Monthly Archives: January 2015

Maybe Call it the “Bucky”

Montreal Biosphere, Canada“[We will do] more and more with less and less until eventually [we] can do everything with nothing.”

There should be a prize for the biggest contributions to the datafication of our world. Datafication involves replacing physical infrastructure with virtual or simply changing the relative value between the physical and data properties of any product or service.

For example, Netflix might have been nominated for such a prize when they shifted their business model from being about disks in the mail to being about streaming of content. They removed the physical aspects of their business and left only data. This is a critical trend in our world, and the largest contributors to it should be recognized and rewarded.

R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization.” Maybe the prize should be named after him.

Hallucinogens 2.0

psychadelicgirlIn spite of their reputation as being dangerous and their classification as illicit drugs, hallucinogens may have a lot to offer. Historically, they have played an important role in certain mystical and spiritual traditions, and they have been seriously studied as a potential means of coming to a better understanding of how our minds work.

And it has been suggested that they are one of the secret ingredients behind the success of Silicon Valley:

R. U. Sirius talked about this a bit on the most recent edition of The World Transformed. On the other hand, there is this quip: “Many people tried acid. Only one became Steve Jobs.”

Maybe what we need is Hallucinogens 2.0, a technology for safely and reliably tapping into the parts of our brains that hallucinogens are known uniquely to impact. We need a computer interface into our own brains to provide the insights of a hallucinogenic trip without the risks.

Anybody working on anything like that?

Where the Possibilities Are

??????????????????Where does the value of big data truly present itself, in the data itself or in the algorithms we use to make sense of it? Bill Franks of Teradata comes down sharply  on the side of the data:

…I’m convinced that new information will beat new algorithms and new metrics based on existing information almost every time. Indeed, new information can be so powerful that, once it is found, analytics professionals should stop worrying about improving existing models with existing data and focus instead on incorporating and testing that new information.

By “new information,” he means information that didn’t exist before or that we now have to a level of depth never before possible. Sensor data in Internet of Things environments can represent either of these kinds of data. For example, we may have always used temperature data in performing some calculation, but back in the day we used a daily average. Now we have sensors providing temperature data every few minutes (or seconds.) That’s data to a greater depth. For data that we didn’t have before, Bill cites sensors on cars that track wear and tear as the vehicle is driven. Previously, vehicle repair occurred in a primarily reactive way. Now we can begin to anticipate repairs before they are needed.

Somehow this reminds me of a talk that Eliezer Yudkowsky gave at the Singularity Summit back in 2007. He said:

In the intelligence explosion the key threshold is criticality of recursive self-improvement. It’s not enough to have an AI that improves itself a little. It has to be able to improve itself enough to significantly increase its ability to make further self-improvements, which sounds to me like a software issue, not a hardware issue. So there is a question of, Can you predict that threshold using Moore’s Law at all?

Geordie Rose of D-Wave Systems recently was kind enough to provide us with a startling illustration of software progress versus hardware progress. Suppose you want to factor a 75-digit number. Would you rather have a 2007 supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, running an algorithm from 1977, or a 1977 computer, an Apple II, running a 2007 algorithm? And Geordie Rose calculated that Blue Gene/L with 1977′s algorithm would take ten years, and an Apple II with 2007′s algorithm would take three years.

There is a progression here, albeit a counter-intuitive one. We might be inclined to think that hardware adds more value than “mere” software and that software is inherently more valuable than “mere” (or the term we like to throw around a lot is “raw”) data. The opposite turns out to be the truth. The data itself is where the value is. Hardware and software only help us to focus on the potentialities, the possibilities, that it already contains.

Acceleration Prizes

Motion Blur from a Tokyo MonorailHow about a new kind of push prize, one just for making things faster?

Just about any process can be improved by being accelerated. Doing things faster means being able to do more. Getting faster means becoming more capable. If you can read faster, you can read more books in the same time. If you work faster, you can produce more work.

Each year the prizes would be awarded to those who accelerated the most important processes, or who achieved the greatest incremental acceleration on a process that has already been boosted.

There would probably have to be categories: medical, financial, industrial, agricultural. Getting a crop to grow in three weeks might seem painfully slow compared to completing a transaction in a thousandth of a second. But it’s all relative.

The Brain Boost

Clever girl thinking with a machine head illustrationWe already boost our intelligence with external resources, including other people, books, and the Internet. How long before we can start boosting our intelligence inside our brains using implants?

If your brain could be made to operate 10-20% faster, if you could completely eliminate mental fatigue or a tendency to become distracted, if you could suddenly have a completely photographic memory and the ability to recall anything you see, hear, or read in perfect detail — wouldn’t you sign on with that?

Plus, boosting our intelligence is an enabler for anything else we want to accomplish. The smarter, the easier.

What’s the best boost currently available? Supplements? Electric currents? Discuss.

UPDATE: on FAcebook Jab suggests modafinil is already providing a boost to a lot of people, especially students. Then there’s transcranial magnetic stimulation.