funding from the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to take it to the next level.

Quantum computers promise to vastly outperform normal PCs on certain problems. But efforts to build them have been hampered by the fragility of quantum bits, or qubits, as the systems used to store them are easily affected by heat and electromagnetic radiation. IBM is one of a number of companies and research teams developing error-correcting techniques to iron out these instabilities.

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Controversial Quantum Machine Bought

Governments and leading computing companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google are trying to develop what are called quantum computers because using the weirdness of quantum mechanics to represent data should unlock immense data-crunching powers. Computing giants believe quantum computers could make their artificial-intelligence software much more powerful and unlock scientific leaps in areas like materials science. NASA hopes quantum computers could help schedule rocket launches and simulate future missions and spacecraft. “It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Deepak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Biswas spoke at a media briefing at the research center about the agency’s work with Google on a machine they bought in 2013 from Canadian startup D-Wave systems, which is marketed as “the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” The computer is installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and operates on data using a superconducting chip called a quantum annealer. A quantum annealer is hard-coded with an algorithm suited to what are called “optimization problems,” which are common in machine-learning and artificial-intelligence software.

However, D-Wave’s chips are controversial among quantum physicists. Researchers inside and outside the company have been unable to conclusively prove that the devices can tap into quantum physics to beat out conventional computers.

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The Universe is a Quantum Algorithm, and the proof has been found in the … Stock Market

Which mean for us?

Recently, quantum gates and quantum circuits have been found when portfolios of stocks were simulated in quantum computation processes, pointing out to the existence of a bizarre quantum code beneath the stock market transactions. The quantum code of the stock market might prove to have a more profound signification if is related to the recent finding of quantum codes at the deepest levels of our reality, such as quantum mechanics of black holes and the space-time of the universe. Could this mysterious stock market quantum code be a tiny fragment of a quantum code that our universe uses to create the physical reality?

John Preskill’s talk „Is spacetime a quantum error-correcting code?” held at the Center for Quantum Information and Control, University of New Mexico, and previously at Kavli Institute for Theoretical physics, may represent a turning point in physical research related to questioning the existence and evolution of our Universe. The essence of this talk may change forever our understanding of the Universe, shifting the perspective of physical research from masses and energies to codes of information theory.

John Preskill, professor at California Institute of Technology, is well known mostly for his remarkable developments of quantum computational models, more specifically topological quantum computing. Preskill’s lectures inspire a whole generation of brilliant physicists working on quantum computation. This experience in quantum computing may point out Dr. Preskill to knock at the Universe gates with the unique perspective of a quantum code reality.

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A Short History of AI, and Why It’s Heading in the Wrong Direction

Sir Winston Churchill often spoke of World War 2 as the “Wizard War”. Both the Allies and Axis powers were in a race to gain the electronic advantage over each other on the battlefield. Many technologies were born during this time – one of them being the ability to decipher coded messages. The devices that were able to achieve this feat were the precursors to the modern computer. In 1946, the US Military developed the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. Using over 17,000 vacuum tubes, the ENIAC was a few orders of magnitude faster than all previous electro-mechanical computers. The part that excited many scientists, however, was that it was programmable. It was the notion of a programmable computer that would give rise to the ai_05idea of artificial intelligence (AI).

As time marched forward, computers became smaller and faster. The invention of the transistor semiconductor gave rise to the microprocessor, which accelerated the development of computer programming. AI began to pick up steam, and pundits began to make grand claims of how computer intelligence would soon surpass our own. Programs like ELIZA and Blocks World fascinated the public and certainly gave the perception that when computers became faster, as they surely would in the future, they would be able to think like humans do.

But it soon became clear that this would not be the case. While these and many other AI programs were good at what they did, neither they, or their algorithms were adaptable. They were ‘smart’ at their particular task, and could even be considered intelligent judging from their behavior, but they had no understanding of the task, and didn’t hold a candle to the intellectual capabilities of even a typical lab rat, let alone a human.

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Coming to a monitor near you: a defect-free, molecule-thick film

An emerging class of atomically thin materials known as monolayer semiconductors has generated a great deal of buzz in the world of materials science. Monolayers hold promise in the development of transparent LED displays, ultra-high efficiency solar cells, photo detectors and nanoscale transistors. Their downside? The films are notoriously riddled with defects, killing their performance.

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