Austin Houldsworth Electric Money 2032 heralded a new era for our currency, as more than half of the world’s countries converted to electronic money systems. Although the new systems were cheap and efficient, problems began to occur…people outside the systems began to suffer. Attempts were made to include the minorities, but unfortunately this led to the system being hacked. Hyperinflation swept the globe and money needed to be made tangible once again. Nanotechnology allowed the redox flow battery to dramatically reduce in size…allowing people to carry a few kilowatt hours of electricity with them; exchanging charged electrolyte for goods is now a widespread reality and because energy cannot be created or destroyed only converted…the risk from hackers is negligible. From RCA’s Design Interactions 2009 show (via @bruces)

http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/5pd3mt.jpg she chose down?

Alright, I think I fixed the RSS mess. If you use a reader for this site, subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/eripsa I updated the meta tags to the left appropriately, hopefully this works. Thanks again Steve

More from Forbes: The Coming Artilect War Considering all this, I predict that humanity will split into three major philosophical, ideological, political groups, which I label as follows. –The Cosmists (based on the word “cosmos”) will be in favor of building these godlike machines (the artilects), who would be immortal, think a million times faster than humans, have unlimited memory, go anywhere, do anything and take any shape. The Cosmists would take a quasi-religious view that they are god builders. Privately, I am a Cosmist, but publicly, I have mixed feelings about the rise of the artilect. –The Terrans (based on the word “terra,” meaning the earth) will be opposed to the construction of artilects, fearing that in a highly advanced form, the artilects may decide to wipe us out. To ensure that the probability that this might happen is zero, the Terrans will insist that the artilects are never built in the first place. But this strategy runs utterly contrary to what the Cosmists want. The Terrans will be prepared to go to war against the Cosmists to ensure the survival of the human species. –The Cyborgists (based on the word “cyborg,” meaning cybernetic organism that is part machine, part human) will want to become artilect gods themselves by adding artilectual components to their own brains, thus avoiding the bitter conflict between the Cosmists and the Terrans. Yes, Forbes published this. The line after this quote starts as follows: I differ sharply with well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil on his over-optimistic prediction that the rise of the artilect this century will be a positive development for humanity. I think it will be a catastrophe. Whenever you find yourself in agreement OR disagreement with a futurist, you know you’ve done something horribly, terribly wrong.

There are some pretty major holes in this presentation, and it has an unusually Eurocentric focus, but its pretty and slick and worth showing. thx kyle

Jon links to Forbes’ special edition on AI. I’ll go through most of these, commenting when appropriate. For instance: Dumb Like Google While the switch to “stupid” statistically based computing has given us tools like Google, it came with a steep price, namely, abandoning the cherished notion that computers will one day be like people, the way early AI pioneers wanted them to be. No one querying Google would ever for a minute confuse those interactions with a Q&A session with another person. No matter how much Google engineers fine-tune their algorithms, that will never change. Google is inordinately useful, but it is not remotely intelligent, as we human beings understand that term. And despite decades of trying, no one in AI research has even the remotest idea of how to bridge that gap. … Since AI essayists like to make predictions, here’s mine. No one alive as these words are being written will live to see a computer pass the Turing Test. What’s more, the idea of a humanlike computer will increasingly come to be seen as a kitschy, mid-20th-century idea, like hovercraft and dinner pills on The Jetsons. This is basically what I’ve been saying for a decade, with a few caveats. First, I don’t think we can make much sense of the ‘unbridgeable gap’ lamented in the first paragraph, as if intelligence were a single-dimensional spectrum with a large black void somewhere near the top. Thats a silly little antiquated picture, and revising the picture makes Gomes’ thesis that much stronger. Intelligence is task-specific; computers, humans, animals, and everything else are good at solving certain kinds of problems, and bad at solving other kinds of problems. Since solving some problems does not necessarily imply success at other problems (even when those problems are closely related), then intelligence […]

Iran’s Web Spying Aided by Western Technology (WSJ) The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren’t fully displayed — until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said. “We didn’t know they could do this much,” said a network engineer in Tehran. “Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.” Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran’s case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country’s system. It couldn’t be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection. All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function — and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest. Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts. Iran is “now drilling into what the population is trying to say,” said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He […]

thx Lally

Apparently my blog update changed some of the rss settings. People using an RSS reader should direct their feeds to http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/?feed=rss in order to see full posts and not just summaries. I dont know if there is some way of changing that on my end, but I know this change will work.

Resident colleague Ben links to the following article: The Philosophical Significance of Twitter: Consciousness Outfolding In Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life, an exquisitely written and astonishingly insightful book, Richard Grossinger writes about ‘infoldedeness’, stating that “the universe is comprehensible only as a thing that has been folded many times upon itself.” Reversing Grossinger’s idea: the outfolding of the human mind, the collective sharing of our thoughts, myriad thoughts from the inane to the mundane to the profound, enabled by technology, is changing our perception of reality and thus changing reality itself. Surely technology is changing the world (the closest thing I know to ‘reality’), since technology is precisely in the business of changing the world. And certainly the internet as a medium for social interaction has profoundly influenced the course of this change. However, our thoughts are by their very nature shared and collective. Technology has at best expanded the scope of the collective itself. In other words, minds haven’t changed. We have. To mistake this change for a new global consciousness is precisely to miss the trees for the forest. You must first understand what we are doing before you can understand the networked superorganism we have become, and above all else this requires settling reference of the paradoxical first person plural pronoun ‘we’. Daou argues that Twitter represents something like a global, networked manifestation of collective human consciousness, implying that we have somehow become singular and unified through our connected technologies. I think this is the wrong way to think about social media, mostly because of the unnecessary emphasis on ‘humanity’. If anything, the global collective is represented as much by the technology itself as its human operators. When we learned to ride horses, it would have been improper to note that man […]