Independence Day weekend seems like a good time to push the envelope on what is possible for human beings to achieve. Hell, if a rag-tag band of colonists could kick the mighty Brits’ butts so long ago, how hard can it be for today’s people to live to 150, use 3D printers to create new organs, and develop superpowers? Read more
Category: singularity – Page 92
A Primer on Computing’s Exponential Growth and Where Tech Is Headed [Video] — By David J. Hill Wired
This presentation is peppered with charts and data from Ray Kurzweil, whose 2005 book The Singularity Is Near mapped out how progress in technology has been accelerating since the beginning, and in recent times, has resulted in computers that will soon rival the processing ability of the human mind.
Recently, Kurzweil announced that the sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer, is scheduled for release around early 2017. Read more
‘We’re a long way from a singularity’ says ‘Ex Machina’ AI consultant — by Luke Westaway c/net
On-screen robots tend to rise up and crush their puny human masters with alarming regularity.
“I decided to log every single incidence of artificial intelligence or robots in the history of cinema,” Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist and author who served as AI consultant on the recent film “Ex Machina”, tells CNET’s Crave blog. “I think I calculated that 65 percent of them end up being a threat, and the rest of them are just servile.” Read more
The Coming Problem of Our iPhones Being More Intelligent Than Us
By Vivek Wadhwa — SingularityHub
Ray Kurzweil made a startling prediction in 1999 that appears to be coming true: that by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have the computing power and storage capacity of a human brain. He also predicted that Moore’s Law, which postulates that the processing capability of a computer doubles every 18 months, would apply for 60 years — until 2025 — giving way then to new paradigms of technological change.
Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and the director of engineering at Google, now says that the hardware needed to emulate the human brain may be ready even sooner than he predicted — in around 2020 — using technologies such as graphics processing units (GPUs), which are ideal for brain-software algorithms. He predicts that the complete brain software will take a little longer: until about 2029. Read more
What if one country achieves the singularity first?
Zoltan Istvan | Motherboard
“Once uploaded, would your digital self be able to interact with your biological self? Would one self be able to help the other? Or would laws force an either-or situation, where uploaded people’s biological selves must remain in cryogenically frozen states or even be eliminated altogether?” Read more
Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
Why the LHC must be shut down
CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!
PRESS RELEASE “LHC-KRITIK”/”LHC-CRITIQUE” www.lhc-concern.info
CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!
These days, CERN has restarted the world’s biggest particle collider, the so-called “Big Bang Machine” LHC at CERN. After a hundreds of Million Euros upgrade of the world’s biggest machine, CERN plans to smash particles at double the energies of before. This poses, one would hope, certain eventually small (?), but fundamentally unpredictable catastrophic risks to planet Earth.
Basically the same group of critics, including Professors and Doctors, that had previously filed a law suit against CERN in the US and Europe, still opposes the restart for basically the same reasons. Dangers of: (“Micro”-)Black Holes, Strangelets, Vacuum Bubbles, etc., etc. are of course and maybe will forever be — still in discussion. No specific improvements concerning the safety assessment of the LHC have been conducted by CERN or anybody meanwhile. There is still no proper and really independent risk assessment (the ‘LSAG-report’ has been done by CERN itself) — and the science of risk research is still not really involved in the issue. This is a scientific and political scandal and that’s why the restart is a sad day for science and humanity.
The scientific network “LHC-Critique” speaks for a stop of any public sponsorship of gigantomanic particle colliders.
Just to demonstrate how speculative this research is: Even CERN has to admit, that the so called “Higgs Boson” was discovered — only “probably”. Very probably, mankind will never find any use for the “Higgs Boson”. Here we are not talking about the use of collider technology in medical concerns. It could be a minor, but very improbable advantage for mankind to comprehend the Big Bang one day. But it would surely be fatal – how the Atomic Age has already demonstrated — to know how to handle this or other extreme phenomena in the universe.
Within the next Billions of years, mankind would have enough problems without CERN.
Sources:
- A new paper by our partner “Heavy Ion Alert” will be published soon: http://www.heavyionalert.org/
- Background documents provided by our partner “LHC Safety Review”: http://www.lhcsafetyreview.org/
- Press release by our partner ”Risk Evaluation Forum” emphasizing on renewed particle collider risk: http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/newsbg.pdf
- Study concluding that “Mini Black Holes” could be created at planned LHC energies: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-mini-black-holes-lhc-parallel.html
- New paper by Dr. Thomas B. Kerwick on lacking safety argument by CERN: http://vixra.org/abs/1503.0066
- More info at the LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique website: www.LHC-concern.info
Best regards:
LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique
Out of the box thinking fostered at unique school founded by tech giants
The University of British ColumbiaOne year ago, Tamara Etmannski became the first Canadian Global Impact Competition winner. The award earned her a scholarship to take part in a 10-week program at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University — a non-accredited institution that aims to solve the world’s greatest challenges through technology. The university was founded by tech legends Peter Diamandis, of the X PRIZE Foundation, and Ray Kurzweil, of Google.
Etmannski, now a UBC Faculty of Applied Science lecturer, is helping develop a new Masters of Engineering Leadership program, tied to the Sauder School of Business. As the second Canadian Global Impact Competition heats up — the winner will be announced April 2 — Etmannski explains how her experience at Singularity University transformed her thinking, and what engineering and business can teach each other.