The Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, called the Marco Civil and signed by president Dilma Rousseff in Sao Paulo, guarantees net neutrality, regulates government surveillance on the Internet, and places limits on data companies can collect from Brazilian customers. In addition, Internet service providers won’t be held liable for content published by their customers and will be legally required to remove offensive material via court order. The legislation’s signing took place at a global Internet governance conference, NETMundial, in front of executives from Google and several other firms.
Impending technological change tends to elicit a Janus-faced reaction in people: part awe, part creeping sense of anxiety and terror. During the Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford called it the “the terror of the machine.” Today, it’s the looming advancements in artificial intelligence that promise to create programs with superhuman intelligence—the infamous singularity—that are starting to weigh on the public consciousness, as blockbuster ‘netsploitation flick Transcendenceillustrates.
There’s a danger that sci-fi pulp like Transcendence is watering down the real risks of artificial intelligence in public discourse. But these threats are being taken very seriously by researchers who are studying the existential threat of AI on the human race.
Each of the 4,500-plus undergraduates at MIT will soon get $100 in bitcoin as part of a project launched by a pair of students who announced today that they’ve raised a half million dollars to fund the effort.
Organizers said they hope to establish “an ecosystem for digital currencies” at the Cambridge campus that will allow professors and researchers to study how students use bitcoin as well as to promote other academic and entrepreneurial activity around bitcoin.
Up until this point, the musical genre known as “drone rock” had been a weird, indie niche that consisted of slow, loud guitar noise. If machinists and programmers have their way, that description will need some major rewriting—but it’ll probably seem just as weird.
This week, a team at Philadelphia-based KMel Robotics, known for building airborne video recording solutions, turned their robot-making talents to creating a band. The company pre-programmed a six-aircraft ensemble to hover over instruments and strum or strike without any human interaction, other than the team’s initial strike of a “play” button.
Louise Donovan — GQ In 1969, the United States put two men on the moon. The mission required more than 3,500 IBM employees and the most sophisticated programs ever written. Today, though, a single Apple iPhone holds more computing power than any of the technology used on Apollo 11. That rapid advance can be explained by a pattern called Moore’s Law: every 18 months, the amount of transistors that it’s possible to fit on to a one– inch-wide microchip doubles. In other words, the pace of change is geometric, not linear. That’s why a laptop bought today is not nine times better than one you could buy nine years ago, it’s 64 times better. The problem for innovators is that Moore’s Law will, in around 15 years’ time, hit a wall. There is a physical limit to how many transistors can be squeezed on to a chip.
In the short term, the chips themselves will evolve. The so-called “wonder material”, graphene could replace their silicon insides. Graphene conducts electricity at high speed and it reduces interference between tightly arranged transistors.
I am so glad to have the new video for my Kick Starter project, Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion and covers briefly Gravity Modification aka Anti-Gravity, Interstellar Propulsion, UFOs, Laithwaite, Crisis In Physics
#YEStoIndependence? According to much of the negative commentary in the Scottish independence debate, scientific research in Scotland will be negatively affected by independence. However, Scottish contributions to science will in the long term receive more recognition if Scotland is an independent state.
Scotland is on the periphery of the UK. According to supporters of independence, the public spending Scotland is receiving from London is not proportionate to what it contributes to the British economy. The interests of the Scottish people are marginalized by London.
Independence: justified for any group that is neglected and marginalized
Scottish independence is not some narrow-minded celebration of nationalism, but a prudent economic decision. London’s inability to let the Scots pursue their own interests has naturally driven the people towards increasingly wanting to govern themselves as an independent state.
Desperately negative or even outright threatening statements from London aimed at the Scottish people only strengthen their preference not to be governed by London, thus leading to an increase in support for independence. As far as the interests of the Scottish people are concerned, independence may be the best choice when they vote in the referendum in September about whether or not to be governed from London.
Concern about independence harming science in Scotland is short term thinking
In the short term, funding to research in Scotland may indeed be negatively affected by independence, as predicted. However, this would really just be a transitory problem far outweighed by the long-term gains for the Scots.
An independent Scotland can be expected to want to change the direction of its development, including its research priorities, and these will be directed more in the interests of the Scottish people rather than Britain as a whole. In this sense, from London’s point of view, research will have been undermined, but from Edinburgh’s point of view it will only have been reoriented and sent in a different direction.
How Scotland progresses scientifically in the long term is up to the way successive Scottish governments handle research spending after independence, and that can be expected to be in the direction of improving their independent country’s standing globally. For this reason, the Scottish government already pledges that it will increasingly support research and development, working diligently to support Scottish scientists because this will help their independent country to stand out.
Scotland to get more recognition in scientific world, if independent
Independence will fundamentally change the way Scotland is perceived in the world. Rather than being seen as a periphery of Britain and all of its accomplishments being credited to the UK, Scotland will become an increasingly strong brand in itself and attract a lot of investment. Best of all, its people will be more recognized for their contributions to science, rather than all the credit going to London. It will have a unique opportunity to grow its own scientific community, and become a centre in ways that it was not before. After independence, there would likely be a lot of effort to create a ‘Scottish Silicon Valley’.
If people have doubts about this being a realistic outcome, they should consider Scotland’s leading scientific role in the United Kingdom at present. Most notably, Scotland is able to manufacture its own satellites and is becoming the site of the first spaceport in Britain. This is not a gift from the UK government, but a combination of the ideal launch sites being in Scotland and the fact that Scottish companies are in the lead in producing components and systems for the UK’s satellites. Considering these advantages, Scotland is likely to have a stronger presence in space and more leeway to make breakthroughs as an independent country than as part of the United Kingdom.
The UK’s scientific contributions could be reduced in the world’s eyes by the loss of Scotland from the Union, but Scotland’s contributions will be more recognized. As an independent country, it will stand out more and will be more motivated to improve its global standing.
There is good reason to expect that Scottish independence is not going to harm scientific funding or collaboration, and will instead lead to more recognition, more competition and a better use of resources within Scotland itself. In truth, this should be expected to lead to more effective global collaboration and more success.
How has your work, your life, your humanity, been improved by the promise of Big Data?
What apps and online media do you use to upload personal and other info?
Singularity has flopped – that is to say, this week Johnny Depp’s new film Transcendence did not bring in as much as Pirates of the Caribbean. Though there may not have been big box office heat, there is heat behind the film’s subject: Big Data! Sure we miss seeing our affable pirate chasing treasure, but hats off to Mr. Depp who removed his Keith Richards make-up to risk chasing what might be the mightiest challenge of our century.
Singularity, coined by mathematician John von Neumann, is a heady mathematical concept tested by biotech predictions. Made popular by math and music wunderkindt turned gray hair guru of an AI movement Ray Kurzweil, Singularity is said to signify the increasing rate at which artificial intelligence will supersede human intelligence like a jealous sibling. Followers of the Singularity movement (yes, with guru comes followers) envision the time of override in the not to distant future with projections set early as 2017 and 2030. At these times, the dynamics of technology are said to set about a change in our biology, our civilization and “perhaps” nature itself. Within our current reach, we see signs of empowered tech acting out in the current human brain mapping quest and brain-computer interface systems. More to the point, there is an ever increasing onslaught of Google Alerts annoucing biotech enhancements with wearable tech. Yes indeed, here comes the age of smart prosthetics and our own AI upload of medical and personal data to the internet. Suddenly all those Selfies seem more than mere narcissistic postings against the imposing backdrop of Big Data.
Johnny Depp’s face says it all in Transcendence where Big Data determines our AI future wherein life as we know it, can and will exist online. Think beyond a 24/7 teenage plug into a smart phone or flash- driving Facebook entries. Think Neuromancer, VALIS, and Star Trek’s Borg — sci fi predecessors predicting memory transformations amounting to an existential reboot. Translated into the everyday, we’re talking more than just uploading your genetic code to 23andme. This is an imagined future where what we call “Me” will be psychologically and legally recognized as living online.
As a contemporary sci fi, Transcendence is filled with pentimento film tributes to Zombie and X-Men TakeOvers, Westerns and Romantic Tragedies. Pitting AI critics against AI visionaries, the film is a bioethics drama, where the prospect of creating online Selves will constitute a direct social threat with thoroughgoing eco consequences. At the center of the bioethics contest, we encounter the marriage and business partnership of Will and Eleanor Castor — the heroic scientist and the eco-activist whose death do us part vows are broken to unleash a future so thoroughly transformed by AI as to render biological existence “hacked” by internet code.
The romantic hubris of Transcendence is jolting with a Shakespearean twist: Dare to Upload yourself to the internet and threaten genealogy, global power. Wait, this is no Romeo and Juliet. Love and Death, Eros and Thanatos, as Herr Freud called it, stands at the center of this science fiction pivoting on Will Castor’s heroic martyrdom (played astutely by Johnny Depp). By the end of the film, we are forced to face the movie’s existential questions as moral and medical ones. With new sentient life living online, collective imagination for our biohumanity and ecosystem is left unhinged.
Image Credit: Transcendence, 2014 Original Soundtrack
While the film lifts common AI themes of transformed “self-awareness” and “identity,” the real AI deal breaker in Transcendence, and in our own lives, is Time – biological, ecological and geologic. Described as a sequential and cyclical process, Time frames our present experience, shaping both memory and imagination of that present experience. As my Buddhist philosophy professor use to say: “When you are waiting for your lover, 10 minutes feels like 1 hour; but when your lover arrives, 1 hour feels like 10 minutes.” Cognitive neuroscientists tell us that episodic memory is at once measurable and elusive of metrics — researchers can study the sequence of what we remember (like learning our ABC’s) but they struggle to discover howit feelsto remember the alphabet.
Time after Will Castor’s AI is not waiting for cognitive neuroscience to catch up with a hacker’s race to design new codes, new systems, and new products for regenerating uberhuman biosystems. After all, AI Time presumes the speed of downloads to the Internet and programming APPs as if to emulate the speed of light.
Before Einstein, Neuroscience, the Internet and Apps, Time was once thought of in mythic, primal terms of genesis. In Indian cosmology, Siva, the God of Time, dances on the back of mother earth, moving us through karmic cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth. In the ancient Greco-Roman cosmos, Time is born from Chronos the three headed serpent that gives us earth, sky and the underworld. Through the ages, Time / Chronos became associated with the cycle of seasons, assigning to the process of change in light and life, the name Father Time in contrast to quiet, deep Mother Earth, which seems to absorb the underworld into her womb.
Conceived as such, Father Time has given way to our current understanding of RAM and neural memory codes leaving Mother Earth to stand in for blood, bones and stem cells. Today as we couple with technology and look to Big Data for knowledge and insight, we lose sight of when, and how, we capitulate to a fundamental misperception: That we are one and the same with the technology we create. Blinded by the light and speed of computer gazing, we mistake ourselves for our creations. We forget difference and our humanity — even if coupled with technology. For the sake of a popular drama, Transcendence pushes on the consequences of this misperception by entertaining a bioethics war over regenerating biological tissue. Like I said, this is a flick with a nod to X-Men.
With computational neuroscience sitting at the center of this passion play, it is neurobiologist and bioethicist Max, the Castor’s closest friend and film’s narrator who reminds us that we are Time emergent and memories alone are not us. Memory may be coded for upload but it cannot fully account for the what and who we are as neuroplastic creatures with uncertain futures. Yes, we are more than just code. As the father of American psychology William James once wrote, we draw from a world of “blooming buzzing confusion,” perceptions enriched with a variety of associated thoughts, sensations and reactions. That piece of wisdom may be more than a century old, but even if our behaviors might fit a statistical profile for behavioral economics, we are reminded: statistical profiles are not Us.
Coda:
Looking back to the late 1990’s, the call for the human-machine interface was met by both excitement and trepidation by frontier technologists and skeptical intellectuals. In my own backyard, I curated a 2003 symposium at Art Center College of Design with NASA scientists and a world famous cyborg, STELARC to discuss: What kind of science and technologies would push the design futures forward and would our imagined futures require the inevitable coupling of human and technology? Now more than 10 years later with advances in the Cloud, wearable tech and neuro-marketing, students have no greater skills for managing their union with the Borg. To paraphrase the thinking of my business partner, Gaynor Strachan Chun, ‘the problem is not with technology, but the way people behave with technology.’
Future Forward? Let’s skill up with the brain in mind to face the behavioral challenges with Big Data.
M. A. Greenstein, Ph.D., Lifeboat Advisor — Neuroscience / Diplomacy / Futures; Founder / Chairman, The George Greenstein Institute (GGI); Founder / Chief Innovation Officer, SM+ART
All religions have points of agreement concerning human toil and its relationship to the divine. This essay considers some of the Biblical and Hellenic parables of human origin, specifically the origins of human knowledge and instrumentality.
Here I want to present how knowledge and instrumentality are reported to originate with an act of mischief, specifically the theft of a divine artifact. My argument is that, although the possession of knowledge may be seen as a sin to be atoned for, the kind of atonement originally promoted may have simply been for us to apply our knowledge constructively in our lives. The concept of atoning for original sin (whether it is the Biblical or Hellenic sin) can then be justified with secular arguments. Everyone can agree that we retain the capacity for knowledge, and this means our atonement for the reported theft of such knowledge would simply rest with the use of the very same tool we reportedly stole.
The story of the titan Prometheus, from ancient Greek mythology, has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times. A great deal of writers and organizations have laid claim to the symbolism of Prometheus, including in modern times. [1] I would argue that too many writers diluted and over-explored the meaning of the parable by comparing everything to it, although this is not the focus of my essay. Greek mythology is notably weak on the subject of “good and evil” because it predates the Judeo-Christian propagation of their dualism, and this means most of the characters in Greek mythology can be defended or condemned without violating Hellenic theology. Prometheus as a mythic figure could be condemned from a Christian standpoint, because he seems strikingly similar to other scriptural characters engaged in a revolt against the divine. Yet the spirit of Prometheus and his theft has also been endorsed by people and organizations, such as the transhumanists who see him as an expression of the noblest human aspirations. [2]
The widely repeated version of the Prometheus story holds that Prometheus was a titan, a primordial deity who literally stole a sample of fire from Olympus and handed it down to humans. Prometheus was subsequently punished by the gods, who nailed him to a mountain and trapped him in a time-loop so that an eagle repeatedly ate his liver before it was regenerated to be eaten yet again. However, contrary to popular belief, the Prometheus parable is not mainly about the theft of fire but about the creation of the first man. According to Apollodorus’ Library dating from the First or Second Century AD:
“After he had fashioned men from water and earth, Prometheus also gave them fire, which he had hidden in a fennel stalk in secret from Zeus. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephiastos to nail his body to Mount Caucasos (a mountain that lies in Scythia). So Prometheus was nailed to it and held fast there for a good many years; and each day, an eagle swooped down to feed on the lobes of his liver, which grew again by night. Such was the punishment suffered by Prometheus for having stolen the fire, until Heracles later released him, as we shall show in our account of Heracles.” [3]
Immediately, you may be eager to identify the differences between this account of humanity’s creation and the Abrahamic accounts. For example, man is created by the thief, Zeus punishes the thief rather than man (it may seem), and the punishment of the thief is not portrayed as good, because ultimately the hero Heracles is destined to set Prometheus free again. However, the similarities are striking. Mankind is believed, in this parable, to be a source of trouble for the gods because mankind’s unique power derives from the violation and theft of divine power. We also encounter the apparent responsibility of women for the release of evil, found in the parable of Pandora, noted in the Library as being described by Hesiod as a “beautiful evil.” [4] Pandora (meaning women) was inflicted on men as the punishment for their possession of fire, which directly connects the tale of Pandora with the tale of Prometheus. We may speculate that Hesiod’s Pandora story contributed misogyny in the way some have argued that the Genesis account justifies misogyny. [5] However, such misogyny would defy the notion that Pandora, unlike men, was created by the gods [6] and was not punished by them…
The whole article has been reprinted at CLUBOF.INFO
Someone sent me this YouTube video. It claimed to have explained Laithwaite’s Big Wheel experiments as explained by classical mechanics. This I had to see.
The reason why I was particularly interested in this video was because, some months earlier I had spoken to a Boeing engineer who had agreed that these observations could not be solved using classical mechanics.
This video is an excellent example of sloppy research. After you have watched this video please review with my comments. Unfortunately, in spite of their academic backgrounds, the experimenters do not have a clue how to conduct world class research. Very unfortunate.
The first thing I noticed about this video’s claimed observations was that this video demonstration contradicted Laithwaite’s meticulous demonstrations as found here, http://www.gyroscopes.org/gallery.asp.
Here are the errors in this video to watch for, in their experimental method.
1. The experimenter introduces systemic errors by rotating the disc about himself while standing on the weight scale. This is observed as bounces around the 91 kg weight.
2. If the disc spin is low enough the weight change is smaller than that introduced by the bounces and therefore masked by the observations, resulting in “null” observations.
3. At 0.54 mins, he says “… if it does not get lighter why does it feel lighter?”. What was that again? It feels lighter? So what he is saying is that his body is telling a different story from his experimental observations! Not good.
4. At 2.49 mins, the experimenter tries to reverse the rotation, and says “it is hard to go back…” You can see that the disc weight has increased as it has fallen much lower and closer to the ground. This experimenter ignores this evidence.
5. At 2.57 mins, we are not sure what he is doing, but there is a weight gain from 431.0 to 431.2 i.e. you can observe weight gain, but those two folks ignore that fact.
6. At 3.29 mins, the weight is dropping all by itself.
7. At 3:36 mins, they keep messing with the experiment. Why?
I conclude this is a very sloppy experiment lacking experimental rigor. Further the experimenter himself agrees that his experiment is a “shaky mess”. Noting that Laithwaite’s own experiments (http://www.gyroscopes.org/gallery.asp) were meticulous by comparison. You have to watch Laithwaite’s experiments to understand how meticulous he was.
And this is the crux of the matter, to make the claim that this is within classical mechanics requires a derivation from classical mechanics of a formula that matches their observations. This they have not done.
Both Laithwaite’s discussion with his esteemed peers at Imperial College London and my encounter with the Boeing engineer affirm that this is not possible.
Summarizing: A sloppy experiment resulting in more disinformation. Very unfortunate as, if they were as meticulous as Laithwaite was, this could have turned into a PhD project and God knows what other discoveries they may have found.
In 1969, the United States put two men on the moon. The mission required more than 3,500 IBM employees and the most sophisticated programs ever written. Today, though, a single Apple iPhone holds more computing power than any of the technology used on Apollo 11. That rapid advance can be explained by a pattern called Moore’s Law: every 18 months, the amount of transistors that it’s possible to fit on to a one–
How has your work, your life, your humanity, been improved by the promise of Big Data?
Someone sent me this YouTube video. It claimed to have explained Laithwaite’s Big Wheel experiments as explained by classical mechanics. This I had to see.