Google’s vision of the future is a search engine that is your cybernetic friend. World renowned AI guru Ray Kurzweil is in charge of a project that, if it comes to fruition, will answer your questions without you even needing to ask. The idea is that combining keywords from your emails, search habits, surfing habits, and the kinds of things you have in common with friends on social networks, Google can predict what you want to know about and deliver it for you before you’ve asked. Ostensibly, this has the ability to save a lot of time and energy, however it could also be a way to drive targeted manipulation of your shopping habits.

There’s also the concern that Google is making us stupid by doing so much of the hard work for us and reducing people to passive knowledge consumers.

Morozov (been reading a bit by him lately) warns of the impending consumerism that will be the main focus of the internet in the future. He believes that Google’s ultimate goal is to provide opportunities to sell you junk through targeted shopping.

Find out more about Morozov on twitter.

To begin, I have two different types of sound sources- one being my electric guitar

an ’89 Charval Mod 6, and the other being a couple of Midi keyboards

a Roland JV-1000(top) and a KurzweilK2500XS(bottom).

We’ll start with the guitar hook-up. A 1/4″ instrument cable runs from the output jack of the guitar to the instrument input of a Line6 Pod XT guitar processor.

From the Pod XT I run two 1/4″ balanced mono cables to input channels 14 and 15 of a Mackie Cr1604-VLZ mixer. The reason for the two cables out from the guitar processor is that certain effects convert a mono signal to a stereo one(ie. reverb and delay), so the two cables actually work as a left and right channel. Before we get from the mixer to the computer let’s go back and take a look at the keyboards.

The Roland has a straight forward output section. A separate 1/4″ TRS connects the left and right channels to channels 1 and 2 on the mixer. The Kurzweil on the other hand has a KDFX effects unit installed that creates 8 mono/4 stereo outputs that are user configurable. This allows for a lot of routing flexibility…but I do all my processing “in the box” so I just use the two main outputs in the same manner as the Roland. These go to channels 3 and 4 on the mixer.

As a side note, I do have a Tascam 122 MKII Master Casette Deck hooked up to the mixer through RCA plugs for times I need to take audio from cassette to the computer.

Now before we get the audio out of the mixer and into the computer let’s talk a bit about trim and gain staging. When I first hook up an audio source to a mixer I set the volume fader on that channel to unity(this is where the audio is neither being amplified nor attenuated). Next I use the input trim control and the audio meters to have the loudest sound at about 3/4 of the meter levels, well within the green. A slight bit of analog distortion from a loud signal adds “warmth” and “character” but digital distortion results in noise(clicks, crackles,etc.) so be very careful setting up your trim.

Getting back to the audio path, since I generally record one track at a time I use the main outs(two 1/4″ balanced lines- left and right) on the mixer to bring the audio into my soundcard’s breakout box. I use an Echo Layla 3G for a soundcard.

The breakout box offers 8 inputs and 10 outputs with mic preamps on channels 1 and 2. From here the sound is converted from analog to digital for use in my DAW. I also use 2 of the outputs to run XLR cables to my studio monitors- a pair of Adam Audio A7 speakers. In case you’re wondering, those foam pads under the speakers are decouplers(they act as “resistance” to vibrations that may travel through a desk surface thus affecting the listening environment). Specifically they are a product called MoPad manufactured by Auralex.

That’s it for how I get the audio into my DAW…we’ll look at MIDI connections another time. Hopefully this will help anyone taking their first steps in digital audio and setting up audio in a home studio. If you have any questions or comments don’t be afraid to post!

-Bill

1. The movie “Dazed and Confused” is 20 years old — which actually means there’s been more time since the movie came out than there was between the movie (1993) and its setting (1976). Also, the backstory on the “moontower.“

3. The sound-length of words: “No” vs. “Nope.”

4. Poetry: Mark Levine writes about having had a class with Philip Levine (thanks to The Dish for highlighting this):

He seemed uninterested in interpreting poems, which was at first mystifying to a student like me, who had been trained to believe that the most valuable response to a poem was finding something clever or unexpected to say about it. He thought that the right words in the right sequence held a power that was magical and instantaneous. He read poems to us — W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Bishop  — with a passion I had never before encountered. His voice was rough and magisterial. Words were alive in him. He read with a clenched jaw and his body almost shaking. He described John Keats’s letters and made clear his sense that the imagination was a sacred place breeding authenticity in words. He insisted that the poem be lived. One student turned in a poem that used the word “lion” a single time, to symbolize power. Levine almost blew up. “Goddamn it,” he shouted, “if you’re going to put a poor lion in your poem, I want that lion to be there.” He seemed to hunger after the texture of reality, which took many forms, but which was instantly recognizable to him. Another student’s poem began: “A window. 
A baseball. The possibilities.” It was a sparse and, in certain ways, abstract poem. He loved it. He saw a world in it: the object in flight, clean and clear; the suspension of time; the opening of   imaginative possibility, of promised lands, however shattered, within the disappointments of the actual one.

I like the idea of responding to the immediacy of the poem rather than trying to interpret it. If the poem is honest, there may be no interpretation that is necessary.

5. Reginald Dwayne Betts gives some poetry advice in his  essay “What It Is”. Some of my favorite parts:

This ain’t about risk. Risk is living below the poverty line in the worst part of town; risk is raising a black boy in a town with laws like Stand Your Ground; risk is being a single parent without family or community support; risk is what soldiers, police officers, firefighters encounter. Poetry is about language, words, about being as honest as you can on the page.

There are things you say in a room with friends. Things you hear others say and can’t forget, ’cos you spent an hour arguing with them, or laughing. The poem should be that, something worth screaming about.

Don’t write about being white.

Don’t be afraid to hate poems. Don’t be afraid to hate your own.

Don’t be the person who only notices the elephant in the room.

Don’t believe them when they say a poem has room for everything. Only the grave does.

Stop with the allusions to dead poets. You do something other than read poetry.

Don’t betray the people you right about.

Don’t strip your poem of identity. Don’t make your identity the 
poems.

Right now there is someone lying to a child, praising the work of some thirteen-year-old kid as if it were the sign of latent genius. Don’t be that person. Teaching poetry to children isn’t about discovering genius. It’s about discovering language, and discovering the difficulties inherent in manipulating it.

Work in a place where no one knows what an iamb is.

Don’t condescend. There is prejudice in calling something beautiful for the act and not the fact.

The colloquial is always musical. “You lucky I can’t breathe or I’d walk all up and down your ass.”

6. Documentaries vs. movies.

7. Nathan Rabin on the Tribe Called Quest documentary.

8. The AVClub’s discussion of perfect pieces of pop culture.

9. How we conceive of the mind — a discussion of Kurzweil.

10. Fifteen years of “The Big Lebowski.“

11. Puns in the names of small businesses.

12. The much-lauded KIPP charter schools have high graduation rates but their students’ college-completion rates are much lower. I hate to be cynical about educators having the success KIPP has had, but as a teacher at a regular public high school, I do get tired of being told that certain reformers have found the perfect way forward. Students are way too unique, and I would just love policymakers to allow a multitude of ways to teach.

Software-wise-

Cakewalk Sonar X2 Producer Edition- the heart of my DAW, I use this for recording, sequencing, and mixing.
Sony Sound Forge 10 Pro- this is my digital audio editor.
Quantum Leap Pianos- kind of self-explanatory.
East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Platinum Plus- my own personal symphony.
East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Choirs w/ VOTA Expansion- the aaaaaaahhhhhs have it!
Native Instruments Komplete 7- an extensive suite of software synths, samplers, and guitar tools.
Fxpansion BFD 2- my drum software including some optional kits, i.e. Neil Peart’s.
IK Multimedia- I own just about everything they make (T-RackS Deluxe, Sampletank 2.5 XL, Sonic Synth 2, Amplitube, etc.).
Waves Platinum Bundle- if you’ve ever listened to music made in the past couple of decades then you’ve heard Waves plugins in use. EQs, Compressors, Reverbs, Limiters, etc.
Nomad Integral Bundle- another fine set of dynamic and processor plugins.
And other assorted software and sample libraries.

Hardware-wise I have an i7 based computer using an Echo Layla 3G soundcard. For external equipment-

Roland JV-1000 with the Vintage Synth and VE-JV1 expansion cards.
Kurzweil K2500XS w/ expanded PRAM, Grand Piano daughterboard, Contemporary and Orchestral Blocks, and KDFX.
Mackie CR1604VLZ 16 channel analog mixer.
Charvel Mod6 6-string electric guitar run through a Line 6 Pod XT (including the software based Pod Farm Platinum 2.5).

I monitor through a set of Adam Audio A7′s.

Even though my DAW is offline I do share my flatscreen monitors with my internet machine through a dual DVI KVM switch.

Ok, enough boring stuff for now!

-Bill

Nothing!  Not a laugh, not even a snigger.  You’d think that a theatre full of geeks would contain at least a single person who’d thought that I was funny; but no.  They all just sat there, like veal; probably pissed that an unknown speaker was delaying Kurzweil’s entrance.  Under any other set of circumstances, I would have been a nervous wreck; convinced that I’d lost them.  I had a trick or two up my sleeve, though, so I pressed on.

“OK, OK, we all know that my assertion is far from true.  You’ve had two days full of the cool stuff, and I’m pretty sure that the room feels the Singularity is coming on strong, even though it’s not quite here yet.  Indeed, if Ray is to be believed, it won’t get here before 2045; some 22 years from now.  I’m on this stage, though, to tell you that he’s completely and utterly wrong. If you let me, I’ll prove to each and every one of you, right here, right now, that the schedule’s been moved up.  When they write the history books they’re gonna say that I personally kicked off the Singularity; did it in front of you, did it right here in Kaufman hall.  Really.”  Then, raising both of my hands and doing a “tada,” I repeated myself: “Really!”

That got them laughing.  Not your amiable “we shared a funny” sort of laugh, mind you.  More like an “I get it; he’s a complete and total idiot” laugh.

Holding up my hands, I said “I know that you think I’m a moron.  Of course you do.  That’s fine, the very idea that the Singularity could start today sounds ridiculous.  And it should!  It’s an extraordinary claim, and as we should all know: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.  I get that.  So here’s the deal: take out your cameras, your iPhones, whatever, and point them at the stage.  One of two things will happen.  Something less than proof, and then you can boo me off, savage me in the press, and have a really good laugh; whatever.  If, on the other hand, something truly amazing does indeed happen, then you can race to upload the first video to YouTube; maybe end up on CNN.”

That calmed them down a bit.  No one (I was positive, no one!) believed that I could be right.  A small percentage might have felt that I was going for something rhetorical, but the rest had little doubt that I was off my rocker.  Even so, I’d made progress, since they were for the most part willing to hear more.  The conference had been chockablock with serious erudition; often leavened with near messianic fervor.  Now, it looked like the cart might go seriously off the rails; just the thing after 17 long hours of all-too-earnest talk.

The second I turned around, the room filled with an incredulous susurration, seatmate talking to seatmate, saying things like “Where does he get off,” and “Can you believe we have to listen to this idiot.”  When I dragged a “magical” box out from the wings, a box covered in blue velvet, with stars and moons and other wizard spoor, though, the room erupted in outright guffaws.  Everyone got it then, or to be more precise: thought they got it.  My bit would be a spot of hilarity thrown in at the end of the conference to poke fun at all of the seriousness.  I wasn’t an idiot after all, or if I was, I was a professional idiot; an entertainer.  Suddenly, the mood in the room altered.  The assumed reveal was so unexpected, so stupid at face value, that all of the bad will that I had built up evaporated in a thrice.

With the box at center stage, I made an elaborate flourish then slowly pulled something out that looked like a pogo stick.  It wasn’t an ordinary pogo-stick, given that it lacked a plunger and had shoe-shaped pads on the bottom instead of a simple bar, but even so it was a fairly recognizable object.  Continuing to play the prestidigitator, I stepped onto the pads then bent my legs a bit as if I was about to start a bounce, and did another “tada” with my head.  By this point, the room was perplexed, had not the slightest idea as to what was going on, but it didn’t matter.  I had brought them full circle, and the important thing was that they were, for the most part, laughing.

Pausing for a second, I reminded the crowd: “Cameras,” then bent my knees and launched into the air.

If I had been on an actual a pogo stick then I would have come right back down and everything would have gone on as before.  The audience would have continued to laugh at my stupidity, unsure as to what I was doing, but even so they would have remained amused and ready for more.  I’d have continued my shtick for as long as they’d let me, then ultimately exited the stage as what they falsely assumed: some sort of clown.

I didn’t, however, come down.  Instead, I drifted a few feet higher then floated forward over the downstage lip.  Within seconds I was above the audience’s heads.  It took almost five minutes to overfly a much of the auditorium; taking an eccentric path, zigzagging, circling, spinning around in tight little circles and squares, occasionally doing the porpoise thing just fun.

By the time I was done, you could have heard a pin drop.

For a wonder, no one had a heart attack, although a fair number did faint.  “As I was saying, the Singularity starts here and now!”  To emphasize my point, I began to fly a tight-edged square in the center of Kaufman hall, flying each circuit at greater and greater speed.  After some four or five of these odd revolutions, I faked a loud belch and mimed being sick.  Slowing the scooter to a crawl and drifting back over the stage, I set back down then said with a burpy voice, “Almost lost my cookies!”

If this were Vaudeville, the room would have jumped up onto their feet then erupted in applause.  The weirdness meter, however, being totally pegged, they all remained fixed in their seats.  A third arms-upraised “tada” didn’t get them going, either, so I was forced to turn explicit.  “Stand up, people, get up on your feet; give yourselves some applause.  The Singularity’s here, it’s what we’ve all been waiting for, it’s here; get on your feet, give yourself some joy.”

I started clapping.  Nothing.

Stamping my feet, yelling, clapping, jumping up and down.  Still nothing.

Incredulous, I looked offstage to see if anyone there got it, and suddenly—breaking eye contact with the crowd—it was like I flipped a huge switch.  The room exploded into pandemonium.  A few people clapped, but mostly everyone started talking to everyone else.  There was crying and hugging and back slapping and shaking one’s neighbor’s hands; it was amazing.  I’d never been to a tent revival, but I’m pretty sure that this was like the moment when everyone got “saved.”

It took forever to get them up onto their feet, so it naturally took even longer to get them calmed down.  I quickly learned that no amount of shouting and gestures would compose them.  I only made headway by pulling a woman out from the audience and getting her to take a ride.  “It’s just like a Segway.  Lean the way you want to go, or twist the handlebar to go up and down.  Be careful, though, and try to go slow.  Also, keep your feet on the pads and at least one hand on the handlebars.  This isn’t anti-gravity.  You step off and you’ll fall like a stone.”

Getting the remarkably complacent woman positioned, I asked “What’s your name?”

“Joan.”  Without the slightest pause, she twisted the handlebar a bit and began to float.  Just a little, not more than 6 inches off the deck.  It took a minute or so to get the leaning thing down, but before long she was tooling around like a pro.  At the lip of the stage, she hesitated for a moment, but gathering her courage, leaned forward and floated out over the audience.  She almost clocked a guy in the first row, but right before she was going to hit him, she nudged the handlebar and vaulted up and over.

Shouting “Let’s give Joan a big round of applause,” got some of the people to pay attention.  No one applauded, of course, but within three or four minutes, the entire room was mesmerized once again.  It helped that Joan was a grandmotherly 60, maybe even 65; short, gray haired and more than a little zaftig, not the sort of gal that anyone would cast in an action-adventure film.  Even so, she was flying and smiling; fully in control, and clearly having a bang-up time.

With a gesture, I drew Joan back to the stage.  A neophyte flyer, she was nonetheless able to execute a quick little pirouette at the end, just before setting down.  Then, getting into the true spirit of the thing, she stepped off the scooter and took an honest to goodness bow.

The room erupted, literally exploded into applause.  Finally!  It was one thing to have someone showy like myself do the do, but to have a random old lady take it for a spin, why that exceeded all bounds.

Doing the flapping arms “settle down” thing, I eventually quieted the room.  Putting my hands up and palms forward, I waited another minute for true silence.  Then, in a stage whisper, I asked: “Are you ready for more?”`

900 heads nodded, along with me, a fervent “Yes.”  I was no P.T. Barnum, but even so, I had them; totally had them!  “That’s good, because I have lots more to show.  For starters, let’s talk about the scooter.  I mean, really, how does it work?  Can anyone guess?”  I waited for someone, anyone, to raise a hand, but no one took the bait.  “Look’s like anti-gravity, doesn’t it?”  Milking the moment, nodding my head up and down, I took a slow turn around the stage, before I continued.  “Yeah . . . not so much!  I’d love to tell you that I’ve invented anti-gravity, but to tell the truth, it’s nothing more than a kind of force cell.”

Taking a short tube from the “wizard” box and holding it up horizontally over my head, I flipped a switch on the end and removed my hands to leave it floating in mid-air.  Then, for fun, I did a chin up.  “You’re looking at a simple force cell, folks; nothing more!  It may look like magic, but I can assure you it’s nothing more than a couple of clever twists on the day to day physics you already know and love.  Even better, you won’t need the expensive toys to build it, oh no!  Forget your billion dollar fabs and cyclotrons; you should be thinking beakers and 3D printers instead.  Assuming the government doesn’t throw a kinipsion, force cells could be in a thousand commercial products within the year.”

Taking a clicker out of my pocket, I did the old-school thing and brought up a PowerPoint slide with a shortened URL.  “I’m going to introduce six more inventions today (all of which will be described ad-nauseum on my site!), but before I go on I’d like to talk about the Singularity.  I mean, what actually makes a Singularity.  Flying scooters are cool, force cells too, and I’ll get into how I powered them next.  Regardless, I’m thinking that we should pause a bit to put things in perspective.  The singularity isn’t a single unforeseen invention, not a hundred or even a thousand.  The Singularity is all about unexpected, unimaginable change.  And I’m not talking about something that comes along gradually and at an easy comfortable pace.  No, I’m talking great big gobs of everything-turns-suddenly-and-completely-unimaginably-different, all at once.”

To make my point, I removed my head.

Louis S. Berman
Drexel Hill, PA, December 25th, 2012

I was familiar with Kurzweil’s Singularity and I was eager to see how Ptolemy dealt with this in the film. Overall it is an interesting work and certainly taught me more about Kurzweil than I previously knew, although there were things I wish it would have explored in greater depth.

For instance, what are Kurzweil’s plans if the singularity does not come to pass in his lifetime? I would have liked to hear his thoughts on cryonics, which I understand are negative, and any alternatives he thinks might work. If his only plan is to “stick around” long enough, frankly I think that’s a little naive.

I also would have liked him to explain what he meant by bringing his father back (from the dead). How does he propose to do that when all he has are notes and various papers belonging to his father?

When I first read about Kurzweil he reminded me very much of Marshal McLuhan, who seemed to predict (his writing was never all too clear) that digital communication would one day make us all telepathically connected. I’m sure that someone has made that connection before and I would be interested in reading about the similarities in their theories.

Both Kurzweil and McLuhan have caused others to conclude that if their theories were true, it would lead to the most destructive world war ever. A sort of terminator scenario where people who want to build the machine are fighting those who don’t, or where the machine is built and simply destroys all the inferior humans. While we get to hear the thoughts of others on this point, we never hear Kurzweil respond to these views.

After this documentary, the main thing I am coming away with is a desire to delve deeper into this area. I’ve downloaded The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil’s 2005 book on the topic, and am looking forward to reading all about the wonderful things that will be implanted in my brain in the future. I’m sure he thought we’d be a lot closer by 2013 than having a massive artificial neural network learn what a kitty cat looks like.

The speaker in question was Lord Anthony Giddens, one of whose many claims to fame is his description as “Tony Blair’s guru”.

His biography states that, “According to Google Scholar, he is the most widely cited sociologist in the world today.”

In support of that claim, a 2009 article in the Times Higher Education supplement notes the following:

Giddens trumps Marx…

A list published today by Times Higher Education reveals the most-cited academic authors of books in the humanities…

As one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists, Anthony Giddens, the Labour peer and former director of the London School of Economics, will be used to academic accolades.

But even he may be pleased to hear that his books are cited more often than those of iconic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

Lord Giddens, now emeritus professor at LSE and a life fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, is the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities, according to the list produced by scientific data analysts Thomson Reuters.

The only living scholar ranked higher is Albert Bandura, the Canadian psychologist and pioneer of social learning theory at Stanford University…

Freud enters the list in 11th place. The American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, who is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and whose political books have a broader readership than some of his peers in the list, is 15th…

Lord Giddens is now 75 years old. Earlier this evening, I saw for myself evidence of his remarkable calibre. He gave an hour-long lecture in front of a packed audience at the London School of Economics, without any notes or slides, and without any hesitation, deviation, or verbal infelicity. Throughout, his remarks bristled with compelling ideas. He was equally competent – and equally fluent – when it came to the question-and-answer portion of the event.

The lecture was entitled “Off the edge of history: the world in the 21st century”. From its description on the LSE website, I had already identified it as relevant to many of the themes that I seek to have discussed in the series of London Futurists meetups that I chair:

The risks we face, and the opportunities we have, in the 21st century are in many respects quite different from those experienced in earlier periods of history. How should we analyse and respond to such a world? What is a rational balance of optimism and pessimism? How can we plan for a future that seems to elude our grasp and in some ways is imponderable?

As the lecture proceeded, I was very pleasantly impressed by the sequence of ideas. I append here a lightly edited copy of the verbatim notes I took on my Psion Series 5mx, supplemented by a few additions from the #LSEGiddens tweet stream. Added afterwards: the LSE has made a podcast available of the talk.

My rough notes from the talk follow… (text in italics are my parenthetical comments)

This large lecture room is completely full, twenty minutes before the lecture is due to start. I’m glad I arrived early!

Today’s topic is work in progress – he’s writing a book on the same topic, “Off the edge of history”.

• Note this is a very different thesis from “the end of history”.

His starting point is in the subject of geology – a long way from sociology. He’s been working on climate change for the last seven years. It’s his first time to work so closely with scientists.

Geologists tend to call the present age “the Holocene age” – the last 12,000 years. But a geologist called Paul Crutzen recommended that we should use a different term for the last 200 years or so – we’re now in the Anthropocene age:

• In this period, human activity strongly influences nature and the environment
• This re-orients and restructures the world of geology
• A great deal of what used to be natural, is natural no longer
• Human beings are invading nature, in a way that has no precedent
• Even some apparently natural catastrophes, like tsunamis and volcanoes, might be linked to impacts from humans.

We have continuities from previous history (of course), but so many things are different nowadays. One example is the impacts of new forms of biological threat. Disease organisms have skipped from animals to human beings. New disease organisms are being synthesised.

There are threats facing us, which are in no ways extensions of previous threats.

For example, what is the Internet doing to the world? Is it a gigantic new mind? Are you using the mobile phone, or is the mobile phone using you? There’s no parallel from previous periods. Globally connected electronic communications are fundamentally different from what went before.

When you are dealing with risks you’ve never experienced before, you can’t measure them. You’ll only know for sure when it’s too late. We’re on the edge of history because we are dealing with risks we have never faced before.

Just as we are invading nature, we are invading human nature in a way that’s unprecedented.

Do you know about the Singularity? (A smattering of people in the audience raise their hands.) It’s mind-blowing. You should find out about it:

• It’s based on a mathematical concept
• It’s accelerating processes of growth, rapidly disappearing to a far off point very different from today.

Everyone should read the books of Ray Kurzweil – who has recently become an Engineering Director at Google.

Kurzweil’s book makes it clear that:

• Within our lifetimes, human beings will no longer be human beings
• There are multiple accelerating rates of change in several different disciplines
• The three main disciplines contributing to the singularity are nanotech, AI, and biotech
• All are transforming our understanding of the human body and, more importantly, the human mind
• This is described by the “Law of accelerating returns”
• Progress is not just linear but geometrical.

This book opens our minds to multiple possibilities of what it means to be human, as technology penetrates us.

Nanotech is like humans playing God:

• It’s a level below DNA
• We can use it to rebuild many parts of the human body, and other artefacts in the world.

Kurzweil states that human beings will develop intelligence which is 100x higher than at present:

• Because of merging of human bodies with computers
• Because of the impact of nanotech.

Kurzweil gives this advice: if you are relatively young: live long, in order to live forever:

• Immortality is no longer a religious concept, it’s now a tangible prospect
• It could happen in the next 20-40 years.

This is a fantastic expansion of what it means to be human. Importantly, it’s a spread of opportunities and risk.

These were religious notions before. Now we have the real possibility of apocalypse – we’ve had it since the 1950s, when the first thermonuclear weapons were invented. The possibility of immortality has become real too.

We don’t know how to chart these possibilities. None of us know how to fill in that gap.

What science fiction writers were writing 20 years ago, is now in the newspapers everyday. Reading from the Guardian from a couple of days ago:

Paralysed people could get movement back through thought control

Brain implant could allow people to ‘feel’ the presence of infrared light and one day be used to move artificial limbs

Scientists have moved closer to allowing paralysed people to control artificial limbs with their thoughts following a breakthrough in technology…

…part of a series of sessions on advances in brain-machine interfaces, at which other scientists presented a bionic hand that could connect directly to the nerves in a person’s arm and provide sensory feedback of what they were holding.

Until now, neurological prosthetics have largely been demonstrated as a way to restore a loss of function. Last year, a 58-year-old woman who had become paralysed after a stroke demonstrated that she could use a robotic arm to bring a cup of coffee to her mouth and take a sip, just by thinking about it…

In the future…  it might be possible to use prosthetic devices to restore vision – for example, if a person’s visual cortex had been damaged – by training a different part of the brain to process the information.

Or you could even augment normal brain function in non-invasive ways to deliver the information.

We could learn to detect other sorts of signals that we normally don’t see or experience; the perceptual range could increase.

These things are real; these things are happening. There is a kind of geometric advance.

The literature of social scientists has a big division here, between doomsday thinkers and optimists, with respected thinkers in both camps.

Sir Martin Rees is example of first category. He wrote a book called “Our final century”:

• It examines forms of risk that could destroy our society
• Climate change is a huge existential risk – most people aren’t aware of it
• Nanotech is another existential risk – grey goo scenario
• We also have lots of weaponry: drones circulating above the world even as we speak
• Most previous civilisations have ended in disaster – they subverted themselves
• For the first time, we have a civilisation on a global scale
• It could well be our final century.

Optimists include Matt Ridley, a businessman turned scientist, and author of the book “The rational optimist”:

• Over the course of human civilisation there is progress – including progress in culture, and medical advances.

This is a big division. How do we sort this out? His view: it’s not possible to decide. We need to recognise that we live in a “high opportunity, high risk society”:

• The level of opportunity and level of risk are both much higher than before
• But risk and opportunity always intertwine
• “In every risk there’s an opportunity…” and vice versa
• We must be aware of the twists and tangles of risk and opportunity – their interpenetration.

Studying this area has led him to change some of his views from before:

• He now sees the goal of sustainability as a harder thing than before
• Living within our limits makes sense, but we no longer know what our limits are
• We have to respect limits, but also recognise that limits can be changed.

For example, could we regard a world population of 9 billion people as an opportunity, rather than just a risk?

• It would lead us to put lots more focus on food innovation, blue sky tech for agriculture, social reform, etc – all good things.

A few points to help us sort things out:

1. One must never avoid risk – we live in a world subject to extreme system risk; we mustn’t live in denial of risk in our personal life (like denying the risks of smoking or riding motor cycles) or at an civilisational level
2. We have to think about the future in a very different way, because the future has become opaque to us; the enlightenment thought was that we would march in and make sense of history (Marx had similar thoughts), but it turns out that the future is actually opaque – for our personal lives too as well as society (he wonders whether the EU will still exist by the time he finishes his book on the future of the EU!)
3. We’ll have to learn to backcast rather than forecast – to borrow an idea from the study of climate change. We have to think ahead, and then think back.

This project is the grand task of social sciences in the 21st century.

One more example: the possibility of re-shoring of jobs in the US and EU:

• 3D printing is an unbelievable technological invention
• 3D printers can already print shoes
• A printer in an MIT lab can print whole systems – eg in due course a plane which will fly directly out of the computer
• This will likely produce a revolution in manufacturing – many, many implications.

Final rhetorical question: As we confront this world, should we be pessimists or optimists? This is the same question he used to consider, at the end of the talks he used to give on climate change.

His answer: we should bracket out that opposition; it’s much more important to be rational than either pessimist or optimist:

• Compare the case of someone with very serious cancer – they need more than wishful thinking. Need rational underpinning of optimism and/or pessimism.

Resounding applause from the audience. Then commence questions and answers.

Q: Are today’s governance structures, at local and national levels, fit to deal with these issues?

A: No. For example, the he European Union has proved not to be the vanguard of global governance that we hoped it would be. Climate change is another clear example: twenty years of UN meetings with no useful outcome whatsoever.

Q: Are our human cognitive powers capable to deal with these problems? Is there a role for technology to assist our cognitive powers?

A: Our human powers are facing a pretty difficult challenge. It’s human nature to put off what we don’t have to do today. Like 16 years taking up smoking who can’t really see themselves being 40. Maybe a supermind might be more effective.

Q: Although he has given examples where current governance models are failing, are there any bright spots of hope for governance? (The questioner in this case was me.)

A: There are some hopeful signs for economic governance. Surely bankers will not get away with what they’ve done. Movement to address tax havens (“onslaught”) - bring the money back as well as bringing the jobs back. Will require global co-operation. Nuclear proliferation (Iran, Israel) is as dangerous as climate change. The international community has done quite well with non-proliferation, but it only takes one nuclear war for things to go terribly wrong.

Q: What practical advice would he give to the Prime Minister (or to Ed Miliband)?

A: He supports Ed Miliband trying to restructure capitalism; there are similar moves happening in the US too. However, with global issues like these, any individual prime minister is limited in his influence. For better or for worse, Ray Kurzweil has more influence than any politician!

(Which is a remarkable thing to say, for someone who used to work so closely with Prime Minister Tony Blair…)

Bob speaks of how an AI would get a sense of purpose.
It seems to me that it would get one in exactly the same way that we get one as human beings, by a complex set of interaction with other individuals, with culture, and with distinctions derived from our own sets of percepts and concepts; with every bit of stored information having an influence on the probability of the next action of the system as a whole, and those probability functions being totally dependent on the operating context of the instant.

All such systems must be uniquely individual.
It seems clear to me that any AI that manages to achieve distributed “holographic” storage and recall of information will have “intuitions” very similar to those that we have.

Thus I see nothing in Bob’s question to indicate that AI will be in any significant way different from human beings (other than in speed and capacity of course). It will be a very smart individual, and a member of many communities of individuals; like we are.

“There is no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down…and because of that we’ve all become commodities, just as the natural world has become a commodity that is being exploited, until it is exhausted or it collapses” (Alhabbo, 2012).

A recent report supports Hedges claims of the system’s inadequacies, finding that nearly half of the world’s food goes waste before it is eaten—an astounding “1.2-2bn tonnes” (Smithers, 2013). When put into perspective, it seems almost intuitive that mass production inevitably yields under consumption, which is simply not sustainable. Joi Ito, director MIT’s Media Lab, points out how the current aims of technological progress “emphasize the wrong priorities for development” in that they endeavor “efficiency” over “resilience” (Shankland, 2013). Moreover over, he believes that the exponential growth of technologies (e.g. Life enhancing biotechnologies, Kurzweil’s singularity) can be ecologically harmful in that their effects to the larger system or social-network are not being accounted for.

In their 1972 book “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari foreshadowed the shortcomings of a capitalist system, suggesting it ultimately led to a state of “psychological repression” and “social oppression” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972). The current state of the economy, the environment, and human health attest to the fact the capitalism is faulty. We are sick. The system is sick. It is time reclaim our democracy and move away from our current delusion of freedom.

References:

Alhabbo. (2012). Chris Hedges Sits Down With Bill Moyers. Retrieved from  

Deleuze, G, Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Œdipus. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. of L’Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. London and New York: Continuum.

Shankland, S. (2013). Ito: Think twice about immortality and the singularity. CNet News. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57565860-76/ito-think-twice-about-immortality-and-the-singularity/

Smithers, R. (2013). Almost Half of the World’s Food Thrown Away, Report Finds. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/10/half-world-food-waste

The result is the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, PRTM. It might seem surprisingly simple, but I must admit that I find it very attractive and plausible, bearing in mind that nature always finds clean, perfectly optimized and straight forward solutions. And the PRTM is such a solution — a highly flexible structure that is relatively easy to grow biologically but which permits an incredibly complex development of the mind.

What Kurzweil basically argues is that the main algorithm in the neocortex — the outermost layer of the mammalian brain which is most developed in the human brain and contains all higher functions — is one single algorithm with the only purpose to recognize patterns.

These pattern recognition modules — there would be a few hundred million of them in the neocortex — are then organized in a hierarchical structure where the lowest modules (in an organizational meaning, not physical as they’re all positioned in one single layer) recognize very basic pieces of patterns such as contours and small pieces of sound, and the highest represent concepts such as irony and aesthetics.

From this starting point Kurzweil elaborates the whole process of how the mind learns and develops, and he also outlines how an artificial mind could be created.

I’m confident Kurzweil is actually in a good position to move forward such a project. And here’s the thing: in the middle of December 2012 Kurzweil was hired by Google as Director of Engineering.

Given the strong engineering culture at Google, its interest for cutting edge engineering projects such as the autonomous car, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google would give the endeavor to create an artificial mind a shot, with Kurzweil in charge as director of the project.

It could be worth to note a similar but kind of opposed project — the Human Brain Project which just got financed with half a billion euros by the EU. The Human Brain Project is a remarkable venture with its roots in the Blue Brain Project led by Henry Markram at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, with the scope to build a complete computer based simulation of the human brain.

The fundamental difference between the two projects is that whereas Kurzweil has a top-down approach, analyzing which are the possible algorithms that define the brain’s way of processing information and creating a computer based representation at a progressively more detailed level, The Human Brain Project’s approach is bottom-up, modelling individual neurons and their connections and eventually arriving at a complete simulation of the brain as an organ.

Both approaches will have their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe we’ll see them meet half way.

For me, the issue of open access to publicly funded research is clear cut.
If anyone accepts public money for any aspect of their research, then the results need to be in the public domain, freely available immediately. In all other cases there should be quite rapid expiry of copyright and patents, no more than 15 years max, and usually around 5 years. If people can’t get a market return in that time, it isn’t going to happen.
Scholarly journals need to stand or fall on the services they supply to their readers (including editorial work, peer review, timeliness of delivery, relevance, etc). The power taken from the public, and given to journals through the current interpretations of copyright law, are, to my mind, without any shadow of doubt, an abuse of power resulting from market values.

3 years ago, when I was told I likely had less than 5 months to live because of metastasised melanoma, I spent many days scouring for information. Much of what I wanted to read was hidden behind $30 a time pay per view firewalls, and all of it was funded with public money.
I refused to pay.
I got enough information from free sources to work out an effective survival strategy (in the face of medical advice saying that no such thing was available).

I have since spent a lot of time investigating the nature of the incentive structures within our society that create such perverse outcomes for the majority of people, and I am now very clear that it is markets, and market valuation mechanisms (aka money) that are actually the single greatest threat to human survival at present.

All monetary systems (market based valuation systems) are scarcity based. The more scarce something is, the more valuable it is; and conversely the more abundant something is the less it is worth. This is completely contrary to the human need for abundance of basic survival commodities.

We have the technical ability to deliver such abundance of basic needs to every human (including information, knowledge and wisdom), but there is zero incentive within any economic system to do so (in fact significant incentives not to do so).

Thus Aaron’s death is something of a wake up call to many of us.
I only met him once, and I liked him very much.
I am greatly saddened by his death.

It is time for a concerted effort to move a majority of humanity beyond the paradigm of markets and market valuation.
It is time to reclaim the legal system to the public domain, and away from the market.
It is time to bring human values back to the law.
It is unlikely to be a smooth journey!

From Singularity Hub, 1/10/13:

In an exclusive with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil gave one of his first interviews since the December announcement that he joined Google full time as Director of Engineering. Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray discusses his new role, how his research interests connect with his latest book How To Create A Mind(which Keith recently interviewed Ray about here), and how technology will advance to produce a “cybernetic friend”

“The project we plan to do is focused on natural language understanding,” said Kurzweil. “We want to give computers the ability to understand the language that they’re reading.”

Regarding the specific kind of artificial intelligence that a Kurzweil-led project will aim to do, he said, “It will know at a semantically deep level what you’re interested in, not just the topic…[but] the specific questions and concerns you have.” He added, “I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.” While it may be take some years to develop this technology, Kurzweil added that he personally thinks it will be embedded into what Google offers currently, rather than as a stand-alone product necessarily.

Now if you’ve been following Singularity Hub’s coverage of personal assistants like Siri, Evi, and the latest, Maluuba, as well as Google Voice Search, then you know that natural language recognition is one of the highest priorities for tech companies today. That’s exciting because it means that holding sophisticated conversations with computers — in much the same way that Dave Bowman does with HAL 9000 in the movie 2001 – is going to become a reality very soon.

As Kurzweil points out, the hurdle currently is that language is hierarchical, and the human brain processes language in a hierarchical way, depending on what stimuli it receives during key stages of development. Computers like IBM’s Watson are just now being programmed to process human information in a related way. Inevitably, the sophistication of this software will grow — slowly, at first, but in all likelihood become exponential, as with many other technological trends that Kurzweil himself has identified.

Though the video is only 10 minutes, it’s great to hear Ray download some more tidbits about what he’ll be doing once he enters Google’s doors. Odds are that when he reemerges, the ability of our computers to understand us is going to take a quantum leap.

The longer explanation is… well… longer, and it starts with a sad story.

A friend of mine, I will refer to him as “Ollie” (people who knew him will recognize his nickname and for everyone else, it’s respectfully anonymous) was a lovely guy. Just one of those people everyone liked. Smart, witty. Late 30s, devoted father and a much-loved husband.

I caught up with Ollie for a beer and a chat about life a few weeks before his second kid was born, a little girl I think. He was loving life, excited about the baby coming and we parted company that afternoon promising to catch up in a few weeks. We had been close friends in university, but like many relationships that kind of get side-tracked by life, we had only sporadically caught up over the years. It was very nice to see him and I felt truly happy to have reconnected with an old friend who was obviously at a contented point in his life.

A couple of weeks later as part of a health kick, feeling self-conscious about a few extra desk-induced kilos (he was a software engineer) and wanting to be healthier for his kids, Ollie started running around the track at a nearby park. On one of those jogs, he had a massive heart-attack and died.

Just a few days after his baby was born. Tragic and awful.

We were all shocked and saddened but something bizarre happened. A few weeks after Ollie passed away, I saw a LinkedIn newsfeed that perfunctorily reported “Ollie has new connections.” I supposed he must have sent a LinkedIn invite to someone who posthumously accepted, maybe they didn’t even know what had happened. I found it slightly creepy. Then a few weeks ago I was doing a LinkedIn search and I guess a few keywords in my search once again pulled up his profile. It’s been amended to indicate that he’s no longer with us, but just the same, it got me thinking.

I realized that we all have an internet persona to some extent. In some cases it’s extensive. Google will already trawl through our email and work out what interests us. Our preferences are dotted all over the virtual planet, from what kind of music we like on iTunes to our seating preferences on United Airlines. It takes a very cursory level of analysis to investigate and understand detailed things about people who have a comprehensive on-line presence. It therefore seems utterly reasonable to me that, in time, algorithms could start to build a pretty good idea of who we are. I reckon an undergraduate computer scientist with access to the 120,000 emails in my Gmail account could probably build a simple bit of code to impersonate my email writing style (at least identify my favorite expletives and the more colorful turns of phrase).

You don’t have to conceptually stretch too much further than this to get to the point where software could know us well enough to think like us, to act like us, to make decisions just as we would … in short, to be us.

Kurzweil and Vinge think it’s still a couple of decades off before it happens, but I think when something is close enough to robustly visualize it, it’s already here. The plain fact of the matter is, Ollie’s LinkedIn and Facebook “avatar” persisted after his death. It continued to echo of his desires and actions in life through the propagation of signals and behaviours after death. I suggest that it is a kind of primitive “Singularity” and certainly more significant than some kind of digital epitaph. Do a mental exercise and put yourself back 200 years in time and try explaining to someone that a deceased individual sent you a message, without actually having written the message before that person passed away. Try explaining that the person truly sent you a message after they had died. You would have characterized that as a “message from the afterlife” – it would be a supramortal event.

Truly worthy of being burnt at the stake.

I actually believe humans will achieve immortality, but not in the biological domain. Our bodies were probably not meant to live forever and even when we solve cancer and heart disease, etc. (which we will) in the limit, the biology of our brains will let us down. It’s also my personal opinion that human beings were not meant to live forever and that our social and ecological existence is based on the promise, inevitability and necessity of death.

I think what will happen is that we will end up living our biological lives in order to create the data points and inputs to our digital lives. In the future, from the day we are born, personalized devices will monitor and capture every moment of our life, our biosignals, our words, our actions, our interactions with people and objects. Massively distributed technologies will chronicle our lives for us and then, when we die, our perfectly captured soul will simply propagate forever. Death will merely be the shedding of a biological core and a nanosecond transition to a synthetic digital being that will continue “life” forward, fully aware that the organic self is no longer.

In this scenario, the life goal would be to maximize the biological experience in order to “richly” propagate the digital soul to eternity. As such, we might think of life rather differently. We might only care about the experiential dimension of life and worry less about things that aren’t important, interesting or exciting. We might deliberate decisions and value relationships more because we’d have to live with them forever. We could take very long views on careers because you would end up being a lawyer/doctor/engineer for the rest of eternity – alternatively, we might want to capture as much knowledge as possible so that when we leave the biological epoch, we are able to enjoy unlimited intellectual diversity. We would crave sophisticated and multi-dimensional personalities, capable of continued evolution in a virtual world.

We would also live our lives with tangible evidence that there is indeed an afterlife … in the form of terabytes stored on a server farm in Palo Alto, but an afterlife no less…

I think this is a very realistic scenario. I just hope whoever is running the IT infrastructure has got site redundancy and good backup power.

In the past it took thousands of years for any major innovation to occur. Today, technological innovations follow each other faster and faster; the next one is probably less than 10 years away from us.

Kurzweil states that we will reach the singularity – a major paradigm shift – by 2045. That is when things will de so different from today, that we just can’t imagine it with our current framework of thinking.

The singularity in 2045, will introduce the next epoch in human life: that is when most of the intelligence in the world will merged with artificial intelligence – which is much more powerful then our human brain:

So, we are not at the end, but only at the very beginning of something very, very big.

And whoever reads in Google what IBM, Microsoft, Apple and others are working on now, can get a glimpse of what that future might be.

Hi Bri

One little 160ft ball of rock isn’t a lot of mass.
If we are wanting to get into serious engineering in space, then we will need a lot of mass – a few peta tons to start with, then more as people start building serious habitats and departing for other star systems.

The problem with stuff that comes to us of its own accord, is that it tends to have a lot of troublesome momentum when it gets here. If we go out, get it, and bring it back, we can keep that momentum differential within safe limits appropriate to spatial and orbital separation.

[followed by]

70 millions Kgs is 10g per person.

In terms of engineering for the entirety of humanity, it’s a teaspoon of rock each.
Not a lot of mass!

If we are talking engineering for humanity, we need about a billion times that amount, if we are serious about making a real difference in the security of every human being, and the ecosystems that support us.
We are talking about serious engineering, using a lot of solar energy to move a lot of rock. All perfectly doable, plenty of energy and mass out there, but not if we restrict ourselves to thinking in terms of markets and money – we have to think beyond that, to real abundance.