Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

telepathy

According to the BBC, telepathy is here, sort of. Human brain waves can be read by machines, then transmitted by machines to other human brains, which can perceive them. At the moment, they are perceived only as light, not the original thoughts that they were. Before we get too excited, the researchers say they think the technology will eventually allow perception of the original thoughts, but not in our current lifetime. I can see another implication though – if brain patterns are already being read into computers, we will eventually figure out how to have computers interpret them. Assuming progress in computing power continues to be exponential or super-exponential, I wouldn’t be so sure that we won’t see this relatively soon. Lots of exciting, and scary, implications, of course.

the cyborg moths are finally here!

Well, they’re finally here – the cyborg moth slaves. First it was cockroaches and I didn’t say much because, well, they’re cockroaches. But moths – they’re just one step from butterflies, and it just doesn’t seem like you should do this to butterflies. From butterflies the obvious next step is Paul Mcauley’s cyborg baboon-human hybrids. If you read his book of short stories The Invisible Country, it is not until about the second page that you start to think this sort of technology could raise some ethical issues.

 

Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he is trying to put people on Mars in 10-12 years, put sustainable colonies on Mars longer term as a hedge against human extinction, build cheap batteries for cheap electric cars and houses, build cheap solar panels to charge the batteries, and protect us against killer artificial intelligence. He also thinks other people should advance the Hyperloop and figure out how we can live forever. I think this is a pretty good to-do list.

July 2014 in Review

I’m going to do a “month in review” post where I sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • The “trophic theory of money”, which to oversimplify just says that economic growth will always add to humanity’s ecological footprint. I don’t buy this 100% but our footprint is certainly continuing to grow with no obvious signs that we are about to turn the corner. (-1)
  • New dams on the Mekong, a hotspot of aquatic biodiversity, may block fish passage although some mitigation measures are being tried. (-1)
  • A new book by Edan Lepucki describes a future where people “traverse a cross-section of mid-collapse landscape, framed by the gradual decline of civilization”. (-1)
  • 100 years ago, exactly now, Europe was dissolving into the mostly unexpected chaos of World War I. Which led later to the extraordinary pain of the Great Depression. (-3)
  • Artificial intelligence and robots are finally turning into a commercial reality, with positive and negative implications like crushing labor unrest. Also, they can identify dog breeds with some accuracy. (-0)

Positive trends and predictions (+4):

  • Urban trees can mitigate a small, but not insignificant (around 2%), amount of a city’s carbon emissions. And that’s with business-as-usual practices – I speculate that this could be boosted to 5-10% with a concerted effort, which combined with emissions reductions could make an actual difference. (+1)
  • “Blue Urbanism” gives some examples of how cities could be more aware of their impacts on the oceans (but clearly, those impacts are still huge so I’m not giving this any points). (+0)
  • On the green infrastructure front, Biophilic Cities lays out a hopeful vision of how urban areas can be more integrated into the natural world. A new website, Falling Fruit, is trying to combine information on worldwide urban green infrastructure with a focus on edibles. (+2)
  • Some EU cities are considering a complete ban on the internal combustion engine…by 2050. Stockholm however is envisioning a “single, supple mesh of mobility” by 2025. (+1)
  • Autonomous vehicles are not quite a commercial reality, but they will be and there are both positive and negative implications of that. (+0)
  • Dubai is building a gigantic, climate-controlled city-like mall under a dome. Children who grow up in places like this will be able to adapt readily to gigantic, climate-controlled mall-like cities in outer space. (+0)

So my Hope for the Future Index stands at -2.

the killer robots are coming, seriously

Wired says the robot future is really, truly almost here:

The robots are coming, and they’re getting smarter. They’re evolving from single-task devices like Roomba and its floor-mopping, pool-cleaning cousins into machines that can make their own decisions and autonomously navigate public spaces. Thanks to artificial intelligence, machines are getting better at understanding our speech and detecting and reflecting our emotions. In many ways, they’re becoming more like us.

There are a couple new and disturbing things I learned from this article. First, military drone technology has moved to police departments and corporate security departments. One example is

the Skunk Riot Control Copter, a drone armed with plastic bullets and pepper spray. The Guardian recently reported that the South African company that builds the Skunk has been selling it to an international mining company interested in using it to suppress labor riots.

There is also a developing robot sex industry, which I suppose should not be a surprise.