Roundups For The End Of The Year

Technology Review:
10 Emerging Technologies 2009

New Scientist:
The noughties – a decade of Big Science

Telegraph:
A decade of scientific discovery

Happy New Year everyone! Here's to what's yet to come

Do Yourself a Favour

... and check out Martine Rothblatt's article about whether an uploaded mind, or mindclone, could ever be considered as being 'alive'

But not before looking at George Dvorsky's wonderful review of James Cameron's Avatar

Truly insightful and thoughtful writing for a quiet contemplative end of the year kinda day

Comparative Mythology

From The Singularity: A Crucial Phase in Divine Self-Actualization? by Michael E. Zimmerman

Some may construe post-humanism as an appalling instance of hubris, in which individuals propose taking enormous risks both with themselves and with the human species, in order to pursue an impossible goal. Others, however may construe post-humanism as calling for alignment of personal energy with a cosmic evolutionary imperative: to preserve self-conscious organic life—currently threatened by anthropogenic environmental disaster—long enough to transfer it to a more enduring substrate needed to support an evolutionary process that culminates when the entire universe is made conscious. If this astonishing goal ever begins to bear fruit, future theologians would presumably rethink traditional conceptions of cosmos and history, humankind and God.

Tokyo Man Marries Video Game Character

Excellent...

From CNN

"I love this character, not a machine," said Sal, when asked about whether he can love an electronic device. "I understand 100 percent that this is a game. I understand very well that I cannot marry her physically or legally."

Read more

Machine Learning with Quantum Algorithms

Posted by Hartmut Neven on Google Research Blog:

Many Google services we offer depend on sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning or pattern recognition. If one takes a closer look at such capabilities one realizes that they often require the solution of what mathematicians call hard combinatorial optimization problems. It turns out that solving the hardest of such problems requires server farms so large that they can never be built.

A new type of machine, a so-called quantum computer, can help here. Quantum computers take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to provide new computational capabilities. While quantum mechanics has been foundational to the theories of physics for about a hundred years the picture of reality it paints remains enigmatic. This is largely because at the scale of our every day experience quantum effects are vanishingly small and can usually not be observed directly. Consequently, quantum computers astonish us with their abilities. Let’s take unstructured search as an example. Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers.

Read more

The Horror

It's hard to be optimistic about our development as a species when this is what qualifies as progress...

Shell and Petronas win Iraqi oil contract - Times Online

Robotic Perception, On Purpose

From Science Daily:

European researchers developed technology that enables a robot to combine data from both sound and vision to create combined, purposeful perception. In the process, they have taken the field to a new level.

Currently, computer vision is good at recognising objects in images and videos and has been successfully employed in several specialised industrial applications, such as quality control during microchip fabrication.

But robotic perception is much weaker in less defined situations, like understanding and responding to human behaviour and even conversations. Yet, it is precisely this sort of interaction which promises the most compelling applications for future humanoid technology, where people-like robots can act as guides, or mix with people, or use perception to infer appropriate actions.

Link

Back To Basics On AI

From the BBC:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun a project to re-think artificial intelligence research. The Mind Machine Project will return to the basics of AI research to re-examine what lies behind human intelligence....

The ultimate aim for the five-year project is not to produce an artificial human but to create a physical system that is smart enough to read a child's story book, understand the context surrounding that narrative and explain what happened. This could lead, said MIT, to the creation of a "brain co-processor" initially intended for those with Alzheimer's to give them a better quality of life. Such mental prostheses could also be used by anyone needing help to co-ordinate their lives.

Link

What Does Your Avatar Say About You?

With the rise and rise of social networks and complex online communities, the implications of choosing an acceptable avatar for any given environment has become increasingly important.

From iamsurly's article on Open Salon:
Have you seen the guy who uses the image of a murderous clown? What about the guy drowning in blood, ketchup, red paint, whatever the hell it is. There are a couple of people using severed body parts. You know what that says to me? That says you're a potential freakin' serial killer and no, you can't be my friend.

Research into the way people behave when playing computer games has unsurprisingly turned up results showing that such a close identification with their digital selves can lead to players taking on the emotions and behaviours that they had invested in that character. Erin Mulvaney at dailycomet.com:

The characters that video-game users choose for themselves — their avatars — can affect their thoughts and emotions in those virtual environments, whether it’s Mario or Luigi or the colors of a football uniform, according to research by a University of Texas communication-studies professor.

In two similar experiments, assistant professor Jorge Pena found that gamers using negative avatars — such as those wearing black cloaks — exhibited aggressive and antisocial behaviors in team exercises.

And what happens as our pixelated representatives take on more responsibilities for us in the digital realm. A recent Telegraph article looks at the role of the avatar in the corporate environment:

A growing number of firms are drawing up rules to regulate the conduct of their staff in online environments, amid concerns that "unprofessional" appearance and behaviour can damage business.

The issue is particularly pressing at companies where staff are required to select an avatar – or character – to represent them in online meetings with clients.

Such observations paint a grim future for the unbridled freedom that had hitherto been unquestioned in MMORPG land and suggest a new mainstream focus on having a trans-spacial presence, ready to work or play at any time, that complies with the expectations of other who share or govern that space.

Such inevitable developments suggest that the avatar is now recognised as being as much of a symbol of our personality and attitudes as the language we use or the clothes we wear. The mainstream acceptance of this fact can only point to a future in which we spend more and more time with our avatars, and eventually merge with them; a point at which we will be able to be all things to all people. It is said that we see what we want to see in others... this may soon be the literal truth.

Social Brain Scanning

Avatar's gaze illuminates social brain - life - 04 December 2009 - New Scientist

Will Vegetarians Inherit The Earth?

We're probably not real carnivores yet... not like, say, cats. We've probably only been eating meat since the last ice age when we didn't have much choice. So, those in doubt as to whether they will live long enough to see the full extent of the major paradigm shift predicted to unfold over the next few decades may be well advised to think about the implications of maintaining what is essentially an unnatural diet on their physical expectancy.

Transhumanists see this kind of attention to lifestyle choice as par for the course, in some cases going as far as sustaining themselves through regimented application of nootropics and supplements. There are also those for whom cutting out meat is not going far enough and focus more heavily on calorie restriction and drinking alkaline water(?!)

That said, we all know of someone who smoked and drank and ate badly their whole lives but lived to 95; so abstinence may not be the be all and end all. Perhaps just being aware is a good enough start for now.

The Future of The Supercomputers

In mid-November Jaguar, located at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, was named as the world's fastest supercomputer. Recording a performance speed of 1.8 petaflops (One petaflop refers to one quadrillion calculations per second), it took the title away from former champion Roadrunner, at Los Alamos.

In under two years from now, we can expect the Blue Waters system to be be fully operational which, according to the NCSA, will mean:

... breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters. They will predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, design new materials at the atomic level, predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes, and simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system and airplanes and automobiles.

And predictions for the future currently look something like this (from Wikipedia):

Given the current speed of progress, supercomputers are projected to reach 1 exaflops (one quintillion FLOPS) in 2019. Futurist Ray Kurzweil expects supercomputers capable of human brain neural simulations, for which according to Kurzweil 10 exaflops would be required, in 2025.

Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories theorizes that a zettaflops (one sextillion FLOPS) computer is required to accomplish full weather modeling, which could cover a two week time span accurately. Such systems might be built around 2030.

Plants, Shamanism and Preparation

Posted an edited version of this video a few weeks ago. This longer version gives it a bit more context...



Also, interesting observations from LVX23 here:

... the effect of shamanic techniques is to present that self with a novel set of data in an attempt to break up the crust of belief that limits the accepted notions of how things ought to be. Although the self is not entirely bound by physiology it nevertheless has a tendency to become rigid and narrow in its conceptual map of how reality should behave, due in large part to the strength of the ego - the ultimate abstraction of the biosurvival mechanism inherent in all creatures. The narrowing of focus establishing the boundaries of the self and its world is strengthened by a feedback loop between the logical and emotional constructs of the mind and the physiological substrate of those constructs as they exist in the brain.