Showing posts with label Artificial Intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artificial Intelligence. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Tech News (1)

Archinaut, a 3D Printing Robot to Make Big Structures in Space

Why Prospecting Asteroids for Precious Resources Is Now Possible [Video]
Most of the raw materials we value on Earth exist in much larger quantities in space. ..... “The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines asteroids.”
Drones Have Reached a Tipping Point—Here’s What Happens Next
Over the past few years, drones have moved from the "government phase" to the "consumer phase" into the "commercial phase." ........ Drones are demonetizing rapidly. Ten years ago, drones were million-dollar military/industrial things. Today they are on the shelves of Walmart. ...... "They started at $1,500 and now they're at $500 and they're soon going to $50, with even better technology onboard. The price decline in the industry is staggering." ..... "You will basically see supercomputer performance in toy level devices, just as we're already seeing with smartphones." ..... The next big breakthrough in drone research will be "sense-and-avoid." ....Right now, drones are either manually piloted or GPS piloted, but as we integrate them into our urban fabric, they'll need true autonomy...... "Drones will need to have eyes. Sensors like radar, LiDAR, stereo vision, sonar, and they'll need to use this to autonomously avoid obstacles and fly. It's environmental awareness and it is necessary to safely navigate worlds they've never explored." ...... The way we're going to digitize the planet is by putting sensors out there on drones ..... Satellites are going to be complementary, covering big areas but at lower resolution. ..... "Today the FCC doesn't have to regulate or give you a license for Wi-Fi because it's low power and self-de-conflicting — it's not a threat to anyone," says Anderson......"In the future, as drones become small enough, with low kinetic energy, and smart enough, I believe the FAA will regulate them like Wi-Fi. We want the FAA to create kind of an 'open spectrum' sandbox to allow for huge amounts of innovation."
Eye on the Cure: Can Algae Genes Restore Vision in First Optogenetics Human Trial?
Given the power of optogenetics to fine-tune brain circuits, rumors of its potential use in humans as therapy have floated around since its inception...... In one previous study, after optogenetics treatment, previously blind mice could swim out of a chamber in which the escape route was brightly lit. On average, they escaped as fast as mice with normal vision.
This Remarkable Robot Hand Is Worthy of Luke Skywalker
most Star Wars tech is beyond us...... Artificial bones were 3D printed from a laser scan of a real skeleton hand; ligaments were fashioned from ultra-strong, lightweight strings; and laser-cut rubber sheets act as soft tissue for stability, flexibility, and torque. All this is controlled by an array of servos and cables. ...... Some of the hardest tasks to automate in factories require human-level dexterity (e.g., handling circuit boards to tightly packing boxes). ...... Xu says we're making progress printing bone structures with biocompatible materials, making biodegradable ligaments, growing muscles in petri dishes, and learning to regenerate peripheral nerves.
Space and Technology: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
there are an estimated 100 billion billion Earth-like planets in our universe. ...... we're finding evidence of liquid water all over the solar system, and the one thing we know about life on Earth is the need for water. ..... in our own solar system, organic compound-glazed comets drift everywhere ..... we should be inside a life-spawning factory of a universe. ..... our universe has 500 billion billion stars like our own, and orbiting those suns are another 100 billion billion Earth-like planets. That is 100 habitable planets for every grain of sand on Earth. That’s trillions of opportunities for some other planet to grow life. ...... there would be one million planets with life in the Milky Way Galaxy alone ..... if even just a handful of alien civilizations have advanced beyond our current level of technological progress, humanity should be waking up to a universe like the world of Star Trek.
The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know
try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, synthetic biology, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining… You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. ..... VR will ultimately impact everything from real estate to retail and healthcare and education. Business meetings, conferences and concerts will soon all be held in virtual environments. ...... Over the past two years, well over $5 billion has been invested in AR and VR by all of the major technology companies, from Google to Microsoft and Samsung to HTC....... we're now reaching a crossover point where hardware technology will let us scan rooms and the people in it, and convert those scans into 3D objects at a very low cost ..... "There will be a magical turning point where the pixel size in our displays will get so small that you can't see them." ...... "When we've developed displays with between 4K and 8K resolutions (roughly), there will be a moment when we can't tell the difference between reality and virtual/augmented reality (at least with our eyes)." ...... we'll be able to animate you at a distance, talking to somebody else with a perfect representation of your facial movements. Think of a film like Avatar and how they transferred the actors onto those characters in the movie. You're going to be able to do that live, in a meeting, where you're going to be that character and it's going to move and express itself emotionally like you do. ..... Why go to conferences, school, or travel for business if you can have richer, deeper experiences from the comfort of your living room? ...... "If you can buy your kid a $600 virtual reality headset, and they can study five times as fast as anybody else, and they don't have to be in a particular neighborhood or near a school to do it, they are just going to adopt these things. They are that much better." ...... In success, your Magic Leap headset will allow you to view a virtual TV anywhere, on any wall, or a mobile phone screen on the palm of your hand, or the air in front of you, then there is no need to carry around clunky glass devices in your pockets or hang TVs on your walls.
Why Big Tech Companies Are Open-Sourcing Their AI Systems
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been making remarkable progress developing artificial intelligence systems. Recently they have released much of their work to the public for free use, exploration, adaptation and perhaps improvement. ..... “deep learning” — an approach that organizes layers of neural networks hierarchically to analyze very large data sets not just in search of simple statistics but also seeking to identify rich and interesting abstract patterns. ......

even experts do not understand when or how AI might become powerful enough to cause harm, damage or injury.

....... AI systems involve large — often very very large — amounts of code, so much that it stretches the ability of any single individual to understand in both breadth and depth. Scrutiny, troubleshooting and bug-fixing are especially important in AI, where we are not designing tools to do a specific job (e.g., build a car), but to learn, adapt and make decisions in our stead. The stakes are larger both for the positive and potentially negative outcomes. ........ Over the long run, Google and Facebook are not really in the business of selling ads, and Amazon is not in the business of selling merchandise. No, these technology companies are powered by your eyeballs (and data). Their currency is users. Google, for example, gives away email and search for free to draw users to its products; it needs to innovate quickly, producing more and better products to ensure you stay with the company. ...... AI is central because it, by design, learns and adapts, and even makes decisions. AI is more than a product: it is a product generator. In the near future, AI will not be relegated to serving up images or consumer products, but will be used to identify and capitalize on new opportunities by innovating new products.
Will the End of Moore’s Law Halt Computing’s Exponential Rise?
Since 1991, the semiconductor industry has regularly produced a technology roadmap to coordinate their efforts and spot problems early. ...... Because the chief outcome of Moore’s Law is more powerful computers at lower cost, Kurzweil tracked computational speed per $1,000 over time. This measure accounts for all the “levels of ‘cleverness’” baked into every chip—such as different industrial processes, materials, and designs—and allows us to compare other computing technologies from history. The result is surprising........ Moore’s Law is the fifth computing paradigm. The first four include computers using electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, and discrete transistor computing elements. ...... “When Moore’s Law reaches the end of its S-curve, now expected before 2020, the exponential growth will continue with

three-dimensional molecular computing

, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.” –Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near .......... Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, virtual reality, unraveling the human genome—these are a few world-shaking advances computing enables. ...... As a society, if we just believed that single trajectory of Moore’s, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.
Don’t Be Alarmed: AI Won’t Leave Half the World Unemployed
we can pretty much automate the job of an airline pilot today. Indeed, most of the time, a computer is flying your plane. But society is likely to continue to demand the reassurance of having a pilot on board even if they are just reading their iPad most of the time. ....... We also need to consider all the new jobs that technology will create. For example, we don’t employ many printers setting type any more. But we do employ many more people in the digital equivalent, making web pages. ..... the Oxford report gives a 98% chance of umpiring or refereeing to be automated. But we are likely to have just as many if not more umpires and referees in the future, even if they use technologies to do their job better. ..... In the US, the average working week has declined from around 60 hours to just 33. Other developed countries are even lower. Germans only work 26 hours per week. .......... Society would break down well before we get to 50% unemployment.
Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What’s Just Around the Corner
AIs will begin to sense and use all five senses. ...... We'll see revolutions in how we manage climate change, redesign and democratize education, make scientific discoveries, leverage energy resources, and develop solutions to difficult problems. ......... AI is being used to match clinical trials with patients, drive robotic surgeons, read radiological findings and analyze genomic sequences. ..... Ultimately, during the AI revolution taking place in the next three years, AIs will be integrated into everything around us, combining sensors and networks and making all systems "smart." ..... AIs will push forward the ideas of transparency, of seamless interaction with devices and information, making everything personalized and easy to use. We'll be able to harness that sensor data and put it into an actionable form, at the moment when we need to make a decision.
In the Future, Ownerless Companies Will Live on the Blockchain
poised to transform global commerce ..... Blockchain has been called “the most disruptive thing I’ve seen in my career” ........ Fundamentally, banks, auditing firms, legal services, and security systems are designed to authenticate the transactions that ripple across our planet. .......

Like the internet democratized the exchange of information, transforming entire industries in the process, the blockchain promises to democratize the exchange of value, a concept with staggering possibilities.

...... “in the same way that we don’t refer to the internet as ‘PayPal’, we should be clear that ‘Bitcoin’ does not mean blockchain. PayPal is just one service built on top of internet protocols—Bitcoin is similarly built on top of the blockchain.” ....... “while Bitcoin itself may not stand the test of time, we can be sure that the blockchain is not going anywhere.” ........... Technologically binding smart contracts would bypass the need for sprawling financial back offices and expensive legal systems requiring lawyers, judges, auditors, and insurance professionals. Imagine a scenario in which a land title could check an online registry and automatically send itself to a new owner, eliminating a need for expensive title insurance to verify the legitimacy of the transaction. ....... One might design an account that automatically donates to relief efforts in the case of any or certain natural disasters, thereby removing the need (or even the option) of a case-by-case donation decision. ...... Imagine that a portion of FEMA’s funds were programmed to check a Hurricane’s status, and in the case of a Category 5 storm that makes landfall—it could allocate money to the correct local offices. ...... At a basic level, corporations themselves are fueled by contracts. We may live to see a new era of business and commerce built upon a more automated legal framework. Legal scholars and computer scientists have pointed out that an ecosystem of self-enforcing contracts would give rise to what are called

distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs)

. ....... Imagine in the future —summoning a taxi that not only has no driver, but that belongs to a computer network, not to a human being. ...... a world where a network-owned drone service might power its units from network-owned charging stations. Supply chains built on top of such a system might further reduce the costs of delivering goods anywhere in the world. ....... The blockchain may then deliver the software smarts to eat away at parts of the economy we hadn’t considered ..... human society after the proliferation of the blockchain will be as unfamiliar to us as anything we’ve experienced.
China’s Curious Dream of Floating Nuclear Plants on the Ocean
a floating, ship-based nuclear power plant. ...... The plants would be situated between 8 and 12 miles from the coast at a depth of at least 100 meters. Power cables would run to switchyard facilities situated on land......Being placed so far from land would help protect the plants against earthquakes and tsunami waves, which are relatively small so far out...... the country will build at least 100 new nuclear power reactors in the coming ten years. ..... the country will use nuclear power to help reduce its current heavy reliance on coal, and in doing so, dramatically lower emissions of CO2 and air pollutants, which have reached health-threatening levels in many areas.

China will invest more than a trillion dollars in nuclear energy over the coming years.

In time, it’s hoping to recuperate some of that by becoming a leading global exporter of nuclear technology. ...... ocean-based reactors would be more susceptible to terrorist attacks. ..... The US Navy has logged more than 5,400 reactor years and traveled more than 130 million miles. They have sailed all the seven seas, including some of the most hostile environments, without any publicized accidents.
Goodyear’s Awesome New Spherical Tire Design For Autonomous Cars
Car bodies of the future might be completely 3D printed. They may be completely autonomous — and now, they might have multi-directional spherical tires. .... Reinventing the wheel ..... Why bother attaching them to the car at all, when you can simply keep them in place with magnets? ..... the way a magnetic levitation train works. .... These trains use electrically charged magnets to lift train cars anywhere from a fraction of an inch to a few inches above the tracks. Once the train car is hovering above the tracks, electricity supplied through coils in the tracks creates magnetic fields that move the train. Since these trains float frictionlessly above the tracks, they can reach speeds of over 300 mph. ..... Inspired by brain coral and natural sponges, the 3D printed tire treads are designed to stiffen in dry conditions and soften when wet, like a sponge, to provide powerful control in all kinds of weather. ...... “What I'd really like to see is a provision for the wheels to be hollow and with some type of access hatch. That way you could fill one wheel with dirty laundry, some water and detergent, and by the time you arrive at your destination, boom, clean clothes! You could also insert peeled avocados, limes and some type of pestle in another wheel to create a delicious guacamole as you drive. The third wheel could be used for smoothies.”






Thursday, February 04, 2016

Android Phones Should Machine Record All Talk

Android phones should machine record all talk on all Android phones all over the world and feed all that to AI, so as to later enable voice search in all languages. Literacy is over rated. What if all knowledge could be translated into every human language? And not just in writing but orally. Literacy is primitive tech. I like it, but it should not be the gatekeeper it is. You should be able to access all knowledge orally. Too many human brains are going to waste right now. Human beings should not have to do robot work. Planting rice is robot work. And Android phones should be solar and drone powered. The drones give you the Internet access and solar gives you energy. There is no wire in sight. If everybody is armed with a phone, we could provide police service to every human being at a much lower cost. Much, much lower cost. 911 would be an app on your phone. Your phone knows who you are, and where you are. We should build a world government, and get every human being to directly vote. You vote on your phone, you have a biometric ID. You press your thumb during the vote week, and you vote through the vote app. Barack Obama should run for President Of The World. POW-WOW. Everyone should have ready credit on your phone. You graduate high school, you get credit. The credit shows up on your phone. Google sends "checks" to your phone for all the data it collects on you, from which it makes money. And there is a Universal Basic Income. Food comes from Iowa. Iowa and the Caribbean, and Bihar. 911 is number one. Education. Voting. Credit. And you unleash unprecedented creativity.

Would it not be great? To have a directly elected President Of The World? Black lives matter, and every vote counts.


Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Eric Schmidt On AI

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on Technology in 2016
The next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) promises to have an impact as big as the mobile revolution or the Internet revolution before that. ...... It can detect patterns that humans can neither see nor anticipate. English speakers can make phone or video calls to speakers of Hindi or Chinese. But the next leap will be Inventive AI—machines trained on a given data set that can tackle a wider range of problems. As society grapples with the increasing volume and complexity of information, more-flexible AI will play a key role in helping us. Eventually it will be possible to give a computer unstructured data—say, spreadsheets used to manage business records—and receive quality advice on improving operations. All it will take is a training data set that is large enough, computers that are big enough and algorithms that are adaptable enough. ..... AI does not have the complex emotions that guide human decisionmaking, so it could avoid most if not all of these inherent biases. .....

Under our control, it can take the drudgery out of work and free up many more hours for creative pursuits. And applied collaboratively, AI could help bring about solutions to the world’s most complex problems.


Saturday, January 09, 2016

In The Tech News (3)

Ray Kurzweil’s Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years
By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. ...... By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. ...... By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim. ...... By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. ..... Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and of exponential technologies. ..... Each of these technologies DEMATERIALIZED, DEMONETIZED, and DEMOCRATIZED access to services and products that used to be linear and non-scalable.






The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years
In 2025, in accordance with Moore's Law, we'll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. ....... A $1,000 Human Brain .... A Trillion-Sensor Economy .... the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value. ...... Perfect Knowledge ... you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights. ..... 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People .... Disruption of Healthcare .... this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system. ....... Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die. ........ Augmented and Virtual Reality .... The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans. ........ Early Days of JARVIS ... In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense. ..... Blockchain
The Internet Allowed Us to Learn Anything—VR Will Let Us Experience Everything
The Internet has liberated information from the constraints of the physical world and essentially made the sharing of information free and unlimited for everyone. From communicating with friends on free Skype calls to taking university-level classes on Coursera and Udacity, our current access and connectivity dwarfs anything we’ve seen before. ....... Massive open online courses have fantastic content, yet a very low percentage of students end up finishing them. It’s great to see my friend’s posts on Instagram and Snapchat, but nothing beats being together in person. And no matter how many times I’ve read about the Apollo 11 mission, I’ve never taken a step on the moon. ....... Just as the Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, virtual reality will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality...... And just as the democratization of information reshaped society, this is going to have a massive impact on the way we work, live, and play......... one word: presence. Presence is the phenomenon that occurs when your brain is convinced, on a fundamental and subconscious level, that the VR simulation you are experiencing is real. ...... Want to watch the Super Bowl from the fifty-yard line? Be on stage at your favorite concert? Or just visit and explore a faraway country? Well, that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be able to do on the Oculus Rift. ..... Using 360-degree video and light field technology, we can now capture real-life events and distribute them to anyone, anywhere. ...... Soon you’ll be able to explore every city, watch every sports game, and explore the universe in VR. Content plus presence is an extremely potent combination. ..... Part of the great sadness of the modern world is being able to text, call, and video chat with friends and family from all over the planet but never truly feel like you’re with them. Sometimes this ghost of a connection can paradoxically be worse than nothing, being just realistic enough to make you miss your loved ones without feeling the true warmth of their presence. ......... Multi-user virtual reality can enable a specific kind of phenomenon—social presence. ...... social presence can convince your brain to believe that the other people in the VR experience are really there with you. ...... An average Tuesday night in the VR future could include dropping into a professional conference with a coworker of yours, watching a football game with your father on the other side of the country, then hopping into a VR concert with your best friend from high school—all without leaving the house.......

The rise of the Internet was one of the most profound developments of the past century. The Internet famously allowed the futurist Ray Kurzweil to conclude that “A kid in Africa has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago.”

........ Can we finally create a digital university that surpasses the quality of our oldest and grandest learning institutions?
Six Technologies That Hit Their Tipping Points in 2015
A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. ........ The Internet and knowledge ... As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity. India now has more Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many. ....... Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means that we will see another three billion people come on line.

Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way.

....... Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley. ...... Doctors in our pockets ... Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars. ..... With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors. Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies.
........ Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles ...... sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors. ......... Bitcoin and disintermediation ..

The blockchain is not useful just for finance. It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted.

........ Engineering of life ..... CRISPR gene modification .. an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders. ..... to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water. ...... The drone age ... You can expect Amazon and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone. And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform building inspections, and provide emergency assistance in disasters. ...... These are an even bigger deal for the developing world. Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods. Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic. They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology. ......... Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy ...... Solar and wind capture are already advancing on exponential curves, installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling. .......

By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.

....... We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage. Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.
Stay Tuned for the Technological Transformation of Governance
Just as early waves of technological innovation in education and health care simply attempted to digitize old practices — putting an analog class into a MOOC or a patient’s file into the cloud — early forays into governmental technology involved bringing civil services online and enabling citizens to follow government protocols on websites instead of in buildings. .....

new governance technologies preparing to reroute lines of authority and change what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

....... Others are helping teams to build consensus and budget together, dynamically and elegantly. Still others are creating operating systems for political parties that are already winning seats in government. .....

Whether we're facing climate apocalypse on Earth or colonizing Mars, the deciding factor between human civilization being extractive and oppressive, or cooperative and generative, will be how much we as a species have practiced the skills of equitable collaboration on a day-to-day basis — hearing diverse viewpoints and synthesizing them, consciously understanding the flows of power dynamics, and designing in the key factors of human wellness.

......... Human beings have been sitting in circles listening to one another for millennia, but software and the internet allow us to scale up these practices in a way we never have before. ....... Cobudget for funding and Loomio for decision-making. ........ Many of the worst aspects of command-and-control, mechanistic, hierarchical governance are consequences of limited communications technologies. If we can make distributed cooperation just as efficient, the need for those old governance forms — which cause a lot of human suffering in the name of efficiency — could be obviated. ..... The key difference is: are you privatizing everything, or are you building the commons? The real distinguishing factor isn't the governing practices, which may be similar to a point, but the governing purpose. Are we building in service of the people and the community, deeply rooted in social values and human rights, or are we in service of private interests, which only answer to their own internal logic of profit and power? ....... Already, in our network, Enspiral, where we run businesses in service of positive social outcomes, we constantly have to 'hack' company structures to make them reflect how we actually want to work. We're sticking to the law, of course, but there's some legal gymnastics involved and we're constantly having to blaze a trail. Are we a community? A company? A charity? None of the current forms actually quite fit, and the distinctions seem contrived. ........ One of the protections against government corruption in democracies is that the moment of the vote is hidden and blind. ......

the very idea that our key moment of agency as a citizen is ticking a box every three or four years is the insane part

..... Our 'democratic' system is another example of something developed a couple hundred years ago because of very limited communications technology — election dates in the US are still determined by how long it took people to go on horseback between cities. ..... What's actually incredible is when you create a society where people not only feel safe being open about their political opinions, but they genuinely discuss them with different people, and their opinion can evolve through that interaction — they can change their minds.

When citizen deliberation is possible, that's when truly amazing solutions can emerge, from synthesizing different views.

......... What can users of SMS-enabled mobile banking in Africa teach us about how our apps could work? People in warzones and disaster areas know a ton about decentralized networks, because centralised infrastructure fails them. Activists threatened by oppressive governments have heaps to teach us about privacy, identity, and leveraging online communications tools for effective action and resistance. ....... most people in this space are running completely analog processes using technologies like neighborhood meetings and science-fair like exhibitions of citizen-generated ideas. They are willing to pound the pavement.
Cosmology Is in Crisis — But Not for the Reason You May Think
a growing zoo of subatomic particles...... We still have no idea what the vast majority of the universe is made of. We struggle to understand how the Big Bang could suddenly arise from nothing or where the energy for “inflation,” a very short period of rapid growth in the early universe, came from. But despite these gaps in knowledge, it is actually human nature — our tendency to interpret data to fit our beliefs — that is the biggest threat to modern cosmology. ....... explanations for the nature of dark energy range from proposals to scrap Einstein’s theory of relativity, the addition of a new fundamental field of nature, or even that

we may be seeing the effects of neighboring parallel universes

. ....... only those papers that agreed with the status-quo were being accepted by journals. ...... Blind analysis is the most straightforward and obvious thing to do ..... By using these three approaches — blinding, systems engineering and transparency — the next generation of cosmology experiments should be able to convince people that confirmation bias is not a factor in understanding the cosmos. Without them,

by looking to the heavens, the most interesting thing we may find is ourselves.

On the Origin of Truly Innovative Ideas
The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea....... But few companies actually try crazy ideas — especially the most successful ones...... The same conditions that increase the rate of biological evolution also drive the greatest rate of idea generation. ...... "speciation" is very similar to "ideation," or the formation of new ideas. ..... High-pressure environments incentivize people to try crazy 'Hail Mary' ideas, and while most fail, if one works, it is usually a true innovation. ..... Place your "innovation team" outside the mother ship, far away from the hordes that will tell them how "crazy" their ideas are. True innovation is massively disruptive and the average employee hates disruptive change. Steve Jobs isolated his Macintosh team far away from the rest of Apple and proudly flew a pirate flag above the building.
The Recipe for Generating Crazy, Innovative Ideas in Companies
it's important for "ideas to have sex." ..... This is how new ideas are made — I merge your idea and my idea and it becomes something new and valuable. ...... if new idea generation is a function of "idea interaction," then the rate of people interacting matters a lot. ...... In the 1950s, 7% of the population lived in cities..... Today, a little over 38% of people live in cities.....By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities........

doubling a city's population drives a 15% increase in income, wealth and innovation.

...... Jobs was very particular about where the bathrooms were placed in Pixar's office because he wanted "serendipitous personal encounters" to occur. ...... ask people to pick a spot and sign up to give a 10-minute talk on any subject, personal or professional. ..... Make sure you have a communication outlet that allows ideas to bubble up from anywhere, across disciplines and layers of the organization. ....... when you ask them to deliver 10x performance, with severely limited resources (i.e. 1/10th the budget and 1/10th the time), it drives invention and innovation. ...... Musk did this with Tesla, creating an epic car company with no legacy, no unions, no old factories and no old approaches. ....... Create hyper-constraints on your team. Set a difficult goal driven by a powerful massively transformative purpose and incentivize them to try new ways of attacking the problems you want solved ....... if you want true innovation, give the hardest, craziest challenges to the youth (or at least youthfully minded) in your company. ...... At what age do you think most Noble Laureates do their prize winning work? Not win their medal, but actually publish the research? .... Turns out, it's in their mid to late twenties...... "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible… and achieve it, generation after generation." ...... Where in your organization do you allow your teams to try crazy ideas?

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

DARPA's Future

1 – Human-Machine Interface ..... for true communication and machine autonomy, Artificial Intelligence must reach a level equal to or surpassing that of humans. ..... technologies that would enable machines to collaborate with humans as partners on tasks far more complex than those we can tackle today.

2 – Mind Control ...... a world where neurotechnologies could enable users to interact with their environment and other people by thought alone.

3 – Nanotech Materials .... Artificial skin, spray-on solar cells, self-repairing architecture, invisibility cloaks, and a host of DNA-level medical applications will be able to build and re-build human beings and the environment...... building substances from the atomic or molecular level up to create “impossible” materials with previously unattainable capabilities.



DARPA’s Top 3 Predictions For The Future

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Artificial Intelligence: The Fears

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (album)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A car moves faster than a human being, but that is not threat to humanity. Why is the same idea taken to artificial intelligence such a bad idea? Maybe some of our most confounding problems do need artificial intelligence help. That is Ray Kurzweil.

Whereas people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are alarmist. They think artificial intelligence is more like a nuclear weapon. You don't want to go beyond a point. Stephen Hawking is also in this camp. You can split an atom, but do you want to?

These concerns go to other areas like gene editing.

Coming to the car itself, it has been a culprit that has us now facing what we call global warming. It is a real problem.

These are some existential debates.

Most human beings will be beat by a computer playing chess. What if that computer also had limbs? What if it could replicate? It could figure out all your moves before you made them. And then where are you?

There is obviously need for robust debate and global regulation, so do produce the nuclear energy, but keep the bombs at bay.

Friday, July 03, 2015

Kurzweil's Schedule

Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In his estimate, current exponential growth of computing will continue until human-level intelligence is achieved around 2029. Merging with artificial intelligence will then follow, sometime in the 2030s as humans will be "a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking," wherein we connect our brains to the cloud to harness massive computational power. Beyond that? "As you get to the late 2030s or the 2040s, our thinking will be predominately nonbiological. The nonbiological part will ultimately be intelligent and have such vast capacity it'll be able to model, simulate, and understand fully the biological part. We will be able to fully backup our brains."
Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have a fundamental disagreement. Kurzweil thinks Artificial Intelligence is a faster, better computer. Musk thinks it is a nuclear weapon.

Longer Lives

Artificial Intelligence (John Cale album)
Artificial Intelligence (John Cale album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Exponential Finance: Financial Advice In the Age of AI and Long Life
most financial advisors as we’ve known them won’t be around much longer. ...... in the next ten years, half of all the financial advisors in this country will be gone ...... Not unlike other industries, like medical diagnostics, for example, artificial intelligence may soon perform many of the technical skills of financial advice better than their human counterparts. ...... AI won’t soon replace the uniquely human relationships clients seek from the best advisors. ...... “We are therapists, counselors, marriage consultants, and psychologists as much as we are financial planners” ...... Charles Schwab disrupted the industry back in 80s, putting many traditional stock brokers out of business. But they reinvented themselves as wealth planners. ..... “You don't see financial planners and financial advisors using a slide rule or a calculator and a number two pencil and a yellow pad.” ..... one of the greatest challenges they face is convincing their clients that instead of planning to live to 95—which is as far as financial planning software goes at the moment—they should plan to live longer. Perhaps much longer. ...... the first person to reach age 150 has already been born ...... Chances are, if you make it another 30 years, you'll make it another 100 ...... Instead of the traditional linear progression—birth, school, job, retirement, death—our lives will become more cyclical. That is, we’ll go to school, get our first job, work for awhile, take a five- or ten-year break, and then go back to school to reinvent ourselves and start our next career cycle. Rinse and repeat. ...... Discrete college degrees, he thinks, will be replaced with lifelong learning.
A lot of that recycling needs to happen already even before people have started living longer.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Technology Problems, Policy Problems

English: ANgel_F, the child artificial intelli...
English: ANgel_F, the child artificial intelligence son of Derrick re Kerckhove and the Biodoll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is not the job of technology to make sure everyone is fed. It is the job of technology to produce abundant food. It is the job of public policy to make sure everyone is fed.

Technology produces guns. And citizenship requires that we agree to the lawful use of the gun by the police and the military, both of whom have to work within the parameters of the law. Public policy does, or should, determine the use of the gun.

Artificial intelligence is the same way. The public policy domain needs to stay vigilant. There is good use to which artificial intelligence can be put. We are nowhere close to having too much artificial intelligence right now.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

The Laundry List From The Future



  1. A $1,000 Brain
  2. A Trillion Sensor Economy ("the Internet Of Things will create $19 trillion of newly created value")
  3. Perfect Knowledge
  4. 8 Billion Hyper Connected People ("We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy.")
  5. Disruption of Health Care ("$3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system.....Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.")
  6. Augmented and Virtual Reality ("a new generation of displays and user interfaces....a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.")
  7. Early Days Of JARVIS ("next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.")
  8. Blockchain