Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini
In the era of information overload, it is difficult to find a study that presents in a nutshell the global situation as a whole along with potential future perspectives. This is exactly what the 2013–14 State of the Future, a new report by The Millennium Project, tries to do in a comprehensive and readable way. Launched at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, this report about the future of humanity is a distillation of the work of over 2,000 international experts contributing through the 50 Nodes of The Millennium Project around the world, from Argentina to Azerbaijan, from China to Colombia, from South Africa to South Korea, from the UK to the USA. It is “an informative publication that gives invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its Member States, and civil society” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and “the most influential annual report on what we know about the future of humanity” notes Paul Werbos from the National Science Foundation.
Half of the report covers the 15 Global Challenges that were defined by The Millennium Project in 1998, after an international Delphi expert survey, and were used as additional input for the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Since then, The Millennium Project has been assessing the yearly evolution of these challenges with quantitative indicators and comprehensive qualitative analysis. But why are these global challenges so important? Well, as my friend Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University, likes to say: “the greatest challenges are also the greatest opportunities”. Indeed, with every challenge there is a huge opportunity to improve the human condition, as well as create new businesses, jobs and economic activity.
Let’s consider quickly these 15 global challenges, not in any specific order, since they are all equally important and fundamental to the long-term development and survival of humanity:
1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change?
Computers will soon be able to simulate the functioning of a human brain. In a near future, artificial superintelligence could become vastly more intellectually capable and versatile than humans. But could machines ever truly experience the whole range of human feelings and emotions, or are there technical limitations ?
In a few decades, intelligent and sentient humanoid robots will wander the streets alongside humans, work with humans, socialize with humans, and perhaps one day will be considered individuals in their own right. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that intelligent machines will eventually be able to see, hear, smell, sense, move, think, create and speak at least as well as humans. They will feel emotions of their own and probably one day also become self-aware.
There may not be any reason per se to want sentient robots to experience exactly all the emotions and feelings of a human being, but it may be interesting to explore the fundamental differences in the way humans and robots can sense, perceive and behave. Tiny genetic variations between people can result in major discrepancies in the way each of us thinks, feels and experience the world. If we appear so diverse despite the fact that all humans are in average 99.5% identical genetically, even across racial groups, how could we possibly expect sentient robots to feel the exact same way as biological humans ? There could be striking similarities between us and robots, but also drastic divergences on some levels. This is what we will investigate below.
#Exclusive: @HJBentham @ClubOfINFO responds to @Hetero_Sapien @IEET
After the reprint at the ClubOfINFO webzine of Franco Cortese’s excellent IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) article about how advanced technology clashes with the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, I am interested enough that I have decided to put together this response. Changes in technology do eventually force changes in the law, and some laws ultimately have to be scrapped. However there is an argument to be made that the Second Amendment’s deterrent against tyranny should not be dismissed too easily.
Franco points out that the Second Amendment’s “most prominent justification” is that citizens require a form of self-defense against a potentially corrupt government. In such a case, they may need to take back the state by force through a “citizen militia”.
Technology and “stateness”
The argument given by Franco against the idea of citizens engaging their government in battle leads to a conclusion that “technological growth has made the Second Amendment redundant”. Arms in the Eighteenth Century were “roughly equal” for the citizenry and the military. According to Franco’s article, “in 1791, the only thing that distinguished the defensive or offensive capability of military from citizenry was quantity. Now it’s quality.”
I believe the above point about the state monopoly on force going from being based on quantity to quality can be disputed. The analysis from Franco seems to be that the norms of warfare and the internal effectiveness of state power are set by the level technology available to the state. Although there is of course a strong technological element involved in these manifestations of state power, it is more accurate to say “stateness” – which military power is only the international reflection of – is due to a combination of having more legitimacy, resources and organization. The effectiveness of this kind of “stateness”, including the ability of the most powerful states to overcome challenges of internecine warfare, has not changed very decisively since the Nineteenth Century.
In fact, stateness is said by many analysts to have declined worldwide since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since that event and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, the number of states facing internal crisis seems to have only risen, which suggests stateness is being weakened globally due to many complex pressures. Advanced technology is itself even credited with eroding stateness, as transport and the Internet only give citizens ever more abilities to get around, provoke, rebel and ultimately erode the strength and legitimacy of the state. In most arenas of social change, states face unprecedented challenges from their own citizens because of the unexpected changes in advanced technology that have taken place over the last few decades. Concerning the future of this trend, Franco aptly anticipates in his article that “post-scarcity” technologies would make things even more uncomfortable for the state, pushing it to rely on secrecy and suppression of knowledge to avoid proliferation of devastating weapons.
Much of this commentary on the loss of stateness may seem irrelevant to the right to bear arms in the United States, but it is relevant for reasons that will become clear in this article. We cannot say that the US government has a true monopoly on force due to its technology, and that the potential of a citizen uprising is gone. We have seen too many other “modern” states such as Yugoslavia, Somalia, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Mali quickly deteriorate into full scale civil war just because groups of determined citizens took up light weapons (many of those rebels have far less skill and technology at their disposal than the average US gun owner).
Internecine warfare in the United States
From what we have seen of civil war in other countries, we cannot know that simple rifles and handguns really are a useless path of resistance against a modern state tyranny, just because the tyrants will have more lethal options such as cluster bombs and nerve gas. Even the most crudely armed insurrectionists are capable of overthrowing their governments, if they are determined and numerous enough. Having a lightly armed population from the outset, like the US population, only makes it more likely that such a war against tyranny would be ubiquitous and likely to succeed swiftly from the outset.
If we do take the unlikely position of supposing that the United States will degenerate into a true tyranny in the Aristotelian definition, then US citizens certainly need their right to bear arms. More than that, their path of armed resistance using those light weapons could still realistically win. If their cause was just, we can suppose that they would be battling in self-defense against a tyrannical regime that has plummeting legitimacy, or is buying time for contingents of the military to break off and join the rebellion. In such a situation, the sheer number of citizens taking up arms would do more than just demoralize government troops and lead to indecision among them.
The fact of a generally well-armed population would, if they took up arms against their regime, guarantee the existence of a widespread insurgency to such an extent that the rulers would face many years of internecine resistance and live under the constant specter of assassination. Add the internal economic devastation caused by citizens committing acts of sabotage and civil disobedience, foreign sanctions by other states, and even international aid to the insurgents by external actors, and the tyrants could be ousted even by the most lightly armed militia units.
Explaining the imbalance that has prevailed between the military might of states and the internal ability of citizens to resist their ruling regimes with arms, Franco notes that the “overwhelming majority of new technological advances are able to be leveraged by the military before they trickle down to the average citizen through industry.” This is certainly true. However, the summation that resistance is futile would not take into account the treacherous opportunities that exist in every internecine war.
When the state projects force internally, it prefers to call that “law enforcement” for as long as it remains in control of the situation. Even if the violence gets more widespread and becomes civil war, the state denies such a fact until the very last moment. Even then, it prefers to minimize the damage on its own territory, because the damage would ultimately have to be repaired and paid for by the state itself. Even in a civil war situation, the technology brought to bear against citizens by the government would never be as heavy or destructive as the kind of equipment brought to bear against foreign states or non-state actors. This is for the simple reason that the state, in a civil war, has to try to avoid obliterating its own constituents and infrastructure for political reasons. If it is caught committing such a desperate and disproportionate act, it will only undermine itself and give a propaganda coup to its lightly equipped opponents by committing a heavy-handed atrocity.
The imbalance of the superior technology of the United States government in contrast to the basic handguns and rifles of its citizenry is real, but it would have zero significance if a real internecine war took place in the United States. The deadliest weapons in the arsenal of the United States, such as nuclear or biological weapons, would never be used to confront internecine threats, so they are not relevant enough to enter the debate on the Second Amendment.
The concept of taking back government via a citizen militia is not about defeating a whole nation in the conventional sense through raw military strength, but rather about a multifaceted political struggle in which the nation is able to confront and defeat the ruling regime via some form of internecine combat. The US would tend to prefer handling militant and “terrorist” adversaries on its own territory with the bare minimum of heavy equipment and ordnance at all times. Given this, the real technological contest would only be between opposing marksmen and their rifles (any advanced firearms would soon be seized by guerrillas and used back against the state). No ridiculously unbalanced battle with tanks, nukes and generals on one side and “simple folks” with shotguns on the other side would take place. In most civil wars, the use of tanks and warplanes (never mind nukes) only tends to make matters worse for the ruling government by hitting bystanders and further alienating the people on the ground. The US military leadership should know this better than anyone else, having condemned regime after regime for making that same mistake of heavy-handed escalation.
Anti-tyranny insurgency using only light (and easily hidden) armaments is as viable in 2014 as it was in the Eighteenth Century, and has proven sufficient to delegitimize and ultimately remove brutal regimes from power. Any sufficiently unpopular regime can be delegitimized and removed from power by the armed resistance of lightly-equipped militia forces.
Franco’s conclusion that the US should neither extend the Second Amendment to cover giving everyone access to ridiculously devastating weapons, nor scrap the Second Amendment altogether, is wise and relevant to helping US society make some difficult decisions. Law (and by extension stateness) is “uncertain in the face of technologies’ upward growth.” States that want to remain popular should try to be as adaptive as possible to new (and old) technologies and ideas, and not be swayed by any single narrow-minded idea or program for society. If the American people distrust their system of government enough to keep their right to bear arms, for fear of tyranny, then the Second Amendment ought to remain.
By Teppei Kasai and Yoshiyasu Shida — Reuters
(Reuters) — Japan’s SoftBank Corp said on Thursday it will start selling human-like robots for personal use by February, expanding into a sector seen key to addressing labour shortages in one of the world’s fastest ageing societies.
The robots, which the mobile phone and Internet conglomerate envisions serving as baby-sitters, nurses, emergency medical workers or even party companions, will sell for 198,000 yen ($1,900) and are capable of learning and expressing emotions, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son told a news conference.
A prototype will be deployed this week, serving customers at SoftBank mobile phone stores in Japan, he added. The sleek, waist-high robot, named Pepper, accompanied Son to the briefing, speaking to reporters in a high-pitched, boyish voice.
“People describe others as being robots because they have no emotions, no heart. For the first time in human history, we’re giving a robot a heart, emotions,” Son said.
Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that’s what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers and candy and that his father is a gynecologist, but it’s all a lie. This boy is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.
That a third of judges were convinced that Goostman was a human is significant — at least 30 percent of judges must be swayed for a computer to pass the famous Turing Test. The test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, was designed to answer the question “Can machines think?” and is a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies.
Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini
In the black holes’ pull. Astronomers discover that magnetic fields in the vicinity of supermassive black holes can equal the force of gravity http://www.mpg.de/8256277/magnetic-fields_supermassive-black-holes
In the black holes’ pull Astronomers discover that magnetic fields in the vicinity of supermassive black holes http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609021814-34427457-in-the-black-holes-pull-astronomers-discover-that-magnetic-fields-in-the-vicinity-of-supermassive-black-holes-can-equal-the-force-of-gravity
At the heart of the antimatter mystery http://www.mpg.de/8242689/proton_magnetic_moment
“At the heart of the antimatter mystery” by @SciCzar on @LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609022248-34427457-at-the-heart-of-the-antimatter-mystery
Change of perspective in the electronic landscape http://www.mpg.de/8242301/bismuth_energy-distribution
“The conventional electronic model for metals is not valid for bismuth” by @SciCzar on @LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609022555-34427457-change-of-perspective-in-the-electronic-landscape-the-conventional-electronic-model-for-metals-is-not-valid-for-bismuth
Environmental change leaves its footprint in the epigenome http://www.mpg.de/8238267/environment-epigenome
Environmental change leaves its footprint in the epigenome http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609022848-34427457-environmental-change-leaves-its-footprint-in-the-epigenome-high-fat-diets-and-long-daylight-periods-alter-epigenetic-markers-in-wild-mice
Extortioners are only temporarily successful http://www.mpg.de/8234305/extortioners-social-conduct
A game theory experiment demonstrates that people only let themselves be extorted to http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609023239-34427457-extortioners-are-only-temporarily-successful-a-game-theory-experiment-demonstrates-that-people-only-let-themselves-be-extorted-to-a-limited-extent-t
The pirate in the microbe. Bacteria do not move entirely randomly as they scout the surface of host cells http://www.mpg.de/8233992/motion-bacteria-tug-of-war
The pirate in the microbe Bacteria do not move entirely randomly as they scout the surface of host cells http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609023539-34427457-the-pirate-in-the-microbe-bacteria-do-not-move-entirely-randomly-as-they-scout-the-surface-of-host-cells
Outgrowing emotional egocentricity. Max Planck researchers discover a region of the brain that enables children to overcome emotional self-centeredness as they mature
http://www.mpg.de/8229113/children-emotional-egocentricity
Gamma rays from the core of active galaxies. Observations show that outbursts occur in the nuclear regions of active galaxies http://www.mpg.de/8225053/blazar-gamma-rays
Gamma rays from the core of active galaxies www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609024028–34427457-gamma-rays-from-the-core-of-active-galaxies-observations-show-that-outbursts-occur-in-the-nuclear-regions-of-active-galaxies
Rosetta’s target comet is becoming active. The scientific imaging system OSIRIS on board ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft witnesses the awakening of the mission’s target comet http://www.mpg.de/8212484/churyumov_gerasimenko_dust-coma
“Rosetta’s target comet is becoming active The scientific imaging system OSIRIS ” by @SciCzar on @LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609024612-34427457-rosetta-s-target-comet-is-becoming-active-the-scientific-imaging-system-osiris-on-board-esa-s-rosetta
Birth of a star in double-quick time. Scientists observe the nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy http://www.mpg.de/8206852/star-birth-milkyway
Birth of a star in double-quick time Scientists observe the nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609024910-34427457-birth-of-a-star-in-double-quick-time-scientists-observe-the-nurseries-of-massive-stars-in-our-galaxy
A new quantum memory on the horizon http://www.mpg.de/8202685/quantum-ion-crystal
A new quantum memory on the horizon http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609025137-34427457-a-new-quantum-memory-on-the-horizon
Endocrine disruptors impair human sperm function http://www.mpg.de/8201201/chemicals-fertility
Endocrine disruptors impair human sperm function Ultraviolet filters, preservatives, and …http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140609025350-34427457-endocrine-disruptors-impair-human-sperm-function-ultraviolet-filters-preservatives-and-plasticizers-may-be-responsible-for-fertility-problems
There is nothing about the Science of Complexity that you can teach the Germans. Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems http://www.mpg.de/154455/dyn_komplex_techn_systeme
Nanosats are go! Small satellites: iny satellites are changing the space business http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140607205338-34427457-nanosats-are-go-small-satellites-taking-advantage-of-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies-tiny-satellites-are-changing-the-space-business
Harvard researchers find switch that causes mature liver cells to revert back to stem cell-like state http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140607210737-34427457-harvard-researchers-find-switch-that-causes-mature-liver-cells-to-revert-back-to-stem-cell-like-state
The Gravity Modification Workshop
Posted in engineering, innovation, physics, science
I am preparing a 1-day The Gravity Modification Workshop (more details here) and expect to conduct this workshop in the August-September 2014 time frame. I would like to gauge interest so if you are interested in attending pleased complete this short QuickSurveys survey https://www.quicksurveys.com/s/p6K3J informing me of your interest. This survey ends June 22 2014.
Workshop details are as follows:
Title: The Gravity Modification Workshop
Presenter: Benjamin T Solomon
Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini
The Black Bible to Extreme Omniscient Womb-to-Tomb Risk Management as per the White Swan Treatise Synthesis!: The White Swan’s Beyond Eureka and Sputnik Moments: How To Fundamentally Cope With Risks
ASIN: B00KTCVFVW http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTCVFVW