Part of his series on Making Sen$e of financial news, Paul Solman has been showcasing the future of technology from a recent conference run by a California think tank — things such as 3-D printing of prosthetic legs and iPhone heart tests. But the conference also resurfaced an age-old question about the future of human workers.

Transcript:

JEFFREY BROWN: And now, more on the challenges of creating enough new jobs in an ever more automated and high-tech economy. NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman has the story. It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.

NARRATOR: American labor, management and capital.

PAUL SOLMAN: Our favorite economics cartoon is a piece of free market propaganda from decades ago that envisioned a sort of cornucopia machine of the future, manned by the happy and lucky American worker, given the name King Joe.

ACTOR: Hi, folks.

NARRATOR: Joe’s the king because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or at least, back in the mid-20th century, he could. Today, our NewsHour inclusive statistic of all un- and under-employed totals more than 26 million Americans, nearly 17 percent of the work force. How many of them worked at jobs that machines now perform more cheaply? How many so-called knowledge workers are threatened by the likes of IBM’s “Jeopardy” champ, Watson?

COMPUTER: I have been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

PAUL SOLMAN: A machine that may soon echo the old song I can do anything better than you.

MAN: Watson?

COMPUTER: What is Jericho?

MAN: Correct. This mystery author and her archaeologist hubby. Watson?

COMPUTER: Who is Agatha Christie?

MAN: Correct.

PAUL SOLMAN: We’ve been showcasing the future of technology from a recent conference run by a California think tank called Singularity University: 3D printing of everything from prosthetic legs to organs; iPhone heart tests; new forms of life, organic and not-so-much. But this story concerns an age-old question raised by the conference with new urgency: Is the fear of machines making most humans obsolete a reality at last?

WILL.I.AM, musician: It’s just going and it’s going. It’s so scary.

PAUL SOLMAN: Will.i.am, lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas, is also director of creative innovation at Intel and someone who worries about the so-called digital divide between those who knows how to capitalize on technology and those who don’t have a clue.

WILL.I.AM: We use the concept of “Star Trek,” but no one ever thinks about the people that “Star Trek” left behind in the ghettos. It was like, what was the life like for the people that “Star Trek” left? They never even put a perspective on homeboy’s family with the little visor. So technology can go either way, right? It can be the prize for humanity, the thing that we created, like, whoa, check this out, or it could be the doom.

LYNN TILTON, professional investor: How many people, how many families, how many children will be left behind in the process?

PAUL SOLMAN: Conference attendee Lynn Tilton, a professional investor with a stake in more than 70 American manufacturing firms, was also worried — less about homeboys than the factory workers she employs.

LYNN TILTON: You’ve got to take people along with you where you go, and, frankly, if there is no work for Americans in the industrial base, you’re leaving a lot of people behind as you’re heading to the moon.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now, this lament is as old as the hills, the hills of Rome, in fact, and its first century Emperor Vespasian, who built the Coliseum. But he built it without the help of labor-saving technology to move heavy columns that had been invented, but that Vespasian quashed, because it would displace manual labor. ”How will it be possible to feed the populace?” the historian Suetonius reports him to have said. The most famous anti-automatons were England’s 19th century Luddites, who sabotaged the textile machinery that was displacing them. But instead of grinding to a halt, technology simply switched to ever newer gears. And, today, we have sneakers, for example, being printed in 3-D, without a stitch of labor.

CARL BASS, CEO, Autodesk: What you have is molten plastic. And it goes down layer by layer about a hundredth, two-hundredths of an inch at a time, and it builds it up.

PAUL SOLMAN: High-tech CEO Carl Bass says jobs like making sneakers aren’t just leaving the U.S., but leaving the whole planet, as machines inexorably take over.

CARL BASS: Like, you can now go to lights-out factories, where robots do almost all of the work.

PAUL SOLMAN: And lights out? Why is it called lights out?

CARL BASS: Because you really don’t need lighting in a place that is run by robots.

PAUL SOLMAN: The key to the current speedup in automation is software. Yale senior Max Uhlenhuth’s technology, which counts and identifies the trees in the forest by algorithm, displaces the human beings who for centuries have trudged in and done the job by hand.

MAX UHLENHUTH, SilviaTerra: My company is just me and my co-founder right now. It’s just two people, and, right now, we’re doing the largest, most comprehensive forest inventory ever done by man. It seems as though some time in my lifetime, there will be very little work left for humans to do.

PAUL SOLMAN: At least, very little paying work for humans who aren’t really smart and highly educated. And that worries economists like Richard Freeman.

RICHARD FREEMAN, economist: We don’t want it to be that there’ll 20 or 30 billionaires controlling everything, and the rest of us struggling for the one or two jobs that are out there.

PAUL SOLMAN: But professional futurists like Ray Kurzweil, whom we interviewed remotely by something called Teleportec, insist that technology is making everyone rich.

RAY KURZWEIL, futurist: I don’t agree that there’s a have-have-not divide. You know, 20 years ago, if you took out a cell phone in a movie, that was a signal that you are a member of the power elite. Today, there are five billion or six billion cell phones. All of them will be smartphones within a few years. In fact, anybody with a device like this or any of these devices is carrying around billions of dollars of capability circa 20 or 30 years ago.

PAUL SOLMAN: The conference mantra, high-tech as cornucopia machine, churning out more than enough to go around. Singularity’s chairman, Peter Diamandis.

PETER DIAMANDIS, chairman, Singularity University: Last century, if you had a watch and I had a hunk of gold, and I traded you, now you had a hunk of gold and I had a watch. This century is all about, if you have an idea and I have an idea and we trade, you have two ideas and I have two ideas.

PAUL SOLMAN: But most Americans are now worried that they’re not going to have any meaningful role to play in the world to come.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I’m sad about that, but I am passionate about giving them the tools for free to be able to do those things, because the — it’s about living into a life of possibility.

RICHARD FREEMAN: This is a very optimistic group that is pushing for technology which will make us all a million times better off. I don’t think they actually think all that much about how it will get distributed. That’s not their business. That’s the business of another set of people in this society, who I think have not done a very good job of worrying about that problem.

PAUL SOLMAN: Richard Freeman means politicians, businesspeople, and his fellow economists.

RICHARD FREEMAN: You have to think of ways of distributing job opportunities and the ownership so that everybody has a good stake.

PAUL SOLMAN: Singularity’s Vivek Wadhwa agrees.

VIVEK WADHWA, Singularity University: We will have to learn how to share. We will have enough to feed the whole world and to look after our people. The question is, will we have the greedy investment bankers and the greedy politicians trying to hoard it all for themselves? If we do, we will have social upheaval.

PAUL SOLMAN: Not surprisingly, Wadhwa, who oversees academic programs at Singularity and also teaches at Stanford, Duke and Emory, thinks ever higher education is key.

VIVEK WADHWA: One of the problems in America is that we believe that education ends when you graduate from college. Wrong. In the new world, in the new era of technology, we’re going to have to realize that education begins when you graduate, when you join the work force. We have to keep our skills current. We have to keep learning. We have to keep adapting to technology. That’s how we’re going to create employment.

PAUL SOLMAN: Employment for the one-third of us who have a college degree, but what about the two-thirds who don’t? Enter companies like Motion Math, trying to bring the basics to everyone via software, in the form of mobile apps featuring fish, for example, who eat numbers.

MAN: In this case, three.

PAUL SOLMAN: As you clear various levels, the game gets more challenging.

MAN: All the way up to very large numbers, subtraction and negative numbers, really tough.

PAUL SOLMAN: Co-founder Gabriel Adauto worries not about putting teachers out of work, but about getting their digitally undereducated students into the game.

GABRIEL ADAUTO, co-founder, Motion Math: The digital divide is a big problem. Although national unemployment is high, we’re having trouble finding the engineers we need in our small company.

PAUL SOLMAN: And those engineers, says partner Jacob Klein, will be part of the Motion Math mission.

JACOB KLEIN, Motion Math: The kids who play our games are going to have better math skills, they’re going to be more likely to master engineering skills that will make them employable in the future. It’s a long-term strategy, but I think creating better science, technology, engineering, math education is really the route of solving the digital divide.

PAUL SOLMAN: To Vivek Wadhwa, budding entrepreneurs like Klein and Adauto are themselves examples of the high-tech cornucopia machine.

VIVEK WADHWA: Right now, the apps economy, building up the applications for devices like this, employs half-a-million Americans. It came out of nowhere. So what’s going to happen is that the convergence of these technologies will create jobs in areas we can’t even think of.

PAUL SOLMAN: But maybe not jobs for people without skills that most us — let’s face it — don’t yet have, assuming we ever will.

JEFFREY BROWN: Online, you can watch Paul’s earlier stories about the California think tank Singularity University. One report is about technology’s next feats, including on-demand kidneys, robot sex — yes — and more. The other is on the potential downsides of innovation, such as personalized bioterror attacks.

Dr. Anders Sandberg is a well known transhumanist, futurist, computational neuroscientist and currently a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford University. I have been thinking of inviting him on Singularity 1 on 1 for some time and when one of my readers actually asked me to do it I could not be happier to oblige. (Thanks Shahan!)

Dr. Sandberg is one of those rare individuals who clearly loves his work and is always very enthusiastic to discuss it. I really enjoyed talking to him and feel that we could have talked a lot more than we did. Thus I will try to bring him back on the show for little more focused discussion on one of his areas of expertise - transhumanism, mind uploading and the ethics thereof.

During our first discussion with Anders we cover a wide variety of topics such as: his childhood and early passion for science fiction; his intellectual journey from science fiction to science and – eventually - to ethics; the goals and benchmarks of his work; human enhancement, body modification and the risks of early adopters; the problem of finding the right priorities; the technological singularity and our chances of surviving it; other existential threats to humanity.

My second favorite quote that I will take away from Anders Sandberg is: The Singularity should not stop us from thinking! (The first one, of course, is the title.)

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who is Anders Sandberg?

Anders Sandberg’s research at the Future of Humanity Institute centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics and future studies he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also holds an AXA Research Fellowship.

He has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modeling of human memory. He has also been the scientific producer for the major neuroscience exhibition “Se Hjärnan!” (“Behold the Brain!”), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation that toured Sweden 2005-2007. He is co-founder and writer for the think tank Eudoxa.

Why do we fear the technological singularity?

Well, let me give you what I believe are the top 10 most popular reasons:

1. Extinction

Extinction is by far the most feared as well as the most commonly predicted consequence of the singularity.

The global apocalypse for the human race comes in many flavors but some of the most popular ones are: the supersmart terminator AI’s – a robopocalypse; nanotechnology gone rogue – the so called grey goo scenario, home-made Smart Weapons of Mass Destruction – used by terrorists and nihilists; genetic modifications or mutations – turning us into living-dead zombies; science experiments gone wrong – the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that engulfs the planet…

In short, the fear is that, as Bill Joy notoriously put it: The Future Doesn’t Need Us.

2. Slavery

Perhaps the second most common reason for fearing the singularity is the potential slavery or subjugation of the entire human race. The argument is pretty straight forward:

Once we have super smart AIs we stop being the smartest entities on this planet. In other words, we have created Gods while remaining mere humans. So, if for whatever reason the machines decide not to exterminate us, then, chances are that, since they will be vastly superior to us, they will enslave us. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways: either explicitly – with us being aware of our bondage, or implicitly – without us realizing it (the Matrix/simulation scenarios).

3. World War III – Giga War

The third most common fear of the singularity is, of course, World War 3. A Giga War of unprecedented scale, sophistication and efficiency of death and destruction that may be the result of either the clash between the human race and the AIs or between different fractions of humans: e.g. the ArtIlect War of terrans versus cosmists as foreseen by Hugo de Garis. Whatever the case may be, it will likely result in billions of deaths and a collapse or complete eradication of our civilization.

4. Economic Collapse

Some have argued that, if we somehow manage to avoid the previous three scenarios, then, we are likely to experience a complete economic collapse:

The complete robotization of our society is likely to lead to overproduction of goods and services. Yet, since it is claimed that most people will lose their jobs to the robots, there will be a global unemployment rate of unprecedented scale which in turn will collapse the demand for those robo-made goods and services. Combine this with a population explosion of 9 or even 10 billion mostly unemployed people who have no means to create income and buy anything, and we are looking at a global economic collapse.

5. Big Brother AI

This scenario is a milder version of the slavery/subjugation Matrix option because we are still under the complete control of an all-knowing Artificial Intelligence. The main difference here is that the AI is merely doing what is best for us, rather than what is best for it: we have a benevolent, omnipotent, absolute monarch protecting us from our worst enemies – our fellow human beings and our own selves. It is all done in the name of maximizing security, prosperity and overall happiness for all people across the planet. The only minor negative is a little bit of propaganda and ideological, political or religious brainwashing required to prop up “the cult of the AI,” but that’s OK since it is for our own good.

6. Alienation and Loss of Humanity

Following the “if you can’t beat them, join them” maxim, one way of potentially surviving the singularity is by merging with the machines. This idea – that we can and should improve on what we have been handed down by mother nature, is often referred to as transhumanism. Merging man and machine via biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies and artificial intelligence, we would increase our cognitive abilities, physical strength, emotional stability and overall health and longevity.

The fear, of course, is that by doing so we are going to lose the very essence of being human – our human nature, our human souls and human identity. Furthermore, at the collective level, the loss of humanity will also mean alienation or loss of community which is to say that the resulting variety of posthuman entities will be so wide apart as to negate any connection whatsoever among different individuals. This in turn will mean that humanity, in fact, did not survive but succumbed to the machine invasion and indeed went extinct.

7. Environmental Catastrophe

Our history shows that our environmental destructiveness is in direct proportion of our technological prowess. Once we live in a global society where everything is mass produced by robots, our manufactured civilization will sever the last connection to the natural world. We will lose the very last bit of respect for mother nature:

Why preserve the rain forest if we can create a “better” and ”smarter” one? Why care about biodiversity, species’ extinction or environmental degradation if we can revive and mold those for our own purposes or pleasure?

Why care about anything if we are (technological) Gods?!

8. Loss of History, Knowledge and Spatial Resolution 

The ever accelerating process of digitization comes along with a certain loss or even destruction of data. This data can be in the form of history, cultural traditions, dead languages or important scientific information. For example, NASA recently admitted it has lost the ability to recover much of the computer data from some of the Apollo missions and the Moon landings. Thus certain kinds of vitally important and unique knowledge as well as history or cultural traditions are lost forever. To know if we are getting a good deal or not, we must fist quantify the data losses and compare them to the potential gains. Yet, at the break-neck speed we’re moving forward few have time for such calculations.

It seems that we live in an analog universe with infinite resolution – both zooming in and out, as far as we can. The process of digitization captures a mere fraction of it. Just like a compressed .mp3 file captures only a part of the actual musical performance, this process creates symbols which are digital representations of the real thing. The fear is we may end up losing awareness that the digital realm is a realm of symbols – a mere reflection of the true analog universe, ending up in Plato’s Digital Cave of Illusions.

9. Computronium and Matrioshka Brains 

As far as we can tell it seems we live in a universe full of dumb matter. This, of course, makes for a pretty dumb universe too.

However, extrapolating from our own development, it would appear that as time goes by there is a movement from less towards more intelligence in the universe. Thus, given enough time, more and more of our planet and, eventually our universe, is likely to contain and consist of more and more intelligent matter. This process is likely to continue until Moore’s Law collapses and an equilibrium is reached. Such a theoretical arrangement of matter - the best possible configuration of any given amount to achieve a perfectly optimal computing device, is the substrate also known as computronium.

A Matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure of immense computational capacity. Based on the Dyson sphere, the concept derives its name from the Russian Matrioshka doll and is an example of a planet-size solar-powered computer, capturing the entire energy output of a star. To form the Matrioshka brain all planets of the solar system are dismantled and a vast computational device inhabited by uploaded or virtual minds, inconceivably more advanced and complex than us, is created.

So the idea is that eventually, one way or another, all matter in the universe will be smart. All dust will be smart dust, and all resources will be utilized to their optimum computing potential. There will be nothing else left but Matrioshka Brains and/or computronium…

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned meat to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table. “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working.” (Accelerando by Charles Stross)

10. Fear of Change

Fear of change and fear of the unkown are deeply embedded in the human psyche: We all want to be comfortable. Not knowing is very, very uncomfortable. Realizing that the coming change is radically unique – both in scale and unpredictibility, is even more discomforting.

When it comes to survival nobody likes surprises. So we take it as a matter of both personal as well as collective security to model and at least roughly foresee the future.

The singularity is a radical change of arguably cosmic proportions which is by definition impossible to model, let alone predict. Thus, there is no surprise it evokes very deep insecurity and primal fear.

The question is: Are you afraid?! Are you not very, very afraid?!

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Original Post: Tomorrow May 19th, SpaceX will become the first commercial company in history to attempt to visit the International Space Station. You can watch the launch live on SpaceX.com beginning at 1:15 AM Pacific / 4:15 AM Eastern / 08:15 UTC.

For more information you can check out the company’s press kit.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dreams 

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk hopes to make history when his SpaceX Dragon Capsule attempts to become the first privately-built spaceship to dock with the International Space Station.

President Kennedy: “I believe that this nation should commit itself, to achiving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

Elon Musk: “It’s it’s been 43 years since 1969 and what have we done?!”

Well, tomorrow morning we are all going to see if SpaceX did it or not. If the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket is successful and the Dragon capsule docks safely with the International Space Station, then, the era of commercial space travel has officially arrived.

Good luck Elon, it is time to show the world what you have done!

Update for May 19, 2012: The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aborted launch half a second before lift-off due to unusual pressure readings in one of the nine engine combustion chambers under the vehicle. The launch has been delayed by at least three days. To find out more click here.

Update: The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soared into space from Space Launch Complex-40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit at 3:44 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 22, 2012 (photo credit: NASA)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update for May 23, 2012: SpaceX founder Elon Musk says witnessing the launch was like winning the Superbowl.

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A Dutch company has successfully conducted a test flight of a car which doubles as an aircraft and hopes to put the machine into production.

Original report by Andrew Potter for Reuters:

Transcript: From a distance it looks like a vehicle built for the road, albeit a slightly unusual one. But on a straight stretch of tarmac or grass this machine transforms, giving it the ability to take to the skies. This flying car is made by Dutch company PAL-V, or Personal Air and Land Vehicle – Robert Dingemanse is their CEO.

Soundbite: Robert Dingemanse, CEO and Co-Founder of PAL-V, saying (English):

“You can drive like a car with your normal car then you can fly like a plane but in one vehicle. So if you want to fly over a mountain you can do that and then drive at the other end and go to your destination or fly over water or past a traffic jam of course. All those kind of things are possible now.”

The PAL-V took its maiden flight in March, and is certified for the air as well as the road. It needs only 165 metres to take off and, depending on weight, can fly for up to 500 kilometres, or 315 miles. The top speed is the same on the ground as in the air, around 180 kilometres an hour, or 110 miles an hour. Lift is generated by an auto-rotating rotor on top, forward speed from a propeller on the back. This configuration is known a gyrocopter, and the company says it’s quiet, easy to fly and safe. Before taking the controls customers must get their private pilot’s license. But PAL-V hope to attract buyers beyond weekend flying enthusiasts.

Soundbite: Robert Dingemanse, CEO and Co-Founder of PAL-V, saying (English):

“Our customers are ranging from private persons but also police, we talk to police, but also aid, flying doctors for example to fly from island to island where there’s no roads you can fly. The beauty is a doctor can fly himself, it’s dead easy. He can also drive so he’s much more efficient doing a much better job in that way.”

There are other considerations of course, like how would hundreds of flying cars in the skies operate safely? PAL-V say they’ve had plenty of customer interest, providing they can find investors to take the project into production. In any case getting home after a day’s flying has never been easier.

Andrew Potter, Reuters

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The issue of religion is one of the more common questions that I ask most of my guests on Singularity 1 on 1. But this is hardly the most important thing during any conversation. Still, if we are talking about the future of humanity, it may be relevant to know a little more about the person’s past and present religiosity. In this way when we move on to topics such as cosmology, metaphysics, ethics or epistemology, we are more mindful of our own implicit presumptions.

The danger in the above approach is that one might embrace the label a bit too tightly and thereby ruin the potential for a genuine conversation and exchange of ideas. Thus we must also be aware of all the religious, intellectual, political or other such shortcuts we are using. While they can be useful in the short term, in the longer term they omit so much that they become rapidly useless.

In addition, the vast majority of us are simply full of contradictions. Thus the more you get to know a person the harder it is to slot her into a rigid label or category.

Take me for example – I consider myself to be an unapologetic atheist. Yet, one of the contradictory personal facts about this statement is that much of the time I wear a golden cross around my neck.

So how can that be?

Let me give you the top three reasons:

Firstly, there is a very personal story behind this particular cross because it was made of my parents’ wedding rings after my mother passed away. So for me it has a very different emotional meaning rather than the usual Christian one.

Secondly, while I am an atheist who was born and lived in a communist country, even there I was unable to escape the deeply embedded Judeo-Christian culture permeating Western Civilization. Consequently, being an atheist hasn’t prevented me from occasionally falling a victim to the same implicit presumptions that are characteristic of Christianity or even Judaism. Thus wearing a cross reminds me that I am still a child of the temporal, political, cultural and georgraphic context I was born in.

Finally, the cross reminds me that the body of my knowledge is always going to be dwarfed by the body of my ignorance. So to me it represents the X factor - something that I don’t know I don’t know - the unkown unknown.

Thus, despite the cross and what it might signify to you, I am not a Christian. In fact, since I am pretty certain there is no such divinity as professed by any of the major religions – I am very much an atheist. However, in a larger sense I am an agnostic: I realize that I don’t know everything and am willing to follow the evidence no matter where it takes me.

If and when I find that I’m wrong I change my mind.

This, I believe, is the essense of the Socratic method – to ask questions, make mistakes, learn and evolve. That is why I believe human is a step in evolution, not the culmination. We are each a process, not an entity. As Buckminster Fuller put it once:

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” (I Seem To Be A Verb 1970)

***

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson claims the title “scientist” above all other “ists.” And yet, he says he is “constantly claimed by atheists.” So where does he stand?

In his own words: “Neil deGrasse, widely claimed by atheists, is actually an agnostic.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Neil is clearly a verb. But what about you?!

Are you an -ist or an -ism? A verb or a noun?

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Cathy Hutchinson has been unable to move her own arms or legs for 15 years. But using a pioneering brain-machine interface she can steer a robotic arm towards a bottle, pick it up, and drink her morning coffee.

The interface utilizes the BrainGate implant system – a sensor chip implanted in Cathy’s brain, which ‘reads’ her thoughts, and a decoder, which turns her thoughts into instructions for the robotic arm.

In this video you can watch Cathy control the arm and hear from the team behind the pioneering study.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out the original research paper here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7398/full/nature11076.html

The same story on Reuters News:

Groundbreaking new research is allowing quadriplegics to control objects with a robotic arm and the power of their thoughts. A study involving a brain-computer interface developed at Brown University in Rhode Island, shows that people who have lost the use of their limbs can perform basic functions by manipulating the technology with their minds. The findings of the study, conducted in April last year, will be published in the May issue of the science journal ”Nature”. Ben Gruber reports.

Transcript: In the trial she is known only as patient ‘S3′. She’s 58-years old and has been paralysed from the neck down since suffering a brainstem stroke 15 years ago. Until this moment she’d been unable to to perform the most basic physical task, let alone serve herself a drink.

Patient S3 is using her thoughts to control a robotic arm. An electronic device smaller than a postage stamp has been implanted in the motor cortex of her brain. The device picks up signals from individual neurons, conveying her thoughts to an external computer which then instructs the robot arm to act accordingly. Patient S3 can’t speak but can communicate via specially adapted computer software. She says she that when the arm began moving, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The researchers say they were delighted to discover that even after more than a decade of paralysis, S3′s brain was still able to issue commands with enough proficiency to control the robotic arm.

S3′s extraordinary achievement comes after years of research by the BrainGate project, a collaboration of researchers whose aim is to give people with paralysis or without limbs a new lease on life. S3 says she hopes one day to have a pair robotic legs she can also control with her thoughts. But for now she says, she’s content just to to think about the future while sipping her coffee.

Ben Gruber, Reuters.

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The very first Arthur C. Clarke book I ever read was a 1963 edition of Dolphin Island. This science fiction novel is about a runaway teenager who gets shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean where he is eventually saved by “the people of the sea”: dolphins. The protagonist – Johnny Clinton, ends up on a mysterious island of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef where a brilliant Professor invents a small handheld device that is used to communicate with dolphins…

***

Orangutans at the Jungle Island Zoo in Florida are learning to use iPads to identify object like body parts and food. The hi-tech approach to communication is modeled on a system used successfully with autistic children. The zoo is hoping it will help visitors connect with the apes and promote awareness of their endangered status in the wild.

Original story by Ben Gruber for Reuters News:

Douglas Rushkoff is one of my favorite social ctitics on media, technology, culture and money. In this interview with Motherboard TV Rushkoff talks about technology, social media, the zombie apocalypse and the occupy movement.

My favorite quote from Rushkoff’s interview:

“Our interactions on line occur on platforms whose function, whose purpose is not to promote our social interaction, but to exploit our social interaction. So you have the average kid using Facebook believes that he is the customer of Facebook and that Facebook is there to help him make friends. And it’s not. The corporation is paying Facebook for Johny’s social graph. To reduce human interraction to that which is marketable to Facebook’s customers. Now, you are inhabiting a comercial environement that was constructed by people and companies in order to promote certain behaviors and attitudes from you. We have an entire way of life that is predicated on a faulty premise – on a faulty premise about profit and money and corporatism which are human inventions…”

Who is Douglas Rushkoff?

Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He teaches media studies at New York University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world.

Rushkoff’s book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is a followup to his Frontline documentary Digital Nation. His previous book was called Life Inc. was also made into a short, award-winning film.

Douglas has ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture which have been translated to over thirty languages. They include titles such as Cyberia, Media Virus!, Nothing Sacred, Get Back in the Box and Coercion. He has written and hosted three award-winning Frontline documentaries – The Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and most recently, Digital Nation.

Related articles

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• Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed
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An experimental stem cell treatment has, according to doctors, saved the life of a seven-year old Romanian girl with a deadly bone marrow disease. The treatment was used as a last resort after two bone marrow transplant operations failed and has proven so successful that the little girl is getting ready to return home from hospital.

Original report by Jim Drury for Reuters News:

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An Australian environmentalist, designer and entrepreneur is catching the eye of policy-makers in his home country and around the world with his innovative straw-insulated house designs. Joost Bakker says his houses are affordable, sustainable and — in a country plagued by bushfires — fire resistant.

Original story by Tara Cleary for Reuters News:

So, what do you think – Did the 1st little piggy have it right all along?! Can we really build affordable, sustainable, durable and fire-resistant houses out of straw?

When Vernor Vinge coined the term technological singularity few foresaw it becoming the conceptual watershed that it is now.

Today, regardless of whether you are writing about sci fi, futurism, artificial intelligence, technology or the future of humanity, the moment you embrace the longer-term big picture framework of reference is the moment you are writing about the singularity. And if that is not the case, then, you must justify why not. So, in a way, you are still writing about the singularity.

Thanks to Josh Calder, who made the effort to dig out and scan the original article, I can now show you a copy of the actual page where the term was used for the very first time in its contemporary technological context: the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine.

Hope you enjoy this little digital piece of history as much as I do!

Courtesy of Josh Calder from www.FutureAtlas.com (click on image for high resolution version)

Related articles

• 17 Definitions of the Technological Singularity

May 11, 2012 marks the 15-year anniversary since IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In the video below IBM Research scientist Dr. Murray Campbell, one of the original developers, talks about the challenges and breakthroughs of building Deep Blue.

Designed as a “brute force” high-power parallel processing super-computer, Deep Blue could analyze 200 million chess positions per second. It defeated Kasparov 3.5-2.5 after losing 4-2 the previous year. After the game Deep Blue was used to develop drug treatments, analyze risk and conduct data mining. It also paved the way for the next generation of its replacements –  Blue Gene and Watson.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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• David Ferrucci on Singularity 1 on 1: Pursue the Big Challenges
• Elementary, my dear, Watson: Who is Smarter than Human?
• They Were There: Errol Morris’ Centennial Documentary About IBM

Forget the zombie apocalypse – the real threat is an imminent Robopocalypse, a robot uprising! That’s why Epipheo interviewed Daniel H. Wilson - to find out exactly how to survive a robot uprising. Daniel is the world’s foremost authority on the subject and NY Times bestselling author of the book Robopocalypse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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• The Technological Singularity Goes Mainstream (Again)
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• Ray Kurzweil at the Daily Show with John Stewart

Karl Schroeder is one of those fantastic science fiction authors and futurists who, despite his numerous and profound books, have not quite made it into the mainstream yet. In fact, it was just a week ago that Eric Boyd emailed me to suggest that I interview Karl on Singularity 1 on 1 and I was skeptically struggling to figure out who Schroeder is, why I’ve never heard of him before and why he would be a good interview subject.

Little did I know that Karl Schroeder will turn out to be one of the smartest and most enjoyable interviewees I have ever had on the show. He not only managed to challenge and stimulate me intellectually but also provided alternative lenses that I can now use when looking at the world and thinking about the future. I can honestly admit that it took only an hour for me to become a Schroeder fan and I have already finished reading one of his earlier books – Sun of Suns.

During our discussion with Karl we cover a wide variety of topics such as: his Mennonite background and early interest in science fiction; the Hunger Games and Karl’s peacekeeping foresight novel for the Canadian military – Crisis in Zefra (free download);  the differences and the similarities between foresight and science fiction; the technological singularity as a possible though, in Karl’s estimate, not a probable scenario for our future; the concepts of the technological maximum, rewilding and natural selection; Schroeder’s Law as a solution to the Fermi Paradox; his novels Lady of Mazes and Sun of Suns; exponential growth, systems theory and limiting factors thereof; transhumanism and his concepts of trans-lionism; trans-dogism and inhumanism.

My favorite quote from Schroeder:

“You have to keep moving forward. [...] The singularity is not the most interesting current idea. It’s old at this point. You’ve got to keep up. You’ve have got to look at what’s going on now. [...] Sure, take the singularity – use it – it’s a lens. Develop other lenses! Use other lenses! Keep looking forward! Keep looking for new ideas, for blind-spots! And the world will continue to be a very interesting place.”

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technological Maximum (as defined by Karl Schroeder):

You hit the technological maximum when you have systems that can rapidly perform natural selection on technological designs. As one of the characters puts it in my novel The Sunless Countries, “Everybody’s equally able to evolve new devices because everybody has the same, perfect physics model. Once you’ve got that model, and fast enough calculation, nobody in the universe should be able to come up with a machine that you can’t duplicate. You just select for it and its design eventually pops out. So there’s a technological stalemate everywhere in the universe.” This is analogous to the biological stalemate that pertained on Earth prior to the evolution of human beings.

The Rewilding (as defined by Karl Schroeder):

The Rewilding, by contrast, is simply a vision of what happens when you erase the distinction between the natural and the artificial. Some cognitive studies, for instance, suggest that the human brain offloads difficult calculations to the physical environment whenever it can. When catching a pop-fly in baseball, for instance, the brain does not attempt to do the calculations necessary to predict the trajectory of the ball; instead it gets you to run backward while occluding the ball with your glove and keeping a fixed angle between your arm and the horizon. This replaces the calculations. Such ‘partial programs’ mean that you’re not required to process all information internally; you use your ambient environment as part of your thinking apparatus. In The Rewilding, we have a world of physical partial programs. Why build a water treatment plant when you can use the local wetlands for the same purpose? In The Rewilding, we establish mutually beneficial relationships with physical and ecological systems while not compromising our ambitions; if you need a nuclear power plant, you still
build a nuclear power plant, but if there’s a partnership with some natural system that will provide the same result, you go that way.

Who is Karl Schroeder?

Karl Schroeder is one of Canada’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, and divides his time between writing science fiction and consulting in foresight studies (chiefly concerning the future of technology). He is the author of nine novels, as well as the influential “foresight scenario fiction,’ Crisis in Zefra, which was written for the Canadian army in 2005. His novels have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. In addition to his fiction works, Mr. Schroeder has published The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Cory Doctorow (MacMillan, August, 2000). As an active member of the Canadian speculative fiction writing community, he helped found SF Canada, the Canadian national science fiction and fantasy writers’ association, in 1989, and was president from 1996 to 1997. He taught science fiction writing at George Brown College from 1992 to 1994.

Karl was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He has a Mennonite background, and in fact comes from the same southern Manitoba Mennonite community as “golden age” SF grand master A.E. van Vogt. Growing up, Karl assumed that novel writing was a career option because his mother had published two novels with Zondervan, “Year of Discovery” and “The Secret of His Presence” and so books with Schroeder on their spines were in the bookshelf along with those of Andre Norton, Agatha Christie, and others. He moved to Toronto in 1986, married Janice Beitel in 2001, and he and Janice have one child.

Since 2003 Karl has been doing work in strategic foresight (also known as futurism) for clients such as the Canadian government and army. In 2011 he achieved a Master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University of Toronto. He regularly consults on the future of technology, and also does public speaking both in person and in the media on the intersection of science and society, and on trends for the future.

Karl’s novels present technology as a realm of experimental philosophy, where previously theoretical constructs are given flesh. His current concern is the notion that “technology is legislation” and that because of this fact, humanity will not gain control of its own political or evolutionary destiny until we learn to anticipate and control the effects that new technologies have upon society.

Researchers in Finland have developed biodegradable joint implants they say will bring permanent pain relief to arthritis sufferers. The implants are designed to replace joints degraded by rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, diseases that afflict millions of people around the world.

The following video contains images of surgery that some viewers may find disturbing.

Original Reuters News video report by Joel Flynn:

Yesterday I interviewed John Smart on Singularity 1 on 1.

Among many other things John is an advisor in Futures Studies and Forecasting for Singularity University where I met him last summer. He is also one of those rare people who are (literary) Smart since birth and totally justify the name. So it was no surprise that I learned a lot during our one-hour-long conversation and I hope you can learn from him too.

During our discussion with John we cover a wide variety of topics such as: the Foresight Education and Research Network (FERN); planning and creating your personal and professional future; the story of how John got interested in futurism and technology; his Acceleration Studies Foundation as well as the meaning of accelerating change; his totally fascinating idea of STEM compression; the Barrow scale vs the Kardashev scale; cosmology, black holes and different interpretations thereof; Moore’s Law and the limits of Physics.

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who is John Smart?

John M. Smart is a technology foresight educator and a scholar in global processes of evolution, development, and accelerating change. He is president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Mountain View, CA), and professor and program champion for the Emerging Technologies masters program at the University of Advancing Technology (Tempe, AZ), which teaches foresight in exponentially advancing technologies, and seeks innovative technology solutions to humanity’s grand challenges. He is also an advisor in futures studies and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA). John has a B.S. in business administration from UC Berkeley, an M.S.-equivalency in physiology and medicine from U.C. San Diego School of Medicine, and an M.S. in futures studies from the University of Houston. His blog is EverSmarterWorld.com.

X-ray of skull showing position of chip with cable running to control unit

Two British men who have been totally blind for many years have had part of their vision restored after surgery to fit pioneering eye implants.

The two patients, Chris James and Robin Millar, lost their vision due to a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, where the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye gradually cease to function.

The wafer-thin, 3mm square microelectronic chip has 1,500 light-sensitive pixels which take over the function of the photoreceptor rods and cones.

The surgery involves placing it behind the retina from where a fine cable runs to a control unit under the skin behind the ear.

Synopsis: A British man who has been totally blind for many years has had part of his vision restored after surgery to fit a pioneering eye implant.

The device, which was fitted behind the retina, has enabled Chris James to perceive light and even some shapes.

The BBC’s Fergus Walsh reports.

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Newly discovered Majorana particles are scientists’ best chance to create subatomic supercomputers that could store as many pieces of information as there are particles in the universe. The discovery was made by researchers in the Netherlands who say it could be applied to make today’s computer technology obsolete.

Original report for Reuters News by Jim Drury:

Transcript: An artist’s conception of the Majorana – a previously elusive subatomic particle whose existence has never been confirmed – until now.

Dutch nano-scientists at the technological universities of Delft and Eindhoven, say they have found evidence of the particle. To find it, they devised miniscule circuitry around a microscopic wire in contact with a semiconductor and a superconductor. Lead researcher Leo Kouwenhoven.

Soundbite (English), Nanoscientist of Delft University, Leo Kouwenhoven, saying:

“The samples that we use for measuring the Majorana fermions are really very small, you can see the holder of the sample, the sample is actually inside here and if you zoom in, you can actually see little wires and if you zoom in more, you see a very small nano-meter scale sample, where we detected one pair of Majoranas.”

When a magnetic field was applied along the the ‘nanowire’, electrons gathered together in synchrony as a Majorana particle. These subatomic particles could be used to encode information, turning them into data to be used inside a tiny, quantum computer.

Soundbite (English), Nanoscientist of Delft University, Leo Kouwenhoven, saying:

“The goal is actually to develop those nano-scale devices into little circuits and actually make something like a quantum computer out of it, so they have special properties that could be very useful for computation, a particural kind of computation which we call quantum computation, which would replace actually our current computers by computers that are much more efficient than what we have now.”

The Majorana fermion’s existence was first predicted 75 years ago by Italian Ettore Majorana. Probing the Majorana’s particles could allow scientists to understand better the mysterious realm of quantum mechanics. Other groups working in solid state physics are thought to be close to making similar announcements….heralding a new era in super-powerful computer technology. Were he alive today Majorana may well be amazed at the sophisticated computer technology available to ordinary people in every day life. But compared to the revolution his particle may be about to spark, it will seem old fashioned in the not too distant future.

Jim Drury, Reuters

Moore’s Law has been around since 1965 when Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described it in a paper. Since that day, the law has been in full effect, and the number of transistors placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has roughly doubled every two years. It’s also a commonly held belief that chip performance doubles every 18 months.

But Moore’s Law won’t be true forever, and in the video below theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains how it will collapse. And Kaku argues that the collapse isn’t going to happen in some distant future but within the next decade.

The problem is one of finding a replacement for silicon coupled with the exponential nature of Moore’s Law. Quite simply, computing power cannot go on doubling every two years indefinitely.

The other issue is we are about to reach the limits of silicon. According to Kaku, once we get done to 5nm processes for chip production, silicon is finished. Any smaller and processors will just overheat.

What’s beyond silicon? There have been a number of proposals: protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers, molecular computers. Dr. Michio Kaku says “if I were to put money on the table I would say that in the next ten years as Moore’s Law slows down, we will tweak it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what do you think?

Is Michio Kaku right or is he going to be just one among many who wrongly predicted the demise of Moore’s Law?!

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This house wants to defeat ageing entirely was a fantastic public debate held last Wednesday (April 25th, 2012) at Oxford University. The two interlocutors were Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Prof. Colin Blakemore, who is a high-profile neuroscientist and science communicator as well as the ex-head of the Medical Research Council, UK’s largest funding body for biomedical research.

This house wants to defeat ageing entirely addressed both the feasibility and the desirability of bringing aging under comprehensive medical control. Moreover, one can claim it was quite a watershed event, since it was the first time that a bona fide grandee of the British biomedical establishment has risen to the challenge of describing publicly, in a forum where he can be challenged, why intervention against aging is not in fact medicine’s most pressing priority.

Now, I am not a scientist or a medical expert so I can’t judge the accuracy of the scientific details. However, from a logical or rhetorical point of view I have to say that Dr. Aubrey de Grey clearly won the debate. Thus it was unfortunate when the moderator didn’t even bother to actually count the votes accurately after the debate because I am willing to bet that Aubrey de Grey did win a substantial number of the audience as compared to their original pre-debate predispositions.

What annoyed me immensely was that Prof. Colin Blakemore not only took substantially more time to lay out his position than Aubrey, but also did not restrain himself to claim that “Aubrey had opinions beyond his expertise” while himself committing a number of logical fallacies such as appeal to authority, strawman, ad hominem, appeal to nature, circular reasoning etc. To sum up Colin Blakemore’s position in one sentence – defeating ageing can’t be done because it hasn’t been done before and shouldn’t be done because it is both a waste of resources and will lead to a global Malthusian apocalypse. I can’t resist using Colin’s own words against himself and note that he is clearly “beyond his expertise” when it comes to both economics and rhetoric.

Keep up the good work Aubrey! Your debate reminded me of President of the Royal Society Lord Kelvin’s 1895 statement that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. Less than a decade later two bicycle manufactures demonstrated that his Lordship was, in fact, totally wrong.

Part 1. The Debate of the Ages:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2. Audience Q & A:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Chinese scientists have cloned a genetically modified sheep containing a ”good” type of fat found naturally in nuts, seeds, fish and leafy greens that helps reduce the risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease. Named ”Peng Peng”, the sheep was born in western China late last month. He’s the first to have been produced by a simplified technique called handmade cloning.

Original story for Reuters News by Rob Muir:

Transcript: Peng Peng is no ordinary sheep. Not only is he a clone, but his cells contain a fatty acid producing gene taken from a roundworm. Fatty acids are known to be good for the human heart, making Peng Peng a theoretically healthier animal for human consumption.

Soundbite: Du Yutao – Project Leader, BGI ARK Biotechnology saying:

“We put this gene, actually, into the somatic cell of a Merino sheep, and then we use this transgenic somatic cell as a donor cell for handmade cloning.”

Du Yutao is one of the scientists who created Peng Peng in far Western China. She says handmade cloning is an emerging technique with great potential. It’s less expensive than conventional cloning and can be performed in the field without the need for sophisticated equipment. Du acknowledges ethical and safety concerns about making genetically engineered foods available for public consumption. But China, which has limited resources with which to feed 22 percent of the world’s population, is aggressively pursuing the kind of research that produced Peng Peng, nonetheless.

Soundbite: Du Yutao – Project Leader, BGI ARK Biotechnology saying:

“Actually Chinese government are quite encouraging the transgenic project in China. Of course we need to have better method, better results, to prove that this transgenic adult plants or animals are harmless and safe and good for consumption. I think that’s very crucial.”

Peng Peng is the first sheep produced by the handmade cloning technique. And despite the concerns of critics, he probably won’t be the last.

Rob Muir, Reuters.

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This is my second interview with Dr. Randal Koene for Singularity 1 on 1.

Dr. Koene is perhaps one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists. He is director of analysis at Halcyon Molecular, co-founder of Carbon Copies and co-founder of and director at the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts.

Randal’s research objective is whole brain emulation, creating the large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of activity in neuronal circuitry that are needed in patient-specific neuroprostheses.

During our first interview Dr. Koene argued that Mind Uploading Is Not Science Fiction and gave a general overview of his personal and professional background as well as the challenges in working on whole brain emulation.

This time around I wanted to focus our conversation primarily on the ethics of mind uploading so we cover topics such as: ethical dilemmas in whole brain emulation; legal and ethical frameworks and constrains; access to mind uploading technology; R.J. Sawyer‘s fantastic sci fi book Mindscan; the computing requirements behind whole brain emulation; the brain in a vat scenario; brain prosthesis; personal identity and multiple uploads; intelligence rights.

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who is Randal Koene?

Randal A. Koene is heading up Analysis at nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley. Previously, Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., was Director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, third largest private research organization in Europe. He is a former Prof. at the Center for Memory and Brain of Boston University, and co-founder/owner of the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. His research objective is whole brain emulation, creating the large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of activity in neuronal circuitry that are needed in patient-specific neuroprostheses.

Koene has professional expertise in computational neuroscience, psychology, information theory, electrical engineering and physics. He organizes neural engineering efforts to obtain and replicate function and structure information that resides in the neural substrate for use in neuroprostheses and neural interfaces. And based on NETMORPH (netmorph.org), Koene’s computational framework for the simulated morphological development of neuronal circuitry, his lab is creating a Virtual Brain Laboratory to give neuroscientists, neuroengineers and clinicians large-scale high-resolution quantitative tools analogous to the computational tools that have become essential in fields such as genetics, chemistry or the aero-space industry. This effort bridges scales and will help determine how significant functions are encoded robustly in neural ensembles, and how those functions can nevertheless depend in specific ways on the detailed biophysics of particular component physiology.

Koene earned his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at McGill University, and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Information Theory at Delft University of Technology. He is a member of the Oxford working group that convened in 2007 to create a first roadmap toward whole brain emulation (a descriptive term for the technological accomplishment of mind transfer to a different substrate that was first coined by Koene on his MindUploading.org website).

Visit Koene’s personal web site rak.minduploading.org, carboncopies.org, MindUploading.org or watch Koene present and discuss “Scope and Resolution in Neural Prosthetics and Special Concerns for Emulation of a Whole Brain”.

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• Randal Koene on Singularity 1 on 1: Mind Uploading is not Science Fiction

German engineering firm Festo has developed a mechanical exoskeleton hand that can be worn like a glove to increase productivity for factory workers or help in the rehabilitation of stroke patients. The company is well known for its innovative automating technologies and says ExoHand is attracting attention at this year’s Hanover Trade Fair.

Original report for Reuters News by Jim Drury:

Transcript: Worn like a glove, the ExoHand is designed to double the gripping power of the hand that’s wearing it. German automation company Festo says it could make factory work more efficient and help stroke sufferers use their hands again. For visitors to this week’s Hanover Trade Fair, the ExoHand has been a highlight. According to Festo spokesman Heinrich Frontzek, it’s an intriguing example of what future automation will look like.

Soundbite (German) Heinrich Frontzek, Spokesman for Festo, saying:

“First of all the ExoHand is a glove which one slips into. And at the back of the glove there is a special power booster built in (the glove). That is done with little air cylinders that give power to every single finger through pressured air that is blown into it. Through that we can reach a doubling of the grip force.”

The key to the technology is air pressure. Sensors in the glove detect finger movement and send instructions via a computer algorithm to eight pneumatic actuators that move the mechanical fingers. Frontzek says the fingers and thumb can be opened and closed with the same degree of precision as a human’s, giving the ExoHand multiple uses.

Soundbite (German) Heinrich Frontzek, Spokesman for Festo, saying:

“The ExoHand was created in order to assist the demographic change in society, people are getting older, and the ExoHand can be used as a power booster in the work process.”

Principally, Festo sees factory assembly lines as the ideal environment for the ExoHand. But the company says that when connected to a brain-computer interface, the hand can also help stroke patients suffering from paralysis to regenerate the damaged connection between the hand and the brain. Each ExoHand is customised to fit, using a 3D scan of the wearer’s hand….gripping technology for an automated future.

Jim Drury, Reuters

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• Festo’s Industrial Automation Robots: Design Inspired by Nature

Planetary Resources - the first asteroid mining company, has been mostly a secret up until now.

The company is backed by a number of billionaires and space enthusiasts. Director James Cameron, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and billionaire Ross Perot Jr., along with a number of other incredible minds, plan to mine the heavens and get rich beyond comprehension.

Even before the official news has broken there are already over 200 reports on the front pages of the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Wall Street Journal and coverage has been growing exponentially.

However, the official launch is later on today (April 24th, 2012) when Planetary Resources co-founder & co-chairman Peter Diamandis will make the announcement via a live webcast at 10:30am Pacific Time.

You can watch the webcast here:

In the meantime, here are a couple of fun videos that provide a good overview of this daring asteroid mining project:

Asteroid mining will create a trillion-dollar industry (credit: Planetary Resources)

Tokyo University scientists are developing what they call ”diet goggles” designed to trick dieters into eating less. When worn over the eyes, the goggles digitally enlarge doughnuts and other foods, making consumers feel as though they are full.

Original story for Reuters by Rob Muir:

Transcript: In the laboratory of Professor Michitaka Hirose, size matters. If your chocolate doughnut doesn’t seem big enough, he can make it bigger. And by making it bigger, he says he can help you lose weight.

Soundbite: Professor Michitaka Hirose, University of Tokyo, saying:

“There’s this idea that depending on whether the size of portions are big or small, the amount of food people consume changes. So we thought it would be interesting to try out the concept using computers.”

Hirose’s diet goggles use a shape-altering algorithm to make items of food appear larger than they really are, relative to the consumer’s hand. A digitally enlarged Oreo cookie, can make the mind believe that one is enough to satisfy hunger, an assertion Hirose says is backed up by tests. When asked to eat normal-sized cookies, Hirose says test subjects could manage up to a twelve in one sitting before feeling full. When the cookies were digitally enlarged one and a half times in a second sitting, the test subjects on average, reduced their intake by more than than ten percent.

Soundbite: Professor Michitaka Hirose, University of Tokyo, saying:

“First the computer must recognise the food type. After that, the aim is to reduce and enlarge the size of the portion while the hand holding it stays the same — that’s the point of our technology.”

Hirose says the technology is far from perfect. Oreos are one thing but odd shaped foods like bananas will confuse the system. Eventually though he hopes to integrate all five senses into a fully immersible virtual world of food consumption, giving consumers greater control over what and how much they eat.

Rob Muir, Reuters

This April 11, Singularity University‘s Live Webcast series, Which Way Next?, featured Dr. Peter H Diamandis, co-founder and chairman of Singularity U, in discussion with Salim Ismail about his new best-selling book, Abundance — The Future Is Better Than you Think.

Diamandis presented the case that the world is getting better at an accelerating rate through the convergence of four powerful forces: the exponential advancement of technology, DIY (Do It Yourself) innovators, Techno-philanthropists, and the Rising Billion, which, acting together, will create abundance in the areas of clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier global health care, and ubiquitous energy — helping to solve humanity’s biggest challenges.

Peter co-authored Abundance with award-winning technology writer Steven Kotler, bringing together decades of data and extensive interviews with hundreds of innovators and entrepreneurs, including Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, and Craig Venter.

The Wall Street Journal called Abundance “a manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions.” The Economist Magazine said it was “a godsend for those who suffer from Armageddon fatigue!” – Sir Richard Branson said: “Abundance provides proof that the proper combination of technology, people and capital can meet any grand challenge.”

Peter Diamandis co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil in 2008, and currently serves as its Chairman and a member of the Faculty. He is also Founder and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs in the areas of exploration, energy and environment, education, global development and life sciences. Diamandis is a leading speaker on innovation, counseling senior business leaders how to utilize exponential technologies and incentivized innovation to dramatically accelerate their business and career objectives. Dr. Diamandis earned a BS in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, and an MD from Harvard Medical School. He is also known for Peter’s Laws, including the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!

Related articles

• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
• Steven Kotler on Singularity 1 on 1: Get Off the Couch and Change the World
• Peter Diamandis on TED: Abundance is Our Future

Optimists at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University are pushing the frontiers of human progress through innovation and emerging technologies, looking to greater longevity and better health.

As part of his series on Making $ense of financial news, PBS NewsHour correspondent Paul Solman explores a future of exponential growth as envisioned by Singularity University and its founders such as Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.

Transcript:

PAUL SOLMAN: On the back lot at 20th Century Fox, the world of make-believe, and a typical make-believe vision of the future, courtesy of FOX CEO Jim Gianopulos.

JIM GIANOPULOS, CEO, 20th Century Fox: Here’s a little peek at what’s in store for us.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: At Weyland Industries, it has long been our goal to create artificial intelligence almost indistinguishable from mankind itself.

PAUL SOLMAN: The sci-fi pipe dream of moving pictures for as long as they have existed, but no dream to those assembled here.

This wasn’t a film industry gathering, but a conference put together by Singularity University, a futuristic Silicon Valley think tank which fosters and showcases high-tech inventions. The goal is to make the world a better place as fast as possible.

Co-founder Peter Diamandis.

PETER DIAMANDIS, chairman, Singularity University: These tools that are now in your hands allow us to really take on any challenge. It’s about the most efficient use of capital and tools that have ever existed.

PAUL SOLMAN: Singularity’s mission is to solve humanity’s most pressing problems by spurring new technologies in food, water, energy, supposedly scarce, but, with the tinkerings of technology, says Diamandis, potentially abundant.

PETER DIAMANDIS: We have the potential during our lifetime, in the next 10 to 30 years, to slay water, energy shortage, hunger, health care, educational issues, where we can create a world of abundance, where we can meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child on this planet.

PAUL SOLMAN: The key, says Diamandis, is that tech growth is not linear, one, two, three, four, five, but exponential, one, two, four, eight, 16, or even faster than that.

PETER DIAMANDIS: The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It’s gone up as people have concentrated in cities.

You know, the coffee shop is the location where people exchange and share ideas. Now the global coffee shop is the Internet, and the more people are connected, the more innovation we have.

Think about the fact that a Masai warrior in the middle of Africa today on one of these cell phones has better mobile com than President Reagan did 25 years ago. And if they’re on Google on a smartphone, they’ve got better access to knowledge than President Clinton did 15 years ago. It’s extraordinary.

PAUL SOLMAN: But, says high-tech entrepreneur Carl Bass, we haven’t seen anything yet.

CARL BASS, CEO, Autodesk: Within five to 10 years, we will be printing biological structures with actual function.

PAUL SOLMAN: 3-D printing is already a reality, copying machines that literally copy in three dimensions toys, product prototypes, and now living things as well.

CARL BASS: There’s some fantastic work going on at Wake Forest, where they’re using that same technology of 3-D printing, and they have already printed a human kidney. It’s not ready for transplant, but I suspect, within five to 10 years, it will be.

PAUL SOLMAN: This conference was filled with sci-fi-like eye-openers. The self-driving car has now been OKed in Nevada.

DOCTOR: So we can put your hands right here.

PAUL SOLMAN: Dr. Dan Kraft gave me an EKG — and with a stent installed, I’ve had a lot of them — with his cell phone.

DOCTOR: It’s just a two-lead EKG, pretty basic. But I can see the basic things, that your heart is beating regularly, that your Q.R. complex looks normal, that you’re not having an S.T. elevation, which would be associated with chest pain or acute attack.

PAUL SOLMAN: Former astronaut Dan Barry said the day was soon coming when robots would provide all sorts of services, from the workaday to the intimate.

DAN BARRY, Singularity University: Robot sex is going to be big. It really is.

(LAUGHTER)

DAN BARRY: This is funny, right? But it’s not funny if you’re 75 years old and you just lost your partner and you are lonely and you’re by yourself, you still have sexual drive, and you have no outlet for that.

PAUL SOLMAN: Among the best-known inventors at the conference was Dean Kamen, whose innovations include this prosthetic arm. It freed double amputee Chuck Hildreth from total dependence, freed his wife from feeding him.

DEAN KAMEN, Founder, DEKA Research & Development Corporation: His wife is standing behind me at the time and starts to cry because she says he hasn’t fed himself. And now here he is. And she says to me, “Dean, you have got a choice. We keep the arm or you keep Chuck.”

(LAUGHTER)

PAUL SOLMAN: Now, Kamen and his cutting-edge contraptions may be familiar, in that we have introduced many here on the NewsHour over the years, from his medical marvels to transportation aids for overworked NewsHour correspondents. Kamen invented the Segway.

But for the past decade, Kamen’s most ambitious project may be the Slingshot, a device to make drinkable the world’s dirty water.

DEAN KAMEN: It is poison. It is toxic waste. Take water that’s got fecal matter, cryptosporidium, giardia, every other kind of organic toxin or inorganic. We said, let’s make a box that’s small and portable that you can plop down anywhere.

PAUL SOLMAN: A box the size of a dorm room fridge that almost instantaneously boils and then condenses water, 250 gallons a day.

DEAN KAMEN: Water that’s so pure, it’s equivalent to rainwater. It’s distilled water. And we believe that, if we can build these machines to scale at a cost that is, we think, highly realistic, we will be able to put these things all over the world where people that today have to make a choice between drinking something that will make them sick or possibly kill them and their children, or not drinking at all, which will surely kill them, that’s not a choice people should have to make, not in the 21st century.

PAUL SOLMAN: Kamen has cajoled Coca-Cola into distributing these devices, first venue, rural Ghana, where they’re now being installed. Eventually, Slingshots could be everywhere.

To Peter Diamandis, Kamen’s project exemplifies the mission of Singularity University.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Converting that which was scarce to that which is abundant.

PAUL SOLMAN: Abundance is the title of Diamandis’ new book, and describes his vision of the future: transformations in water, food, energy.

PETER DIAMANDIS: What people don’t realize is that we’re living on a planet that’s bathed with energy; 5,000 times more energy hits the Earth’s surface than we consume as a species in a year. It’s just not accessible yet. But there’s good news in this area. There are breakthroughs constantly in solar energy production.

Last year, in 2011, the cost of solar in the world dropped by almost 50 percent.

PAUL SOLMAN: Admittedly, solar now provides less than 1 percent of U.S. energy needs. But Singularity University’s other co-founder, Ray Kurzweil, whom we interviewed by something called Teleportec, says the public is pointlessly pessimistic.

RAY KURZWEIL, Chancellor, Singularity University: And I think the major reason that people are pessimistic is they don’t realize that these technologies are growing exponentially.

For example, solar energy is doubling every two years. It’s now only seven doublings from meeting 100 percent of the world’s energy needs, and we have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to do that.

PAUL SOLMAN: One last high-tech frontier: meat. At the moment, livestock production takes up a third of the world’s ice-free land, generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases, via organic exhaust, front and rear.

And eating just one serving of red meat a day, says a new Harvard study, correlates with a 12 percent increased risk of death.

Enter in vitro meat, not to be confused with pink slime.

PETER DIAMANDIS: We have the technology now, it’s being done in a number of labs, to actually grow meat products in the laboratory, in the test tube, so to speak. And people say, that’s disgusting. Have you ever seen how Chicken McNuggets are made?

PAUL SOLMAN: But an in vitro hamburger doesn’t sound like it would be good for you.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Well, actually, these kinds of new food products will be far better for you, because they will have the best proteins, the best fats, the nutrients built in.

PAUL SOLMAN: It will taste like a hamburger?

PETER DIAMANDIS: It will taste better than a hamburger.

PAUL SOLMAN: By this time, we were sufficiently wowed, if not downright overwhelmed.

But, keeping our journalistic wits about us, we posed the skeptic’s question to Vint Cerf, known as the father of the Internet. Did he think this conference might just be over-hyping the future?

VINT CERF, chief Internet evangelist, Google: I have been surprised repeatedly by the things that we’ve been able to do that would have been thought to be science fiction in the past. What Craig Venter talked about this morning about creating synthetic life would have been science fiction — in fact, it was science fiction — and he’s pushed the boundaries of what’s real.

PAUL SOLMAN: But what about Craig Venter himself? The man who cracked the human genome in record time a decade ago is now hard at work creating new life forms for fuels, food and vaccines. He surprised us by issuing a warning of sorts. Singularity’s brand-new world, he said, is not just around the corner.

CRAIG VENTER, CEO, Synthetic Genomics: Most of what you’ve heard here so far today is fantasy or bull (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

PAUL SOLMAN: Venter was venting for effect, perhaps, since he too is creating the future. But think of the world’s growing problems, he says.

CRAIG VENTER: If all these dreams come true — and I hope these people are right — then we will solve everything. Nobody has the solutions in hand right now.

We have potential solutions. We don’t have ways to provide the fuel, we don’t have ways to provide the food, clean water, medicine for seven billion people now. How are we going to do it for eight, nine, 10 billion people in the coming decades?

PAUL SOLMAN: How, indeed? But here in the make-believe world of the future, you can be sure someone has started working on the question.

Related articles

• Top 5 Tips for Applying to Singularity University
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Click here to view the embedded video.

“This disconnect between the public’s view of copyright and fair use and what should and should not be prosecuted, versus the ‘copyright maximist’ view of the law, is our generation’s Prohibition,” says Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger and a loud voice in the recent backlash to SOPA and PIPA, two congressional bills aimed at curbing internet piracy.

Copyright exists to “promote the useful arts” according to the Constitution. But is it still doing that? And should the government protect so-called “intellectual property” in the same way it protects other forms of property? Reason.tv posed these questions to Ben Huh, as well as a professor and a movie studio representative.

Tom Bell, a law professor specializing in property law, has serious reservations about attempts by groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to equate property and copyright through ad campaigns admonishing viewers with messages like, “You wouldn’t steal a car. Downloading pirated movies is stealing.”

“As soon as we start using [the word] ‘copyright’ for ‘property,’ we start taking less seriously our property rights for things like cars and houses,” says Bell. “When you steal a candy bar or a car, you’ve left somebody without something to eat or something to drive.”

But the MPAA’s head content protection counsel, Ben Sheffner, thinks that piracy is a major problem that needs to be stopped.

“If this kind of piracy is allowed to run rampant, it’ll deprive the public of the next great film,” says Sheffner.

So, if the purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of artistic works, is it still doing its job? The data points to today’s copyright regime doing little more than enriching the corporations with the strongest lobbyists.

“Is there a market failure in the production and dissemination of expressive works?” asks Bell. “I don’t there’s any risk that we’re going to run out of songs, or books, or movies, or software any time soon.”

While the MPAA and other entertainment industry trade groups have bemoaned the effects of rampant internet piracy on creative output, the numbers tell a different story. Research shows more music and books produced than ever before between 2005 to 2010, production of feature films growing by a factor of more than 4 in 14 years, and the number of video game companies exploding by a factor of 18 in the span of three years.

Still, the MPAA stands behind Chairman Chris Dodd’s statement, made in the heat of the SOPA battle, that the U.S. could look to China’s site-blocking laws as a positive example of anti-piracy regulation.

“If site blocking broke the internet, the internet would’ve been broken a long time ago,” says Sheffner. “There’s ways to implement these narrowly tailored remedies that really cut off these ‘worst of the worst’ web sites.”

Written and produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Tracy Oppenheimer and Weissmueller. “The Day the LOLcats died” written and performed by LaughPong. Additional music:”Thomas Kinkade Pays His Respects to Walt Disney” by Der Christer Schytts; “Twinklebox” by Ephemetry; “Betty Boop” by Ergo Phizmiz; “Frog Legs Rag Tag” by James Scott; “Mickey Impression” by thehottestguy23.

Approximately nine minutes.

Related articles

• Copyright Was Just The Beginning: Cory Doctorow on the Coming War on General Computation
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A new glucose monitor that can be synced with an iPhone is being hailed by diabetics and doctors as a tool that could save lives. The device allows diabetics to conveniently manage their condition while also alerting their doctor and concerned relatives when their blood sugar levels get too high.

Original story for Reuters News by Jim Drury:

Transcript:

Teenager Anielle Pointu says she felt devastated after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes last year. Now needing regular doses of insulin, she feared that she’d be unable to maintain the rigorous programme of self-administered blood sugar monitoring her condition requires. But then her nurse referred her for nationwide trials of the iBGStar, a one-inch long device, which slots into an iPhone or iPad and today, does much of the work for her.

The iBGStar contains a needle to prick the skin and draw a small amount of blood which is monitored instantaneously. Phone software analyses the data, flashing the results on to the screen within six seconds. Anielle says the device has helped her regain confidence.

Soundbite (English) Anielle Pointu, Diabetes Type 1 sufferer, saying:

“With the new monitor I feel like I can manage my diabetes better. With the new equipment and stuff I see like, it’s the smallest one I’ve ever seen, so I can see how things are advancing. It’s making me feel like more confident that like things will get better…….With my new monitor I can plug into my smartphone and I have my log book wherever I go.”

Other smartphone apps are already helping diabetics, but the iBGStar is the first to allow them to input their own data into their phone using a free Diabetes Manager App. The device, launched recently in London, allows users to follow changing trends in their blood glucose. It also records their carbohydrate intake and insulin levels. Dr Andrew Hockey, medical director of manufacturers Sanofi, says it the technology is a huge advance for diabetics of all ages.

(Soundbite) (English) Dr Andrew Hockey, Diabetes Medical Director, Sanofi, saying:

“Anybody can use this blood glucose meter. It simply plugs into an iPhone and if you can use a modern phone you can use this meter, you don’t have to be technically savvy. You can use this from 16 through to 86.”

Professor Peter Hindmarsh, of London’s University College Hospital, works with diabetic children. He says the device’s third party monitoring capability could be a life-saver.

Soundbite (English) Peter Hindmarsh, Professor of Paediatric Endocrinology at University College Hospital, saying:

“If you came out with a very low glucose value, and it’s quite possible that you might not be able to make rational decisions based on that because of the hypoglycemia that you’re currently having to face, that information if everyone was agreeable could then be transmitted on to somebody who could come in and say ‘oh, actually you’re looking a little bit low there, let’s do something about it’. So it’s got quite an interesting safety feature to it which could be harnessed for the benefit of the individual.”

High blood sugar levels in Type-1 diabetics can lead to heart and kidney damage, and in extreme cases blindness and even death. The World Health Organisation says around 180 million people worldwide suffer from some form of the disease. The device is currently available in Europe and its developers hope to make it available to diabetics around the world soon.

Jim Drury, Reuters

A couple of days ago I interviewed Australian James Harvey.

James is pretty unique among my guests because he was the very first interviewee whose willingness to take a chance on a brand new podcast helped me kick off Singularity 1 on 1.

This, however, is not the only thing that makes him different for James is also “a musician, a poet, a mystic and learned observer of Life…”

Most notably, in 2009 Harvey published his thought provoking book Singularia: Being at an Edge of Time which was my reason for inviting him the first time.

This time around I asked James to share and discuss his unique Both/And point of view of the singularity, which eludes the traditional dichotomy of the struggle of opposites but stresses instead their unity as parts of a whole.

In our first conversation two quotes stood out for me:

1. “I respect science and think it is a marvelous tool but I do not worship it!”

2. “We are Singularia”

This time my favorite quote is Harvey’s observation that:

“Our analog universe has an infinite resolution both zooming in and zooming out.”

In addition, during our second conversation with James we discuss a variety of other topics such as: the importance and differences of digital and analog worlds (e.g. mp3 files and live music); his book Singularia and why the singularity is a lot more than just technology; Jaron Lanier‘s view that the singularity is rapture for geeks; art, creativity, love and the fear of death.

Related articles

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• Singularia: a “Both/And” Point of View of the Singularity (Part 1)

In Barry Ptolemy‘s fantastic documentary Transcendent Man, Ray Kurzweil went on the record saying that he intends to bring his father from the dead. Naturally, there is a myriad of ethical, legal, religious and technical issues surrounding such an endeavor, so I wouldn’t even begin listing them here. However, it seems that at least from technical point of view, Ray is indeed getting closer and closer…

Or, is he?!

Russian scientists, in cooperation with counterparts in Japan and South Korea, have begun work on resurrecting the extinct woolly mammoth, using biological material recovered from Siberian permafrost to create a clone.

Reuters News report by Jim Drury

Transcript:

Russian schoolchildren view the skeleton of a woolly mammoth in a museum. But in ten years time they could come face to face with one of the prehistoric pachyderms in real life. That’s the aim of scientists from Russia, Japan, and South Korea working to bring the species back from the dead.

Recent thaws in Siberian permafrost have uncovered the remains of several woolly mammoths. Scientists hope to use the recovered biological material to clone the shaggy, Ice Age beast, by implanting mammoth DNA into an elephant egg. The resulting foetus would be grown inside an elephant’s womb.

Semyon Grigoriev, head scientist at Russia’s Northeast Federal University, is heading an expedition from all three countries to northern Siberia.

Soundbite (Russian) Head Scientist at Nefu University Semyon Grigorievich, saying:

“This summer Korean scientists together with us will go on expeditions, starting from this year and in northern Yakutia will search for material from permafrost. They’re bringing mobile laboratories from Korea and are planning to start working on the selection and cultivation of biological material.”

Mammoths evolved from hairless elephants in Africa, roaming North America and northern Eurasia, before becoming extinct almost 4,000 years ago. Scientists from Japan’s Kinki University are also taking part in this summer’s expedition. Biology professor Iritani Akira is project leader.

(Soundbite) (Japanese) Biology Professor and Leader of Mammoth Cloning Project at Kinki University Iritani Akira saying:

“The technology to extract and clone the nucleus of a cell already exists, but finding good quality samples, such as tissues, skins, muscles or bone marrows, has been the barrier in cloning prehistoric mammals.”

And good quality samples are what they’re hoping to find on their trek. The scientists say the production of a successful clone could open the door to recreating other extinct animals – while helping prevent endangered species from dying out. They admit the scale of the project is elephantine but say that soon, if all goes according to plan, a live mammoth will once again roam the earth.

Original report by Jim Drury, Reuters

The term singularity has many meanings.

The everyday English definition is a noun that designates the quality of being one of a kind, strange, unique, remarkable or unusual.

If we want to be even more specific, we might take the Wiktionary definition of the term, which seems to be more contemporary and easily comprehensible, as opposed to those in classic dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster’s.

So, the Wiktionary lists the following five meanings:

Noun
singularity (plural singularities)

1. the state of being singular, distinct, peculiar, uncommon or unusual
2. a point where all parallel lines meet
3. a point where a measured variable reaches unmeasurable or infinite value
4. (mathematics) the value or range of values of a function for which a derivative does not exist
5. (physics) a point or region in spacetime in which gravitational forces cause matter to have an infinite density; associated with Black Holes

What we are most interested in, however, is the definition of singularity as a technological phenomenon — i.e. the technological singularity. Here we can find an even greater variety of subtly different interpretations and meanings. Thus it may help if we have a list of what are arguably the most relevant ones, arranged in a rough chronological order.

Seventeen Definitions of the Technological Singularity:

1. R. Thornton, editor of the Primitive Expounder

In 1847, R. Thornton wrote about the recent invention of a four function mechanical calculator:

“…such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury. But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!”

2. Samuel Butler

It was during the relatively low-tech mid 19th century that Samuel Butler wrote his Darwin among the Machines. In it, Butler combined his observations of the rapid technological progress of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of the species. That synthesis led Butler to conclude that the technological evolution of the machines will continue inevitably until the point that eventually machines will replace men altogether. In Erewhon Butler argued that:

“There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time.”

3. Alan Turing

In his 1951 paper titled Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory,  Alan Turing wrote of machines that will eventually surpass human intelligence:

“once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.”

4. John von Neumann

In 1958 Stanislaw Ulam wrote about a conversation with John von Neumann who said that: ”the ever accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” Neumann’s alleged definition of the singularity was that it is the moment beyond which “technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated.”

5. I.J. Good, who greatly influenced Vernor Vinge, never used the term singularity itself. However, what Vinge later called singularity Good called intelligence explosion. By that I. J. meant a positive feedback cycle within which minds will make technology to improve on minds which once started will rapidly surge upwards and create super-intelligence:

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

6. Vernor Vinge introduced the term technological singularity in the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine in a way that was specifically tied to the creation of intelligent machines:

“We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between … so that the world remains intelligible.”

He later developed further the concept in his essay the Coming Technological Singularity (1993):

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. [...] I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.”

It is important to stress that for Vinge the singularity could occur in four ways: 1. The development of computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. 2. Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity. 3. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. 4. Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.

7. Hans Moravec: 

In his 1988 book Mind Children, computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore’s Law to make predictions about the future of artificial life. Hans argues that starting around 2030 or 2040, robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, eventually succeeding homo sapiens. In his 1993 paper The Age of Robots Moravek writes:

“Our artifacts are getting smarter, and a loose parallel with the evolution of animal intelligence suggests one future course for them. Computerless industrial machinery exhibits the behavioral flexibility of single-celled organisms. Today’s best computer-controlled robots are like the simpler invertebrates. A thousand-fold increase in computer power in this decade should make possible machines with reptile-like sensory and motor competence. Properly configured, such robots could do in the physical world what personal computers now do in the world of data–act on our behalf as literal-minded slaves. Growing computer power over the next half-century will allow this reptile stage will be surpassed, in stages producing robots that learn like mammals, model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans. Depending on your point of view, humanity will then have produced a worthy successor, or transcended inherited limitations and transformed itself into something quite new. No longer limited by the slow pace of human learning and even slower biological evolution, intelligent machinery will conduct its affairs on an ever faster, ever smaller scale, until coarse physical nature has been converted to fine-grained purposeful thought.”

8. Ted Kaczynski

In Industrial Society and Its Future (aka the “Unabomber Manifesto”) Ted Kaczynski tried to explain, justify and popularize his militant resistance to technological progress:

“… the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

9. Nick Bostrom

In 1997 Nick Bostrom – a world-renowned philosopher and futurist, wrote How Long Before Superintelligence. In it Bostrom seems to embrace I.J. Good’s intelligence explosion thesis with his notion of superintelligence:

“By a “superintelligence” we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has subjective experiences.”

10. Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is easily the most popular singularitarian. He embraced Vernor Vinge’s term and brought it into the mainstream. Yet Ray’s definition is not entirely consistent with Vinge’s original. In his seminal book The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil defines the technological singularity as:

“… a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lifes, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.”

11. Kevin Kelly, senior maverick and co-founder of Wired Magazine

Singularity is the point at which “all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes.”

12. Eliezer Yudkowsky

In 2007 Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out that singularity definitions fall within three major schools: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion. He also argued that many of the different definitions assigned to the term singularity are mutually incompatible rather than mutually supporting.  For example, Kurzweil extrapolates current technological trajectories past the arrival of self-improving AI or superhuman intelligence, which Yudkowsky argues represents a tension with both I. J. Good’s proposed discontinuous upswing in intelligence and Vinge’s thesis on unpredictability. Interestingly, Yudkowsky places Vinge’s original definition within the event horizon camp while placing his own self within the Intelligence Explosion school. (In my opinion Vinge is equally within the Intelligence Explosion and Event Horizon ones.)

13. Michael Anissimov

In Why Confuse or Dilute a Perfectly Good Concept Michael writes:

“The original definition of the Singularity centers on the idea of a greater-than-human intelligence accelerating progress. No life extension. No biotechnology in general. No nanotechnology in general. No human-driven progress. No flying cars and other generalized future hype…”

According to the above definition, and in contrast to his SIAI colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky, it would seem that Michael falls both within the Intelligence Explosion and Accelerating Change schools. (In an earlier article, Anissimov defines the singularity as transhuman intelligence.)

14. John Smart

On his Acceleration Watch website John Smart writes:

“Some 20 to 140 years from now—depending on which evolutionary theorist, systems theorist, computer scientist, technology studies scholar, or futurist you happen to agree with—the ever-increasing rate of technological change in our local environment is expected to undergo a permanent and irreversible developmentalphase change, or technological “singularity,” becoming either:

A. fully autonomous in its self-development,
B. human-surpassing in its mental complexity, or
C. effectively instantaneous in self-improvement (from our perspective),

or if only one of these at first, soon after all of the above. It has been postulated by some that local environmental events after this point must also be “future-incomprehensible” to existing humanity, though we disagree.”

15. James Martin

James Martin – a world-renowned futurist, computer scientist, author, lecturer and, among many other things, the largest donor in the history of Oxford University – the Oxford Martin School, defines the singularity as follows:

Singularity “is a break in human evolution that will be caused by the staggering speed of technological evolution.”

16. Sean Arnott: “The technological singularity is when our creations surpass us in our understanding of them vs their understanding of us, rendering us obsolete in the process.”

17. Qwiki: Definition of the Technological Singularity

As we can see there is a large variety of flavors when it comes to defining the technological singularity. I personally tend to favor what I would call the original Vingean definition, as inspired by I.J. Good’s intelligence explosion because it stresses both the crucial importance of self-improving super-intelligence as well as its event horizon-type of discontinuity and uniqueness. (I also sometimes define the technological singularity as the event, or sequence of events, likely to occur right at or shortly after the birth of strong artificial intelligence.)

At the same time, after all of the above definitions it has to be clear that we really do not know what the singularity is (or will be). Thus we are just using the term to show (or hide) our own ignorance.

But tell me – what is your own favorite definition of the technological singularity?

***

This is the first blog post from an upcoming series that will eventually become a short ebook titled Singularity 101: the Optimist’s Short Guide to the Future. Please post your comments below and help me make it better for all.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests from people asking me for a quick overview of the technological singularity. Naturally, I always recommend Ray Kurzweil’s seminal book the Singularity is Near but a few seem to be either overwhelmed by it or simply don’t have enough time to go that deep into the matter.

So, in order to make the ideas even easier to understand as well as to popularize them, I have decided to write a short series of blog articles covering the fundamentals of the technological singularity as well as other relevant information such as definitions of the basic terms and concepts, relevant books, movies, people, institutions, blogs, events etc.

My plan is to write a couple of articles per week which will in turn become different book chapters. Once I have all of those written and thoroughly vetted by readers like you, I will put them together in a short, free and easy to download .pdf ebook.

The book doesn’t intend to be a complete singularity guide, bible or encyclopedia. Its goal is not to make money or turn readers into singularity experts. It is to popularize the idea and concepts related to the technological singularity by demystifying and making it easy to understand by everyone. Thus it will focus on the very minimum of relevant information that can provide the foundation as well as numerous additional references to all who are interested in learning more but do not know where to begin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So far my working title is Singularity 101: the Optimist’s Short Guide to the Future. Feel free to suggest chapters and/or contribute to each post that I publish. Just keep in mind that this is supposed to be a brief introduction to the topic. In any case, I promise that all comments will be considered for incorporating into the final version of the eBook.

Thank you for joining me in our quest to bring forth a better future, better you!

Earlier this month Raspberry Pi started shipping what is almost certainly the cheapest mass-produced computer in the world. It is “a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video.” 

Currently there are two Raspberry Pi models: Model A costs $25 and model B is $35 with the main difference being that the former has 256Mb of RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet network connection whereas the latter has an extra USB port plus Ethernet.

The tiny computer has been designed to inspire anyone, especially children, to get started with computer programming. It has garnered huge interest from developers, hobbyists and others interested in a cheap and easy-to-use computer. Given its incredibly low price and open source software, the Raspberry Pi is vying to be a real game-changer in third world and emerging market countries.

Here is a short BBC News report on the product details:

The 8 min video introduction below was made by Liam Fraser – the youngest Raspi volunteer, who administers the downloads server and is also behind the series of YouTube tutorials for Raspi owners.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A reader of this blog recommended a very interesting episode of Future States. It is called Advantageous and was made by Jennifer Phang.

The short 22min sci fi film deals with issues related to mind uploading, bioethics, motherhood, overpopulation and the future of humanity. It is well made and very moving so I decided to re-post it. However, I have to warn you that it paints a particularly dark and depressing picture of the future in general and mind uploading in particular. Thus you may want to consider if it is worth your time or not.

Synopsis: Gwen is the spokesperson for a radical technology allowing people to overcome their natural disadvantages and begin life anew. But when her job and family are in crisis, will she undergo the procedure herself?

Genesis: To what extremes would a parent go to secure their child’s future? In considering the purpose of this series, I felt it was the right time for me to take a hard look at issues surrounding the future of women. I started envisioning the tale of a talented mother going to extremes to preserve her own viability in the job market in order to protect the prospects of her gifted daughter.

The stories of mothers sacrificing and suffering for their children proliferate across generations and cultures. I began looking for a multifaceted approach in exploring this theme. I didn’t want to tell a story about a guileless, idealized mother whose sole need in life is to raise a child. Rather, I wanted to create a mother who was a savvy, accomplished figure – a woman certain of herself, even prideful – a woman aware of her station and the tenuous nature of her position in a hostile, fast-paced world. This mother had to be fiercely determined to make good on her commitment to her daughter and to make up for past mistakes at any cost.

Around the time I began developing the script, I also began to notice an evolution in America’s collective consciousness: while in the past women were stigmatized if they had any plastic surgery done at all, they were now being judged on whether or not their elective surgeries were well-executed. Through the media, through our personal and professional circles, we are encouraged more and more to accept this kind of “self-improvement” as a compromised empowerment, or at least a practicality.

With this in mind, I wanted to look at the decisions of a cosmopolitan single woman at a time when competition for employment and education has reached a crisis point. This tale is ultimately a reaction to the myriad ways we try to self-improve in order to attain stability and success.

For more episodes check out FutureStates.tv

A prison in South Korea is testing the world’s first robot prison guard. Equipped with 3D cameras and software designed to gauge a prisoner’s emotional state, the robot might soon replace human guards to keep prisons safe.

Original report by Ben Gruber, Reuters.

Video Transcript:

It’s the world’s first robot prison guard…and, according to the Asian Forum of Corrections’, it’s the future of prison security. Lee Baik-Chul, the forum chairman says the robot is a game changer.

(Soundbite) (Korean) Lee Baik-Chul, Chairman of Asian Forum for Correction saying:

“The purpose to develop this kind of robot is to secure prisoner’s life and safety, and to decrease the workload of correctional officers in a poor working environment.”

The robot was developed in South Korea and is currently undergoing its first field trial. Equipped with 3D cameras and software designed to study human behavior, the robot is able to detect abnormal prisoner activity and report back to its controllers.

(Soundbite) (Korean) Lee Baik-Chul, Chairman of Asian Forum for Correction saying:

“By using the 3D depth camera, it will detect every detail of actions happening inside through a window. So, when there is an unusual behaviour, it’s going to analyse it and report the problem to the control system. Therefore, correctional officers will run and arrive at the scene in time.”

An officer can also use the robot’s two way wireless system to communicate with a prisoner without having to leave the control room. The robot has been designed to patrol a prison autonomously, but an IPad will allow manual control as well. The next step, say designers, is a robot that conducts body searches although they admit, neither the technology nor the prison system is quite ready for a step that far into the future.

Ben Gruber, Reuters.

William Gibson, the iconic sci fi author who coined the term cyberspace - i.e. the “mass consensual hallucination” of computer networks, talks about a wide variety of topics such as the occupy movement, technology, the Internet, the growth of cities, the relationship between drugs and creativity, and having a time-machine. While Gibson does not talk directly about his newest collection of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor, during the 12 minutes of the interview he still focuses almost entirely on the present rather than the future.

My two favorite quotes from William Gibson’s interview:

“Technology invariably trumps ideology. And I am inclined to think that history increasingly suggests that human social change is more directly driven by technology than by ideology. I think we develop ideologies in an attempt to cope with technologies and that in fact we’ve been doing that all along. Technology is knowing how to grow, harvest and store cereals without which you can’t really do a city. Technology is knowing how to build efficient sewage infrastructure without which you can’t build a slightly larger city. So I think of technologies as the drivers and ideologies as an attempt to steer.”

“Life is a succession of altered states.”

A trio of UK-based scientists has developed a mathematical equation explaining the shape of human ponytails. Their discovery, which encompasses everything from hair stiffness to curls, could help textile manufacturers, animators, and personal care companies improve their products.

Reuters News report by Jim Drury.

Video Transcript:

Fashion guru Karl Lagerfeld is known for his clothes, his outspoken views….and his ponytail. This simple hairstyle is one that’s puzzled scientists and artists ever since Leonardo da Vinci mused on hair waviness 500 years ago. Now Cambridge University Professor Ray Goldstein believes he can explain how ponytail shapes are formed. His team has developed the Ponytail Shape Equation, which takes into account four major factors.

Soundbite (English) Prof. Ray Goldstein, Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge, saying:

“The first is the elasticity, the fact that the individual bundles – or effectively this outer edge – has a resistance to bending like any elastic object. The second is the tension. And then the third contribution is just the weight itself… and that is opposed by the pressure which comes from the random curvatures of the filaments in here, which are pushing out and trying to swell the bundle.”

An average head contains 100,000 individual hairs. But Goldstein believes a ponytail’s shape can be deduced from the properties of a single strand. Working with Warwick University Professor Robin Ball and Unilever scientist Patrick Warren, he took numerous photographs with a high-resolution camera in the lab.

Soundbite (English) Prof. Ray Goldstein, Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge, saying: ”The quantity of great interest is the typical excursion that the hair makes from side to side if you were to hold it vertically, so in that case we held individual hairs from this and then we would take an image and then rotate at 90 degrees and take another image, thus giving us a kind of stereoscopic view.”

To predict the shape of a ponytail the equation must take into account its length – the so-called Rapunzel Number, named after the fairytail in which a young long-haired girl is exiled to a tower.

Soundbite (English) Prof. Ray Goldstein, Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge, saying:

“The crucial test was to actually cut the ponytail down in stages and see if the theory continued to predict the proper shape, and once you get down to this length you observe that the hair is basically unaffected by gravity, and that means there’s a characteristic length, which turns out to be about two inches, below which you can ignore gravity and above which you must consider it.”

A short ponytail, like this one sported by David Beckham a decade ago, is characterised by a low Rapunzel number, and fans outward. A long ponytail has a high Rapunzel number and hangs down, the pull of gravity overwhelming its springiness. The research could aid computer animators, who find it difficult to accurately represent hair. Consumer goods giant Unilever believes the research could lead to better quality shampoos and hair gels. Many companies have followed the trio’s research with great interest… as they seek to untangle one of history’s hairiest puzzles.

Original story by Jim Drury, Reuters.

One of my favorite TVO shows is the Agenda with Steve Paikin.

This episode features Robert J. Sawyer - sci fi author of WWW, James Hughes – author of Citizen Cyborg, Madeline Ashby – futurist and sci fi author of vN, and Jesse Hirsh – founder of metaviews.ca.

The issue at stake is if we are moving towards a bright and shining future of Abundance or progress to nowhere?

The debate kicks off with a short clip from the upcoming documentary Surviving Progress (see full trailer at the bottom) and goes on to cover topics such as: what is progress and have we made any, why we fear technology; the real and imaginary threats of our future, longevity and transhumanism.

Program Synopsis: We’ve looked into the future, and it’s dark. Increasingly, we’ve lost a progressive view of our future. Instead of seeing promise and lives made better by technology, we’re seeing lives filled with cyborgs and an uninhabitable society. Should we be afraid? Or are we being unnecessarily pessimistic?

Surviving Progress Trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what do you think:

Are we moving towards a bright and shining future of Abundance or progress to nowhere?

Related articles

• Robert J. Sawyer on Humanity 2.0

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler have been making the case for Abundance for some time now.

Whether you are skeptical or not, the evidence is piling up.

One great example I came across today is the Chilean Water Plasma Purifier. (A few days ago I covered another example in Making Water Out of Air)

The Water Plasma Purifier is documented by the two videos below. What is unique about this inventive gadget is not that it cleans water, but that it does it with the right combination of low cost, high energy efficiency, small size, low maintenance and high output.

As Vivek Wadhwa notes in his Washington Post article: “If the system can be mass produced for less than $100, as Zolezzi believes, and the output passes the lab tests to which it is being subjected, it has the potential to provide clean, safe water to billions in the developing world.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Waters Plasma Purifier on Reuters News:

A cost and energy efficient water purifying system being used in a Chilean camp could one day provide safe drinking water for millions of people in the developing world. Created by Chilean scientists, the system cleans contaminated water by blasting it with ionized particles making it safe to drink. Ben Gruber reports.

Video Transcript:

Rosa Reyes lives in San Jose de Cerrillos, a small camp on the outskirts of Chile’s capitol, Santiago. She says for years the people inhabiting this camp have suffered from diseases due to the poor quality of their drinking water. But now, thanks to a new inexpensive water purification system developed by scientists at the Chilean Advanced Innovation Centre, Reyes says she and her neighbours are no longer suffering.

(Soundbite) (Spanish) Rosa Reyes, Resident of San Jose de Cerrillos Camp, saying:

“It is cleaner. Our kids aren’t sick, it is easier for the elderly that [otherwise] have to boil their water.”

The system works by compressing contaminated water and then feeding it into a chamber where a quick change in pressure and exposure to an electrical field converts it into plasma, a state of matter similar to gas. In a plasma state, the water is ionized – killing 100 percent of bacteria and microbes it carried. According to Alfredo Zolezzi, a scientist at the Centre, the system can purify 35 litres of water in just five minutes – using the same amount of energy that it takes to run a light bulb. Zolezzi says since it was installed in September the results have been remarkable.

(Soundbite) (Spanish) Chief Innovation Officer of the Vina Del Mar Chilean Advanced Innovation Centre, Alfredo Zolezzi, saying:

“It went better than we had anticipated. Not only did the people have water – which one would imagine is a basic right and necessity – what it really affected was these peoples dignity, the ability to feel that they have water available and can live like a normal person.”

Julian Ugarte helped develop the system. He says one its greatest benefits is its low cost, making it a sustainable solution for millions of people now living in poverty.

(Soundbite) (Spanish) Director of the Centre of Innovation De Un Techo Para Chile, Julian Ugarte, saying:

“We need new ideas, not obsolete ideas. The technology could have a tremendous impact on 63 percent of the world that makes less than $1,500 dollars a year that nobody considers – which is also the largest market in the world. So, you can also get business, though per person it might not be so useful, but could be at mass. And this opens the possibility, not only in this centre, but for everyone who can generate a successful enterprise and solve problems facing the poorest populations.”

The United Nations estimates that one in six people have inadequate access to safe drinking water. Ugarte hopes their plasma purifier could dramatically reduce that number. Rosa Reyes says she prays that the benefits of the purification system will extend far beyond her small camp.

(Soundbite) (Spanish) Rosa Reyes, Resident of San Jose de Cerrillos Camp, saying:

“I hope in Africa they get the same great privilege we’ve had and get purifiers just like us.”

The developers of the system hope to answer Rosa Reyes’ prayers. They are currently working on a second prototype that will hopefully reduce the cost of water purification even further – making clean water for the planets poorest – a reality.

Original story by Ben Gruber, Reuters.

Related articles

• In Chile’s slums, a lesson in how to make apps for social good (Washington Post)

Today I interviewed Prof. Linda MacDonald Glenn on Singularity 1 on 1.

Linda is an American bioethicist, healthcare educator, lecturer, consultant, and attorney-at-law. Her academic research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies and “evolving notions of personhood”.

During our conversation with Prof. Glenn we discuss a variety of topics such as: the very personal and moving story behind her interest in bioethics;  women in technology; human rights versus sentience rights; the legal differences of being human vs being a “person”; the legal test (or lack thereof) for recognizing personhood; the problems of defining and measuring intelligence.

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the adapted video interview in full. There is delay between my own video and audio, which are out of sync, but Linda Glenn’s end is very good so you will not be annoyed by it for 90% of the time.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who is Linda MacDonald Glenn?

Linda MacDonald Glenn JD, LLM (Biomedical Ethics, McGill) is a healthcare ethics educator, counselor-at-law, futurist and international consultant. She holds a faculty appointment at the Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical Center, and is also a Fellow at the Institute for Emerging Technologies and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Her other honors include an appointment as a Senior Fellow at the American Medical Association’s Institute for Ethics, and being named a Women’s Bioethics Scholar. Her research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging healthcare technologies, and evolving notions of legal personhood. She has advised governmental leaders and agencies, published numerous articles in professional journals and books, addressed public and professional groups internationally, and made many media appearances, including the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and NPR. She is currently working on a book titled Bioethics for a New Earth: How Emerging Technologies Can Change Humankind.

ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and IBM today announced an initial 32.9 million EURO, five-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is an international consortium to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Scientists estimate that the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to 100 million of today’s fastest desktop computers.

ASTRON is one of the leading scientific partners in the international consortium that is developing the SKA. Upon completion in 2024, the telescope will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter and even the very origins of the universe – dating back more than 13 billion years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

An interesting thing to consider is DOME’s processing power versus that of a human brain – roughly around 10^18 vs 10^16 respectively. If those numbers are accurate, then, DOME will be – at least as far as hardware is concerned – a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful. What does this mean?! Well, it could mean everything or nothing depending on whether we can get the software end of things right by then. If we do, then, DOME could turn out to be among the first smarter-than-human AI. If we don’t, then, it will be just the most powerful super-computer.

The Square Kilometre Array science animation video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The SKA Official Animation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chinese word for crisis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My friend Jose Cordeiro is a hopeless optimist always bursting with energy.

Jose is a published book author, public speaker and faculty at Singularity University. One of his favorite examples he often uses during presentations is the Chinese word for crisis (wieji).

Cordeiro likes it so much because it consists of two characters: one signifying danger and another, which according to him, is signifying opportunity.

I have to admit that the first time I heard Jose give the example I was both moved and inspired. It is a very effective and powerful way of highlighting why we should not simply fear any crisis – due to its inherent dangers, but we should also embrace and try to make the best of it – due to the unique opportunity that it provides. That latter part is something we often forget.

A crisis is indeed a terrible thing to waste for it does provide entirely unique opportunities. This profound realization – that there is always more than a single tragic path in front of us, can provide just enough optimism that, in the end, makes all the difference to those who need it most.

How many times have you been drawn into a critical situation that you not only overcome but end up better off than you ever were before? So much so, that looking backwards you end up being very grateful for the original crisis that got it all going. Well, I’ve had my fair share of those and can’t fail to notice that most of my personal growth and accomplishments have come right after what I thought at the time was an existential crisis of epic proportions.

Growth always comes at the point of resistance. So while I am not getting any more comfortable with the process itself, I have started to notice that if I am not kicking and screaming I am probably doing something wrong. Basically it comes down to this: you can be uncomfortable growing, or you can be comfortable shrinking. That’s it.

Now, I admit – I neither speak nor read Chinese. But I do my homework. Thus I am aware of the debate on the accuracy of Jose’s interpretation. Some say it is a myth – an urban legend most commonly used by personal development gurus trying to impress their audience.

If you are knowledgeable on that topic feel free to set the record straight in the comment section below. However, for me this is not merely a matter of translation. It is a matter of personal philosophy, world outlook and, ultimately, making a choice. It is because of what we chose to see and focus on that we take (or fail to take) any given action. So for me, looking for the opportunity beside the danger is a great way to approach life. This is what entrepreneurs such Jose Cordeiro and Peter Diamandis do: we see a problem, they see an opportunity. And I for one have decided to embrace rather than criticize such a philosophy. It gives me a great way to approach with confidence all of our future crises, be it personal or collective.

Yes, sometimes it seems that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But great blessings lie ahead for those who know the secret of finding opportunity within each crisis.

For a better future, better you!

Related articles

• Jose Cordeiro on Singularity 1 on 1: The Energularity is Near

I hate ads.

Chances are you hate them too.

So why do I keep showing ads on SingularityWeblog.com?!

Well, it is because I don’t want to lose the meagerly $100 per month that I make from Google AdSense.

In fact, I’ve been frantically searching for ways to improve my revenue and make this blog financially viable. If I fail to accomplish that, then, I will eventually be forced to move on and find an alternative vocation – one that not only makes me happy as this one, but can also put some food on the table.

It is for this reason that I took Daniel Scocco‘s course on improving AdSense revenue. Taking the course, however, got me thinking about the exact opposite alternative as a potential solution:

What if I remove all the ads?

Ads or No Ads?

Surely, the value of the annoyance to my readers from the adds must be far greater than the revenue that those create for me. So by removing them I ought to be creating overall more net value than I’m losing. Furthermore, in theory, this should make people less distracted when visiting Singualrity Weblog and therefore incentivize them to spend more time here. In addition, even if I keep the ads and improve their revenue by a factor of 5 or 10 it still will not be sufficient to make the blog viable. Clearly, if Singularity Weblog is to survive and prosper, I must go beyond the ad revenue model.

But where will that money come from?!

Donations (as well as grants) seem like one of the potential sources of income. After all, many radio and TV programs are almost entirely funded by money raised through that model. However, with one very notable exception where a generous anonymous reader donated $2,500 for video, photo and audio equipment, I have been making about $50 per month from donations. Clearly, I need to improve my fund-raising skills and send out a more compelling message. Still, I suspect that, while donations will remain to be an integral part of SingularityWeblog’s revenue stream, they will continue to be fluctuating and therefore less reliable source of income.

So, donations can help to survive but it will take more to prosper:

It will take a solid business model that works.

Then, it dawned on me: I’ve got amazing readers who like the blog and thus have a stake in its success or failure. I believe that people such as yourself will probably enjoy it if Singularity Weblog got bigger and better. If that is true, then, why don’t I ask you to help me figure this out?!

Let’s start with something simple: Should I have ads or should I remove them all?

Once we figure this out, then, we can move on to bigger issues such as: “How do we make SingularityWeblog.com grow and prosper? What are the best business models, alternative sources of income or other ways to turn it into a financially viable entity which can stand on its own?”

The Pain Ray (aka the Heat Ray) is Pentagon’s Active Denial System - a non-lethal weapon designed to disperse violent crowds and repel enemies without permanent injury.

The device turns electricity into invisible millimeter-wave radio frequency beam sending out 95GHz of focused heat waves to a distance of up to 2,500 feet. It then penetrates and heats up the top layer of the skin at about 3 sheets of paper worth of depth (1/64th of an inch or 0.4 mm) prompting people into near instant instinctive flight.

The US military says that its non-lethal weapon has been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers and the chance of injury from the system is 0.1% or 1 in 1,000.

The project still has a number of issues to overcome: It takes 16 hours to boot up and once “On” the amount of energy it consumes makes even the best gas guzzlers blush from shame. More notably, the Pain Ray doesn’t work if it is raining, snowing or dusty. Still, as testified by Spencer Ackerman’s Wired Magazine video report below, under ideal testing conditions the Pain Ray certainly earns its name.

Related articles

• I Got Blasted By the Pentagon’s Pain Ray – Twice – Wired News (wired.com)
• US army heat ray gun in Afghanistan (BBC News)

New York City, one of the hungriest consumers of energy in the world, is going green with a project designed to capture tidal energy from the city’s East River. The project is the first of its kind in the United States and if successful, could herald a revolution in sustainable, marine-based energy production.

Original report by Tara Cleary for Reuters.

Transcript:

New York City, with a population of more than eight milion, has an insatiable appetite for power, satisfied mainly with electricity generated by the burning of fossil fuels. But down by the city’s East River, a green alternative is emerging. It’s an energy experiment using turbines to harness the force of the tides sweeping up and down the river. The company behind the project is Verdant Power, co-founded by Trey Taylor.

Soundbite: Trey Taylor, co-founder and president, Verdant Power, saying (English):

“The water current flows from this direction through to these rotors that are downstream. And underneath we have a device that allows the turbine then to turn. So as the tide shifts and comes around, the turbine will then swing to get it in the opposite direction. And as this rotor’s turning, it then generates power into a generator and the generator then comes down and takes the power to shore.”

And Taylor says the advantage of generating energy through tidal movement is its reliability.

Soundbite: Trey Taylor, co-founder and president, Verdant Power, saying (English):

“So a Con Ed for example, the distributor of power, they can look at their clocks or tidal chart and they know exactly when power’s coming on or going off. So as a form of distributed generation right in New York City close to where the power is needed, it’s ideal.”

Verdant Power’s research started in 2002 on Roosevelt Island – a tiny East River land mass wedged between Manhattan and Long Island. Ten years on, the company now has a commercial license for the project – the first such permit in the country and proof says Kit Kennedy, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, that the government is serious about alternative energy.

Soundbite: Kit Kennedy, Counsel, Air and Energy Program, New York, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) saying (English):

“We do have a tremendous potential on our coasts for wave power, for tidal power, and there’s a lot of interest in seeing if we can demonstrate it and scale it up.”

Taylor says that one of the secrets behind the project’s potential success is the power of the East River, a tidal straight connecting Long Island Sound with the Atlantic Ocean.

Soundbite: Trey Taylor, co-founder and president, Verdant Power, saying (English):

“You have a tremendous current sort of flowing through here with the tide. It’s not the rise and fall of the tide, it’s the water current that comes through. And by putting very strong, robust rotor machines into this water, and eventually we’ll put thirty of those machines here in the water, then we’ll be able to produce electricity by using that water current in both the ebb, in other words the tide flowing out, and the flood, the tide coming in.”

The tidal turbine system could potentially work all over New York State where there are similar conditions to those in the East River. In many ways the project is a test bed. Taylor says that if some of the power needed for the state’s more than 19 million people could come from a predictable, sustainable source, it could make waves across the entire United States.

Story by Tara Cleary, Reuters.

Does God play dice with the Universe?!

The story of mice and men is still unfolding.

But the end doesn’t have to turn out the way we think it will.

Robert Burns’ original poem To a Mouse reads:

“The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!”

And so, en route to the singularity, can our grandiose plans to become immortal, super-intelligent, god-like beings turn out to be “the promised joy” that went awry?

After all, it’s been said that “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”

And so, even “the best laid schemes” come with no guarantee about the outcome. Indeed, “grief and pain” often (or is it always?!) come along with the “promised joy.” That is why “attachment” and “desire” are the ultimate sources of suffering according to Buddhism.

On the one hand – nothing gets accomplished without emotional attachment and total commitment to the outcome. On the other – those can (especially in the case of failure) and often do lead to “grief and pain.”

It seems that the only way to avoid the negatives will be to make sure nothing goes awry. Hence we make our “best laid” plans.

But can we control the outcome?

Einstein himself was a determinist who thought that we merely appear to have free will while, in fact, we don’t. He simply refused to accept that God might play dice with the Universe by allowing for random events (and chance) to ruin the perfectly good cosmic order of cause and effect. It is for this reason that, despite all the evidence, to his very dying day Albert refused to embrace quantum mechanics and strove to find a single, unified, non-random, cause-and-effect theory of everything. (For more on that see Einstein: His Life and Universe)

If Einstein was right, then, one way or the other, the fate of mice and wo/men (as well as that of the singularity and the cosmos) has already been determined by all the preceding events in the cosmic cause-and-effect chain. Taking this a step further, techno-determinists believe that the singularity is inevitable and we might as well get ready for it (and the coming utopia).

But if Einstein was wrong (and God is dead), then, anything is possible.

To me this is the more likely (and interesting) scenario.

While things can go awry they really don’t have to. Especially if we have made the effort to lay the best possible plans. Again, this doesn’t guarantee success but certainly raises the probabilities. Add a little random chance (or luck) and anything is possible, including things going flawlessly well. (Mark Twain once observed that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable.)

To conclude, in contrast to Einstein I very much believe that God does play dice with the universe.

In our cosmic casino of life civilizations are born, live and die with the roll of the dice.

This time we get to roll the dice. And the more adept at technology we are the more we can change the rules and rig the game in our own favor.

And so the die is cast.

Let the chips fall where they may for we are likely beyond the point of no return.

We’ve got one-way-tickets on spaceship Earth and, whether we reach any destination or not, I am enjoying the ride.

Carpe diem!

Computer scientists at the University of Texas in Austin are developing intersections of the future, designed to accommodate the driverless vehicles they believe will soon take over our roads. The intersection will have no traffic lights and no stop signs, just computer programs that will talk directly to each car on the road. Ben Gruber reports.

Transcript:

Driving through an intersection can be deadly. According the World Health Organization 3,500 people die every day in traffic accidents, and if conventional intersections controlling conventional traffic are dangerous, Peter Stone is trying to imagine a world where driverless cars are no longer experimental, but the norm. Stone is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas. He believes the era of the driverless car has already begun.

(Soundbite) Peter Stone, Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Texas, saying:

“Ninety-five percent of accidents are caused by human error and the reason we are focusing on intersections is that one quarter of all accidents occur in intersections and a third of all fatal accidents so taking the person out of the loop will be a huge advantage.”

But while removing human control inside an intersection may be a daunting idea, Stone and his team believe they’ve developed a system that will work on the busiest of roads. Stone’s idea sees traffic signals like lights and stop signs, replaced by a computer programme that manages each individual vehicle as it navigates the intersection.

(Soundbite) Peter Stone, Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Texas, saying:

“Within a few hundred yards of where it is approaching, it calls ahead essentially, sends a wireless signal using a technology that already exists called dedicated short range communications or DSRC and there is a computer programme at the intersection that is basically maintaining a reservation system.”

Stone says the reservation system will ensure that cars stay far enough apart to avoid a collision while always staying in motion.

(Soundbite) Peter Stone, Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Texas, saying:

“By virtue of the cars not having to accelerate and decelerate as much and by not having to slow down and wait, the statistics show that the average American spends 48 hours each year stuck in traffic which costs about 5 billion dollars in fuel and productivity that is lost basically thrown out the window. If all the cars are autonomous, we can put a huge dent in that.”

Stone says computer controlled cars and intersections will be eco-friendly as well. By eliminating the need to continually stop and start, he says the cars will use a lot less energy and reduce their carbon footprint significantly. Stone admits that a completely autonomous driving environment is still years away, even though the technology already exists. He says the cost of the technology will have to come down before a driverless car – and his intersection – get a green light.

Original story by Ben Gruber, Reuters.

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The Obama Administration has approved five times the number of covert drone strikes that George W. Bush did.

Thomson Reuters Digital Editor Chrystia Freeland sits down with Reuters’ Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist David Rohde to discuss his special report detailing the quiet expansion of presidential power under Obama. During their conversation David and Chrystia cover topics such as: the 3 american citizens executed abroad by the US government; the differences between CIA and US military drone strikes; the differences between the so called ‘personality’ and ‘signature’ strike; why it is a myth that drones are ‘light footprint’; the absurd covert/overt relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

Check out the full video on Obama’s secret drone war explained by Reuters’ David Rohde on Fast Forward:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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