Matt Uebel originally shared this post: #futurism #singularity #science #circleshare #circle . Realityzealot circle of futurism zealotry. 0_o This is my circle of people that seemed to have expressed an interest in the future, the future of science and technology, and maybe some people that are flat out singlulartarians. If these topics interest you, please add and share this circle. This is the power of g+ folks ^_^

+Jonathan Zittrain‘s keynote at #roflcon2012 Frederic Emam-Zadé Gerardino originally shared this post:

Jenny Winder originally shared this post:

There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming. But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find “a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all”, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around u…

Twittering Machine Paul Klee 1922 Khan Academy: Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twittering_Machine

Deen Abiola originally shared this post: Surprisingly detailed account of speech signal separation for a general audience publication. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=speech-getting-computers-understand-overlapping&print=true Audio Alchemy: Getting Computers to Understand Overlapping Speech: Scientific American You have little trouble hearing what your companion is saying in a noisy cafe, but computers are confounded by this “cocktail party problem.” New algorithms finally enable machines to tune i…

+Callum J Hackett commented: “Is it dickish of me to say that once the fund got to around, say, $100,000, people should have thought, “Maybe it’s time to turn my money to an actual charity”? Yes, those kids were awful (though I have to say that she didn’t look much like she cared given the gravity of some of the things they said), and yes it’s great that people have come out in support of her. But I think this is an example of people behaving disproportionately, and though we hear it happening all the time with bad things, it can happen with good things like this too. I think, as a crowd, the people who have donated have become carried away with indulgence in generosity, perhaps for the fuzzy feeling it gives them rather than her. I don’t think it’s rationally sustainable to make a random woman rich because she was treated like crap by children when there’s so much agony elsewhere in the world that even half of the money this woman will receive could help with enormously.” https://plus.google.com/u/0/110603832885954401865/posts/WmdDv8sL9Xw I left the following response in his thread: I think you are right that this is a disproportionate response. The problem is that there is no infrastructure to ensure that the good will generated on the internet is used productively and effectively, or that its response are in proportion to the crimes that instigated it. Such infrastructure doesn’t yet exist; +Jonathan Zittrain keynote at ROFLCon is in some sense a call for that infrastructure. The paradigm case of such disproportionate response was the Kony 2012 meme, the fastest spreading meme in history and (consequently) the most radically disproportionate ratio of virality to actual accomplishment we’ve ever seen. Just imagine if the internet had actually fomented some action as a […]

‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence by Dan Dennett “What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children’s growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: “Comprehend in order to be competent.” For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing’s world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level — or divine level! — competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.” More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ via +Neil Smith

Happy Birthday, #Turing ! Marta Rauch originally shared this post: Is This the Smartest Google Doodle Yet? Another day, another awesome interactive Google doodle. This one — which hits Saturday in the U.S., but you can see it already in the Australian and New Zealand versions of Google — celebrates

The Attention Economy Primer This primer is designed to introduce newbies to some basic concepts and readings on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. There is a lot of material here, some of which is quite difficult, and not all of it is explicitly connected. However, I hope that taken together this guide sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. More: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/06/attention-economy-primer.html #attentioneconomy #bigdata #complexity #science #internet #digitalvalues #digitalculture ______________________________ +Gideon Rosenblatt asked me to put together a reading list on the attention economy last week. It took me a while, but I pulled together around 20 important contributions to the discussion, sorted it by category, and wrote a brief introductory essay to hold it together. Some of it may be familiar, but hopefully enough is new and interesting to encourage further exploration. This is a lot of material, probably more than a summer’s worth. Sorry Gideon! Still, this is a developing story, and I hope to continue to update and argument this primer as more people start to contribute to the discussion. Suggestions, criticisms, and contributions are always welcome. If you appreciate this work, please participate!