Since the beginnings of civilization, humans have had reason to think carefully about where to grow food, where to sleep, where to put waste. We call it land use planning and for most of history it’s happened pretty haphazardly. Like other activities, though, we’ve gradually systematized the process, especially as we’ve come up against scarcity and competition. Until we can move significant portions of the population to a new planet, land will only get more scarce, of course, and how we make use of it in the future is an important conversation to have. Patrick J. Kriger,…
Future
-
Most Topular Stories
-
The next 50 years of land use planning
Blog of the Long Now17 May 2013 | 9:09 am -
Non-wetting fabric drains sweat
KurzweilAI » News22 May 2013 | 4:13 amThe hydrophobic fabric repels water except where stitched with channels (credit: UC Davis) Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the University of California, Davis. The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at UC Davis is a field known as microfluidics, which focuses on making “lab on a chip”… -
When Will AI Be Created?
Machine Intelligence Research Institute » Blog15 May 2013 | 10:00 pmHuman-level AI (HLAI) appears to be the topic of the week. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks AIs will be as smart as humans by 2040. Karl Smith at Forbes and “M.S.” at The Economist seem to roughly concur with Drum on this timeline. Moshe Vardi, the editor-in-chief of the world’s most-read computer science magazine, predicts that “by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.” But predicting AI is more difficult than many people think. To explore these difficulties,… -
Imagination Experiment: Visualizing Transformative Tech
Open the Future20 May 2013 | 3:16 pmTime for another thought experiment. Or, rather, a puzzle without a good answer yet. We're getting pretty good at building extremely powerful telescopes. The Kepler planet finder orbiting telescope may have gone functionally offline, but Hubble keeps plugging along, and the James Webb infrared telescope is on the calendar. And when we look out in the universe, we're seeing some pretty amazing stuff. But what if the stuff we're seeing is even more amazing than we think? Imagine, if you will, a very high technology non-human civilization living in two star systems (reasonably close to one… -
Path to getting salamander like regeneration under hospital conditions
Next Big Future22 May 2013 | 12:49 amMacrophages are a major immune cell type which roam the tissues engulfing invaders like bacteria and fungi. But they're not just involved in gobbling up debris. They actively determine repair - for example they are important in human muscle repair. When macrophages were removed from salamanders, it had a "devastating effect" on their ability to regrow limbs. The animals ended up with fibrosis (scarring) and a stump. Godwin believes that chemicals released by the animals' macrophages are essential for the regeneration process, and is conducting experiments now to investigate…
-
Blog of the Long Now
-
The next 50 years of land use planning
17 May 2013 | 9:09 amSince the beginnings of civilization, humans have had reason to think carefully about where to grow food, where to sleep, where to put waste. We call it land use planning and for most of history it’s happened pretty haphazardly. Like other activities, though, we’ve gradually systematized the process, especially as we’ve come up against scarcity and competition. Until we can move significant portions of the population to a new planet, land will only get more scarce, of course, and how we make use of it in the future is an important conversation to have. Patrick J. Kriger,… -
Disruptive Technology
15 May 2013 | 6:48 amWe are social animals: it’s by connecting and communicating with others that we’ve managed to survive, thrive, and become “as gods” on planet Earth. The development of communications technologies has dramatically expanded our ability to connect with the world around us. Wireless networks now allow us to communicate in real-time with people on the other side of the globe; and with the portability of tablets and smart phones, global connectedness has become integral to even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re always on the lookout for new… -
Spaceship Earth
13 May 2013 | 10:20 amOVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo. In 01963, Buckminster Fuller wrote: Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star – our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun – is ninety-two million miles away … Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D.C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred… -
Earth Engine: decades of Landsat photographs, animated
10 May 2013 | 8:21 amHumans have been telling stories about space for generations, but now space is starting to tell stories about us. By putting satellites into orbit pointed not out at the stars, but in at our selves, and simply letting the cameras roll, we can see ourselves in aggregate, growing and changing. NASA’s Landsat program has recorded millions of photographs of the Earth’s surface since 01972 and Google has recently marshaled its significant computational power to organize that massive dataset into watchable video of our planet’s surface. These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and… -
Stewart Brand Seminar Primer
7 May 2013 | 12:40 pmStewart Brand (left) with Ben Novak, the scientist working on reviving the passenger pigeon. “Reviving Extinct Species” Tuesday May 21st, 02013 at the SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco From promoting the publication of NASA’s first satellite images of the whole Earth to co-founding The Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has always sought to simultaneously humble and empower. Our planet, seen for the first time against the vastness of space, suddenly seemed finite and precious. Our society’s moment placed within The Long Now – the history and future of civilization –…
-
KurzweilAI » News
-
Non-wetting fabric drains sweat
22 May 2013 | 4:13 amThe hydrophobic fabric repels water except where stitched with channels (credit: UC Davis) Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the University of California, Davis. The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at UC Davis is a field known as microfluidics, which focuses on making “lab on a chip”… -
Do salamanders hold the solution to regeneration?
22 May 2013 | 4:11 amSalamander (credit: Scott Camazine/Wikimedia Commons) Salamanders’ immune systems are key to their remarkable ability to regrow limbs, and could also underpin their ability to regenerate spinal cords, brain tissue and even parts of their hearts, scientists have found. In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), researchers from the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University found that when immune cells known as macrophages were systemically removed, salamanders lost their ability to regenerate a limb and instead… -
Reducing caloric intake delays nerve cell loss
22 May 2013 | 3:59 am(Credit: iStockphoto) Activating an enzyme known to play a role in the anti-aging benefits of calorie restriction delays the loss of brain cells and preserves cognitive function in mice, according to a study published in the May 22 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings could one day guide researchers to discover drug alternatives that slow the progress of age-associated impairments in the brain. Li-Huei Tsai — director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT — along with postdoc Johannes Gräff and others at MIT… -
IBM Watson Engagement Advisor hopes to improve customer service
22 May 2013 | 3:45 amIBM Watson Solutions VP Stephen Gold interacts with the new IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, which uses cloud-delivered mobile and online chat technology to assist businesses’ customers, anytime and anywhere (credit: Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM) Now customers can access Watson’s question-answering power directly. IBM has unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a cognitive computing assistant that “learns, adapts and understands a company’s data quickly and easily,” according to IBM. The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor‘s “Ask Watson”… -
Making quantum encryption practical
22 May 2013 | 3:25 amPart of Alice’s optical parametric amplifier receiver. This receiver enables her to obtain the quantum-illumination performance advantage that ensures Bob’s communication to her is immune to Eve’s passive eavesdropping. (Credit: Zheshen Zhang et al./MIT) Researchers in the Optical and Quantum Communications Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) have experimentally demonstrated a new quantum communication protocol that solves two basic problems with achieving practical quantum encryption. Quantum key distribution (QKD) requires the inefficient…
-
Machine Intelligence Research Institute » Blog
-
When Will AI Be Created?
15 May 2013 | 10:00 pmHuman-level AI (HLAI) appears to be the topic of the week. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks AIs will be as smart as humans by 2040. Karl Smith at Forbes and “M.S.” at The Economist seem to roughly concur with Drum on this timeline. Moshe Vardi, the editor-in-chief of the world’s most-read computer science magazine, predicts that “by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.” But predicting AI is more difficult than many people think. To explore these difficulties,… -
Advise MIRI with Your Domain-Specific Expertise
15 May 2013 | 2:38 pmMIRI currently has a few dozen volunteer advisors on a wide range of subjects, but we need more! If you’d like to help MIRI pursue its mission more efficiently, please sign up to be a MIRI advisor. If you sign up, we will occasionally ask you questions, or send you early drafts of upcoming writings for feedback. We don’t always want technical advice (“Well, you can do that with a relativized arithmetical hierarchy…”); often, we just want to understand how different groups of experts respond to our writing (“The tone of this paragraph rubs me the wrong way… -
Five theses, two lemmas, and a couple of strategic implications
5 May 2013 | 6:36 pmMIRI’s primary concern about self-improving AI isn’t so much that it might be created by ‘bad’ actors rather than ‘good’ actors in the global sphere; rather most of our concern is in remedying the situation in which no one knows at all how to create a self-modifying AI with known, stable preferences. (This is why we see the main problem in terms of doing research and encouraging others to perform relevant research, rather than trying to stop ‘bad’ actors from creating AI.) This, and a number of other basic strategic views, can be summed up as… -
AGI Impacts Experts and Friendly AI Experts
30 Apr 2013 | 6:00 pmMIRI’s mission is “to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact.” A central strategy for achieving this mission is to find and train what one might call “AGI impacts experts” and “Friendly AI experts.” AGI impacts experts develop skills related to predicting technological development (e.g. building computational models of AI development or reasoning about intelligence explosion microeconomics), predicting AGI’s likely impacts on society, and identifying which interventions are most likely to increase… -
“Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics” Released
29 Apr 2013 | 2:28 pmMIRI’s new, 93-page technical report by Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics,” has now been released. The report explains one of the open problems of our research program. Here’s the abstract: I. J. Good’s thesis of the ‘intelligence explosion’ is that a sufficiently advanced machine intelligence could build a smarter version of itself, which could in turn build an even smarter version of itself, and that this process could continue enough to vastly exceed human intelligence. As Sandberg (2010) correctly notes, there are several…
-
Open the Future
-
Imagination Experiment: Visualizing Transformative Tech
20 May 2013 | 3:16 pmTime for another thought experiment. Or, rather, a puzzle without a good answer yet. We're getting pretty good at building extremely powerful telescopes. The Kepler planet finder orbiting telescope may have gone functionally offline, but Hubble keeps plugging along, and the James Webb infrared telescope is on the calendar. And when we look out in the universe, we're seeing some pretty amazing stuff. But what if the stuff we're seeing is even more amazing than we think? Imagine, if you will, a very high technology non-human civilization living in two star systems (reasonably close to one… -
Getting It (Almost) Right
14 May 2013 | 2:54 pmAsk any reputable modern futurist to make a prediction, and you'll nearly always get the same general reply: futurists don't make predictions, we talk about scenarios, implications, and forecasts -- structured narratives about future possibilities that make clear the uncertainty and contingency of outcomes. But push a little harder, and you might hear something a little different: it's always fun to get one right. So it's with all due humility that I quote the opening of this CNN/Fortune article: As Wall Street predictions go, Jamais Cascio had a good one. A little less than a year ago,… -
Push-Button Gunsmithing and the Long Arm of the Law
14 May 2013 | 2:30 pmCalifornia state Senator Leland Yee wants to stop people from being able to print out firearms with 3D printers. Like many other folks, Yee was startled by the work of Defense Distributed, a group working on designs for guns that can be produced by the 3D printers. A few months ago, Defense Distributed crafted a grip and lower receiver for an AR-15; more recently, they produced a fully-functional handgun. Yee's not the only official trying to put a stop to this: NY Senator Chuck Schumer wants legislation to explicitly outlaw 3D printed guns, and the US Department of Defense recently ordered… -
The Fuzzy Now
3 May 2013 | 12:10 pmThought experiment: imagine you've been taken, somehow, and dropped into a big city in another place, with comparable technological and economic development, somewhere you don't speak the language. Here's the twist: it's also time travel. How long would it take you to notice that you've been shifted in time as well as space? I've been thinking more lately about how it is we (as a collection of societies) respond to the world evolving around us. I've written before about the banality of the future -- the idea that changes that seem mind-boggling and transformative from the perspective of today… -
A Month of Silence
29 Apr 2013 | 2:32 pmMy most recent post here was on March 29. Today is April 29. What do I have to say for myself? Production of the 2013 Ten-Year Forecast at the Institute for the Future -- up to and including the multi-day presentation conference -- took up pretty much all of the first half of April. Last week I spent in New York for the FastCompany "Innovation Uncensored" event, and then at IFTF's Future of Governance/ReConstitutional Convention affair. I slept, too. It's funny, in a way: I spent several years doing nothing but blogging every day, several times a day; now I discover (much to my chagrin) that…
-
Next Big Future
-
Path to getting salamander like regeneration under hospital conditions
22 May 2013 | 12:49 amMacrophages are a major immune cell type which roam the tissues engulfing invaders like bacteria and fungi. But they're not just involved in gobbling up debris. They actively determine repair - for example they are important in human muscle repair. When macrophages were removed from salamanders, it had a "devastating effect" on their ability to regrow limbs. The animals ended up with fibrosis (scarring) and a stump. Godwin believes that chemicals released by the animals' macrophages are essential for the regeneration process, and is conducting experiments now to investigate… -
Ending $1.25 per day PPP poverty by 2030
22 May 2013 | 12:42 amThe Brookings Institute has a study on getting poverty below 3% of population by 2030. The range of poverty outcomes for 2030 is large, implying that the future trajectory of global poverty is highly uncertain. Getting to the “zero zone”, defined here as a poverty rate of under 3 percent, by 2030 is unlikely to occur through stronger than expected consumption growth or an improving distribution alone. Both factors are needed simultaneously. There is no magic ingredient for eliminating poverty. Rather it hinges on a complex recipe: better than expected consumption growth and distributional… -
Age of Technological Disruption
22 May 2013 | 12:09 am"All of the structures that we use to run the world today— our civics, our politics, our legal systems, healthcare, education— are all structured for a world 100 or 200 years ago, not for the world of today. So we think we're in for a lot of disruption," says Salim Ismail, founding director of Singularity University. ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer caught up with Salim at the 2013 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, CA to discuss crowd funding, the next steps in technological expansion, and how we've entered the age of an information-based environment. -
South Korea should overtake Japan by 2017 on per capita income (GDP PPP)
21 May 2013 | 11:36 pmLooking at GDP PPP numbers across the four Asian tigers shows that they are each slowly reaching, if not, overtaking Japan. 1993 Singapore overtook Japan in GDP PPP 1997 Hong Kong , and 2010 Taiwan in 2010 South Korea should overtake Japan as the richest [larger] country in Asia in terms of GDP PPP by 2017. It was only in 1980 that South Korea had a GDP PPP that was less than one quarter of that seen in Japan at the time. South Korea has clearly come a long way since 1980, especially given that back then, companies such as Hyundai, LG, and Samsung were practically unheard of outside of Seoul. -
Bloom Energy has raised $130 million to bring total raised to $1.1 billion and are on track to be profitable in 2013
21 May 2013 | 5:08 pmFuel cell maker Bloom Energy has raised $130 million in new venture capital funding in May 2013 Bloom now has raised more than $1.1 billion in venture capital funding, including past investments from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, Advanced Equities, DAG Ventures and Goldman Sachs. The company had become gross margin positive (on a pro forma basis),was "operating with a fully funded business plan" and was "on track with our goal to be profitable in 2013." Bloom Energy is most likely not profitable even after 11 years. Bloom Energy CFO Bill…
-
the Foresight Institute
-
Germanane: germanium's answer to graphane
15 May 2013 | 2:44 pmcredit: Goldberger et al. Soon after graphene sheets were being produced on a laboratory scale routinely, researchers began producing the hydrogenated version graphane (with a hydrogen atom on each carbon). This step is one of many approaches aimed at harnessing graphene’s powerful conductivity and is also being explored for hydrogen storage and other potential applications (more info in this 2009 ScienceDaily article From Graphene to Graphane…). Despite the divergence from planarity which naturally accompanies the shift from sp2 to sp3 hybridization, graphane is considered a 2D… -
Drexler's book tour extends to U.S. May6-9
4 May 2013 | 3:27 pmRecently we pointed at a Forbe’s interview with Eric Drexler, in anticipation of his pending new book Radical Abundance. The book has shipped, and Drexler’s tour schedule now includes a few stops on the coasts of the U.S: New York: May 6th Los Angeles: May 8th & 9th Seattle: May 9th Find exact times and locations on Drexler’s website, and find more information about the book from publisher Public Affairs and/or from your favorite book store. If you’ve been imagining an updated version of Nanosystems, you’re in for a surprise. The book invites us to take a… -
Silicene: silicon's answer to graphene
1 May 2013 | 2:50 pmCredit: Le Lay et al. On the list of potential post-silicon materials for electronics and chips is none other than silicon. More specifically, silicene — 2D sheets of hexagonally arranged silicon atoms, structurally analogous to graphene and experimentally characterized by physicist Guy Le Lay of Aix-Marseille University in France (2012 abstract here). While graphene possesses exceptional performance qualities, it can’t be directly swapped in to existing silicon-based industry and technology. As described last year in the ExtremeTech article Silicene discovered: Single-layer silicon… -
A framework to promote critical thinking about nanotechnology
26 Apr 2013 | 3:55 pmForesight's Director of Education Miguel F. Aznar Last year we announced a talk that Miguel F. Aznar, Foresight’s Director of Education, would be givng a talk on critical thinking about nanotechnology. The talk “Critical Thinking about Nanotechnology” is now available on the web; however, only in Spanish. Here for comparison with the output from translate.Google.com, are the first two paragraphs from the English draft that Mr. Aznar forwarded: Most people do not know what nanotechnology is, but they make choices that are influenced by nanotechnology. As individuals and as… -
Superparamagnetism-explicated-for us
17 Apr 2013 | 9:51 amNickel nanocrystals mechanically coupled to a piezoelectric substrate allowed a magnetic field to be controlled by an electric field. Credit: Carman et al., UCLA Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, superparamagnetism may become a familiar term in the context of nanoscale electronics and devices. Loosely speaking, superparamagnetism is a size-based phenomenon in which materials that are ferromagnetic on the macroscale — meaning predisposed toward strong magnetization at room temperature, such as iron and nickel — display zero net magnetization at nanoparticle…
-
Soft Machines
-
Innovation policy and long term economic growth in the UK – a story in four graphs
10 May 2013 | 4:16 amI have a post up on the blog of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute – The failures of supply side innovation policy – discussing the connection between recent innovation policy in the UK and our current crisis of economic growth. Rather than cross-posting it here, I tell the same story in four graphs. 1. The UK’s current growth crisis follows a sustained period of national disinvestment in R&D Red, left axis. The percentage deviation of real GDP per person from the 1948-1979 trend line, corresponding to 2.57% annual growth. Sources: solid line, 2012 National… -
Nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler and me
21 Mar 2013 | 1:38 amNext week – on the 26th March – I’m participating in a discussion event sponsored by the thinktank Policy Exchange at NESTA, in London. Also on the panel is K. Eric Drexler, the originator of the idea of nanotechnology in its most expansive form, as an emerging technology which, when fully developed, will have truly transformational effects. It will, in this view, allow us to make pretty much any material, device or artefact for little or no cost, we will be able to extend human lifespans almost indefinitely using cell-by-cell surgery, and we will create computers so… -
Fulfilling the promises of emerging biotechnologies
18 Jan 2013 | 7:21 amAt the end of last year, the Nuffield Foundation for Bioethics published a report on the ethics of emerging biotechnologies, called Emerging Biotechnologies: technology, choice and the public good. I was on the working party for that report, and this piece reflects a personal view about some of its findings. A shorter version was published in Research Fortnight (subscription required). In a speech at the Royal Society last November George Osborne said that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is his job “to focus on the economic benefits of scientific excellence”. He then listed eight key… -
We sold out our energy future
7 Dec 2012 | 2:25 amEveryone should know that the industrial society we live in depends on access to plentiful, convenient, cheap energy – the last two hundred years of rapid economic growth has been underpinned by the large scale use of fossil fuels. And everyone should know that the effect of burning those fossil fuels has been to markedly increase the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, resulting in a changing climate, with potentially dangerous but still uncertain consequences. But a transition from fossil fuels to low carbon sources of energy isn’t going to take place quickly; existing low… -
Why isn’t the UK the centre of the organic electronics industry?
12 Nov 2012 | 1:24 amIn February 1989, Jeremy Burroughes, at that time a postdoc in the research group of Richard Friend and Donal Bradley at Cambridge, noticed that a diode structure he’d made from the semiconducting polymer PPV glowed when a current was passed through it. This wasn’t the first time that interesting optoelectronic properties had been observed in an organic semiconductor, but it’s fair to say that it was the resulting Nature paper, which has now been cited more than 8000 times, that really launched the field of organic electronics. The company that they founded to exploit this…
-
Ultrafuture World
-
Key advance to the medical use of stem cells
22 May 2013 | 12:54 amThe scientific prowess, recently reported, using somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce human embryonic stem cells for potential clinical utility, successfully continues to generate admiration reactions in the scientific community, hope in society in general, and headlines in the media. And it is not for less. This scientific breakthrough opens new and promising prospects for use of stem cells to find out the specific causes in each individual of certain diseases, and to develop personalised therapies. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a technique in which the nucleus from a donor cell is… -
Atmospheric CO2 already exceeds the threshold of 400 parts per million
20 May 2013 | 11:45 pmAfter analysis of data, it has been verified that the past May 9, daily average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the station’s monitoring of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, exceeded the 400 ppm (parts per million) for the first time since measurements began in 1958. Since CO2 emissions to the atmosphere are still at a good pace, there is no reason to believe that this measurement is a unique rarity, that everything points to that I just attend the first unequivocal step in the establishment of 400 parts per million as the new normal and overall value of the average… -
They discover the source of sleep slow waves
20 May 2013 | 2:36 amThe process of sleep consists of two important stages: dream of rapid eye movement (REM for its acronym in English), which is when we tend to dream of. And without eye movement (NREM) sleep, which includes what is known as slow wave sleep, named for the synchronous oscillations of the neurons that are recorded on the EEG (electroencephalogram), which take the form of large slow waves with a frequency of less than 4 Hertz. It is assumed that these waves are involved in processes such as the consolidation of memories. Although it has enough researched slow brain waves, there was shape so far… -
Could life hiding in the clouds of Venus?
18 May 2013 | 11:59 pmFor years we have seen Venus the Roman goddess of beauty and love, but as a hellish world, a planet plunged into a runaway greenhouse effect which has caused the temperatures soar to nearly 500 ° C. And not only is the heat, its dense atmosphere has collapsed even titanium armor Soviet Venera probes in just hours. In short, conditions that is far from able to be compared with those in our placid home that is Earth. But it is precisely these extreme conditions that astrobiologists have led some to wonder if, contrary to popular belief, Venus can become a home for some kind of life. They note… -
New details of the supernova that wowed the world a thousand years ago
18 May 2013 | 12:53 amWhen the object that we now call SN 1006 appeared for the first time, on 1 may of the year 1006 of ours was, was much brighter than Venus, and was even visible to daylight for weeks. Astronomers from China, Japan, Europe and the Arab world have documented this spectacular view. With the consolidation of the space age in the Decade of 1960, scientists were able to send into space, in the quite long missions, instruments and detectors to observe the universe in wavelengths that are not usually detectable from the Earth’s surface due to the locking action of the natural barriers of our…
-
The Technium
-
Sourced Quotes, 16
13 May 2013 | 11:29 pmRemember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down. -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters [episode unknown]. Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has... -
Personal Shadow Outsourcing
16 Jan 2013 | 5:33 pmFor years I've heard apocryphal stories of knowledge workers in Silicon Valley who outsourced their job themselves. They had permission to work at home, but in fact outsourced their work to cheap Chinese or Indian labor. The Valley worker would... -
I'll Pay You to Read My Book
16 Jan 2013 | 12:56 pmNobody reads big factual books anymore. Who has time? With a lot of effort you can get folks to buy big factual books, but they don't usually read them. They sit on the "to read" shelf once they get home.... -
The Improbable is the New Normal
7 Jan 2013 | 5:13 pmCops, emergency room doctors, and insurance actuarists all know it. They realize how many crazy impossible things happen all the time. A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the... -
Pain of the New
7 Jan 2013 | 1:17 amNew media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its "standard" mode. A day later...
-
Sentient Developments
-
How Skynet Might Emerge From Simple Physics
11 May 2013 | 11:55 amA provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI — but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might come about. We spoke to the lead author to learn more. In the paper, which now appears in Physical Review Letters, Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross posits a Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle — a conjecture that intelligent behavior in general… -
11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox
11 May 2013 | 11:45 amMost people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox. There's no shortage of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The standard ones are fairly well known, and we’re not going to examine them here, but they include the Rare… -
Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day
13 Apr 2013 | 9:38 amWe've been told since we were children that we need to eat three square meals a day. But new research shows that we don't need to be eating throughout the course of the day. And in fact, it might even be undermining our health. These insights have given rise to what's known as "intermittent fasting" — the daily restriction of meals and caloric intake. Here's why some health experts believe you should starve yourself just a little bit each day. Most people associate fasting with juice cleanses or religious rituals — a torturous affair that lasts an entire day if not longer, and the sort of… -
How Much Longer Before Our First AI Catastrophe?
12 Apr 2013 | 1:52 pmWith everyone’s attention focused on a pending technological Singularity, few give consideration to the immediate period of time leading up to it. If things continue apace, this could prove to be the most dangerous time in human history. It will be the era of weak and narrow artificial intelligence, a highly problematic combo that could wreak tremendous havoc on human civilization. Here’s why we’ll need to be ready. As opposed to the Technological Singularity, which is defined as the advent of recursively improving greater-than-human artificial intelligence (or artificial… -
What is the purpose of the Universe? Here is one possible answer.
30 Mar 2013 | 7:00 amIt’s often said that Jupiter — or any gas giant for that matter — is a failed star. This sentiment riles a lot of people, who bristle at the suggestion that Jupiter is deficient somehow, or that it was even meant to do something in the first place. But the conjecture belies a larger, more important question. What is it, exactly, that the universe and all the stuff that’s in it supposed to do aside from just floating in space? Well, it just so happens that there is a theory that gives a kind of raison d'etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it…
-
Broader Perspective
-
Innovation in Epistemology
20 May 2013 | 2:07 pmRather than being a dusty old concept in philosophy, epistemology is a source of philosophical advance, and is perhaps shifting in some even more vibrant ways per the contemporary science and technology era of big data, information visualization, synthetic biology, biohacking, DIYscience, and the quantified self.Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is one of the three main branches of philosophy, together with metaphysics (nature of reality), and aesthetics (nature of beauty). The study of knowledge remains one of the most dense and unresolved areas in philosophy. Some of the usual concerns… -
Pluralist Narratives in Digital Art and Philosophy
13 May 2013 | 10:25 amMuch of contemporary human endeavor involves both art and technology. Objects are both technologized and aesthetically designed. Apple forever changed the expectation of high-quality technology and design in objects. Information visualization, 3-D printing, personal data, video games, and de novo biological design (e.g.; proteins, other molecules, synthetic biology) are some examples of the strong linkage between technology and aesthetic design.Artists, scientists, and individuals alike are exploring these new venues of information, software, personal data, biology, and virtual reality for… -
Friendship 2.0
5 May 2013 | 8:45 pmThe new mindfulness extends to every area of life. Communication and romantic relationships often exist now on much improved ground compared to even a few years ago. Now friendship is under the spotlight.The new idea is becoming more active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing tending. At least two new genre-pioneering books are on the scene: Friendships Don’t Just Happen! and The Friendship Fix. The books are aimed at women, but have broadly applicable themes. The attendant… -
Quantified Self Fourth Person Perspective and Self 2.0
28 Apr 2013 | 12:17 pmQuantified self trackers1 are having an increasingly intimate relationship with technology and data flow in mediating their experience of reality. Technology effectively opens up a new perspective (as vaunted by Nietzsche), a fourth person perspective – a new and objective view of the self, possibly on the road to creating the overself (self 2.0). An important and radical aspect of quantified self (QS) activity is its inherent linkage of the former binary of quantified and qualified in three important ways:1) The QS Act Itself The very act of QS’ing fundamentally includes both the… -
Venter's Deep Linkage: Microbiome, Synbio, Genomics, and Computing
21 Apr 2013 | 11:45 amAs usual, Craig Venter’s remarks on April 16, 2013 at UC Berkeley did not disappoint - they were inspirational, informative, and demonstrative of progress. Of note is the multidisciplinarity amongst different branches of his labs’ work, for example using synthetic DNA to perform genomic error correction in stem cell operations, genome transplantation between yeast and bacterial species, and linking microbiome activities to pathology and synthetic biology/biofuel synthesis. Some key points were:Microbiome – YASP (yet another sequencing problem) – While the human genome is currently…
-
Andart
-
Me on the death panel
16 May 2013 | 3:22 pmI participated in a panel discussion at the Oxford Literary Festival earlier this year on the topic of death and the future. Now the video is up, and you can see me talking cryonics, posthumans, gods and gadgets.... -
A mathematical model of dressing
15 May 2013 | 2:23 amHow much time should you spend selecting clothes in the morning? XKCD pointed out that for everyday tasks it might be rational to spend a few hours to shave off a minute each day: over the next 5 years the... -
Some videos
29 Apr 2013 | 12:36 pmI have not been posting for a long while. My excuse is work - far too much things to do to actually blog properly. But here is some entertainment: On the FHI YouTubechannel some of the videos from the Winter... -
The privacy of hive minds
16 Mar 2013 | 7:44 amI was interviewed for George Dvorsky's article How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes A Hive Mind? There is an interesting twist to the privacy issue: is privacy even relevant in a hive mind? Of course, the situation is different if... -
Knotted whirlpools
5 Mar 2013 | 1:27 amFinally a knotted vortex! Kleckner and Irvine describe in a Nature article how they managed to create a threefoil-shaped vortex by taking a threefoil band and accelerating it. The band has an airfoil cross-section, so when it starts moving it...
-
Overcoming Bias
-
Thought Crime Hypocrisy
21 May 2013 | 7:20 amPhilip Tetlock’s new paper on political hypocrisy re thought crimes: The ability to read minds raises the specter of punishment of thought crimes and preventive incarceration of those who harbor dangerous thoughts. … Our participants were highly educated managers participating in an executive education program who had extensive experience inside large business organizations and held diverse political views. … We asked participants to suppose that scientists had created technologies that can reveal attitudes that people are not aware of possessing but that may influence… -
Imagining Futures Past
18 May 2013 | 4:50 pmOur past can be summarized as a sequence of increasingly fast eras: animals, foragers, farmers, industry. Foragers grew by a factor of about four hundred over two million years, farmers grew by a factor of about two hundred over ten thousand years, and the industry economy has so far grown by a factor of about eight hundred over three hundred years. If this trend continues then before this era grows by another factor of a thousand, our economy should transition to another even faster growing era. I saw the latest Star Trek movie today. It struck me yet again that such stories, set two… -
High Road Doubts
16 May 2013 | 1:00 pmAccording to the intellectual norms that I learned when young, there is a high road and a low road for proposing reforms. The low road is populist and pandering – you ignore critics and try anything to get folks who could do something excited about your idea – sex appeal, group loyalties, demonizing opponents, overselling gains, whatever it takes. The high road is elitist and analytical – you carefully write up arguments, ideally with math models, randomized trials, and stat analysis, and present them to elites for evaluation. Academics usually see the low road as deceptive… -
Robot Econ Primer
14 May 2013 | 10:30 pmA recent burst of econo-blog posts on the subject of a future robot based economy mostly seem to treat the subject as if those few bloggers were the only people ever to consider the subject. But in fact, people have been considering the subject for centuries. I myself have written dozens of posts just here on this blog. So let me offer a quick robot econ primer, i.e. important points widely known among folks who have long discussed the subject, but often not quickly rediscovered by dilettantes new to the subject: AI takes software, not just hardware. It is tempting to project… -
Your Honesty Budget
14 May 2013 | 6:15 amKira Newman runs The Honesty Experiment: 30 days. Complete honesty. Can they survive it? — Follow their journey and read about honesty in life, love, and business. She interviewed me recently. One excerpt: Honesty Experiment: How do we solve this conundrum? Hanson: I think the first thing you’ll have to come to terms with is wondering why you think you want to be otherwise. We’re clearly built to be two-faced – we’re built to, on one level, sincerely want to and believe that we are following these standard norms – and at the other level, actually evading them whenever it’s in…
-
Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories
-
2 miniature spider species discovered in Giant Panda Sanctuaries of China
22 May 2013 | 7:49 amTwo new minute spider species have been discovered from the Sichuan and Chongqing, China. The tiny new spiders are both less than 2 mm in length, with Trogloneta yuensis being as little as 1.01 mm and Mysmena wawuensis measured to be the even tinier 0.75 mm, which classes it among the smallest spiders known. The two species described in the open access journal Zookeys both have a bizarre body shape with disproportionately big spherical posterior body. -
Study finds better immune system doesn't make women more attractive to men
22 May 2013 | 7:40 am(Phys.org) —A diverse team of international researchers has found that women with stronger immune systems don't necessarily have prettier faces than women whose immune system is not so strong. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, the team describes how they used photographs of women that had been vaccinated against hepatitis B to compare facial beauty. -
EU leaders look to energy for growth boost
22 May 2013 | 7:40 amEU leaders, desperate to give growth a boost, target energy policy Wednesday amid concerns a US-led revolution in shale oil and gas development will reshape the global economy and leave Europe far behind. -
Engineering students develop a super 'space stethoscope'
22 May 2013 | 7:30 amEven though astronauts receive some general medical training in preparation for a stay aboard the ISS, most of them still aren't medical professionals by any means—and with the inherent difficulties of microgravity and the relatively noisy environment inside the Station, even a simple diagnostic task like listening to a heartbeat can be a challenge. -
New study offers insight into how to best manage workaholics
22 May 2013 | 7:30 am(Phys.org) —Workaholics tend to live in extremes, with great job satisfaction and creativity on the one hand and high levels of frustration and exhaustion on the other hand. Now, a new Florida State University study offers managers practical ways to help these employees stay healthy and effective on the job.
-
The Fourth Revolution Blog
-
Good consulting or coaching is about simplifying complexity
21 May 2013 | 4:30 amWhat is actually good consulting or coaching? As a professional consultant and coach it might be time that I ponder on that question! Focus and reflection is often what people expect from external contributions Reflecting on my most successful and satisfying moments, I can relate them to AHA moments for my clients, who were discovering an entire new perspective on things. This perspective was in fact often a way to simplify their life (or their organization’s) by providing new focus. Of course, consulting and coaching are not the same thing: consulting comes with advice and solutions;… -
How to Really Being Productive in the Collaborative Age
18 May 2013 | 4:30 am“Being productive isn’t about wringing every last minute out of every day doing something or checking stuff off a to-do list and building a relentlessly efficient system that allows nothing through the cracks.” – Amber Naslund Is that the way you are productive? Now that’s quite an interesting thought, which is further developed in this blog post “Rethinking Productivity“. Amber Naslund is an entrepreneur and she’s working in social networks business. She’s quite advanced in the Fourth Revolution. So, no wonder that when she looks at… -
Focus means saying no. How often do you say no?
16 May 2013 | 4:30 amHere’s a famous quote from Steve Jobs about creativity: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other ideas that they are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.” Again and again, in my coaching practice, when people develop plan to evolve and change their life, I encounter that one very fundamental question is: “What are you ready to stop doing?” It’s a tough… -
Is national investment in R&D a fallacy for economic growth ?
14 May 2013 | 4:30 amIt is a commonly held belief that to create innovation, and hence economic growth and competitiveness, governments and companies should invest in R&D. R&D expenditure is an important indicator used at political level to evaluate the competitiveness of economies. The first powered flight by the Wright brothers However, there is plenty of substantial evidence, at least anecdotal, that the most impacting and most fundamental inventions were rarely created by government or centralized spending. For example, computers created in a garage; or powered flight invented by self-taught bicycle… -
What Makes Great Organizations and Individuals different?
11 May 2013 | 4:30 amAccording to Simon Sinek, what makes the difference for great organizations – and great leaders – is that they know their ‘Why”. It is from their purpose that they derive how they do things and what they do in detail. All individuals and organizations know their “What”. Some organizations know their “How”, but very rarely their “Why”. Watch Simon Sinek give a great explanation with fantastic examples related to the Wright Brothers versus the establishment, and other great examples in this TED speech (if you’re a hurry, watch…
-
Futurist.com: Futurist Speaker Glen Hiemstra
-
The future of higher education
17 May 2013 | 1:33 pmAll across America two things are happening about this time of year. First, graduates of colleges and universities are walking to the stage to receive their diplomas. Second, high school seniors are confirming their plans to attend, or not to attend, various colleges and universities. This year both of these traditions are fraught with uncertainties that are high by historical standards. Let me explain. First, for full disclosure I spent my first career in higher education, on the admissions staff and then the faculty of one university, and subsequently teaching for two other universities… -
Glen Hiemstra Programs on iTunes
17 May 2013 | 1:17 pmI was on iTunes the other day and noticed that two free podcasts in which I was interviewed are available there. One is a fireside chat, audio only, conducted by Lisa Haneberg. The other is a 53-minute video interview that was part of a series called Future Talks, with the interview conducted by Roger Simon. To download the podcasts just go to the iTunes store and search for Glen Hiemstra. In coming weeks we at Futurist.com will be launching a successor program to the Future Talks series, called Future Conversations. I will be doing the interviews this time, focusing on interesting people and… -
Safeguarding your child’s financial future
17 May 2013 | 2:30 amGuest blog by Aimee Claire Planning for a child’s financial future used to be considered a luxury, with only the wealthiest families able to provide for their life and education through trust funds or estates. Today, tools for safeguarding the financial security of a child are available to everyone, and parents will want to take advantage of these many tools and schemes throughout their child’s life, often starting from birth. There are several reasons why it is wise to plan for a child’s financial future. Many parents simply want to save for their child’s educational future,… -
The Future of Gen Y: an interview with the co-Editor of Share or Die
16 May 2013 | 10:41 amWe are the time when the future begins to be passed fully into the hands of a new generation, in this case the Millennial Generation, young people born basically between 1980 and 2000, and thus now ranging in age from the middle teens to their early 30′s. Two of them are Neal Gorenflo and Malcolm Harris, co-founder and Life/Art Editor, respectively, at Shareable Magazine. Now they have collaborated in producing an intriguing new book, Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis. In the book they have collected the stories of a number of millennial gen young… -
Be a Superhero…For Real
7 May 2013 | 6:00 amI love superheroes. I always have. That’s why I was so happy to hear last year that I could be one in real life. Thanks to an exciting game called Cyberhero League anyone can be a hero. At last year’s State of the Arts conference, Dr. Dana Klisanin presented the idea of merging philanthropy and gaming into one engaging, adventurous package called the Cyberhero League. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to find the idea appealing. Last year Cyberhero League was selected as a winner in the World Future Society’s Beta Launch Tech competition. Great! Everyone thinks this game is…
-
XYZ University
-
Crowdsource your mentors: hareness networks for career support and leadership
19 May 2013 | 4:30 amImage source: http://www.fundraising.co.uk/ In the face of the ever-changing knowledge economy; now more than ever, there is no manual for a successful career (however one chooses to define success). After nearly 10 years in the working world, I’ve unconsciously sought and received mentorship from a “crowd” of engaging, successful and extremely generous people. Traditional mentor model The traditional mentor model involves one-on-one guidance where a senior/seasoned professional provides advice, guidance and advocacy (for the career of) a younger/emerging professional. A few years back… -
Conquering the digital divide
17 May 2013 | 4:30 amAccording to research by Pew Internet, 55% of U.S. adult cell phone owners use their mobile phones to access the internet, nearly double the rate from three years ago. And 31% of American adults own a tablet computer. This means that more than half of your members may interact with your association while they’re on the go. Yet the average association is still behind the digital curve when it comes to being mobile friendly. The following guidelines will help you conquer the digital divide: Research your members’ online habits. It’s hard to plan a digital strategy without… -
Recruiting new members? How’s your pitch?
15 May 2013 | 9:13 amWhen you’re interacting with prospective new members, you need to have a convincing pitch. I’m sure you’ve all heard some bad ones. I know I have. The last association I didn’t join didn’t have a pitch; I’m not even sure they had a purpose. If they did, they weren’t communicating it to me, and I certainly wasn’t buying. Naturally, a good pitch includes a strategy for delivering it, how and when. Listen to them What am I looking for in an organization? What’s missing from my professional life that I’d be willing to pay money for? You don’t… -
Forget the sale: Create an experience with Gen Y
6 May 2013 | 4:45 amGen Y does not want to be sold to. But, that does not mean they don’t want to buy things. Quite the opposite, in fact. This generation spends $200 billion annually. Millennials not only want to buy things they feel good about, they want to talk about them, tell others to buy them too. You want them talking about you online. To get that, you need to engage them. Sounds simple, right? When it comes to Gen Y, you need to forget about the sale and create an experience. Create an appealing online environment Website Tech savvy Gen Y is going to be shopping online, on your website, from their… -
Happy together: The value Gen X and Y bring to your association
3 May 2013 | 4:00 amImage credit: Wikipedia Last time we were together, we discussed the disconnect between Baby Boomer centric Associations and Gen X and Gen Y membership recruits. Mainly, X and Y are not joining Baby Boomer centric associations. All is not lost, however. When it comes to relating to X and Y, we don’t have to abandon ship. X and Y do bring significant value to associations: Gen X and Gen Y offer flexibility and the willingness to try new things. They are usually amenable to taking on different responsibilities – whether it’s part of their job duties or not – in order to gain…
-
Singularitarian
-
futurescope: Meet Eesha Kare, who invented a device that...
21 May 2013 | 10:55 amfuturescope: Meet Eesha Kare, who invented a device that charges cell phone battery in under 30 seconds Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, Calif. received the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award of $50,000. With the rapid adoption of portable electronics, Eesha recognized the crucial need for energy-efficient storage devices. She developed a tiny device that fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds. Eesha’s invention also has potential applications for car batteries. [read more @HuffPost] -
Wi-Fi Network Breaks Speed Record
20 May 2013 | 3:50 pmWi-Fi Network Breaks Speed Record : Think your network is fast? Getting a gigabyte-sized movie over your local wireless network to your hard drive in a few seconds is old hat. Now there’s a network that can push a 2-hour, high-definition movie to a computer a mile away in less time than it takes to read a single word. At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, a new record has been set: 40GB per second over a distance of about .6 of a mile. That’s like sending 10 high-def feature films. -
Stanford physicists develop revolutionary low-power polariton laser
20 May 2013 | 1:58 pmStanford physicists develop revolutionary low-power polariton laser: Stanford physicists have created a new method of producing coherent matter beams. The new laser system would use a hundredth the power of conventional lasers and could one day be used in many places from consumer goods to quantum computers. -
Advance in nanotech gene sequencing technique
20 May 2013 | 11:17 amAdvance in nanotech gene sequencing technique: The allure of personalized medicine has made new, more efficient ways of sequencing genes a top research priority. One promising technique involves reading DNA bases using changes in electrical current as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole. -
Drone-Vision Rifle Goes On Sale For $22K
19 May 2013 | 9:06 pmDrone-Vision Rifle Goes On Sale For $22K: The most inaccurate component of a rifle is the human behind the trigger, but starting Wednesday hunters can turn to drone-inspired vision for a little help. Provided they have $22,000 on hand for a new rifle, that is.
