A recent debate at TED between Paul Gilding and Peter Diamandis captures the issues pretty succinctly. So who’s right?

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss.

Plus: other future-related topics, including:

Google getting smarter 

One teeny-tiny drawback: this would not actually be a starship:

This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites.

For a ship longer than the Burj Khalifa is tall, those speeds sound a little on the pokey side, don’t they?

On the one hand I think it would very cool indeed if we had such large manned interplanetary craft operating in the next few decades. On the other hand, what is described is no starship enterprise. I don’t care if it’s a little smaller, but to be effective it’s going to need to be quite a bit faster.

How do we get from here to there? The phases might look something like this:

Life Extension

Durable Digital Replacements

Substrate Mobility

Immortality

So, will some of us live forever? And what does that even mean? Join us!

For those who have asked: the image shown is a woman emerging from the mythical Fountain of Youth. Presumably she looked a lot older when she jumped in, but we don’t have that picture…

Question:“What do you make of the Singularity University?”

Buzz Aldrin: “I’m a pretty high achiever. But I come here and think ‘Gosh. I’ve just got to do better.’”

Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss what makes Singularity University special and indispensible.

Then they’ll talk about how to adopt some of the Singularity U awesomeness in your own life: In case you can’t attend, OR in preparation for when you do.

Planetary Resources

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss

We’ll look at:

• Nanoscience and Technologies
• Resource Technologies
• Engineering Technologies
• Information Technologies
• Social Technologies
• Economic Technologies
• Political Technologies
• Security Technologies
• Health Technologies
• Cognitive Technologies

John will be delivering a talk on “Forecasting the Future” at the DaVinci Institute’s next Futurist Mastermind Group meeting on Thursday, 4/19/2012.

About our guest:

John M. Smart is an evolutionary developmental systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and technology foresight. He is professor and program champion for the M.S. program in Emerging Technology at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT.edu, Phoenix, AZ), and directs the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Mountain View, CA) a nonprofit technology and social foresight research organization. He is an affiliate of the ECCO research group at VUB, and a co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community of scholars exploring evolutionary and developmental processes of change at the universal and subsystem scales. His personal website (since 1999) on accelerating technological change is AccelerationWatch.com.

John has a B.S. in business administration from UC Berkeley, an M.S.-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from U.C. San Diego School of Medicine, and an M.S. in futures studies from the University of Houston, and has done additional undergraduate work in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at U.C. San Diego, U.C.L.A., and U.C. Berkeley. He studied systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in evolution, development, and accelerating change starting from a systems perspective.

Join us.

Wednesday 4/18/2012 7 PM PDT, 10 PM EDT

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2. What are ready to do in order to realize the possible?

3. Who or what are we willing to become?

4. When do we start?

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss whether there are winners and losers in the game of accelerating change and (if so) who they are.

Join us.

78 percent increase in autism rates over past decade coincides with new vaccination schedules

Alex Jones elucidates:

And yet the mainstream medical system and its allies in the government and media are willfully ignoring this glaring fact, blaming “unknown” causes and “genetics” for causing autism, which are the two most common catch-all scapegoats. And in explaining the drastic rise in autism rates over the years, the talking heads actually claim that there is no rise — the seemingly elevated autism rates are merely the result of improved autism screening methods that are now identifying more cases.

Yes, blaming unknown causes for an unknown thing is downright irresponsible, especially when that unknown thing suspiciously coincides with some other thing. That’s why I think it’s time we face up to what’s really going on, here. Vaccinations are a pretty good explanation for autism, but I think there’s something else that makes even more sense. If we’re ready to face it, that is.

Look, I don’t like it any more than you do. Dora is cute, and Boots seems to all appearances to be a very decent monkey. But the facts are what they are: Dora the Explorer first aired in the year 2000. Diagnoses of autism have been skyrocketing ever since.

When are our puppet masters in the medical establishment going to come clean?

Back in ancient India, a certain Prince wanted to reward the inventor of chess for his wonderful new game. He asked the brilliant man how he’d like to be rewarded. The inventor asked for one grain of rice for the first square on the chessboard, two grains for the second, four for the third square and so on doubling for each square.

Depending on who tells the story, the Prince either recognized the brilliance of the inventor and elevated him to chief advisor… or had the smart ass beheaded.

30 linear steps will take you from your front door to your mailbox, 30 exponential steps would take you around the world… 20 times… if there was a walking path at the equator. Seriously.

Ray Kurzweil has suggested that we humans need illustrations like these to understand the power of exponential development. Our species developed in a linear world. If the antelop is at point a, moving at speed b, then our hunter-gatherer ancestor would have to throw the spear to point d to bring him down. That’s very complicated math, but all linear.

Today we live in an increasingly exponential world. We benefit from the chess inventor’s trick – but instead of rice, we get exponential improvement of computation… and everything that computation touches.

And computation touches more and more things.

Picture Spock’s 3D chess board (yeah, I know that’s Sheldon, but it’ll always be Spock’s game). Let the base board represent computation. Each move from one square to the next over time represents a doubling in computer power – something that Gordon Moore observed back in 1965.

The exponential computation board buys our way onto other levels of the 3D chess set: nanotech and genetic engineering are improving exponentially too. Advancement on these new levels can feedback to fuel the progress of the computation board – or any other board. It can also spawn new platforms.

Last week the Journal Science briefly mentioned what is, I think, the arrival of a new board. Materials researchers have been awaiting computational power sufficient to simulate the nearly infinite variety of potential materials that could be used to advance technologies like batteries, or solar cells.

researchers think steady progress in technology has now made supercomputers powerful and available enough to make the task worth starting. The White House announced a new federal effort last June to promote the use of high-performance computing to cut in half the time it takes to develop a new material. Known as the Materials Genome Initiative, the effort promised $100 million just this year to drastically accelerate materials discovery—particularly in alternative energy, a field heavily reliant on advanced materials.

Not only will computation give materials science an exponential boost, materials science will most likely return the favor – giving us new materials for better integrated circuits. This cycle of virtue has been hard for me to get my head around. But its essential to understanding why the future is coming at us so fast, and in ways that always surprise us.

Popular Science just published an article about a centimeter long medical microbot currently in development called the Cyberplasm that could be in use as soon as 5 years. This device is nowhere near the nano-scale, but its a very cool start – a bot swimming around detecting and treating disease from inside our bodies. Such a device will be used occasionally by doctors to perform, for example, much less invasive upper and lower GI scoping.

Actual nanobots, however, are probably twenty years away.

Much closer on the horizon is the Medical Tricorder that will allow quick, cheap diagnosis of many diseases from tiny bodily fluid samples. Put the Star Trek-inspired name aside, this one is coming quick. The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is challenging researchers to deliver the first generation of Dr. McCoy’s most indispensable device in three and a half years.

Because it will allow daily monitoring of our health, it will move us away from sick care – where we only act when something’s wrong – to true health care where we monitor and tweek our bodies for optimum performance.

Let’s put the window on the common use of tricorders at about 7 years.

Between the arrival of these two technologies – the tricorder you hold in your hand (7 years) and the medical nanobots that operate inside your body (20 years), there is a potential intermediate technology – a med lab that resides on your body – the dermal patch lab.

It would contain flexible (probably printed) electronics – lab-on-a-chip technology much smaller than than the tricorder. It would have a flexible battery. It would be tough – allowing the user to shower without harming the device, but also cheap to the point of disposability – and would be replaced every week or so on a different location on the body.

It would communicate with your smart phone/tricorder device and the cloud. Epidemics would be tracked in real time. And armed with your complete DNA sequence, your geographical location, and real-time monitoring of your health – your own personal Dr. Watson will be able to prescribe the precise medications and dosages you need.

The user will determine how much of this is background – how much data about himself he cares to process. But optimal health will require a level of monitoring and decision-making far beyond anything we do today. We will push most of this work to our AIs.

Within a few years of the dermal patch lab AI doctors will be able to determine down to the molecule what the patient needs, run simulated drug trials on virtual populations, and then order the manufacture and delivery of a drug for a single patient that perhaps no one in the world has ever used before.

March 29, 1993: Teleportation Beams From Sci-Fi to Real Science

1993: Scientists show teleportation is possible, at least theoretically. The downsides: The original teleported object must be destroyed, and it can’t happen instantaneously.

The story goes on to flesh out some of the milestones that have occurred in the teleportation arena in the interrum, including teleporting photons a few meters and teleporting information up to 10 miles.

Gizmodo marked the anniversary by sharing this story with us:

Beam Me Up, Scotty: Scientists Transport a Hunk of Matter 18 Inches

Scientists in Copenhagen took one more step toward the Star Trek transporter, figuring out how to teleport groups of billions of atoms from one place to another using light, quantum mechanics, magnetism and a concept they call “entanglement.” Professor Eugene Polzik and his team managed to move an object about 18 inches, using an excruciatingly complicated process that amounts to some serious magic. Says the Prof:

“Creating entanglement is a very important step, but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps — that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback.”

Somebody on Facebook said this story was actually six years old. Probably so, as the Reuters story linked in the Gizmodo article isn’t there any more. Still very cool.

Star Trek references aside, this method of teleportation sounds somewhat different from the Star Trek models of teleportation which breaks you down into bits and either beams 1) you or 2) your pattern to the other location where it is reconstituted either 1) from your original matter or 2) locally available materials. (For the record, 1) is the original series and 2) is Next Generation and beyond.) I’m not sure if I would ever want to do 1), but 2) is a big no way. The guy who lands on the other side isn’t me — he just thinks he is. I’m dead.

But THIS approach, from the sketchy details provided, might move the whole person intact, irrespective of what the Wired article says about the original having to be destroyed. As I understand it, if you recreate my quantum states, you recreate me. You don’t just have a copy in that case, you have the original. Would the subjective me-ness that is me come along for the ride? Theoretically, yes.

Still, come to think of it, I think I would have to pass. Not that it looks like anyone is going to be offering free teleportation rides any time soon.

I’m just sayin’.

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss

Mars on the Cheap

Instant Genius

A Back Step Forward with Stem Cells

…and other items that have washed up on shore this week.

Join us!

Source: Shoreline Image

I got to participate in a live online event yesterday talking with Abundance authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. What a treat. I put myself in the queue for questions and asked the authors the following: now that the book has been out for a few weeks, how has it been going dealing with the media?

Owing to the fierce devotion the media has to painting a bleak picture of what’s occurring in the world today and to drawing up even grimmer scenarios for the future, you would think that the constant media exposure of a book tour would generate a lot of friction, or at least tension. But no. Both authors report that they’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well everyone, or at least most everyone, is taking the news that the world is not going to hell in a handbasket.

Why is that? I think it’s because most of them, deep down, don’t really believe their own narrative. Now don’t take that as an all-out slam on the media. I know it sounds pretty bad, but the mitigating factor (if this is a mitigating factor) is that most of us don’t believe our own narrative about the future.

Research shows that most people have a positive expectation for their own future. In fact, most people have an unrealistically positive expectation for their own future. And that’s okay. Apparently there are evolutionary advantages to this sort of optimism. Over the long haul, optimists — at least this particular variety of optimists — have done a better job than pessimists of living long enough to reproduce. (This is a vast oversimplification, of course. Sometimes it’s advantageous to be a pessimist, and sometimes being an optimist will get you killed. But statistically, over the long haul, optimism appears to provide a greater survival advantage than pessimism.)

Interestingly, that set of expectations doesn’t necessarily get applied to others. If anything, we tend to underestimate their future happiness. But I think the’re’s an important difference. The notion that we are each going to have an extraordinary future is an ingrained belief. It’s the way we think when we’re not thinking about how or what we’re thinking.

Our views about the future of humanity, on the other hand, are more just a position that we have assumed. And if you’re going to pick an outlook on humanity, optimism has never been all that socially acceptable. The cool kids are mostly cynics, resigned to the inevitable decline and downfall that their species. It’s an insult to call somebody a Pollyanna. But what’s the opposite of that? A cynic? (That sounds way better than Pollyanna.) A Gloomy Gus?

Nobody says that.

Plus, a generally pessimistic outlook is increasingly built into our political discourse. If things don’t change soon…you can pretty much  insert your favorite doom scenario. Environmental, social, economic — take your pick. The world is divided between US, the people who genuinely want things to be good, and THEM, the ones who are carelessly or perhaps even deliberately leading us to our doom. The more precarious things sound, the more urgently we need people to sign onto our side — and possibly make a donation. Go to just about any political blog and that’s the basic narrative you’ll find. The ideology doesn’t matter, although (not surprisingly) the farther you are to either the left or right, the greater the evil of the other side and the greater the danger they represent.

I think what happens is that when people, even media people, hear something like what Diamandis and Kotler have to say,  it reminds us of what our true disposition towards the future is. Deep down, we believe that things can work out, and that we’re going to find a way to make that happen. Of course, I doubt that  many (or, sadly, any) of the media folks the authors have spoken to over the last month have undergone a permanent change in outward position towards the future.

If it bleeds, chances are it’s still going to lead.

Still, I find great encouragement in the fact that Diamandis and Kotler have been (mostly) warmly received so far. It tells me that cynicism and pessimism need not be permanent. If they can be set aside for a few moments, they can be set aside.

Anyway, here’s Peter Diamandis telling us what (deep down) we all suspected might be true: that the future might not be so bleak after all; that the world may, in fact, be getting better all the time.

Cross-posted from Better All the Time.