Daily Archives: September 7, 2007

Singularity Summit Countdown

The Summit Begins tomorrow…

summit.jpg

I’ve just arrived in San Francisco, and will be attending a pre-Summit reception this evening. I plan on doing some video interviews with speakers and attendees. Here are the standard questions I plan on asking everyone:

1. Why are you at this event? What’s your interest in the Singularity?

2. Do you believe that you, personally, have a role to play in the unfolding of the Singularity. If so, what is it? If not, why not?

3. What’s one thing you wish other people understood about the Singularity?

4. Pick one of the following — your greatest hope or your greatest apprehension concerning the Singularity — and tell me about it.

Should prove for some lively discussion.

Is the brain too strange to emulate?

Our friend Will Brown points to this article from Chris Chatham:

10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers

Chris argues that the metaphor that “our brains are computers” has been valuable. But, like most metaphors, it is eventually checked by reality. He points out how vastly different our brains are from digital computers. Why it’s almost as if one evolved biologically, and the other were artificial!

I suspect that the brain/computer comparison is more than a metaphor. The brain is a strange organic system far different from what any human computer scientist would design. That said, I suspect that it can be emulated by a sufficiently powerful Turing Machine.

Informally the Church–Turing thesis states that if an algorithm (a procedure that terminates) exists then there is an equivalent Turing Machine (equivalently: recursion|recursively-definable function or lambda calculus|λ-definable function) for that algorithm. One conclusion to be drawn is that, IF a computer can effectively calculate an algorithm THEN so can an equivalent Turing Machine.

So even if the brain is not a Turing machine, it could be emulated by a sufficiently powerful Turing machine. In theory.

-Linkathon.

Hey Nike, this is a nobrainer!

Pop quiz: how many cool 2015-era product placements do you see in this picture?

Hoverboard%201.png

Well, if you ignore the blurry stuff in the background, there’s just two – a Mattel Hoverboard and a nifty pair of self-lacing Nike sneakers.

We reported a month ago about efforts to make the levitation technology behind the hoverboard a reality. Obviously it’ll be a long road to the hoverboard. But is there really any reason we can’t have those Nike sneakers now?

What exactly would be required? They glow and they pull their laces tight. So they would need the ability to hold a charge – a battery or a capacitor of some sort. It would be cool if the act of walking kept them charged, but that could be a version 2.0 improvement. We’d accept plugging them in for now. You’d need a small electric motor to pull the laces and a couple of LED’s for lighting.

By comparison to a hoverboard, this is really low-hanging fruit.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. Michael Maloof emails to inform us of his “McFLY 2015 project.” Apparently he’s petitioning Nike to make this happen.

If you’re Nike and you’re looking for ways to get aging Gen-Xer’s to shell out serious cash for sneakers, this seems pretty obvious.

-Linkathon.