Hybrid Reality | Big Think

The Foldable Car: Coming to a Parking Spot Near You

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:23:02 -0500

More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a percent that is estimated to increase to 70% by 2050. Much of the urban growth will be in the emerging economies like China and India where a new middle-class wants Western conveniences … like cars. But there are huge costs to owning and ...

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Is Reality Real?

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:44:01 -0500

BY AHMED EL-HADY Have you ever thought what is happening in our brains when we wander in the world around us? How do we perceive “reality”? How can we interact with reality in a dynamic and continuous manner? What is “reality” after all? One might think of our reality as 2D sheets put ...

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Techno-Anarchy: Peaceful or Violent?

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:30:39 -0500

An excellent article by Bill Wasik in Wired UK discusses the role technology and connectivity play in the creation of unruly mobs (as opposed to the peaceful protests seen widely during the Arab Spring). Common lore holds that the use of the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) by rioters in London in the ...

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Finding Our Musical Soul With Technology

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:26:12 -0500

For most of the world, music lessons are a luxury of the bourgeois class. Both musical instruments and music lessons are pricey. As the average American moves his home several times during his lifetime, children find that they have inconsistent teachers, and rarely continue playing instruments ...

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The Sacred Geography of 21st Century Renaissance Civilization

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:25:04 -0500

by Michael Garfield “As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is ...

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Reaching the Singularity: It’s More Complicated Than We Think

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:58:12 -0400

When will humanity reach Singularity, that now-famous point in time when artificial intelligence becomes greater than human intelligence? It is aptly called the Singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil: like the singularity at the center of a black hole, we have no idea what happens once we reach it ...

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The Beginning of Infinity

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:40:10 -0400

By @jason_silva and @notthisbody Hybrid Reality Institute Fellow Jason Silva will be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York on October 15th. Here is Jason's latest video inspired by the ideas explored in David Deutsch’s new book, THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY. THE BEGINNING OF ...

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WAKE UP AND DREAM

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:30:25 -0400

BY JASON SILVA “Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.” - Alphonse de Lamartine, French romantic poet. PART I: DREAMING WITH OUR EYES OPEN (The Call To Adventure) The film [Inception] is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director ...

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Fashionable Avatars

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:19:11 -0400

When you think of Burberry, do you think of prim and proper English models wearing plaid coats or do you think of beautiful exotic scantily clad holographic models walking on a virtual runway in the middle of Beijing? Probably the former, but the truth is actually the latter (or perhaps both ...

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Evolution made Self-Aware

Parag and Ayesha Khanna — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:23:33 -0400

BY JASON SILVA Physicist Freeman Dyson has spoken of a new "Age of Wonder" centered on computers and biology. He has artfully articulated that in the near future "a new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses." What I find the most ...

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