Singularity – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jan 5
2015

MANDATE: Thou Shalt Sin In Favor Of Explosively-Nonlinear Victory For Eternity!, Stupid? By Mr. Andres Agostini — Amazon — LinkedIn — Lifeboat Foundation

MANDATE: Thou Shalt Sin In Favor Of Explosively-Nonlinear Victory For Eternity!

ERGO:

Thou Shalt Sin Against Linear Failure, In Order To Embrace Explosively-Nonlinear Victory For Eternity!

What to do against the item below?

Thou Shalt Sin Against Linear Failure, In Order To Embrace Auspicious Nonlinear Victory!

FIRST, LET US UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS HAPPENING CONCERNING PERVASIVE CHANGE:

“… BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013 …”

AND TO UNDERPIN THE PRECEDING PARAGRAPH, LET US ALSO CONSIDER THE WORDS OF BILL GATES:

On Mar 24, 1999 Microsoft Chairman, and today’s smartest and wealthiest person, gave, in hard writing (ISBN: 978–0446525688), a pervasive forewarning that 96.357% of the people, with their intrinsically and un-salvageably linear and unprepared minds, utterly ignored.

THIS IS THE VERBATIM FOREWARNING:

“ … We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years [2001] and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten [2011] …” — Bill Gates. Brackets by the Author.

AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, LET US CAREFULLY CONSIDER THIS:

1.-) “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS]…” [226]

2.-) “…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…” [226]

3.-) “… BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013 …” [226]

4.- ) “…KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING BY EVERY FOURTEEN MONTHS…” [226]

5.-) “…MORE THAN THE DOUBLING OF COMPUTATIONAL POWER [IS TAKING PLACE] EVERY YEAR…” [226]

6.-) “…The flattening of the world is going to be hugely disruptive to both traditional and developed societies. The weak will fall further behind faster. The traditional will feel the force of modernization much more profoundly. The new will get turned into old quicker. The developed will be challenged by the underdeveloped much more profoundly. I worry, because so much political stability is built on economic stability, and economic stability is not going to be a feature of the flat world. Add it all up and you can see that the disruptions and going to come faster and harder. No one is immune — not me, not you, not Microsoft. WE ARE ENTERING AN ERA OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION ON STEROIDS. Dealing with flatism is going to be a challenge of a whole new dimension even if your country has a strategy. But if you don’t have a strategy at all, well, again, you’ve warned…” [226]

WHAT TO DO ABOUT? EXACTLY THIS:

(1.-) Picture mentally, radiantly.

(2.-) Draw outside the canvas.

(3.-) Color outside the vectors.

(4.-) Sketch sinuously.

(5.-) Far-sight beyond the mind’s intangible exoskeleton.

(6.-) Abduct indiscernible falsifiable convictions.

(7.-) Reverse-engineering a gene and a bacterium or, better yet, the lucrative genome.

(8.-) Guillotine the over-weighted status quo.

(9.-) Learn how to add up — in your own brainy mind — colors, dimensions, aromas, encryptions, enigmas, phenomena, geometrical and amorphous in-motion shapes, methods, techniques, codes, written lines, symbols, contexts, locus, venues, semantic terms, magnitudes, longitudes, processes, tweets, “…knowledge-laden…” hunches and omniscient bliss, so forth.

(10.-) Project your wisdom’s wealth onto communities of timeless-connected wikis.

WHAT ELSE?

(11.-) Cryogenize the infamous illiterate by own choice and reincarnate ASAP (multiverse teleporting out of a warped / wormed passage) Da Vinci, Bacon, Newton, Goethe, Bonaparte, Edison, Franklyn, Churchill, Einstein, and Feynman.

(12.-) Organize relationships into voluntary associations that are mutually beneficial and accountable for contributing productively to the surrounding community.

(13.-) Practice the central rule of good strategy, which is to know and remain true to your core business and invest for leadership and R&D+Innovation.

(14.-) Kaizen, SixSigma, Lean, LeanSigma, “…Reliability Engineer…” (the latter as solely conceived and developed by Procter & Gamble and Los Alamos National Laboratories) it all unthinkably and thoroughly by recombinant, a là Einstein Gedanke-motorized judgment (that is to say: Einsteinian Gedanke [“…thought experiments…”].

(15.-) Provide a road-map and blueprint for drastically compressing (‘crashing’) the time’s ‘reticules’ it will take you to get on the top of your tenure, nonetheless of your organizational level.

(16.-) With the required knowledge and relationships embedded in organizations, create support for, and carry out transformational initiatives.

(17.-) Offer a tested pathway for addressing the linked challenges of personal transition and organizational transformation that confront leaders in the first few months in a new tenure.

(18.-) Foster momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that harm credibility.

(19.-) Institute coalitions that translate into swifter organizational adjustments to the inevitable streams of change in personnel and environment.

(20.-) Mobilize and align the overriding energy of many others in your organization, knowing that the “…wisdom of crowds…” is upfront and outright rubbish.

IS THAT YOUR BEST?

(21.-) Step outside the boundaries of the framework’s system when seeking a problem’s solution.

(22.-) Within zillion tiny bets, raise the ante and capture the documented learning through frenzy execution. (23) “…Moonshine…” and “… Skunkworks …” and “…Re-Imagineer…” it all, holding in your mind the motion-pictured image that, regardless of the relevance of “…inputs…” and “…outputs,…”, entails that the highest relevance is within the sophistication within the THROUGHPUT.

(24.-) Don’t copy Nature and Biology, don’t even copy Universe. Just copy the Omniverse.

(25.-) Correlate everything else with the ignored and unthinkable ‘else’ of everything else, forever.

(26.-) Combine the practical and technological with the mysterious and meaningful.

(27.-) Pencil your map.

(28.-) Brush your road-map.

(29.-) Scratch your blueprint.

(30.-) Conceive of, develop and share unthinkable lessons learned.

(31.-) Facilitate a heterogeneous group — in the midst of appalling interpersonal chemistry — towards the accomplishment of a common goal.

(32.-) Learn complex new skills and new ways to make corporate miracles crystallize.

(33.-) Typo the cartoon.

(34.-) Keystroke the drawing.

(35.-) Acculturate your brain to operate executions from the applied omniscience via the lenses and springs of systems methodology.

(36.-) Manage RISKS and BENEFITS and CHANCES and OPPORTUNITIES in series and never in parallel.

(37.-) Remove accident causes prior to a loss, knowing that an accident is never a random stroke of fate, but an utter and thus purported instrument of ignorance of supine ignorance.

(38.-) Convert your viewpoint to a systems approach.

(39.-) Enable full-orbed and balanced stability of your thinkables and unthinkables.

(40.-) Attempt to know, early on, the end from the beginning.

(41.-) Identify driving forces to make better decisions, manage uncertainty, and profit from change.

(42.-) Declare the past, recover yesterday, analyze the present, enjoy today, and reinvent tomorrow (today’s ensuing 24 hours).

(43.-) Build your own FUTURE transcending your past.

(44.-) Contort your mindful, mindless executions — and those in the midst of ‘mindful’ and ‘mindless’ executions —, solely out of this world, and solely out of this universe, and solely out of this reality, but not just for the inexpensive, tangential, impious sake of intellectual stunts, but only so that the ‘life’ has not unfruitful ‘afterlife’ — so-called —, and also so that the ‘world’ has no ‘afterworld’ (as well as, in congruence with the present work, ‘after-universe’ and even ‘after-verse.’) — so-called —. Aren’t afterlife and afterworld dis-intermediated anyway? Now, you, and merely you, proceed and transcend yourself, by yourself and for yourself.

(45.-) If you really want to make an operational difference in your professional theater of operations, go and get a full immersion in the fringe. Right in there, under that tense and pressing dynamics, you’ll have the vantage flux of the mirage.

AND, WHAT ELSE?

(46.-) Tantalize your tangential pre-cognition and cognition into ever-‬metamorphosing ‭your attentive and contemplative trans-meditation Zen.

(47.-) ‭De-realize, thus, de-focus from that taken-for-granted realities of the folly and the faulty, literally!

(48.-) ‬Mostly in-source your mind with long-unknown virtualities.

(49.-) Assure that there are not un-searched areas of risk, benefit and sustainable opportunity.

(59.-) Acculturate yourself and those in your crew and in the orbit of incumbent stakeholders with most actionable, applied omniscience. Remember culture without science and technology is beyond blind.

(60.-) Cultivate the highest manifestations of human intelligence: vision, discipline, passion and conscience.

(61.-) Achieve next-level breakthrough in productivity, innovation and leadership in the marketplace and society.

(62.-) Develop the internal power and moral authority to break out of those problems to become a significant force in solving them.

(63.-) Use your voice and deeds to superbly serve your organization’s purposes, functions and stakeholders.

(64.-) Magnify your current gifts, talents, skills and dexterities.

(65.-) Take a prior learning for Life, apply it to a new situation, learn from practical experience, and apply the new learning.

(66.-) Pervasively reason from effect to cause and from cause to effect.

(67.-) Envision shrewd yet calculated risks, from start to end, to turn downsides into upsides.

(68.-) “…Exponentialize the rushed and marshaled progression of your own all-rounded, perennial learning curves on the doubles, chiefly those directly concerned with engaging your diverse skills, dexterities, and talents to overcome — through fluid execution by mind preparedness — your theater of operations because of and by the increasingly threatening surroundings. Otherwise, the onset Technological Revolutions (compounded in a pervasive composite), as explained in «Futuretonium and Futureketing», will give you the hardest time to you and yours. There is realistic and austere hope if we work the hardest and in the most scientific mode.

(69.-) Figure out exactly which genes and neurons coalesce to make synapses with.

(70.-) Wire up synapses and genes the soonest.

(71.-) Ask now more sophisticated questions to marshal upon.

(72.-) Don’t juts copy Nature but focus on copying Biology, Nature and the Omniverse.

(73.-) Transfer the Heritage Business or the Legacy Business into the Third Millennium.

(74.-) Transform Completely.

(75.-) Expand Globally.

(76.-) Extend Digitally.

(77.-) Build an Intelligent-Innovation Strategy.

(78.-) Combine the best features of the three breathtaking strategies into one.

(79.-) When in doubt, Be Bold!

(80.-) Learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

(81.-) Experiment at the edges of business.

(82.-) Challenge yourself to question every assumption.

(83.-) Keep the acceleration going, keep your world changing and off balance.

(84.-) Remember, the frozen image is false. The reality is continual motion.

(85.-) Trigger domino effects and change the way the economy behaves.

(86.-) Foreshorten product life cycles from years to months or even weeks or hours.

(87.-) Put customer experience at the heart of digital transformation. This includes blurring the line between digital and physical customer experiences, the authors advise. “A Digital Master figures what customers do and why, where and how they do it. The company then works out where and how the experience can be digitally enhanced across channels.”

(88.-) Constantly challenge your business model; consider how you might transform your industry before others do it. “Not paying attention is even a bigger risk. Executives in music, newspapers, and equity trading have already seen the radical upheavals that digital business model reinvention can bring to their industries.”

(89.-) Get familiar with new digital practices that can be an opportunity or a threat to your industry and company.

(90.-) Identify bottlenecks or headaches — in your company and in your customers — that resulted from the limits of old technologies, and consider how you might resolve these problems digitally.

(91.-) Craft a compelling digital vision, one that specifies both intent and outcome. “There is no single best way to express a vision for digital transformation. It’s not a formulaic process,” the authors state. “You need to craft a vision that builds on your strengths, engages employees, and evolves over time.”

(92.-) Make your digital vision specific enough to give employees a clear direction, while giving them the flexibility to build on it.

(93.-) Open up the conversations to give everyone a role in digital transformation, and deal with resistance by being open and transparent about the goals.

(94.-) Consider which digital decisions must be governed at the highest levels of the company, and which will be delegated to lower levels.

(95.-) Focus your initial investments on getting a clean, well-structured digital platform; it’s the foundation for everything else.

(96.-) Challenge yourself continually to find new things you can do with your IT-business relationships, digital skills, and digital platform.

AND, SUBSEQUENTLY WHAT?

(3,102.-) “ … Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense …” (On October 29, 1941, U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill)

TO THE EXPRESS PURPOSE, IT MUST BE INCESSANTLY ACKNOWLEDGED FOR LIFE:

As well as Andres, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a captive to history.

Whatever he, she can imagine, he, she can accomplish.

As well as Andres, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a vassal in a faceless bureaucracy, he, she is an activist, not a drone.

As well as Andres, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a foot soldier in the march of progress.

As well as Andres, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is a Revolutionary! … ”

TODAY, I GOT THIS FROM LOCKHEED MARTIN RESEARCH SCIENTIST:

“ … Many businesses think today’s world is complicated and with technology rapidly changing, trying to figure out all the correct things to do is impossible, that it is better to just do what can be done, and adjust things when the result happens to be what is not expected. This is simply gambling where the odds for success and the liability of failure are getting worse by the day. The truth is the world is not complicated, just complex, and with complexity increasing at the same time technology is rapidly changing, the combination of the two conditions only seems complicated. The difference between complexity and complication is complexity can be logically addressed and accounted for such that proper risk management can then be applied and when the quality of the technology is assured early in the planning, analysis and design of the technical solution instead of only assuring it late in the development cycle, the integrated combination of these two scientifically validated methodologies can be used to reliably predict the expected outcomes. There is nobody better at applying the integrated combination of risk management and quality assurance than Mr. Andres Agostini or is there anybody that has more real world experience in doing so, and this includes solving some of the most wicked problems of some of the largest businesses throughout the world. If you are just gambling things work out, then I highly recommend you stop doing business dangerously and seek the assistance of Andres, the master of risk management and quality assurance, as well as reliability and contiguous process improvement…”

ABSOLUTE END.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

White Swan Book Author (Source of this Article)

http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini

http://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/heldenceo (Other Publications)

http://LIFEBOAT.com/ex/bios.andres.agostini

http://ThisSUCCESS.wordpress.com

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/agostiniandres

http://www.appearoo.com/aagostini

http://connect.FORWARDMETRICS.com/profile/1649/Andres-Agostini.html

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/amazonauthor

http://FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com

http://ANDRES-AGOSTINI-on.blogspot.com

http://AGOSTINI-SOLVES.blogspot.com

@AndresAgostini

@ThisSuccess

@SciCzar

Jan 4
2015

New Book: An Irreverent Singularity Funcyclopedia, by Mondo 2000’s R.U. Sirius.

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

Dec 30
2014

The Blockchain is the New Database, Get Ready to Rewrite Everything

Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/

Dec 28
2014

Actuarial Science Suffice? By Mr. Andres Agostini — Amazon, Linkedin

Actuarial Sciences Suffice?

QUESTION: Actuarial Sciences Suffice?

ANSWER: Absolutely used by actuaries and some futurists, actuarial sciences are structurally linear and incomplete in a world mired by explosive nonlinearity, fluidly and incessantly.

EXCERPTED FROM THE WHITE SWAN BOOK:

WARNING: Dots are connected.

“…You can never plan [retrospectively, that is a posteriori or ex post facto] the future by the past…” Brackets are of the author.

To set the stage properly, I will start with an enlightening quote by Albert Einstein.

“…The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created then…”

Or, it could be better noted:

“…The significant problems we face [today] cannot be solved [in the future] at the same level of [démodé] thinking we were at when we created then [in the fossilized past]…” Brackets are of the author.

Besides:

As the past and the present are NEVER a script for the future, retrospective analyzes and historic data (a posteriori data provided by actuaries and statisticians) are always being disrupted by the final trends and outcomes.

WHY RETROSPECTIVE [A POSTERIORI] ANALYZES DON’T WORK:

“…After-the-fact [retrospective and hence a posteriori] no longer works [….] Bring it back if you have any trouble with it, and I’ll fix it somehow,’ was the standard comment when you used to pick up a bicycle, automobile, food mixer, or lawn mower from the repair shop. And the repairman meant what he said. He was confident that if he had overlooked anything or made a mistake of any kind, he would get a second shot at fixing [….] The ‘second shot’ is a luxury that no longer exists in many businesses. You get only one chance — after that, you’ll be talking only with attorneys, insurance agents, or bankers …”

And:

“ … Life used to be simple. You knew your customers on a first-name basis. Your product or service was a relatively simple one — understood by both you and your customer. Your name and reputation were sufficient to cover any error or oversight [….] But the world has become complex, too complex to allow such comfortable relationships. Consumer expectations are matching the complexities. Instantaneous news coverage of accidents and losses virtually precludes the private, out-of-sight settlement of risk effects that had previously allowed the after-the-fact resolution of risk to succeed …”

And:

“ … The breadth in that old idea is rapidly being squeezed out — like the inevitable tightening of a boa constrictor around its victim [….] The price for public exposure of loss is high. Managers have begun to realize that risk must be examined formally and resolved beforehand rather than being settled after-the-fact. And they learn from others. It was the 1982 sinking of the offshore drilling rig Ocean Ranger that spurred EXXON top management to order a systematic evaluation of their offshore drilling risks … Even though EXXON does not own such rigs, it recognized that even conducting operations aboard them created risks that demanded before-the-fact identification, evaluation, and control … ” [226] Brackets are of the author.

Hence:

Please remember: “… THE FUTURE IS NOT AN ECHO OF THE PAST…”

So, instead of retrospective data [a posteriori], it is much more important prospective data [a priori, ex ante].

BESIDES:

DEFINING THE TERM “…RETROSPECTIVE…”

“ … Retrospective comprises something that is looking back on, contemplating, or directed to the past [….] looking or directed backward [….] Applying to or influencing the past; retroactive [….] looking or directed backwards, esp in time; characterized by retrospection …. applying to the past; retroactive [….] directed to the past; contemplative of past situations, events, etc. [….] looking or directed backward [….] review, revision, another look, reassessment, fresh look, second look, reconsideration, re-evaluation, re-examination [….] Considering a past event or development [….] Something that is chronologically presented pertaining to business tasks, with the utter object to show the trajectory of those business tasks …”

AND ALSO:

DEFINING THE TERM “…PROSPECTIVE…”

“ … Prospective comprises something that is likely or expected to happen [….] that looks forward to the future [….] that it is anticipated or likely to happen [….] of or in the future [….] potential, likely, or expected [….] yet to be or coming [….] of or concerned with or related to the future Set of analyzes and studies developed, with the utter end of exploring or foretelling the future, regarding a determined subject matter …”.

AS WELL:

DEFINING THE TERM “… A PRIORI …”

“ … A Priori comprises that proceeds from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; deductive [….] Derived by or designating the process of reasoning without reference to particular facts or experience [….] Knowable without appeal to particular experience [….] Made before or without examination; not supported by factual study [….] relating to or involving deductive reasoning from a general principle to the expected facts or effects [….] to be true independently of or in advance of experience of the subject matter; requiring no evidence for its validation or support [….] existing in the mind independent of experience [….] conceived beforehand …”

A SYNONYM OF A PRIORI IS GIVEN BY THE TERM EX ANTE.

ALSO:

DEFINING THE TERM “… A POSTERIORI …”

“ … A Posteriori indicates the demonstration that entails the ascendance of the effect to the cause, or the properties of the essence of something [….] After examining the matter that is dealt with [….] Derived by or designating the process of reasoning from facts or particulars to general principles or from effects to causes; inductive; empirical [….] Knowable from experience [….] relating to or involving inductive reasoning from particular facts or effects to a general principle [….] derived from or requiring evidence for its validation or support; empirical; open to revision [….] from particular instances to a general principle or law; based on observation or experiment [….] not existing in the mind prior to or apart from experience [….] the process of reasoning from effect to cause, based upon observation …”

A SYNONYM TO A POSTERIORI IS ENTAILED IN THE TERM EX POST FACTO.

ABSOLUTE END.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

White Swan Book Author (Source of this Article)

http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini

http://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

http://LIFEBOAT.com/ex/bios.andres.agostini

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/agostiniandres

http://www.appearoo.com/aagostini

http://connect.FORWARDMETRICS.com/profile/1649/Andres-Agostini.html

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/amazonauthor

@AndresAgostini

@ThisSuccess

@SciCzar

Dec 9
2014

Sam Chaltain: The Singularity is Coming. What Should Schools Be Doing About It?

Sam Chaltain — NEPC

Whenever I want to get a feel for the national mood, I look to Hollywood – and the films it thinks we’ll pay to see. In the post-911 malaise, there was the dystopian world of The Dark Knight. In the era of extended male adolescence, there’s just about anything from Judd Apatow. And now, in the shadow of the Technological Singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.

What’s the Singularity, you say? That’s the moment when the whole game board changes – the moment when artificial intelligence purportedly pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with) human intelligence. Hollywood’s best effort to portray it thus far is Spike Jonze’s Her, the unsettling story of a man who falls in love with his operating system, which also happens to be the first artificially intelligent OS (think Siri with a personality, and a conscience, and Scarlett Johansson’s voice). But there are others: Lucy, the film about a woman (curiously, also Scarlett Johansson) who begins to use 100% of her brain’s capacity; Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp plays a dying scientist who gives the Grim Reaper the slip by uploading his mind to the mainframe; and then, starting October 10, there’s Automata, a story about the moment man-made robots acquire a consciousness separate from their creators.

Oct 3
2014

What if your memories could live past your mortal shelf life?

Would you have your brain preserved? Do you believe your brain is the essence of you?

To noted American PhD Neuroscientist and Futurist, Ken Hayworth, the answer is an emphatic, “Yes.” He is currently developing machines and techniques to map brain tissue at the nanometer scale — the key to encoding our individual identities.

A self-described transhumanist and President of the Brain Preservation Foundation, Hayworth’s goal is to perfect existing preservation techniques, like cryonics, as well as explore and push evolving opportunities to effect a change on the status quo. Currently there is no brain preservation option that offers systematic, scientific evidence as to how much human brain tissue is actually preserved when undergoing today’s experimental preservation methods. Such methods include vitrification, the procedure used in cryonics to try and prevent human organs from freezing and being destroyed when tissue is cooled for cryopreservation.

Hayworth believes we can achieve his vision of preserving an entire human brain at an accepted and proven standard within the next decade. If Hayworth is right, is there a countdown to immortality?

To find out more, please take a look at the Galactic Public Archives’ newest video. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers!

Sep 30
2014

Dr. Ken Hayworth: What is the Future of your Mind?

We live in world, where technological advances continually allow new and provocative opportunities to deeply explore every aspect of our existence. Understanding the human brain remains one of our most important challenges– but with 100 billion neurons to contend with, the painstakingly slow progress can give the impression that we may never succeed. Brain mapping research unlocks secrets to our mental, social and physical wellness.

In our upcoming releases for the Galactic Public Archives, noted American PhD Neuroscientist and Futurist, Ken Hayworth outlines why he feels that mapping the brain will not be a quixotic task. Through this, he reveals his unconventional plan to ensure humanity’s place in the universe—forever.

We admit to teasing you with the below link in preparation for the main events.

Sep 22
2014

VICTORY!

VICTORY: Getting Fortune-500 Prospective Client’s Cash, Continually and Successfully! By Mr. Andres Agostini at www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS ACCORDING TO THESE COMPANIES:

Mitsubishi Motors, Honda, Daimler-Chrysler’s Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, Google, Xerox, Exxon-Mobil, Boeing, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, NASA and DARPA, Lockheed Martin, RAND Corporation and HUDSON Institute, Northrop Grumman Corporation, etc.

FIRST. You fully study the corporation’s story and current culture and lexicon.

SECOND. You fully study the corporation’s financial and legal and compliance and tax standing.

THIRD. If the corporation is publicly traded, you strongly look into this.

FOURTH. You fully study the corporation’s industry and all of its competitors.

FIFTH. If the industry to which belongs the designated corporation is facing an extraordinary unforeseen challenge, make a long executive presentation for the middle-management executives, fully acknowledging the details of said challenge and suggesting, as per authoritative authors in the subject matter, a well-organized myriad of viable fundamental solutions.

At all times, you are to make this executive presentation like a presentation to a sacred university professor and classroom, hence an institutional one only, and not a marketing one as you objective is to break the ice with your targeted corporate client ONLY through meaningfulness, utility, relevance, and purposefulness.

In no slide you would mention your name, but in your solemn business cards.

Throughout this executive presentation, you will NEVER be addressing any theme natural to your Core Business’ Products and/or Services, but in your solemn business cards.

(Commentary to FIFTH. Why does it have to be a long executive presentation? I will respond through Napoleon Bonaparte’s best practices.

Every time a General (Manager) under his Command would give him a one-page letter (memo, slide), Napoleon would say to his General in question,

“…General (Manager), you are to wage a grave military campaigns full of dynamics and details … I want to KNOW everything at all in advance, every detail at all, large or tiny, in order for me to issue my most-detailed commanding plans for your campaign …”

Frequently, Napoleon would dishonorably discharge this General (Manager) or have his head role for incompetence, incompetence is another word for people with a Mind “Engaged” in worshiping The Least Mental Effort, thus repudiating the “extra mile” effort.

Clearly, Napoleon, during his life time and early on, heavily warns against Corporate America CEOs wanting JUST a 1-page memo delivered via email.

SIXTH. Then, you call the prospective corporate client’s P.R. person Or Communications officer and tell them about what you would like to do.

You send a letter with a summary of your presentation via FEDEX. They will give you a time and board room for your presentation, to be received by the corporation’s middle-level and supervisory-level management workers.

SEVENTH. Once you drive you car to the corporation’s office, pay extreme attention to (first) the lower-level security personnel, (second) the front-desk receptionist, and, if possible, and (third) to the great janitorial staff.

Get extremely respectful with them and treat them as the Chairman and become a bit friendly as you try to get the company’s ethos’s by and through the lower-level security personnel, the front-desk receptionist, and the great janitorial staff.

Listen and mind-record their word types and wording construes most carefully.

In my case, by observing the front-desk receptionist for ten (10) minutes, I can tell you exactly what type of corporate culture there is about my coping with, much more importantly than those confidential underground reports by Wall Street Bankers and Trader.

EIGTH. Before starting the executive presentation, say to the audience that you would like to introduce yourself to each one of them and shake their hands, to bring about much more psychological proximity and fore-acceptance.

Then, explain the order of your executive presentation. Second, with great care, deliver the presentation without attacking people, institutions, or even ideas.

Use, with extreme care and utility, their parlance and corporate culture at all times while you get, from A to Z, very solemnly.

Once you have thoroughly and calmly finished your executive presentation, use the Lee Iaccoca’s rule and say,

“ …okay, we have completed this executive presentation and through it we saw this, that, x, y, z,…” in a summarized way.

Give them now boundaryless time and psychological space to ask you zillion questions in the Q-and-A.

Ascertain to respond fully, accurately, on the point and with NONE MANIPULATION at all. If there is something that you do not know, tell them, research the answer fully, and get back with the answer via FEDEX-ed hard-copy.

Once you have responded all of the questions, give them an exact copy of the Executive Presentation, with the additional attachment of the authoritative literature you used in your evidence-based research.

Do this in hard-copy only and put it a nice white envelope. You give one package to each attendee and give the P.R. Manager three or four more for the CEO and the Board Members.

NINE. If you followed through to ULTIMATE PERFECTION, points #1 through #8, step by step, you will see them ask you something along these lines,

“…Okay, Mr. A, we like you evidence-based research and executive presentation and wonder who in the marketplace could offer these solutions to us …” Without being or sounding desperate, you will say quickly and softly, “… Our Company can fully take care of those for you …”

And the idea now is that you go from a Pro Bono Executive Presentation into a formal for-business conversation with your prospective corporate client.

As the formal conversation begins, as per my long experience, tell them kindly that in parallel you want to fulfill the corporation’s Guidelines to become a Registered Contractor as per your company’s Lines of Professional Practice.

Also in parallel, ask the mid-level managers that you are formally talking to that you would like to gain more familiarity by doing some small talk with lower-level employees, including the lower-level security and janitorial staff.

Put in writing a detailed overview and hand to him or her personally.

Sometimes these folks know the corporation better than the CEO.

THEN, FOLLOW THROUGH THESE PRACTICAL TENETS CONDUCIVE TO OUTRIGHT VICTORY:

(1.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Procter & Gamble, talk to them through the notions of and by Process Re-engineering.

(2.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at GE, talk to them through the notions of and by Six Sigma, and Peter F. Drucker’s Management by Objective (MBO). While you are with them, remember to commend on the Jack Welch’ and Jeff Immelt’s master lectures at GE’s Crotonville.

(3.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at RAND Corporation and HUDSON Institute, talk to them through the notions of and by Herman Khan’s (Dr. Strangeloves’) Scenario Methodology.

(4.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Mitsubishi Motors and Honda and Daimler-Chrysler’s Mercedes-Benz and Maytag, talk to them through the notions of and by Kaisen.

(5.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at NASA and DARPA and the Industrial-Military Complex, talk to them through the notions of and by Systems Approach with the Perspective of Applied Non-Theological Omniscience. And, also, want to get funded by DARPA? How? The pathway is extremely easy and promissory. Just give them an unimpeachable real-life demonstration of how to “violate” the Laws of Physics correctly and frequently, for Life!

(6.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Lockheed Martin, talk to them through the notions of and by Lean, Six Sigma and Skunk Works.

(7.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Toyota, talk to them through the notions of and by Toyota Production System (methodology). Please remember: TPS is also known as “…Thinking People System…”

(8.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Royal Dutch Shell, talk to them through the notions of and by Pierre Wack’s Scenario Methodology.

(9.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Mayo Clinic, talk to them through the notions of and by Dr. Joseph Juran’s (Total Quality Assurance) Prescription (ISBN: 978–0787900960).

Also remember to conjointly speak, at all times, of efficiency, productivity, and ROI as it stems in the incessant real-time reckoning of man-hours per patient cured and healed.

To this end, you might wish to peruse this great title: The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management by Peter F. Drucker (ISBN: 978–0061345012).

(10.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Google, talk to them through the notions of and by Strong Quantum Supercomputing and Human-Death Reverse-Engineering, as well as Curing Human Death.

(11.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Xerox, talk to them through the notions of and by PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated).

(12.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at ExxonMobil, talk to them through the notions of and by Efficiency and Productivity as well as Return On Investment (ROI) per Petroleum Barrel produced (outputted), and Project Management.

(13.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Boeing, talk to them through the notions of and by Aerospace Engineering, Avionics, Systems Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Safety Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

(14.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), talk to them through the notions of and by Superintelligence entrenched, in “… plain sight…,” in the covert ad infinitum realm of Dark Energy and Dark Matter.

(15.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Loyd’s of London, Swiss RE, Munich RE, and Allianz, talk to them through the notions of and by Minimax, Statistics, Actuarial Science, Predictive Analytics, and Systems Engineering.

(16.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Amazon, talk to them through the notions of and by Low-Cost And High-End Online Commerce, Content Creation, Hi-Tech, Quadcopters (Commercial Flying Drones), and Eternal Staggering Innovation. Don’t forget to mention the Mechanical Turk.

(17.- of 17 ).- If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Northrop Grumman Corporation, talk to them through the notions of and by State of the Art: Quality, Continuous Improvement, Customer Satisfaction, Leadership (Man-Management and Statesmanship), Integrity, People, Suppliers, Sound Business Management, “…Best in Class…” Products and Services, and how to preemptively countermeasure Chinese penetrations and otherwise of both commercial and government networks in the United States.

NOTE: I know great c-suite consulting incumbents and other professional service providers who want to get the undivided attention of 90% of the CEOs above at once.

The majority of those CEOs are august applied scientists. They are only into applied scientific management. Ergo, they really need to get ready to be multidimensional and cross-functional and multifarious.

There is, NEVER EVER, no Internet resource, nor an online book or article giving you this most-profound advice/

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini
White Swan Book Author
www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini
www.amazon.com/author/Agostini

Sep 18
2014

Why Superintelligence May Not Help Us Think about Existential Risks — or Transhumanism

Among transhumanists, Nick Bostrom is well-known for promoting the idea of ‘existential risks’, potential harms which, were they come to pass, would annihilate the human condition altogether. Their probability may be relatively small, but the expected magnitude of their effects are so great, so Bostrom claims, that it is rational to devote some significant resources to safeguarding against them. (Indeed, there are now institutes for the study of existential risks on both sides of the Atlantic.) Moreover, because existential risks are intimately tied to the advancement of science and technology, their probability is likely to grow in the coming years.

Contrary to expectations, Bostrom is much less concerned with ecological suicide from humanity’s excessive carbon emissions than with the emergence of a superior brand of artificial intelligence – a ‘superintelligence’. This creature would be a human artefact, or at least descended from one. However, its self-programming capacity would have run amok in positive feedback, resulting in a maniacal, even self-destructive mission to rearrange the world in the image of its objectives. Such a superintelligence may appear to be quite ruthless in its dealings with humans, but that would only reflect the obstacles that we place, perhaps unwittingly, in the way of the realization of its objectives. Thus, this being would not conform to the science fiction stereotype of robots deliberately revolting against creators who are now seen as their inferiors.

I must confess that I find this conceptualisation of ‘existential risk’ rather un-transhumanist in spirit. Bostrom treats risk as a threat rather than as an opportunity. His risk horizon is precautionary rather than proactionary: He focuses on preventing the worst consequences rather than considering the prospects that are opened up by whatever radical changes might be inflicted by the superintelligence. This may be because in Bostrom’s key thought experiment, the superintelligence turns out to be the ultimate paper-clip collecting machine that ends up subsuming the entire planet to its task, destroying humanity along the way, almost as an afterthought.

But is this really a good starting point for thinking about existential risk? Much more likely than total human annihilation is that a substantial portion of humanity – but not everyone – is eliminated. (Certainly this captures the worst case scenarios surrounding climate change.) The Cold War remains the gold standard for this line of thought. In the US, the RAND Corporation’s chief analyst, Herman Kahn — the model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove – routinely, if not casually, tossed off scenarios of how, say, a US-USSR nuclear confrontation would serve to increase the tolerance for human biological diversity, due to the resulting proliferation of genetic mutations. Put in more general terms, a severe social disruption provides a unique opportunity for pursuing ideals that might otherwise be thwarted by a ‘business as usual’ policy orientation.

Here it is worth recalling that the Cold War succeeded on its own terms: None of the worst case scenarios were ever realized, even though many people were mentally prepared to make the most of the projected adversities. This is one way to think about how the internet itself arose, courtesy the US Defense Department’s interest in maintaining scientific communications in the face of attack. In other words, rather than trying to prevent every possible catastrophe, the way to deal with ‘unknown unknowns’ is to imagine that some of them have already come to pass and redesign the world accordingly so that you can carry on regardless. Thus, Herman Kahn’s projection of a thermonuclear future provided grounds in the 1960s for the promotion of, say, racially mixed marriages, disability-friendly environments, and the ‘do more with less’ mentality that came to characterize the ecology movement.

Kahn was a true proactionary thinker. For him, the threat of global nuclear war raised Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of ‘creative destruction’ to a higher plane, inspiring social innovations that would be otherwise difficult to achieve by conventional politics. Historians have long noted that modern warfare has promoted spikes in innovation that in times of peace are then subject to diffusion, as the relevant industries redeploy for civilian purposes. We might think of this tendency, in mechanical terms, as system ‘overdesign’ (i.e. preparing for the worst but benefitting even if the worst doesn’t happen) or, more organically, as a vaccine that converts a potential liability into an actual benefit.

In either case, existential risk is regarded in broadly positive terms, specifically as an unprecedented opportunity to extend the range of human capability, even under radically changed circumstances. This sense of ‘antifragility’, as the great ‘black swan’ detector Nicholas Taleb would put it, is the hallmark of our ‘risk intelligence’, the phrase that the British philosopher Dylan Evans has coined for a demonstrated capacity that people have to make step change improvements in their lives in the face of radical uncertainty. From this standpoint, Bostrom’s superintelligence concept severely underestimates the adaptive capacity of human intelligence.

Perhaps the best way to see just how much Bostrom shortchanges humanity is to note that his crucial thought experiment requires a strong ontological distinction between humans and superintelligent artefacts. Where are the cyborgs in this doomsday scenario? Reading Bostrom reminds me that science fiction did indeed make progress in the twentieth century, from the world of Karl Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1920 to the much subtler blending of human and computer futures in the works of William Gibson and others in more recent times.

Bostrom’s superintelligence scenario began to be handled in more sophisticated fashion after the end of the First World War, popularly under the guise of ‘runaway technology’, a topic that received its canonical formulation in Langdon Winner’s 1977 Autonomous Technology: Technics out of Control, a classic in the field of science and technology of studies. Back then the main problem with superintelligent machines was that they would ‘dehumanize’ us, less because they might dominate us but more because we might become like them – perhaps because we feel that we have invested our best qualities in them, very much like Ludwig Feuerbach’s aetiology of the Judaeo-Christian God. Marxists gave the term ‘alienation’ a popular spin to capture this sentiment in the 1960s.

Nowadays, of course, matters have been complicated by the prospect of human and machine identities merging together. This goes beyond simply implanting silicon chips in one’s brain. Rather, it involves the complex migration and enhancement of human selves in cyberspace. (Sherry Turkle has been the premier ethnographer of this process in children.) That such developments are even possible points to a prospect that Bostrom refuses to consider, namely, that to be ‘human’ is to be only contingently located in the body of Homo sapiens. The name of our species – Homo sapiens – already gives away the game, because our distinguishing feature (so claimed Linnaeus) had nothing to do with our physical morphology but with the character of our minds. And might not such a ‘sapient’ mind better exist somewhere other than in the upright ape from which we have descended?

The prospects for transhumanism hang on the answer to this question. Aubrey de Grey’s indefinite life extension project is about Homo sapiens in its normal biological form. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil’s ‘singularity’ talk of uploading our consciousness into indefinitely powerful computers suggests a complete abandonment of the ordinary human body. The lesson taught by Langdon Winner’s historical account is that our primary existential risk does not come from alien annihilation but from what social psychologists call ‘adaptive preference formation’. In other words, we come to want the sort of world that we think is most likely, simply because that offers us the greatest sense of security. Thus, the history of technology is full of cases in which humans have radically changed their lives to adjust to an innovation whose benefits they reckon outweigh the costs, even when both remain fundamentally incalculable. Success in the face such ‘existential risk’ is then largely a matter of whether people – perhaps of the following generation – have made the value shifts necessary to see the changes as positive overall. But of course, it does not follow that those who fail to survive the transition or have acquired their values before this transition would draw a similar conclusion.

Jul 6
2014

By 2045, Physicist Says ‘The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans

Dylan Love — Business Insider

“Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you’re going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.”

These are the words of Louis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.” Del Monte spoke to us over the phone about his thoughts surrounding artificial intelligence and the singularity, an indeterminate point in the future when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world’s combined human intelligence too.