Anders Sandberg heeft een lezing gegeven over Mind Uploading:
Via GoogleTechTalks — Google Tech Talk May 27, 2010.
ABSTRACT
Presented by Anders Sandberg.
The idea of creating a faithful, one-to-one computer copy of a human brain has been a popular philosophical thought experiment and science fiction plot for decades. While computational neuroscience and systems biology are currently very far away from this goal, the trends towards large-scale simulation, industrialized neuroinformatics, new forms of microscopy and powerful computing clusters point in this direction and are enabling new forms of simulations of unprecendented scope. In this talk I will discuss current estimates of how close we are to achieving emulated brains, technological requirements, research challenges and some of the possible consequences.

read more

Kate Ray's Web 3.0 mini-doc explores the potential for the semantic web.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

This documentary offers some interesting insights into how difficult it is to both develop and predict the next iteration of the Web. I can't help but feel, however, that human cognition is missing from the discussion; in my mind, the next iteration of the web has to be further conceptualized as a part of the exosomatic brain. Anything we can do to better streamline the process of accessing and processing information will be a step in this direction. Put another way, how can we blur the divide and reduce the friction that currently separates the human mind from the internet?

Maybe that's Web 4.0 stuff....

Anders Sandberg delivered a talk on whole brain emulation at Google last month:

Why good memory may be bad for you: The counterintuitive finding that too good a memory makes foragers inefficient reveals a glimpse of the forces that govern the evolution of intelligence.

From the article:
It's easy to imagine that a good memory would confer significant benefits to a foraging animal.

But it's not quite so straightforward, say Denis Boyer at Universite Paul Sabatier in France and Peter Walsh at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico.

These guys have created one of the first computer models to take into account a creature's ability to remember the locations of past foraging successes and revisit them.

Their model shows that in a changing environment, revisiting old haunts on a regular basis is not the best strategy for a forager.

It turns out instead that a better approach strategy is to inject an element of randomness into a regular foraging pattern. This improves foraging efficiency by a factor of up to 7, say Boyer and Walsh.

Clearly, creatures of habit are not as successful as their opportunistic cousins.

New book: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age in which Clay Shirky argues that, amid the silly videos and spam, are the roots of a new reading and writing culture.

Excerpt from the WSJ review:
The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

New book: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr on how the internet is changing the way we think.

Excerpt from the NYT review:
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. "I can feel it too," he writes. "Over the last few years, I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." While HAL was silenced by its human users, Carr argues that we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet. As Carr first observed in his much discussed 2008 article in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," the mere existence of the online world has made it much harder (at least for him) to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas. "Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words," Carr writes, with typical eloquence. "Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he's careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.

Nevertheless, Carr insists that the negative side effects of the Internet outweigh its efficiencies. Consider, for instance, the search engine, which Carr believes has fragmented our knowledge. "We don't see the forest when we search the Web," he writes. "We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves." One of Carr's most convincing pieces of evidence comes from a 2008 study that reviewed 34 million academic articles published between 1945 and 2005. While the digitization of journals made it far easier to find this information, it also coincided with a narrowing of citations, with scholars citing fewer previous articles and focusing more heavily on recent publications. Why is it that in a world in which everything is available we all end up reading the same thing?

04.06.2010

“Mit Hilfe modernster nanotechnologischer Methoden haben britische Wissenschaftler jetzt das optische Prinzip der irisierenden Flügel eines tropischen Schmetterlings nachgebaut. Wie sie in „Nature Nanotechnology“ berichten, lassen sich die durch Nanostrukturen erzeugten Signale auch als Fälschungsschutz beispielsweise für Banknoten einsetzen. [...]“

Source/article: Scinexx

02.06.2010

“[...] Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell’s own fuel.

The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

“This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before,” said Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters. “We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.” [...]“

Source/article: Discovery

02.06.2010

“The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed at Earth, and finally converting the beams back to electricity at terrestrial power stations. The Luna Ring concept, the company says, could meet the entire world’s energy needs. [...]“

Source/article: PhysOrg

01.06.2010

“Setpoint Medical, a startup based in Boston, is developing a nerve stimulator designed to dampen the out-of-control immune system that triggers autoimmune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. The technology is based on a decade of research elucidating how the brain controls the immune system, particularly inflammation. The treatment has not yet been tested in patients, but based on animal research, scientists hope it will provide an alternative treatment that is more effective and have fewer side effects than existing drugs. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review

There’s an interesting article about Ray Kurzweil up at UPI, which gives more perspective than usual for a news article, and quotes interesting people besides Ray. The title is “Commentary: the Singularity is Here”.

Dresden Codak, which publishes new strips only every couple weeks or even every month, has a funny new piece up, Dark Science #01.

Also, Monday will be your last day to register for the Singularity Summit at the $385 price point. Prices go up to $485. There are plenty of discounts available — it’s $100 off if you’re a student. You also get a $100 discount for every non-student referral. Refer four people who pay for full price by Monday, and you can get in for free.

The banners with the proper city (San Francisco) are now available.

Data shows coffee addicts only stave off caffeine withdrawal | Guardian

This is what happens to a video after it has been uploaded, downloaded and re-uploaded to YouTube 1,000 times. Straight copying of digital data is (mostly) lossless -- it's compression and conversion that creates this sort of nastiness. Some of this degradation is noticeable even after only one generation (MP3s as an example).


This is what the original looks like:

More about Jonathon Rosen.

Buddhist magazine Tricycle recently interviewed the IEET's James Hughes about his unique take on transhumanism and Buddhism -- and how the two seemingly disparate philosophies should be intertwined.

Excerpt:
As a former Buddhist monk, Professor James Hughes is concerned with realization. And as a Transhumanist—someone who believes that we will eventually merge with technology and transcend our human limitations—he endorses radical technological enhancements to humanity to help achieve it. He describes himself as an “agnostic Buddhist” trying to unite the European Enlightenment with Buddhist enlightenment.

Sidestepping the word “happiness,” Hughes’ prefers to speak of “human flourishing,” avoiding the hedonism that “happiness” can imply.

“I’m a cautious forecaster,” says Hughes, a bioethicist and sociologist, “but I think the next couple of decades will probably be determined by our growing ability to control matter at the molecular level, by genetic engineering, and by advances in chemistry and tissue-engineering. Life expectancy will increase in almost all countries as we slow down the aging process and eliminate many diseases.” Not squeamish about the prospect of enhancing—or, plainly put, overhauling— the human being, Hughes thinks our lives may be changed most by neurotechnologies—stimulant drugs, “smart” drugs, and psychoactive substances that suppress mental illness.More.
Richard Eskow, who did the interview, followed it up with a rebuttal of sorts: Cerebral Imperialism. In the article he writes,
Why “artificial intelligence,” after all, and not an “artificial identity” or “personality”? The name itself reveals a bias. Aren’t we confused computation with cognition and cognition with identity? Neuroscience suggests that metabolic processes drive our actions and our thoughts to a far greater degree than we’ve realized until now. Is there really a little being in our brains, or contiguous with our brains, driving the body?

To a large extent, isn’t it the other way around? Don’t our minds often build a framework around actions we’ve decided to take for other, more physical reasons? When I drink too much coffee I become more aggressive. I drive more aggressively, but am always thinking thoughts as I weave through traffic: “I’m late.” “He’s slow.” “She’s in the left lane.” “This is a more efficient way to drive.”

Why do we assume that there is an intelligence independent of the body that produces it? I’m well aware of the scientists who are challenging that assumption, so this is not a criticism of the entire artificial intelligence field. There’s a whole discipline called “friendly AI” which recognizes the threat posed by the Skynet/Terminator “computers come alive and eliminate humanity” scenario. A number of these researchers are looking for ways to make artificial “minds” more like artificial “personalities.”Hopefully more to come on this intriguing debate.

Some very cool mega-projects as envisioned by Japan's Shimizu Corp | Formatting Gaia

Data Explosion: Analytics Software Must Adapt or Die | KurzweilAI

520-day Mars mission simulation starts today.

Martine Rothblatt: There's a philosophical and political struggle ahead of us to secure the rights of virtual, uploaded persons.

Note: This is very much along the same lines of the talk I'll be giving at Harvard next week.