The information revolution mainly occured in english. Why? Because, being developed in the United States, english speakers had a head start on things before other countries and cultures could get involved. If anything, this has sealed English’s position as lingua franca, quite likely in perpetuity of the human race (is there any reason for another lingua franca to emerge, now that the entire world speaks english, via the web?)
However, the next technological revolutions aren’t necessarily going to happen in silicon valley. They are going to happen where the willpower and resources to make them happen exists. And, increasingly, that is overseas. Like, for instance, Russia, which is taking a diametrical tack to the U.S. in this regard. Take their new nanotechnology program, for example.
Rosnanotekh was set up last year with a budget of five billion dollars (3.2 billion euros), an unprecedented level of funding for Russian scientists starved of resources since the 1991 Soviet collapse.
The corporation aims to make the creations of Russian scientists commercially viable and, through co-financing, to promote private investment — the main source of technology funding in countries such as Japan and the United States.
With the removal of state funding after the Soviet collapse, hundreds of thousands of scientists emigrated to places such as Silicon Valley. The often remote research institutes they abandoned largely stagnated.
…
Russian officials are hoping all that will change. When Rosnanotekh was set up last year the then president, Vladimir Putin, said nanotechnology was “a key direction” for the country’s economy.
Another current buzzword is “technology clusters,” which the government hopes will be based around research institutes and universities to develop inventions and bring them to market more efficiently.
The global market for nanotechnology will be worth 2.9 trillion dollars by 2014, according to research data shown at the forum. Russia has signalled it wants to be up there with industry leaders such as the United States.
Up there with industry leaders, or biting at their heels? Brain power isn’t an anglosaxon invention, and, thanks to the equalizing power of information age, the thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs that would have been left farming the grandfather potato field (or rice paddy, or cow herd) will get the opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of the cubicle farm :>
And, overtaking won’t take much, with current policital candidates unafraidly (proudly?) admitting that they don’t know computers.
This site was hacked. Posts were edited to deliver malware. Send people places they didn’t want to go. I didn’t want them to go.
Fuck.
I’ve cleaned up now, and updated Wordpress, which apparently wasn’t nearly as secure as it needed to be. Hopefully, the warnings will go away and people can visit here again. I’ll be more vigilant in the future. I hope no one had any problems because of this.
May’s issue of Reason magazine has an interesting interveiw with Peter Theil, one of the major supporters of Transhumanist research. Not too much new information, but an interesting read nonetheless.
It could happen with computers. It could happen with enhanced human intelligence, where you have things that modify humans. There are aspects of the biotech revolution that could represent this. There are nanotechnological versions that could be very, very strange. There are all sorts of very bizarrely different versions of this, and it’s very hard to know which of these trends is a dominant one. Maybe they have natural limits to them. Maybe Moore’s Law [the observation in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors incorporated into integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years] breaks down. If Moore’s Law were to stop tomorrow, then I think the hopes for A.I. and computer science may be deferred by centuries. Then the biotech revolution seems to have a lot of promise, but again maybe there are some strange constraints that it runs into.
Welcome to the world of community based, collaborative content.
One of the big stories of 2006’s reiteration of the online landscape has been the development of business models leveraging user created content and communities. You create a site that allows others to upload and post their content, you share that with the world, throw in some kind of monetizing plan (show ads on content, charge a membership fee, or whatever) and voila, instant money making.
Flickr and Digg are perfect examples of this new layer of interactivity and commerce, which has been dubbed ‘web 2.0′ - the new version of the old. Flickr is a photo sharing web site, which goes beyond simple hosting and management of pictures, to develop real communities and photo sharing opportunities. On one’s flickr home page a section displays recent photos from your friends and online acquaintances (including the ones you met through the site), and another displays randomly chosen recent pictures from the entire user base.
Digg is a collaborative news site, where users upload and rate links to sites elsewhere on the web, and, base
We are still discovering what that means to the whole scheme of things. In the old world, you made something, you sold it, you called all the shots. But what happens when your customers are not only purchasing your product, but providing it to you?
Stories were getting deleted and user accounts were being banned all because of a stupid HD-DVD copyright Hex code that can be used to unlock HD-DVD. Digg claimed that they could be sued and what not for it so they decided to censor all of the stories that had to deal with the key. The whole thing is just bull, you can’t copyright a sequence of numbers and letters.
March 5, 2008 at 4:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Some people have let me know that google is flagging this site as ‘containing malware’. I have no idea why, nor how to make them stop. I have checked every inch of the site for problems or possibly compromises, and have found none. While I would like to assure you that there is no problem, I am still waiting for my service provider to give me an explanation. I haven’t had any problems myself accessing the site, and nor have anyone else. This is f-ing annoying, please bear with me while I traipse through the delightful red tape of clearing my name…
March 1, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Bil conference.
I’m at the Bil un-conference this weekend. It’s a self-organizing conference, where everyone shows up, anyone can give a talk, and things generally happen in an ad-hoc fashion. It might sound like chaos, but the opposite is true - it’s really cutting to the meat of what a conference is all about: the exchange of ideas, and the meeting of people.
What has this got to do with our road to the singularity? Well, I am meeting and hearing from the people who will be making the singularity happen. People developing Rapid DNA sequencing, a guy who is developing a networkeded model of economics, a guy who is at a start up trying to develop a ubiquitous online trust system. My friend Sheffie talking about efficient shmoozing and networking skills. Earlier, there was a talk on the origins of stem cells and cell differentiation. Later, Brad Templeton is going to talk about Robot Cars and the future of communication.
November 21, 2007 at 3:12 am · Filed under Uncategorized
What’s so special about 23andMe, deCODEme, and Navigenics? What makes them stand out of the crowd? After all, DNA testing is nothing new…DNA Direct, has been offering consumers a whole slate of different tests for several years complete with genetic counseling and informative
November 5, 2007 at 10:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A very fascinating post from Elizer Yudkowsky’s Overcoming Bias blog on the upper limits on DNA based evolution, with a startling conclusion:
Among mammals, the rate of DNA copying errors is roughly 10^-8 per base per generation. Copy a hundred million DNA bases, and on average, one will copy incorrectly. One mutation, one death; each non-junk base of DNA soaks up the same amount of selection pressure to counter the degenerative pressure of copying errors. It’s a truism among biologists that most selection pressure goes toward maintaining existing genetic information, rather than promoting new mutations.
Natural selection probably hit its complexity bound no more than a hundred million generations after multicellular organisms got started. Since then, over the last 600 million years, evolutions have substituted new complexity for lost complexity, rather than accumulating adaptations. Anyone who doubts this should read George Williams’s classic “Adaptation and Natural Selection”, which treats the point at much greater length.
In material terms, a Homo sapiens genome contains roughly 3 billion bases. We can see, however, that mammalian selection pressures aren’t going to support 3 billion bases of useful information. This was realized on purely mathematical grounds before “junk DNA” was discovered, before the Genome Project announced that humans probably had only 20-25,000 protein-coding genes. Yes, there’s genetic information that doesn’t code for proteins - all sorts of regulatory regions and such. But it is an excellent bet that nearly all the DNA which appears to be junk, really is junk. Because, roughly speaking, an evolution isn’t going to support more than 10^8 meaningful bases with 1 bit of selection pressure and a 10^-8 error rate.
October 12, 2007 at 2:21 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I volunteered at the singularity summit a few weeks ago and. It was quite a weekend. What is the singularity? Well Eliezer Yudkowsky ’s introductory presentation outlined this conception of it:
Sometime in the future technology will advance to the point of creating minds that are smarter than human through brain computer interfaces or purely biological neurohackery or by constructing true artificial intelligence.
Vernor Vinge was a professor of mathematics were also wrote science fiction. And he realised he was having trouble writing story set in the future past the point where technology creates smarter than human minds because he was having to try to write characters that were smarter than he was, and at that point his crystal ball cracked down the centre.
That is why Vernor Vinge originally called [this] the singularity, after the centre of a black hole where 1970s models of laws of physics break down. Note that it’s the model that is the breaking down not necessarily the future itself. If I am ignorant about the phenomenon. that is a fact about my mind, not a fact about the phenomenon.
Stripped to its barest essentials, the core thesis of the event horizon is that smarter the human minds imply a weirder future than flying cars and amazing gadgets with lots of blinkenlights.
The core of Vinge’s event horizon is about intelligence. Improving the brain is a very serious business it tampers with the roots of the technology tree, goes back to the cause of all technology, and that makes the future a lot more uncertain.
Now the best news is that all the sessions got recorded, and now the audio from all the sessions for the whole weekend is online, and you can listen to the whole weekend’s stuff. They can be a tad confusing, since they were giving accompanied by slideware, and this is just the audio, but I think there will be video too in a while.
September 22, 2007 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s hard to argue that video games are not capable of developing a dependency in their users. As I’ve posted before, the situation has grown so acute that 10 South Koreans — mostly teenagers and people in their twenties — died in 2005 from game addiction-related causes.
At a recent conference in Melbourne, Australia, Jonathan Blow, a prominent independent developer labeled modern games such as World of Warcraft unethical.
[The reward system used by many online games] is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme,” he says. “It’s considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don’t get bored and give up on your game. That’s actually exploitation.”
Developers should provide activities that interest players “rather than stringing them along with little pieces of candy so that they’ll suffer through terrible game play, but keep playing because they gain levels or new items”, he says.
“I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation,” Mr Blow says.
He believes players will naturally avoid boring tasks but developers “override that by plugging into their pleasure centres and giving them scheduled rewards and we convince them to pay us money and waste their lives in front of our game in this exploitative fashion”.
It may be relevant to trot out this old gem - The View From the Top - a post from a highly successful online gamer who, after a year of toiling away online, quit ‘cold turkey’ from the entire environment.
Don’t get me wrong, WoW did a lot of things right. At times it was a fun game that allowed me to keep in contact with friends who lived far away. More importantly it introduced me to some of the best real life friends I’ve ever met. However, it did take an undeniable toll on me and is taking a far greater one on many, many people when taken too far.
September 7, 2007 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Technology
One step closer to mind reading - this wheel chair interprets sub-vocalized speech - in other words, your stream of internal self-talk, and turns it into movement.
I can see how this would be useful. I can also see how thinking “that pillock on my left is really annoying me.” might turn you to face them.
September 7, 2007 at 12:13 pm · Filed under Other stuff
Not particularly singularity relevant, but neat nonetheless:
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.
Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.
This interesting post discusses the user interface of this month’s new overpriced bauble from Apple (No, I’m not jealous - much.) Representational physics (Dubbed “Digital” Physics by the author) is a an ever more immersive part of the digital user interface. Part of this is certainly resulting in improved experience, but part of the drive is IMO just “feature” competition, bored programmers doing cute stuff, and marketing wonks let loose in product design.
For people who play video games, Digital Physics is old news. For the rest of us, the Digital Physics experience is new. The traditional Windows desktop of the nineties never delivered life-like experiences. Instead, users where forced to learn to interact with computers by learning new gestures, via mice and keyboard. The modern interface from Apple changed that paradigm somewhat, by introducing digital interfaces that responded to mouse clicks. iPhone takes this experience to a whole new level, letting us interact with digital information using our hands.
I am not convinced that this is the paradigm shift that Apple boys are all calling it. Representational Physics (The article calls this “Digital Physics” which misses the real point IMO.) has been around as long as tools have - after all, what is a tool but a way of translating one intention into a different action? And, what makes selecting an item from your iphone playlist any different from choosing the floor to go to in an elevator? Read the rest of this entry »
Nice quick summary of the current status quo of virtual/real world convergence, though I still think that people take ‘Second Life’ far too seriously, and the google earth/MS Earth tools aren’t showing the potential to have make any substantive changes to our existence yet. (No time to really comment right now, hopefully I will come back to this. I really need to add a link blog to this site.)
Life is becoming more digital and digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth. In both cases digital information is breaking geographical boundaries and overcoming the limitations imposed by our physical world. Flying in second life has the same affect as linking a Wikipedia entry to the Grand Canyon as rendered in Google Earth.
Information is being unleashed and re-shuffled. We are beginning to look at information from literally a 1000 foot view. And everything is becoming increasingly more connected. This is both very exciting and a bit unnerving. We are accelerating into our digital future from all directions - pushing digital towards life and pushing life towards digital.
Following on from yesterday’s post (well, not really) is this TED video demonstrating the latest in virtual real reality processing. Something tells me that this isn’t going to be as good as the real thing. But, I sure if we wait a decade or so…
Microsoft’s Stephen Lawler gives a whirlwind tour of Virtual Earth, moving up, down and through its hyperreal cityscapes with dazzlingly fluidity, a remarkable feat that requires staggering amounts of data to bring into focus. Google might still be ahead of the game, but even in beta, Virtual Earth shows incredible promise. Microsoft’s visions for the product — as a provider of real-time weather and traffic data, or a realistic backdrop for game developers and IM conversations, or virtual ad space — all seem well within the limits of possibility.
A study of Swedish vacationing and antidepressant use seems to suggest a correlation between inclement weather and antidepressant use. Sweden, being very far north, has excessively dark winters, and consequently a government mandate summer holidays to compensate.
Hartig and colleagues suggest that being stuck indoors on vacation can limit mental recuperation. On the other hand, when able to roam outdoors, we can exert ourselves at a favourite sport or simply linger in the park. Psychologically, beautiful scenery can distract us from our troubles, help us forget our normal stressful environments and reconnect us to nature.
Well, who knows what’s really going on, but the Swedish researchers found a negative correlation between SSRI prescriptions filled with the temperature in Sweden for the month of July, going over several years. Given that more and more of people’s time is spent doing less and less outside (and more and more time is spent staring at a computer monitor, like you are right now) what does this trend bode for our mental health? Read the rest of this entry »
In my professional and personal life I have found great use for online forums. They are of immense value to geographically scattered but like-minded individuals focused on a specific area of human expertise. What we have, is a cognitive artefact that facilitates peer advising via the electronic medium.
That’s a rather fancy way of saying they are a good way of sharing information with other people who share a particular vocation or hobby. There are forums for all sorts of things, from dealing with acne, to recording rock bands, to political activism (there are plenty of those), along with mailing lists that have been functioning for aeons (those are online forums, too), as well as plenty purely for the entertainment of their members.
So this study regarding the efficacy of advice to be found in online forum discussions comes as no surprise.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who seek out general weight loss information via Internet forums will, more often than not, receive correct information, especially if the messages are posted on heavily trafficked Internet sites, results of a study suggest.
The information revolution mainly occured in english. Why? Because, being developed in the United States, english speakers had a head start on things before other countries and cultures could get involved. If anything, this has sealed English’s position as lingua franca, quite likely in perpetuity of the human race (is there any reason for another lingua franca to emerge, now that the entire world speaks english, via the web?) 
I’m appalled. Mortified. Disgusted. Shocked. 
