Phil and Stephen welcome Brian Wang of Next Big Future for a readout on the recent Techonomy conference at Lake Tahoe.

techonomy (te-kän'-uh-mē) n. [tech(nology) + (ec)onomy]
organized activities related to the invention, development, production, distribution and consumption of technology-enhanced goods and services that a society uses to address the problem of scarcity and to enhance the quality of life.

About our guest:

Brian Wang is a futurist who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 7:42 PM | Permalink

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.

It all sounds plausible enough -- use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor...get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we're sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.

The technique's ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington's disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.

Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:

"I think RNAi could work for anything," [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. "But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good."

See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 6:23 AM | Permalink

At H+ Magazine, Brad Templeton outlines the case for giving computers a privileged status regarding our personal information not unlike that afforded to attorneys or priests.

If we're afraid our computers will betray us, we won't be able to use them fully. The harm incurred by that loss must be balanced against the benefits of catching more crooks. We're going to use our computers a lot more than we use our doctors, lawyers and priests.

It might be argued, in fact, that we already use our computers a great deal more. And in dealing with lawyers, doctors and priests, there is a real conversation with a human being and we're typically fully alert about what we say — and of the risks of saying it. With computers, we are usually casual. They are like intimate family. Not too far in the future, they will be implanted in our bodies. For some, such as deaf people with cochlear implants, computers are already connected to their brains. If you can't trust the computer implanted in your skull, who can you trust? Thanks to this familiarity, the criminals among us seem happy to let their computers record as they commit their crimes. Often, they are just not thinking about it. Thus, we might feel that while the confessional becomes almost valueless without clerical privilege, the computer is only modestly diminished.

But it is diminished. Therefor, it seems that some level of privilege should be granted to us and our interactions with our most trusted technologies.

I like the idea. It certainly seems that the recent trend has been towards greater and greater police power, however, and I can't help but wonder how fiercely the criminal justice system would fight putting such a standard in place?

UPDATE: Sort of related: 10 Fallacies About Web Privacy

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:58 PM | Permalink

On a special extended 90-minute edition of FastForward Radio, Foresight Institute co-founder and president Christine Peterson joins us to talk about her upcoming conference on Personalized Life Extension. Register here -- use the discount code FASTFORWARDRADIO for a $100 discount. Plus, George Dvorsky and PJ Manney help us round out our recap of the Singularity Summit.

About Our Guests

Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.

PJ Manney is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She is an occasional guest host on FastForward Radio as well as being our official Hollywood correspondent.

Canadian futurist, consultant and award winning blogger, George Dvorsky writes and speaks extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology -- particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:34 PM | Permalink

...where science, futurism, and anything else Stephen finds interesting are

thrown together in an informational stew for your consumption.

Enjoy!

Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephentgo

• George Dvorsky: Scientists successfully use human stem cells to treat Parkinson's in rodents.

  Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

• The Moral Turing Test?

  Are the decisions made by an AI at least as moral as an average person? One way of determining this would be with a blind Turing-type test.

• Engadget: Flobi robot head realistic enough to convey emotions, not realistic enough to give children nightmares (hopefully).

  Why cross the uncanny valley when you can go around it?

• Claytronics. An early implementation of utility fog?

• Wired Science: Awesome timelapse of Milky Way and last week's Perseid meteor shower at Joshua Tree:

  Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

• Looking for love in Alderaan places? Sci-fi-themed speed dating.

• Brian Wang: Start up hopes to Reduce Cost of Batteries for Electric Cars by 85% by 2015

• North Korea sends first tweet.

  My guess: "get me outta here!"

• Infrared laser shown to quicken heart rate, gives hope for ultra-small pacemakers

• Half.com Offers iPhone App to Find Cheap Textbooks On The Go

  There is a huge need for this. Peer-to-peer selling of textbooks would have eliminated a particularly greedy set of middlemen during my education.

• Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone ...in 1910.

  He predicted the device would:

  • Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

  • Either ring or vibrate in your pocket.

  • Transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

  • Allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

  • Allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

• Movie critic Roger Ebert is a big fan of paper books:

  Every home I've ever lived in has had a Library. When I lived in one room, I put my bed in the Library.

  And he looks with a somewhat jaundiced eye at ebooks. He had a series of tweets mocking their incorporeal character:

  I've read my e-book of Shakespeare so many times since graduating college in 1964 that look how lovingly the pages are thumbed.

  Here's my old e-book "10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories," and written inside "To my boy Roger from Daddy.

  I don't disagree with Ebert's point. A physical book can be a special thing. I wouldn't throw out a signed copy of "The Stand" if I were given the ebook.

  But what avid reader doesn't love having a library in his pocket at all times? (see also: "5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books")

  When "Fellowship of the Ring" was released there was zero chance that I was going to wait to see it on DVD. That movie needed the big screen. And while I loved "Dodgeball," it is just as funny at home as the theater. It loses little in the transition to the smaller screen.

  Likewise, some books seem to cry out for paper. Imagine a dark and stormy night. You decide to read "The Raven." Do you reach for a dusty tome... or your laptop? Easy choice. But does a tree really need to die so that I can read the latest Patterson thriller? Probably not.

  And if your e-Reader doesn't feel real enough, you can always give it a vintage book cover.

• Lungs Grown on Scaffolds Breathe After Transplantation in Rats
  
  How to Grow Lung Tissue
  Uploaded by teknoport. - Technology reviews and science news videos.

• Article asks "is consumerism robbing our creativity?" The author suggests that too much choice is a bad thing.

  But bad for who? I don't see paralyzed shoppers at the mall and supermarket. I see people making choices. Choice is good. Competition is good. Consumerism supports creativity.

  There's a much more interesting way of looking at this question. In his recent TED talk, Larry Lessig states that we have just gone through a period of read-only culture - consumers just listening to the radio, not singing and making their own music as they had throughout history. The means of music production and distribution were centralized.

  But, Lessig argued, read-write culture is battling back. Every kid with a lap-top possesses a recording studio and a distribution system.

• One square meter of sunlight is equivalent to about one horsepower.

  Matt Ridley - no huge fan of solar power in its current subsidized form - said in his book "The Rational Optimist," that...

  ...once solar panels can be mass-produced at $200 per square metre and with an efficiency of 12 per cent, they could generate the equivalent of a barrel of oil for about $30. Then, instead of drilling for $40 oil, everybody will be rushing to cover their roofs, and large part of Algeria and Arizona with cheap solar panels... it would take about one-third of Arizona to supply Americans with all their energy.

• Closing in on the Solar Singularity: Arthur Nozik, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and professor at the University of Colorado told PhysOrg.com. "There is a theoretical possibility based on thermodynamic calculations of increasing the efficiency of present day solar cells by a very significant amount of 50-100%. In addition, quantum dots could lower the capital cost of solar cell production in terms of cost per unit area."

  Increasig the efficiency of solar cells while bringing down their costs will make the cost effective in more and more places and in new applications.

• Ben Goertzel's new H+ Magazine article on AGI, long-lived flies, antagonistic pleiotropy and immortality.

• Canadian librarian leads worldwide digital revolt for free knowledge (64 flags)

  It began when an academic database proposed increasing the fee it charges the University of Prince Edward Island by 120 per cent.

  Mark Leggott snapped.

  "The world's knowledge is increasingly being held to ransom and available only to those who can pay the fees," Leggott told the Star on Tuesday.

  He announced in a campus-wide letter that as chief librarian he had cancelled UPEI's subscription to Web of Science and was launching "an effort to create a free and open index to the world's scholarly literature called 'Knowledge For All'."

  Then he contacted librarians in Canada and around the world.

• Google's MapReduce algorithm turns smart phones into a self-contained cloud computing environment.

  The point of this exercise is to create a system that allows the MapReduce magic of distributed processing of large amounts of data to happen closer to the data itself. By eliminating the need to first transmit the data over a relatively slow wireless network, it can, in some situations, be processed even faster than if it were first uploaded, in total, to a remote server. This, despite the fact that the remote server would be much faster than the processor on any one phone.

• "You Have Reached My Mind, Please Leave a Message."

  Our current state of wireless communication is, already, high friction telepathy.

  It seems a safe bet that we will work to reduce this friction in every way possible.

• Book "Power to Save the World" - how the author morphed from nuke-fearing into proponent who believes we need nuclear power.

• Via Brian Wang's "Next Big Future:" Scientists from the University of Cambridge are talking about a "Nuclear Renaissance."

  They suggest:

  • develop new 'fast reactors' could be developed that could use uranium approximately 15 times more efficiently

  • develop reactors with replaceable parts so that they can last in excess of 70 years instead of 40-50 years

  • Flexible nuclear technologies could be an option for countries that do not have an established nuclear industry, suggest the scientists. One idea involves ship-borne civil power plants that could be moored offshore, generating electricity for nearby towns and cities. This could reduce the need for countries to build large electricity grid infrastructures, making it more cost effective for governments to introduce a nuclear industry from scratch.

  • build small, modular reactors that never require refuelling. These could be delivered to countries as sealed units, generating power for approximately 40 years. At the end of its life, the reactor would be returned to the manufacturer for decommissioning and disposal.

  • Thorium is mentioned as having potential to become an important nuclear fuel.

  • Accelerator-Driven Sub-critical Reactors are mentioned as an option

  • Nuclear fusion is mentioned. Fusion-fission hybrids and fusion-driven fission fuel breeders are a route to early commercialization of fusion energy.

• Oh, the Places You'll Go!: Neptune's 'dead zones' hold more rocks than asteroid belt.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This very exciting event is just a bit more than a month away. Says organizer Christine Peterson:

Join us for two days of practical, realistic exploration of what each of us can do to slow individual aging and live the longest, healthiest, most active life possible.

A terrific lineup of speakers includes Esther Dyson, Peter Thiel, and Greg Fahy as well as some folks we've been fortunate enough to have as guests on FastForward Radio: Terry Grossman, Sonia Arrison, Gregory Benford, and of course Christine -- with whom we'll also be chatting on our upcoming podcast.

The Conference will be October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. I personally can't make it to California that weekend but I'm hoping we get a Speculist regular to cover it for us.

You can be that person! Register here. Get a $100 off the cost of registration by using the discount code SPECULIST.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Why look for ways to increase human intelligence?

Here's why:

Much more of this sort of thing here. I assume Hans Jenny is speaking metaphorically about sound in his opening remarks. I don't see how literal "sound" could have brought matter into shape in the airless void of the Big Bang.

Here's more:

We have a lot to learn about what we are really doing when we observe the world around us. Our perceptions are defined by, but not always limited to, the way our senses work. We see sights, hear sounds, smell odors. Seeing sounds is a small glimpse into a completely different world, one where we can taste colors, feel fragrances, hear textures. (Apparently there are some people who already experience something like what I'm describing.)

Of course, even these ideas are just a simple mix-and-match of sensory experiences we already have. A true superintelligence might experience phenomena via senses for which we currently have no point of reference. Imagine experiencing the speed of numbers or getting high on symmetry or falling in love with gravity. Imagine that, then dial up the weirdness by an order of magnitude or two.

What will we learn about complexity, even the very nature of existence, when these new channels are opened up to us?

Personally, I can't wait.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:17 AM | Permalink

We did our special show on Saturday from the Singularity Summit. We'll be back next Wednesday at the usual time.

Meanwhile if you need a futuristic fix, may I recommend this blast from a year ago?

I was telling a friend about Anita Goel's rather provocative conclusion to the talk she gave Sunday morning, in which she asked:

What if information, consciousness, and mind are something pervasive, more primal, and even more fundamental than matter, energy or even space time?

Not a question that a lot of people would be comfortable asking with the likes of Michael Vassar and Eliezer Yudkowsky in the room. What I wanted to make clear to my friend was that a lot of Singularity Summit types would reject this sort of speculation because of the hint of mysticism, not because Singularity Summit types shy away from radical cosmological ideas.

For example...are we living in the Matrix? (And BTW, if we are, Anita's question could be answered in the affirmative without a smidge of mysticism.)

Anyhow, I gave the show a listen myself and something occured to me -- modesty aside, this is some awesome radio (thanks to the guests, of course.). Our new special series will not be a repeat of The World Transformed -- there's currently no reason to repeat it. The series we did still stands up.

On to new topics this fall.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:09 PM | Permalink

The Singularity Summit was an exciting two days. I had a great time meeting up with old friends and making new ones. I hope I was able to convey a little of the energy and give a glimpse of some of the amazing ideas that were covered.

So now what?

Well, being in that environment helps to remind me of why we do what we do at the Speculist. We live in an era of unprecedented change, and it's a great privilege to be even a small part of that. In reporting and commenting on this change as it occurs, The Speculist and FastForward Radio are here to get the word out, to describe both the opportunities and risks we face as we move towards this new horizon.

So now what happens is that we keep on doing what we do, only (I hope) we do more of it and we do it better. I've been working in the background over the past couple of months to give this site a new look and feel. I'm hoping to have that wrapped up very soon.

More importantly, Stephen has gone Twitter on us in a huge way, which has given us a serious and much-needed infusion of new future content. Keep it up, buddy.

I realize that I've been waffling about our special summer-now-autumn series on the podcast, but I am digging in and waffling no more. Even if the website doesn't get finished soon, even if we run into a period where things are hard to schedule -- no matter what -- we're moving ahead with a new series of shows updating and amplifying our World Transformed series last summer. I am outlining this series now and will begin scheduling guests and promoting the new shows as soon as Stephen and I have had the chance to confer.

I really want FastForward Radio to be a weekly Singularity Summit (or H+ conference, or Foresigh Vision Weekend) for those who are unable to attend or who have not yet attended such an event. And I want the Speculist to be a daily version.

If we can pass on to those reading and lsitening even a small portion of what occurs at such events, we'll be doing our job.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 4:29 PM | Permalink

6:15 James Randi

A few angles to consider in your pursuit of the singularity.

Talking about the Singularity is like Aristotle talking about interstellar travel.

How do we know things?

Human beings are good at tricking, fooling, and bamboozling each other.

Randi shows that the "microphone" he is holding is really an electric razor and his "eyeglasses" are actually empty frames. And yet we have to make assumptions. We would be catatonic otherwise.

Think critically about the world as it is presented. We don't debunk. We start not assuming that the thing is bunk. We take a scientific approach assuming that we don't know.

Great story about scientists at Livermore labs fooled by a simple magic trick.

Another story: MIT physicist takes David Copperfield's "flying" illusion as being done with superconductivity.

Fooled by his own education.

We are often not as bright as we think we are. If we still can't distingish between fantasy and reality, how can we undertake creating greater than human intelligence?

Favorite terms -- vibrations and quantum. Watch for Woo Woos to adopt the terminology of the singularity.

He does a mentalist trick -- shows how easily we are fooled. It's not that people are stupid, they just aren't informed.

Two great clips from the Tonight Show, exposing a tv faith healer and "psychic surgeons."

5:35 PM Irene Pepperberg

Nonhuman Intelligence: Where we are and where we're headedwq

Animals, a very complex relationship: friends, property, competitors, metaphors /icons.

Animal robots: people would feel guilty when turning them off.

Key question: why is Pluto a dog while Goofy is a humanoid? Americans spend $46 billion per year on pets.

We don't yet really understand how intelligent animals are.

Selective breeding causes a host of problems: thoroughbred race horses with heart problems, dog breeds with hip displasia.

Amazing videos of a crow modifying a tool to get a treat, a parrot counting objects and identifying colors.

We don't yet know how intelligent animals are. Should we really be augmenting animal intelligence until we have a better handle on that?

Currently we use animals on a lot of ways. Making them more intelligent puts all of those into question. Or do we really want to takeon super-intelligent squirrels?

5:00 PM Jose Cordeiro

The Future of Energy and the Energy of the Future

Interesting background -- political exile from Venezuala. Part of the UN MIllenium Council. Teaching fellow at Singularity University.

Energy is the biggest industry in the world. It is the industry that rules the world. Biggest challenge / opportunity facing us -- how to make solar energy affordable for humanity.

Peak Oil, if it happens, is not relavent. We had Peak Whale Oil in the 19th century and yet managed to push on.

90% correlation between temperature fluctuations on Mars and on Earth. Should be taken into consideration in climate models.

Club of Rome: Limits to Growth. Was wrong because it did not take technological change into consideration.

We have gone through energy waves from lumber to coal to oil. At each stage we produce less carbon and use more hydrogen.

Buckminster Fuller talked about creating a global energy network. Still a long way off, but wireless electricity and other developments will bring it closer.

Will have space elevator in the next 30 years.

Craig Venter's bacteria will eat CO2 and excrete 99 octane gasoline. From fossil hydrocarbons to living carbohydrates. A major phase shift!

Two major experiments currently goin on with nuclear fusion. One in France, one at Livermore labs. Right now fusion works, but it's not economical. It's a matter of time before we get a handle on the basic process that powers the universe.

We currently use about 16 Terawatts. If we used only 1% of 1% of the energy available from the sun we would solve all the world's energy problems.Right now solar energy is growing exponentially.

Japan plans by the year 2030 to power Tokyo with space-based solar.

We need cheap energy to solve the world's problems. In 30 years, we may have hundreds of times as much energy as we currently do -- for free.

Old Chinese saying: "Do not blame the darkness. Light up the world."

4:25 PM David Hanson

Why Characters Are Key to Friendly A.I.

We are hardwired to form relationships. We are hardwired to learn and grow via relationships.

Part of our intelligence is knowing how to respond to persons. Modeling people through robots and simulation helps us to understand the dynamics of nonverbal communication, which at the neuroscience level is not yet thoroughly understood. Having these characters among us as our friends will build trust with these emerging intelligences.

Defining character. Has to have:

Agency
The illusion of reality
Values / empathy

Currently character robots don't have as much intelligence as we would like.

Creating these robots is a mixture of engineering, art, and cognitive and neuroscience. Still driven largely by intuition because we don't yet fully understand the dynamics of the relationships people form.

Consumer demand will drive the development of good machines -- machines that are part of the human family.

David has developed a material called "Frubber" that makes the faces of these robots much more realistic.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 5:39 PM | Permalink

3:20 PM Tooby, Goertzel, Yudkowsky & Legg panel

Narrow and General Intelligence

Missed this session.

2:40 PM John Tooby

Can discovering the design principles governing natural intelligence unleash breakthroughs in artificial intelligence?

Opening comment -- "It's a pleasure to be among the intellectually adventerous."

All the pieces in place for realizing the enlightenment goal of establishing a rigorous natural science of human nature.

There are two ways of studying the brain -- one as a physical system. It's an amzaingly vast, daunting system from that perspective. The other approach is to map it at a computational level -- look at it from the standpoint of its functions.

All better than random capabilities in the brain reflect problem-solving strategies developed through selection. We need to do research into how these strategies became brain functions as a guide to developing AI.

2:00 PM Shane Legg

Universal measures of intelligence

Intelligence -- are we concerned with what's going on inside or can we accept intelligence strictly through observing external behavior. Plus, are we interested in human or ideal intelligence?

Shane takes the perspective of ideal intelligence as viewed from external behavior.

Definitions of Intelligence

-- Intelligent systems are expected to work and work well in many different environments.

--A cluster of cognitive abilites that lead to successfull adaptation in a wide range of environments

-- Act appropriately in an uncertain environment

--Generates adaptive behavior

Shane's synthesis:

Property of an agent that interacts with its environment so as to successfully achieve goals across a wide range of environments.

+ Occam's Razor

Together you get a formula for intelligence.

Shane shows a mathematical formula for intelligence.

It is formally defined, captures the essence of many informal definitioons, orders simple agents correctly, it is continuous, and it is non anthropocentric.

The goal is to use the formula to measure intelligence in the real world.

Shane is now taking the equation and implementing it to acsertain AIQ -- algorithmic intelligence quotient.Initial tests are encouraging -- providing exactly the results he would expect to see on evaluations of algorithms.

If you can't measure it, it's not science. Need solid measures in place in order to track progress towards artifiicial intelligence.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 3:07 PM | Permalink

11:50 AM Anita Goel

Information Processing & Physical Intelligence in Nanomachines that Read/Write DNA

Convergence of fundamental physics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

About 15 years ago got interested in the reading and writing machines in DNA. There are many mysteries about this process -- how is it modulated by the environment? Is it a complex adaptive system? Got interested in the physics of this machine and this process. How can we control that machine? Could we introduce precision control?

A divergence. Medicine is practiced at the level of chemistry and microbiology. Physicists don't know much about physics. How can these two worlds be brought together?

Can we develop a conceptual framework for developing nano-tools -- knobs and controls to harness these nanomachines for a number of practical applications?

Precision controls have been introduced. Applications:
Converting energy efficiently at the nanoscale
Storing information in DNA
Computing

Gene RADAR -- enables real-time point of care diagnosis. Handheld pathology lab -- take a sample and get a result.

Several nanomachines within DNA. One of these uses a template to replicate the sequence.

Tools for single molecule detection and manipulation.

Anita closes her talk with some audience provocation / interaction.

Are nanomachines intelligent?

Audience answer: No.

Nanomotor might be thought of as a Maxwell Demon? Second law of thermodynamics -- we go from order to disorder. Can we go the other way?

On the nanoscale, you can't get a free lunch but you can get a cheaper lunch.

Feyman calculated in 1999 -- if you stored all of human information into DNA you could store it in a box less than a millimeter thick. These nanomotors make 10/15th computational steps to take one step forward.

Intelligence = Information extracted / Information Present

Need a new framework that brings matter, energy, and consciousness into one framework.

Life, mind, and consciousness are emergent phenomena -- get enough complexity and you get those things.

What if information, consciousness, and mind are something pervasive, more primal, and even more fundamental than matter, energy or even space time?

Refernces to John Archibald Wheeler -- It from Bit.

11:15 AM Ellen Heber-Katz

The MRL mouse - how it regenerates and how we might do the same

Some mice can grow back more parts than others. Have found some mice that can grow back limbs, restore holes punched in ears.

Have looked at genetics. Have looked at the biology. Inflmation is key. Some part of the anti inflmatory reponse is related to the regeneration process. Anti-inflammatory drugs block the regeneration process

MRL mouse has mitochondria sitting on top of the nucleus. Resembles a stem cell.

Ear cells are very rapidly growing.

Have identified what may be the regeneration gene. Does regenration lead to immortality? Not currently, the MRL mouse dies of tumors related to an inflammatory autoimmune disease. Now working on separating tumors and inflammation from regeneration.

Question: why did we evolve away from regeneration -- went with scar tissue instead? It is incorrectly believed that scarring is faster. May have to do with evolving away from the autoimmune / inflammatory problems.

10:40 AM Lance Becker

Modifying the Boundary between Life and Death

We used to have a clear bright line bwetween life and death. What we see now is an increasingly flexible boundary between the two.

We are "death" phobic. People don't like the word -- don't like to talk about it. But if we're going to prolong life, we need to understand death better.

What is death?

We don't know much about it. We don't understand its processes very well.

A more fundamental question -- when is death? Did research some time ago on heart cells. Deprived them of oxygen for an hour -- looking for when they died. Cells deprived of oxygen did not die. Cells died when oxygen was restored to them.

This occurs with brain cells and many other types of cells in the body.

This is intentional death -- it's a very active process. Mitochondria are key to this. We know that their function is energy. But apparently they also have a cell death switch built in. When you have no oxygen in your body, electrons build up in the mitochondria. When oxygen is reintroduced, the presence of those electrons is the signal to throw the death switch.

Cooling helps inhibit that process -- "A cold heart can save your brain." But cooling is a very time-dependent process. And our coolants aren't good.

Working on developing a "slurry" to cool patients in a matter of minutes. Normally take about 8 hours to cool a person down.

"Mostly dead is slightly alive."

That's a good summary of what we know about the boundary between life and death.

Uncontrolled reperfusion -- no oxygen for an hour. Lethal for animals. Controlled reperfusion with a cocktail -- 6/6 test subjects survive.

Emergency room doctors trying to save lives are all about restoring oxygen to all parts of the body that aren't getting it.

The border between life and death can be modified. We don't know what the time window is. It could be that there is no point of death. We ned to understand and monitor mitochondria better -- key to preventing death from many dieases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer).

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:47 AM | Permalink

9:00 AM Eliezer Yudkowsky

Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

Opposition to life extension has a long pedigree. From pious clergymen saying it was wrong to cure smallpox because it's God's perogative to smite whom He wishes to a recent (tragic) case about a British couple delayed from having a second child who would be a bone marrow match and would have offered hope for their terminal son.

Death doesn't make life meaningful. Life makes life meaningful.

"You know what makes this sunset beautiful? The fact that one day I will no longer exist."

Yeah, right.

If no one had ever heard of old age or death, would anybody buy the "benefits" of it? Absolutely not.

Life doesn't have to complicated. Sometimes the obvious answer is right.We need simplified Humanism.

Typical: Curing disease is good, unless genes are involved
Simplified: Curing disease is good.

Shape matters not: fishes and chickens are non-persons because they're differently brained, not differently shaped. (We wouldn't eat Yoda, for example.)

Simplified humanism -- embrace the goal of success rather than making excuses for failure.

In the hunter-gatherer age, 15-65% of men died violently. 100 million people died in wars in the 20th century, if we were still killing each other at the hunter-gatherer rate, it would have been 2 billion. (Stepehn Pinker.)

Futurism: Rational first, then positive.

1. What you want doesn't control how the world is.
2. There's no destiny that helps you.
3. Magic doesn't work.
4. You can't just make stuff up.

Positive futurism doesn't mean foretelling a golden age. It means that "a much nicer place to live" is still on the table as a stake.

Technophile -- technology is good
Technophobe -- technology is bad
Technonormal -- talk of golden age and catastrophe is childish
Technovolatile -- most likely scenario is a godlen age or a catastrophe (not "normailty')

Eliezer is a technovolatile. Most serious thinkers on these subjects are. They are the heirs of the Enlightenment.

9:40 AM Ramez Naam

The Digital Biome

Massive climate change is a possibility. Not the projections of the IPCC, but consequences of enough warming to release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. We don't know it will happen, but it is a possibility and one that we should take precautions against.

Fish catch is leveling off. The amount of effort required to bring fish in is going up dramatically. Boats are going ten times the distance they used to go and bringing back fewer fish.

Fresh water. Major North American aquifer dropping fast.

Food yields have been mostly good news. In 08 there was a major spike in food prices (due partly to push to biofuels.)

Endangered species. Each species is a source of information -- we're losing data.

Peak oil. We'll run out eventually. May be occuring now, may not be until mid century.

Bio science is now digital. Shows us a picture of a bio sequencing center -- looks like a data center.

George Church wants to sequence 100,000 genomes by 2020 -- thinking too small. It should cost about ten bucks by then. It will be possible to do millions.

If the genome is digital, can we edit it? Short answer -- yes.

Benefits:

Energy -- current biofeuls are not efficient. Craig venter is creating designer organisms that will produce highly efficient and clean fuels. Turning alage into ethanol or hydrogen. Algae doesn't compete with food crops -- uses waste water. By 2013, DARPA plans to produce biofuels on site for the entire US armed forces fleet. Tobacco virus has been modified to create photovoltaice cells via tobacco.

Increase the photosynthetic capabilites of the planet by 6%, offsets our Co2 increases.

Genetically modified salmon -- grows to maturity much faster.

Pathogens are moving more quickly, but we're moving more quickly as well.

Direct solar energy looking more and more promising. Unlocking more energy is the key to solving the water problem -- we can desalinate the ocean to get more fresh water.

There is no guarantee of success. How do we make it more likely that we get a good future, not one of the many bad ones? US energy R&D spending $1.8 billion; defense R&D $78 billion (some of which does trickle down to energy.)

Meanwhile, we spend a trillion a year on energy.

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5:20 Terry Sejnowski

Reverse-engineering brains is within reach

Fascinating description of how a software program taught itself to play backgammon using a very simple learning heuristic. The program went from rudimentary skills to grand master status -- similar to IBM's Deep Blue, but without teams of programmers hard-coding game strategies into it. It taught itself.

This learning ability has broad application across a host of technologies: soon we will have a cognitive power grid, cognitive cars, congitive homes, etc.

5:50 Dennis Bray

What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't

Bray argues that the information encoding capability of RNA and other proteins far surpasses what is typically found in even very advanced robotic systems. We have a vast, he argues "almost infinite" (but that seems excessive) capability to store data.

If true, it still seems to me that Kurzweil's exponential processing growth eventually closes this gap.

6:15 Sejnowski/Bray debate

Will we soon realistically emulate biological systems?

I had to miss this one in order to do me Steven mann interview and video. I'm guessing they disagreed.

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2:00 Steven Mann

Humanistic Intelligence Augmentation and Mediation

Steven Mann is a cyborg. As we watch him speak we're getting a live feed from the video camera mounted on his eyeglasses. He's been wearing computers for 30 years.

He is demoing the Eyetap (one of his many inventions), a camera that enables him to continuosly broadcast more or less excatly what he is seeing at all times.

He describes what he does as "Glogging" (abbreviated from "cyborg logging.") Unlike a blog which provides digital, discrete data a Glog presents continuous, streaming data.

Now a mini-concert played on the hydrolophone, a musical instrument invented by Mann:

"World's first musical instrument that produces sound from vibrations in in water itself, and also uses water as the user interface."

This kind of pure streaming experience is a brief glimps into the world of the undigital singularity -- which I don't get, but it sounds kind of cool. In any case, it's a fascinating merger of science, engineering, and art.

3:00 Mandayam Srinivasan

Enhancing our bodies and evolving our brains

Haptic interfaces -- touch interfaces. Showed a video of deaf/blin individuals trained via a methodology called TADOMA. Amazing, seeing a person with no eyesight or hearing having a conversation with someone, able to "listen" to what the other person is saying just by touching her face.

Haptics applications:

Virtual reality -- using real touch to operate in artificial environments

Teleoperation -- using real touch to operate in real envionments via computer interfaces

3:25 Brian Litt

The past, present and future of brain machine interfaces.

I sat this and the next one out as I was putting some audio together for tonight's podcast. But From Brian's abstract:

Brain-computer interfaces (aka Brain-Machine Interfaces or Neuroprosthetics), long of interest to science fiction writers and creative thinkers, became a government funded research discipline in the United States beginning in the 1970s. The vision of its architects at DARPA and the National Science Foundation was to restore motor control to soldiers with brain, spinal cord and limb injuries, programs that continue to flourish today. Early devices sampled a variety of neural signals, including scalp EEG and evoked potentials, though the first dramatic successes arose ~ 20 years later from more modern technologies that allowed completely paralyzed (or "locked in") patients to operate computers or move robotic arms using nothing but their thoughts. These systems record multi-unit neuronal activity from small, targeted brain regions, compute transfer functions to transduce this activity into movement control signals, and conduct it to "effectors," such as computer cursors or robotic limbs. What has followed is an explosion of innovation in hardware (materials, batteries, computation speed and miniaturization), software (e.g. machine learning), and systems neuroscience that is producing a growing array of implantable neural recording and activation devices to treat disease, restore and potentially augment human function.

BCIs are now universally accepted in a variety of forms. Brain stimulation devices for movement disorders and pain are implanted in patients on almost every continent. New successes, such as recent reports of treating depression with brain stimulation, are world news. Auditory prostheses such as cochlear implants are now commonplace, visual prostheses have reached early milestones to restore low resolution sight, and haptics research holds promise to restore sensation in the setting of limb loss, brain and peripheral nerve injury. Early areas of emphasis, such as prosthetic limb research, have made the most progress, using both real-time feedback to improve responsiveness of artificial arms and legs, and transplanted peripheral nerves to drive sensors. BCIs for speech work slowly but they function enough to be gaining users, and those for cognition, particularly for memory, are being tested in early forms, with great promise. Underlying all of these implementations are an understanding that "neuroplasticity," the brain's ability to adapt and interpret regular and logical signals when taught, can take even low levels of information and interpret it logically. This is the case, for example, in cochlear implants where patients can learn to interpret crude electrical stimulations through a handful of macroelectrodes as intelligible speech.

The major hurdles to better BCIs are both technical and rooted in neuroscience. Materials science researcher must deliver more durable and better-tolerated implantable materials to prevent failure and rejection. Engineers must craft smaller, higher resolution devices with more contacts, higher density but that can also cover larger regions, to be able to record and activate the large neuronal networks involved in brain functions. Better machine learning techniques to extract pertinent information from neural signals without relying on human experts to identify them are required. Finally, ways of dramatically increasing information transfer rates, and to optimize neuroplasticity are required to get fast enough bandwidth from humans to devices to make their speed useful. Challenges on the neuroscience side are equally important, most crucially determining on what scale to record neural activity (e.g. single neurons, cortical columns, broad brain regions etc.), how much activity, and over how large a region. We also need better techniques to map the diverse regions in the brain that work together in cognition and other functions, both invasively and non-invasively in humans, in order to unlock how they work.

The future of BCI research is extremely bright. The scientific community worldwide is making rapid progress in each of the above challenge areas, as demonstrated by the number of devices being invented, tested, deployed for human use, and the dramatically increasing research literature in the area of BCI. Most crucially, the rate of information transfer from human brain to computers is rapidly increasing, though in part by using more invasive technologies. Taking the step from repairing damage and restoring function to augmenting our abilities to see, hear, move or think is a dramatic one, and one with major ethical and moral implications. Devices to restore and enhance memory are already being tested, and our growing understanding of how memories are encoded and retrieved give dim glimpses of how information might be transferred from computer storage to human consciousness, though this type of application seems far off now. Augmentation of strength, perhaps reducible to mechanical design once appropriate control is established, seems much less challenging by comparison. What seems most clear is that the pace of advancement in these areas is accelerating. That BCI research will eventually transition from plasticity and repair to augmentation is not in doubt. It is imperative that we think carefully about how and where, scientifically, this shift should take place, and how we might best guide this process.

 

4:15 Demis Hassabis

The past, present and future of brain machine interfaces.

Also missed this one, but  Brian Wang writes:

Neuroscience is rapidly teasing apart the functional roles of the brain's components, and in some cases even the types of algorithms that they use. Machine learning, meanwhile, is producing a growing collection of techniques for specific kinds of problems, but as yet no general purpose algorithm for artificial intelligence. By bringing these two fields together, we can have both a high level architecture for an artificial general intelligence, and working algorithms for implementing many of the required components. In this talk I will outline the case for pursuing this approach, some current work in progress, and some of the challenges we face going forward.

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12:30 Ben Goertzel

Ben introduced as the "badass" of the AI community.

The human body is like machine. Body produces and processes a huge amount of data. Hard to address the complexity. A drug typically goes after one target, not all the interrelationships. SENS for example may fall short grasping the complexity.

Move mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus -- prevents damage, but what else results?

Genescient's flies live 5x normal fruit flies. Got there by intensive breeding, focused on longevity. Superflies! Stronger, more sex, better immune systems. Sexy immortal billionaire insects.

Isolated genes that express differently in superflies -- hundreds of them. Many of these have analogs to human genes. Traditional statistics revealed a lot about superfly data. How can AI tools reveal more? One day AGI biologists will put humans out of existence. Meanwhile, narrow AI can help. Text analysis -- can map and reveal relationships.

Certain genes have been identified as key. Mapped supplements which trigger proteins related to this key genes. Includes zinc, vitamin E, reverstrol.

But current AI tech just scratches the surface.

Combine early stage AGI with powerful narrow AI to get the artificial biologist.

12:00 Ray Kurzweil

The Mind and How to Build One

(Ray is "here" via video conference.)

The brain is not magic. The complexity of the brain is not inherently beyond our measn to comprehend.

Speech recognition, visual proecessing, many limited Ai applications have had a big boost from emulating the appropriate

brain functions. Take the basic principles and focus them, amplify them.

Exponential progression shows that we will be able to get to 10-14th / 10-16th calculations per second. Justin Rattiner of

Intel says 3D chips will take off where stand silicon chips leave off. Moore's Law will continue. The exponential growth will get us to human levels.

These ideas are highly contested by mainstream thinkers / media.

Singularitarian -- someone who understands or accepts the fact that information technology progresses exponentially, which

ultimately leads to something transformative. Education, experience, qualifications -- none of these are necessarily indicators of the likeliehood that someone will be a Singularitarian.

Intelligence is the most progound phenomenon in biology. We have already amplified intelligence with our technology. Homo

sapiens were a big step forward with our big heads. But now we don't need a bigger brain case -- we can move to a new substrate where the old limitations don't apply.

Shows the Moore's Law chart -- his expanded take on it -- updated from the Singularity Is Near. The progress is very smooth.

One transistor for a dollar in 1968, a billion for a dollar today. Different technologies -- eg, biotech -- now growing exponentially because of information technology. Exponential trends start out slow and then produce huge returns unexpectedly.

We literally create our brains by the thoughts we have. Thoughts seem ephemeral but they create the physical structure of the brain.

A perfect simulation of the brain won't do anything until it learns something.

The cortex is the only region that allows us to think in hierarchies. A symbol for and idea can be combines with a symbol for another idea to create a new idea with its own symbol. This sums up to what we call knowledge.

Complex concepts are organized as individual lists in a particular order. LISP mania in the 70's and early 80's was a foreshadowing of the dot-com bubble. Bust cycles are precursors to profound developments. Dot-comm bubble leads to multi-billion dollars companies (Google.) Our understanding of the cerebral cortex shows us now that it is a LISP processor. As was asserted in the 70's and 80's, this is how the mind works -- generating one-dimension lists that can be embedded to encode any level of sophistication.

It's hard to have a serious discussion about consciousness becasue of a conceptual gap between the objective and the subjective. There's no evidence provided that consciousness lies anywhere that it is speculated to be. You can't do a falsifiable experiment to isolate consciousness. Ultimately it's a lep of faith.

But, "if it qaucks like a duck..."

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10:45 Attendee Feedback

A guy stopped to tell me he listens to the podcast. Said he wanted to keep his criticism positive. Finds it too "folksy and rambling." Half of that is by design, of course.

10:30 Gregory Stock

Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence

Exuberance doesn't necessarily pan out. Lots of great visions of how things will be but we don't get there in the time frames we expect. We are suffering from a data Tsunami.

Kurzweil's vision as seen in his new film is the triumph of love / human values.
Stock sees the Singularity as the extinction of humanity.
"A journey into we know not where."
We have no idea what will be on the other side -- no reason to think our values will survive.

We need a macroevolutionary perspective.

We are animating the inanimate world -- breathing complexity that rivals life into the sand beneath our feet.

Genomic revolution -- we are beginning to take control of our own evolutionary process.

A transformation is underway. Won't we be transcended?

Evolution isn't static. Evolution itself is evolving. (Accompanied by several amusing photos of animals having sex.)
Social evolution -- ideas can compete and evolve in the abstract now -- rapidly accelerating the process. Traditional Darwinian evolution is being replaced. No exponentials in Darwinian evolution -- other things are happening faster by orders of magnitude.

Past evolutionary breakthroughs:

First -- life out of non-life. Blue green alage 3.5 billion years ago.
Next -- complex cells, symbiosis of bacteria into more complex organisms
Next -- mutlicellular organisms
Next -- to planetary superorgnism (Accompanied by images of the US at night, internet connections, city skylines.)

This is not a metaphor -- it's a real organism with its own nervous, digestive, and cisulatiry systems. Internal processes. Internal competition. Requires no external membrane.

Simple biology took simple nonbiology (calcium phosphate) to create bone. This led to the sophsiticate orgganisms we have today. Now complex biology is manipulating complex nonbiology.

New levels of complexity subsume old ones. We are going to no longer be "free range." We're going to be left behind.

What does an amydala cell know about fear? Very little. What do we know about what's happening with the superorganism? Very little.

The Singularity -- the future is going to get very weird very quickly. What does it mean for us?

Human ehtics and values are not unique to us -- they are critical to primate social strategy. Chimps have the basic building blocks -- sharing, empathy, loyalty (images of chimps grieving a lost fellow, a chimp trying to comfort a crying child.)

Why would we expect these values to persist? They cyber world is all about speed, boundaries are weak, competition is intense. Different reality will require different values. Uploading -- humans will disappear through the skylight. The only way to preserve human values is to stop evolution.

Singleton rule might be one way to do this
Superorganism communities is another possibility

If top-down control is the only way to preserve humanity, humanity is over.

Current debates -- cloning, designer kids, genetic engineering, human enhancement, AI -- are just symbolic. And thay are all the same argument. Brings a lot of angst. But people SHOULD be worried -- the line between the natural and technological is being permanently blurred / eliminated.

Change will come from the nimble, the bold. "Notwithstanding

Sigma Bio Sciences CEO and founder.
Managed Alzheimer's research -- the posetr child for unment medical need.
Very prevalent -- if you make it to 85, you have a 50% chance of getting it.

Sigma looks at proteins.PP2A may be key -- started looking for things to activate it. Coffee -- 4 cups or more per day reduces incidence of diabetes and Parkinsons. (Yay!) Coffee bean extract (SIG1012) administered to mice, extends life, delays motor problems.

On to human trials. Coffee is generally recognized as being safe to consume.

9:45 Michael Vassar

The singularity -- is it a rational thing to discuss?

Some things are rational but not scientific -- building the Roman aqueducts, building a Gothic cathedral. Civilizations have been around for thousands of years -- in the 17th century two new things came along science and capitalism.

There were precursors to science, eg Archimedes. rational, mathematiical, useful but not science.
--Didn't test a hypothesis
--No organized literature/publication standards
--Archimedes' method works but requires honest geniuses

Scholarship works because it is basically pattern recognition with built-in correction. Scholarship is a scaled up version of how children learn. Society has more resources than a child -- scholars are "superchildren" who learn for society.

There is no innate human drive to keep learning, to keep changing one's view of the world. Scholarship fails because of correlated errors, bias against unexpected claims, inaccessibility for outsiders, and standard biases of human cognition.

What changed in the 17th century -- radical skepticism

Enlightenment Science
Build on long chains of reasoning from solid foundations
Look for surprising conclusions
Test conclusions
Doesn't require geniuses!

Enlightenment science was a good start
Seemingly necessary assumptions may be false
Its form can be imitated to aid justification of what you want to believe

Darwin and Wallace -- working independently came to the same conclusion.

The Singularity

Independent origination of similar hypothesis (Von Neumann, Vinge)
Logical argument -- the intelligence explosion
Massive data analysis -- Kurzweil
Nominal buy-in by credible non-experts

Therefore the Singularity is rational and scientific.

9:15 AM Looks like the live feed is not happening -- Sorry,Sally

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Back from the reception. In addition to chatting with old friends Michael Anissimov, Christine Peterson, Brad Templeton, and Ben Goertzel, I was introduced to (or introduced myself to) a number of really interesting people:

One of them heads up a group devoted to Seasteding, or as Christine put it -- "start-up countries."

One of them is the managing director for technology equities research for a New York-based securities firm, scouting opportunities just a tad outside of the scope of what the typical Wall Street firm is looking for.

And speaking of money, one of them invented a computer immune system that IBM took a shine to and bought from him for $45 million. He is now using that money to fund a little pet project -- creating a hardware replica of the human brain.

Lots more to come both on these folks and the actual Summit sessions. Stay tuned.

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Image via Wikipedia

Singularity Summit coverage starts bright and early tomorrow morning, unless something interesting happens tonight that demands my attention.

I'm headed over to the Palace of Fine Arts -- which is where the Summit was held last time I managed to attend. There's a reception over in that neighborhood, and I'm hoping to bump into some old friends and maybe make a few new ones,

I'll be collecting audio snippets if possible (no video this time.) I brought my good camera but forgot the cable. So either I'll take photos with iPhone and publish them right away or take higher quality photos and publish them later.

Or maybe just let Zemanta illustrate my posts... 

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...where science, futurism, and anything else Stephen finds interesting are

thrown together in an informational stew for your consumption.

Enjoy!

Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephentgo

• 

• Michael Annisimov points us to two essential Nick Bostrom essays: "When Machines Outsmart Humans" and "Taking Intelligent Machines Seriously."

  Artificial intelligence is a possibility that should not be ignored in any serious thinking about the future, and it raises many profound issues for ethics and public policy that philosophers ought to start thinking about. This article outlines the case for thinking that human-level machine intelligence might well appear within the next half century. It then explains four immediate consequences of such a development, and argues that machine intelligence would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of the social, political, economic, commercial, technological, scientific and environmental issues that humanity will face over the coming decades.

• New Scientist: Swallowing its pride, NASA says it wants to learn from commercial missions to the Moon.

  There's a growing consensus that the Cold War Space Age was a false dawn - a brute force project necessitated by our conflict with the Soviet Union, and made possible by unsustainable spending.

  Now, we may finally be entering a true, sustainable, Space Age. This time we go to space to earn a living. NASA's relationship to these entrepreneurs should be analogous to that of the FAA to Delta Airlines.

  As this transition happens, NASA can take a role encouraging others to make the necessary advances:

• New Push Prize: Got a plan to get us back to the Moon? NASA's got $30 million worth of motivation!

• Negroponte thinks that the e-book will kill the physical book within five years.

  "Kill" may be a strong word. But Phil and I have a little wager going. We both think that by February 25, 2019, most reading will be done on electronic devices. The difference: I think the market for paper books will be diminished as a result of this competition. Phil thinks that the print market will be bigger than ever.

• Richard MacManus asks: "What are your favorite eBook features? I like highlighting a word for its definition. Your faves & the eReader you use?"

  I bought a Kindle that I rarely use now. I read my Kindle books on the device I always have with me - my iPhone. An ebook feature I want: public note sharing. I want to be able to read what other readers think. And add my own thoughts.

• Moderate exercise is good for longevity; "excessively strenuous" not so much.

• Wil Wheaton: "DRM-Free Game Suffers 90% Piracy, Offers $5 Amnesty sale. Come on, Gamers, do the right thing."

  Developers will probably see this as a failure of the DRM-free experiment. Perhaps there's an alternative way to look at this - why not drop the price? The iPhone app market has shown that huge amounts of money can be made charging small prices to many people. Price it at $5 or less and it starts to become an impulse buy - something that's purchased for just the chance that it may be useful or fun.

  Having a $5 amnesty sale is a smart response. With the price that low the incentive to pirate falls too.

• Quite an exit: Flight attendant curses out passengers on the PA, grabs two beers, deploys emergency chute, and slides away...

  Funny from a distance. It was probably less funny for some of the passengers.

• DIY bio-tech! This is the Lava Amp - a cheap and portable thermal cycler for performing rapid polymerase chain reaction in 30 minutes or less. Its powered by USB or AC. Coming soon to a garage near you

  

  But remember Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Moore's Law for Mad Scientists" - every 18 months, the IQ required to destroy the world drops one point.

• Scientific American: Seniors face lower risk of getting dangerous prescriptions with computerized hospital Rx system

  Prescription foul-ups occur alarmingly often in busy hospitals. Taking the possibility of human error out of the system is a step in the right direction.

• Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web.

  There's a parallel to solar power. It makes sense for Arizona to adopt solar faster than Maine. The solar environments are different. The speed at which your community embraces online education will probably depend on your school district. The weaker the neighborhood school (or the more overpriced colleges become), the faster parents and students will embrace alternatives.

• Mike Anissimov pointed us to the Jaron Lanier NYT op-ed, "The First Church of Robotics."

  ...and then commented on the article.

• Filming starts again on my favorite show:

  

• Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells May Replace Embryonic Stem Cells - TechCombo (blog)

  Related: human embryonic stem cells and reprogrammed cells virtually identical - EurekAlert

• Engadget: Cut-rate, webcam-based 3D scanner coming soon to a MakerBot store near you.

  3D printers will follow the same adoption path as home computers. The first 3D printers have been built for large industrial applications. Then high-priced units with limited functionality will be offered to hobbyists. The practical uses for these machines will grow as the price drops. Eventually we'll all have one... or more.

• Drudge Report: Physicist Stephen Hawking: Abandon the Earth!

  Actually, that headline is an overstatement. Hawking thinks we should disperse: some staying on Earth, but others moving on elsewhere. The more we move into space, the less chance that all of humanity would be wiped out in a common disaster.

• Neanderthal bedroom:

  The late Pleistocene room, found in the Esquilleu Cave, included a hearth and grass beds that seems to have once been covered with animal fur. According to the report published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Neanderthals used the room between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago.

  Scientists say the residents changed the bedding material very often and used the old ones in the hearth.

• Solar Roadways: Crackpot Idea or Ingenious Concept?

  According to the article, one mile of highway, if converted to solar cells, could provide enough power to run 428 homes - with just four hours of sunlight per day.

• IGN: Favorite Video Games of 2010 (So Far)

• "I haz Toxoplasma gondii!"

  Researchers explore link between schizophrenia, cat parasite.

• Thoughtware.TV - Foldit: Biology for gamers - by Nature Video:

• Scientific American: Harvesting Waste Heat Could Boost Photovoltaic Power

  Stanford University scientists may have developed a way to double the efficiency of solar power collectors by using heat as well as the light.

• Engadget: Solar Motorcycle. Leave it in the sun while you're working and its fully charged at the end of the day.

• Check out the new site for Acceleration - a Singularity-themed documentary in production.

• Mike Anissimov: Check out the Singularity Summit Facebook page, and click "like it" if you do.

  If you are attending Singularity Summit, get VIP treatment! For an extra $100 you can meet & mingle w/ our speakers.

• TEDtalk: Stewart Brand - Why We Should All Think Like Engineers

• Dish Network to offer live TV streaming on its free mobile apps next month

• A very interesting new TED talk by Lawrence Lessig:

• World War II photos overlaid on modern pictures.

  
  

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Phil and Stephen welcome publisher, author, and counterculture icon R.U. Sirius back to FastForward Radio to discuss the rebirth of H+ Magazine.

Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio

About our guest:

R.U. Sirius is editor-in-chief of the online transhumanist publication, H+ Magazine. He is former Editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000, a technoculture magazine that was legendary during the 1990s. Books authored or co-authored by Sirius include A User's Guide to the New Edge, True Mutations, Counterculture Through The Ages, and Design For Dying with Timothy Leary. In addition to editing H+ Magazine, Sirius is organizing the Mondo 2000 History Project, an open source memoir.

If you're interested in helping out as part of the H+ community, contact R. U. Sirius:
ru-at-hplusmagazine.com.

Continue reading "Fast Forward Radio -- Humanity Plus, R.U. Sirius?" »

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