Singularity and Futurism

Three Technology Advances That Will Crank America's Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:16:00 +0000

Wall Street Journal - 1.30.12 By MARK P. MILLS AND JULIO M. OTTINO

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

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Escaping Neutrons May Prove the Multiverse

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:06:00 +0000

POPSCI - 1.23.12 by Clay Dillow

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult. But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles--made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields--are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

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A Brighter Tomorrow? Interview on upcoming "Abundance"

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:01:00 +0000

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Don't look now, but the Internet is changing your brain!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:38:00 +0000

OnlineCollege.org - January 8, 2012

Noted science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted that one day, we'd "have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you're interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else," and with this appliance, be able to truly enjoy learning instead of being forced to learn mundane facts and figures. His insight has proven to be amazingly accurate, as we now live in a world with the Internet, where nearly the entire wealth of human knowledge can live at our fingertips or even in our pockets. Such an amazing feat, of course, doesn't happen without impacting our lives, and scientists have begun to note that the Internet has not only served to fulfill our brains' curiosities, but also rewired them. So what exactly is the Internet doing to our brains? Read on to find out.

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We almost bought the farm in 1883? Comet's near miss discovered.

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:31:00 +0000

technology review (MIT)

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

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The next decade in science revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:26:00 +0000

What's ahead for science and technology in the next 10 years? According to The Institute for the Future in their newly published "A Multiverse of Exploration - The Future of Science 2021," we can look forward to the following:

Decrypting the Brain
Hacking Space
Massively Multiplayer Data
Sea the Future
Strange Matter
Engineered Evolution.

Check out the PDF here.

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The ideas you should follow in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Want to keep up? As we start climbing the curve of accelerating technological change, you'll have to work a bit harder to avoid being left behind. Here's the New Scientist's Smart Guide to 2012:

Neutrinos may be tachyons

Next year, experiments will test claims of particles breaking the cosmic speed limit - but how to meld these misbehaving particles with the rest of physics?

Higgs hunt is all about catching Zs

Confirming the existence of the Higgs boson will be like trying to identify the tracks of a zebra after a herd of horses has passed by.

The Rio Earth Summit

Spaceship Earth needs a pilot – at Rio we will have to push for a global system of "environmental governance"

How best to test machine IQ

A hundred years since the birth of Alan Turing, his famous benchmark for machine intelligence is both too hard and too narrow, but there's another way.

How to win at the Olympics

Athletes have the right combination of genes and will have trained for years, their diets finely honed. It is in their minds where medals will be won or lost.

Humans' chimeric origins

The roots of our species are being called into question in ways that challenge the roots of our identity.

The US cyber election

The way we live our lives online will make it easier for US presidential candidates to target their message.

Billion-dollar price of privacy
Facebook is about to go public and could be worth up to $100 billion – and it's all because of you.

Mapping the human brain

The Human Connectome Project aims to map the large-scale connections of 1200 human brains and will start reporting data in late 2012.

The networks that run the world

From the global economy to the human brain, understanding the connections is key. To make sense of the world you've got to know network theory.

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Machine Morality

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:44:00 +0000

New York Times - December 25, 2011 by Colin Allen

A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”

The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the “Three Laws of Robotics” to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; second, obey human orders; last, protect oneself. From the first story in which the laws appeared, Asimov explored their inherent contradictions. Great fiction, but unworkable theory.

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Watching light move - Camera catches light in motion

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000

New York Times - December 12, 2011 by John Markoff

More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk.

Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.

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Is Majel the Siri Killer? Android v. iOS Battle Rages!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 17:58:00 +0000

Android and Me - December 14, 2011 by Taylor Wimberly

A couple days ago we posted about Majel, and now some more tips are starting to come in. We compared Majel to Apple’s Siri voice assistant because that’s how it was described to us, but the project could be much larger than we initially imagined. Read on for new details and some interesting quotes from Google employees.

First we had a tip from “Ted,” who described his experience with an early release of Majel on an Android tablet. Even though this tip was sent from an anonymous IP, we believe it to be accurate since it matched an earlier description we received.

Ted wrote: “It’s definitely as good, or better, than Siri. At least on the tablet you can sort through different answers with these swipe-able trays. Like, if you say “show me the Statue of Liberty” it’ll automatically take you to Google Image results, but another tray beneath it might be its location on Google Maps and then another tray might have a Wikipedia page. It’s also pretty good at giving you succinct answers if you ask it a question. The UI is definitely more powerful than Siri’s, even if a little harder to navigate.

At least at one phase of the development you would activate it by saying “Computer…” It was hard not to use a Jean Luc Piccard accent when doing it!”

As you can see, the first release of Majel might be rather simple and focus solely on natural language questions with answers from Google Search.

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A Hint of Higgs!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:13:00 +0000

CNET News - December 13. 2011 by Stephen Shankland

These red lines show how the LHC's Atlas experiment registered the arrival of four particles called muons. They could have been the byproducts of a short-lived Higgs boson--or they could have been more humdrum events. CERN's LHC particle accelerator will continue smashing protons into each other to spot the statistical significance that means the Higgs really has been found. (Credit: CERN)

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of events around mass of about 126 GeV," CERN physicist and Atlas leader Fabiola Gianotti said in slides presented today at a CERN seminar to physicists who applauded her results. That equates to about 212 quintillionths of a gram; by comparison, a proton is more than 100 times lighter with a mass of 0.938GeV.

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Has the God particle been found? Tune in tomorrow!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:15:00 +0000

FoxNews - December 12, 2011

The world of physics is abuzz with speculation over an announcement expected Tuesday, Dec. 13, from the CERN laboratory in Geneva -- home of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The announcement, planned for 8 a.m. EST (2 p.m. CET), will address the status of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, sometimes called the "God Particle" because of its importance to science.

This particle, which has long been theorized but never detected, is thought to give all other particles mass. Scientists at the LHC have been hoping that when protons inside the machine collide together at extremely high speeds, the energetic explosions that result will create the Higgs.

Researchers on two of the LHC's experiments, called ATLAS and CMS, will present the status of their search for the Higgs at a public seminar tomorrow.

"These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs," CERN scientists said in a statement.

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The coming programmable universe

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:26:00 +0000

New York Times - December 5, 2011 by Larry Smarr

Over the next 10 years, the physical world will become ever more overlaid with devices for sending and receiving information.

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances and buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centers — the “clouds” of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are “spatially aware.” For instance, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Smart electric grids are measuring our homes’ use of power; active people are tracking their heart rates; and hundreds of millions of us are uploading geo-tagged data to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook and Google Plus. As we look 10 years ahead, the fastest supercomputer (the “exascale” machine) will be composed of one billion processors, and the clouds will most likely grow to this scale as well, creating a distributed planetary computer of enormous power.

Such computational power, co-located with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world gradually becomes programmable.

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Getting texts via your contacts - coming soon?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:58:00 +0000

This will be the coolest thing ever!

MailOnline - 11.22.11 by Fiona Macrae

Imagine catching up with your texts, social networking and perhaps the news without having to log on to a computer or even glance at a smartphone.

Messages and images would simply appear in front of your eyes, generated by a computerised contact lens.

Of course, you may not always want to be bothered by such messages if you are doing anything so quaint as – for instance – reading a book or going out walking and enjoying the scenery.

But until now the concept of info-vision – the ability to stream information across a person’s field of vision – had belonged to the realms of science fiction, featuring in films such as the Terminator series or TV shows such as Torchwood.

However, scientists have developed a prototype lens that could one day provide the wearer with all kinds of hands-free information.

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Faster than light particles still speeding along!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:20:00 +0000

A second experiment confirms!

CBSNews - 11/18/11 by Washington Post reporter Brian Vastag

(Washington Post) This story was written by Brian Vastag

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.

The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment.

While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency of its result," Ferroni added, "a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

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Are those pig muscles or human?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 18:23:00 +0000

Wired - 11.9.11 by Katie Drummond

A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They’re the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that’s already being used to rebuild parts of people.

The research team behind the project, based out of the University of Pittsburgh, has made remarkably swift progress: Mere months after starting their first-ever clinical trial, they’ve already operated on four soldiers and are now training groups of surgeons from across the country in perfecting the approach. If progress continues at this pace, the trial will wrap in 24 months and the technique will become “a standard of care for orthopedists and trauma surgeons,” according to Dr. Stephen Badylak, head of the initiative.

It isn’t quite salamander territory, but it’s astonishingly close. The Pittsburgh team’s research means that, within this decade, the thousands of soldiers who’ve suffered major muscle loss during this decade’s wars can overcome devastating impairment — a life sentence of chronic pain, disability and no viable treatment short of amputation — and experience at least a 25 percent improvement in physical function. For civilians, the impact would incalculable. The kinds of trauma and health problems that now cause amputation, from car accidents and fires to cancer or diabetic peripheral vascular disease, would no longer cause irreparable damage.

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Tearing Apart the Vacuum! (That just sounds cool!)

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:19:00 +0000

Telegraph - 10/30/11 by Richard Gray

Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed.

Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists claim it could allow them boil the very fabric of space – the vacuum.

Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.

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Robotics, Automation, and a Jobless Recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:33:00 +0000

NYT - October 23, 2011 by Steve Lohr

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.

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Great, now we can't just unplug them!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:54:00 +0000

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Flying Cars Anyone? The power of superconductivity

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:44:00 +0000

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Turns out the Moon is made of titanium!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:19:00 +0000

Or has lots of it, anyway...

Space.com - October 11, 2011

This lunar mosaic shows the boundary between Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquillitatis. The relative blue color of the Tranquillitatis mare is due to higher abundances of the titanium-bearing mineral ilmenite. CREDIT: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

A new map of the moon has uncovered a trove of areas rich in precious titanium ore, with some lunar rocks harboring 10 times as much of the stuff as rocks here on Earth do.

The map, which combined observations in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, revealed the valuable titanium deposits. These findings could shed light on some of the mysteries of the lunar interior, and could also lay the groundwork for future mining on the moon, researchers said.

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The Singularity is Far?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:11:00 +0000

technology review - Paul G. Allen and Mark Greaves 10/12/2011

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff.

While we suppose this kind of singularity might one day occur, we don't think it is near. In fact, we think it will be a very long time coming. Kurzweil disagrees, based on his extrapolations about the rate of relevant scientific and technical progress. He reasons that the rate of progress toward the singularity isn't just a progression of steadily increasing capability, but is in fact exponentially accelerating—what Kurzweil calls the "Law of Accelerating Returns."

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Will you be eating genetically modified animals soon?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:13:00 +0000

TPM - October 10, 2011 by Jim Kozubek

The Food and Drug Administration has completed its highly-anticipated evaluation of the environmental impact of the world’s first genetically-engineered (GE) fish for human consumption, and written a document supportive of its commercialization on the U.S. market, according to a person close to the review process.

The evaluation is now under review at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Meg Reilly, a communications liaison for the White House, confirmed the office now has the final documents under active review, but declined further comment.

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Krauthammer opines on faster-than-light neutrinos

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:03:00 +0000

National Review Online - October 7, 2011 by Charles Krauthammer

A scientific discovery changes everything we think we know about the world.

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

— Joke circulating on the Internet

The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana.

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Upgrading humanity

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:25:00 +0000

Steve Fuller: it's time for Humanity 2.0

The sociology professor says we are moving away from seeing ourselves as 'normal' humans as we increasingly embrace technological and medical advances – if we can afford them.

Ian Tucker - The Observer, Saturday 24 September 2011

What do you mean by Humanity 2.0?

Humanity 2.0 is an understanding of the human condition that no longer takes the "normal human body" as given. On the one hand, we're learning more about our continuity with the rest of nature – in terms of the ecology, genetic make-up, evolutionary history. On this basis, it's easy to conclude that being "human" is overrated. But on the other hand, we're also learning more about how to enhance the capacities that have traditionally marked us off from the rest of nature. Computers come to mind most readily in their capacity to amplify and extend ourselves. Humanity 2.0 is about dealing with this tension.

In what areas have we reached 2.0 already?

Let's put it this way: we've always been heading towards a pretty strong sense of Humanity 2.0. The history of science and technology, especially in the west, has been about remaking the world in our collective "image and likeness", to recall the biblical phrase. This means making the world more accessible and usable by us. Consider the history of agriculture, especially animal and plant breeding. Then move to prosthetic devices such as eyeglasses and telescopes.

More recently, and more mundanely, people are voting with their feet to enter Humanity 2.0 with the time they spend in front of computers, as opposed to having direct contact with physical human beings. In all this, it's not so much that we've been losing our humanity but that it's becoming projected or distributed across things that lack a human body. In any case, Humanity 2.0 is less about the power of new technologies than a state of mind in which we see our lives fulfilled in such things.