By Peter Diamandis — SingularityHub
In my new book BOLD, one of the interviews that I’m most excited about is with my good friend Ray Kurzweil.
Bill Gates calls Ray, “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Ray is also amazing at predicting a lot more beyond just AI.
This post looks at his very incredible predictions for the next 20+ years.
So who is Ray Kurzweil?
By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub
More and more people are getting to know drones, and not just the military kind.
Drones were one of the hottest gifts over the holidays because they’re not only getting easier to fly (though not yet a no-brainer), they’re also pretty affordable. In fact, a toy drone recently crash landed on the White House lawn, prompting President Obama to call for more regulations (something the FAA is already working on).
While these aircraft show the growing accessibility of drones, they belie their true potential.
By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub
Last year, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking admitted they were concerned about artificial intelligence. While undeniably brilliant, neither are AI researchers. Then this week Bill Gates leapt into the fray, also voicing concern—even as a chief of research at Microsoft said advanced AI doesn’t worry him. It’s a hot topic. And hotly debated. Why?
In part, it’s because tech firms are pouring big resources into research. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are making rapid advances in machine learning—a technique where programs learn by interacting with large sets of data.
Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.
To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.
Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.
Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.
This means that even the smallest change creates a completely different digest. This is called the “avalanche effect”. Also, the chances of generating the same digest from a transformed message are a tad rare. This is called “collision resistance”.
Such nature of Bitcoin’s hash function makes it impossible to change records and transactions once they have been documented. As soon as the hashes are hashed together within the blockchain, counterfeiting records of transactions is no way near possible.
Then there’s the technology of wallet software. This is where people store bitcoins and use for making transactions. The wallet system is set in which users are prohibited from spending the same units twice (double-spending) by checking new transactions against the blockchain and against other new transactions to ensure the same units are not being cited more than once.
Though this system was established to avoid fraudulent activities and has proven to be an effective one, it also became an ideal scenario for hacking attacks on a Bitcoin exchange that aim to steal bitcoins. It’s because once bitcoins are lost, they’re gone for good and there’s no way of reclaiming them, especially that cryptocurrency usage is not covered by the central government and other intermediary parties like banks. Nonetheless, it’s not totally the Bitcoin’s fault; it’s the Bitcoin exchanges’ security measures.
Singularity Hub
Google, a long-time supporter of Singularity University (SU), has agreed to a two-year, $3 million contribution to SU’s flagship Graduate Studies Program (GSP). Google will become the program’s title sponsor and ensure all successful direct applicants get the chance to attend free of charge.
Held every summer, the GSP’s driving goal is to positively impact the lives of a billion people in the next decade using exponential technologies. Participants spend a fast-paced ten weeks learning all they need to know for the final exam—a chance to develop and then pitch a world-changing business plan to a packed house.
Google is, of course, no stranger to moon shot thinking and the value of world-shaking projects.
By Jason Hiner — TechRepublic
Something is going to happen in the tech industry in next several years that will surprise us. It will shock us. And the whole industry will make a left turn.
It may be a product. It may be a technology. It may be a new company. We’ve seen it happen over and over again with developments from the integrated circuit to the Macintosh computer to the web browser to the Google search engine. Often, innovation comes from unexpected places.
But, there are also developments we see gathering long before they ever become an industry standard or a dominating force. Right now, there are three of these forces that are preparing to define both the tech industry and society over the next 10 years.
— Aeon
It is January 2014 and at least 400 people are packed into a conference hall in Miami Beach. High-profile journalists stand against the walls. Powerful venture capitalists crouch in the aisles. Banking and finance gurus crane their necks from the back of the room. They’re waiting for one of the most anticipated presentations of the 2014 North American Bitcoin Conference. A massive surge in interest from the media has just pushed the price of a single Bitcoin to around $900, up nearly 800 per cent in three months. Bitcoin Miami is the largest ever conference of its kind. In this moment, the possibilities for Bitcoin seem limitless.
What appears to be a teenage boy mounts the stage. The crowd goes quiet. In fact, Vitalik Buterin – all acne-splotched face, spidery fingers and shining eyes – is just a few days shy of 20. He surveys the audience nervously for a moment, then kicks off his presentation by lauding the benefits of the Bitcoin payment network – its speed, security, economy and autonomy.
By Rhett Allain — Wired
The Super Bowl isn’t just a football game. It’s an opportunity to discuss physics. Let’s look at some of the interesting physics concepts that go with the game.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little weary of the whole “deflategate” thing. In case you missed the controversy, it appears that some of the footballs in the playoff game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots had below-acceptable inflation pressure. Now, it’s true that if you put a balloon outside on a cold day, the balloon deflates with the colder temperature. Could something like this have happened to the deflategate balls? The answer is: probably not. If you want more details, Chad Orzel has an excellent piece that looks at the physics of pressurized football. He shows experimentally that a ball in a 50°F football game wouldn’t drop 2 PSI due solely to the temperature change.
By Jason Bloomberg, Intellyx — Wired
We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law: the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. We’re also familiar with the plethora of corollaries to the law, pertaining to everything from network speed to hard drive capacity to the number of pixels in our digital cameras. It seems that the natural behavior for technology advancement follows an exponential growth curve.
However, not all innovation follows such a curve. Organizational and process improvements, in particular, seem to proceed at a glacial pace. Management fads come and go, and they don’t even seem to be getting much better, let alone better at a faster rate.