The Orbitron – Pure Automotive Scifi Sex

This is the Orbitron.

Just look at it. Look at those lines. Look at that bubble top. Look at those headlights.

Those red, blue and green headlights that were focused to combine and make a single beam of white light.

This was the goddamned car of the future.

It was a one-off custom car designed by custom hot rod legend Ed Roth (creator of the Rat Fink character) and Ed Newton. Unfortunately, the car was deemed a failure when it was debuted, Roth attributing it to his choice to cover the beautiful painted and chromed engine, as well as to the Beatles. He stated that people were now buying guitars instead of cars.

Ultimately, the car was sold to another custom enthusiast, then to a series of private collectors. It was rediscovered in 2006 outside of an adult bookstore in Juarez, Mexico. After some finagling, a new collector was able to purchase the car and fully restored it, unveiling the reborn Orbitron in 2008.

More information and pictures are here at Kustomrama.

The Active Denial System is now deployed in Afghanistan

From the BBC:

A newly-developed heat-ray gun that burns the skin but doesn’t cause permanent injury is now with US troops in Afghanistan.

The Active Denial System (ADS) is a non-lethal weapon designed to disperse violent crowds and repel enemies.

It uses a focused invisible beam that causes an “intolerable heating sensation”, but only penetrates the skin to the equivalent of three sheets of paper.

The discomfort causes whoever it’s pointed at to immediately start moving away. They often scream but the US military says the chance of injury from the system is 0.1%.

It’s already been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers. Even reporters have faced the heat-ray.

Interesting thing about tech like this is what happens once you improve it. Think about computers. Effectively, since the first difference engines, computers have done nothing but calculations. The only things that have changed are that the calculations got more abstract and complex, and the devices themselves got smaller – massively smaller.

Right now the ADS is mounted to a mobile armored vehicle. Imagine, instead, the ADS as a device implanted into, say, every street lamp in a city. Instant riot control. Or, to the wheels of a car. Instant car jacking defense. Or what about to the buttons on your clothes? Personal protection.

The ADS as it is now is little more than an expensive PR stunt, but what could be done with the tech in twenty or thirty years, now that’s the interesting stuff.

Acceleration

Things are speeding up. People are moving faster, goods are moving faster, information is moving faster, ideas are moving faster. You can’t take a moment to study something because by the time you blink, it will have changed.

Previously, there was a definite sense of things happening around you. Identifiable periods in history were long – sometimes centuries long – and they were things that you could see and appreciate being a part of while they were going on. You could have a sense of the gravity and importance of something. But, as technology started to kick in, things sped up. They got faster. They accelerated. Century long periods were cut down to decades, then years, then months, to the days or hours that define periods now.

Think about the late 1960s. The American Social Revolution. Civil rights, feminism, anti-war, and pro-drug movements all spun into one broad counter-culture thread. And everyone could feel it happening. You knew these were the defining days of a period of history. It lasted long enough for you to be able to grab hold of something tangible and hang on for the ride if you were so inclined.

But after that? Things start to blur together, like things moving past the window of a speeding car. The 70s blended into the 80s which blended into the 90s which blends into now. The biggest event was the end of the Cold War, but that was more of a left over from a previous period when things moved slower.

Now I feel like I exist in a world that is blurring around me because it moves so fast. Nothing is tangible because by the time you’ve reached out your arm to touch it, it has already faded away. Things are more ephemeral than they’ve ever been, and it is all due to the acceleration that technology caused.

Think about it like eating a fine, multi-course meal. Except, that the time you have for each course is half of the previous one. Before you’re even out of the appetizer/soup/salad courses, you’re throat is jacked open and food is shoved straight down your throat. The flavors mash-up, you can’t appreciate any of the texture or nuance, but because things keep coming, you start to forget what it was like to ever be able to chew or savor the food. Eventually, you just go numb to the whole experience, as the only sensation that’s left is a mass of food stuffs being forced into your gullet. Time and experience have been force-compacted into bland, forgettable food stuffs.

I love technology, it lets me do things that absolutely blow my mind (like typing this piece), but this is my greatest apprehension about it.

Surface Area Required to Power the World

Source.

Interesting way to present this data. One of those nice little “if money and resources weren’t a problem, we could do THIS!” sort of things.

But, if you want to take a little bit of – heh – sunshine from this, look at the metrics they give you for energy consumption. While the total amount of energy used is going up, the rate at which it is going up is decreasing.

Now you just have to wonder if we have the resources to survive the run up to the point where the curves intersect and we have just the right amount of resources to meet our energy needs.

Net Neutrality is Dead

Court Rules Against F.C.C. in ‘Net Neutrality’ Case

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 6, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

Tuesday’s ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for the Comcast Corporation, the nation’s largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose so called “net neutrality” obligations.

It marks a serious setback for the F.C.C., which needs authority to regulate the Internet in order to push ahead with key parts of its national broadband plan.

That just came across the wire, I pulled it from the NYT.

Time to pull out this graphic:

And the piece I wrote to go along with it.

Graphic by Gizmodo

Dark Places

I want to talk to you about dark places.

Not literally places that lack adequate illumination, but locations that don’t exist. Like a place built out of dark matter and powered by dark energy, completely hidden from human perception, but real and there all the same.

FourSquare, the newest means of shouting about your life on the web, was the impetus for this idea. For those of you with a life and more important things to do with your time, let me explain FourSquare. You go places, tag yourself as being in that location with FourSquare, and then get “badges” when you accomplish things. For example, going to a place more than anyone else and becoming “mayor” of that place or visiting a gym and getting a “fit” badge. Pointless, intangible things, but for some reason people love it. There is also a tacked-on messaging system where people can leave each other suggestions of things to do at certain locations, and notes about those locations.

(Unlike Twitter, FourSquare stands a real chance of making money with their system. The amount of data they are harvesting from their users and the ability to connect businesses to those users will make the people behind it very, very rich.)

Up until their last update, if you checked in at a new place, you had to know the exact street address of a location. Annoying in every instance, downright near impossible if you are, say, in a shopping center or a mall. With the new update, however, you don’t need the address. You can just drop in the name of the place, and the address will get filled in later.

Which made me wonder – what if you just made up a place? Call it NoPlace, and then start slamming it with notes and suggestions and ideas. You’ve made a little nook in a system designed to handle the digital footprints of real places, but that nook doesn’t correspond to anything real. It is just a place out in the ether, filled with information. This is a dark place.

The name comes from darknet, the term being used to describe closed-access networks. Being they professional, social, even piracy oriented, they are the new dominant feature of the Internet these days. The professional and social ones normally start with people who’s trade involves more idea than object. They want to discuss their ideas with others like them, but email is too clunky, and the large social networks will expose them to prying eyes, so they close themselves off and go dark. There are entire cloned networks of Twitter for people like this, they took the API and built themselves a feed that is hidden away from the rest of the world.

The good internet data pirates operate in the same way now. Private ftp networks, torrent swarms that only accept pre-set IPs, encrypted newsgroups, they are the fertile ground for what the music, movie and electronic game trade groups pushed into the shadows after the hey-day of file sharing programs like Napster, Limewire, Kazaa and first generation of torrent sites like Suprnova and The Pirate Bay (yes I know TPB is still around, but they exist in a weird legal limbo land, and the originators are in jail).

Ironically, the most important and exciting places on the Internet are hidden away behind closed doors in Fight Club-esque secrecy. First rule of a darknet is that you don’t talk about a darknet. Which itself is counter point to the idea of an open network with all of the information of the world available for anyone who is willing to go looking.

But back to the local space application of this, the dark place. Essentially, the idea of using FourSquare for this is rather pointless. The functionality is too limited, but it did serve to give me an idea of what it could do. If you take a theoretical jump to include some actual augmented reality functionality, instead of faking it like FourSquare tries to do, you could end up with something like a digital speakeasy. The person who wants to form the group goes to a place in a city; a tree in a park, a pool table in a bar, or something so mundane no one else would notice it. Then that person drops an AR landmark at this spot, say with a password protected login. People with the password then get access to whatever was in that landmark, be it just a few lines of text, a video, a forum, a program, whatever. You could bury a secret history in the digital ether of a city, and no one would know save those that were supposed to know.

I’m not entirely sure why you would want to do any of this, but I’m thinking more about the how rather than the why of it right now. Didn’t get the point of Twitter, and I don’t really get the point of FourSquare, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from using those applications. It seems the good ideas are always built more around how these days, and people just hope the why shows up somewhere along the way.

There could be commercial potential in this, if you wanted to offer coupons to people who were in your businesses and you had, say a chalk board with that day’s password on it. But, I’m really more interested in the potential to hide information in a place that can only be retrieved from other people coming to that same place.

Hidden points of thought, secreted away in the dark places. That’s what this thought is about.

God I love the potential of the future.

a = F/m

That’s Newtons formula for acceleration, the converse of his formula for force, F=ma.

The variables are a for acceleration, F for the force applied to the object, and m for the mass of that object.

Of course, there are a lot more equations that can explain acceleration in more detail, and account for its varied forms (dynamic, constant, centripetal, etc), but this is the one I’m going to use for today’s random thought.

The speed of events in the world is increasing. That’s an irrefutable facts. Things are happening faster, everything, anything, what ever you can think of, it happens faster than it did a century ago, a half-century ago, a decade ago, maybe even a year ago. This is the acceleration of modern life.

We’ll refer to it as a_ml.

That leaves two parts to the equation, the force and the mass.

The force, is, at the root, the advancement of our knowledge. Both in the breadth of what we know, and the depth of what we know about what we know. The rule of thumb for knowledge is that what we know is doubling every ten years. So, linear growth. That’s not to say that we’re going to make twice as many brilliant discoveries as we did in the last last decade, because a lot of what we’re learning is pointless mundane shit. We’re learning tons about how people interact with digital devices right now, but that’s not going to solve the world’s problems or give us limitless clean energy. It will just make the next generation of iPhone more attractive than last year’s model. But, there are some real advancements, and they compound on existing knowledge.

Discovering lighter alloy metals makes airplanes faster and more fuel efficient, so they can travel farther for less money. Discovering new ways to increase the density of batteries increases the usefulness of everything from electric vehicles to laptop computers to vibrators. And I don’t even know where to begin with the Internet. Things are moving so much faster every year that it is only a matter of time before the entire industrialized world is blanketed under a sheet of high-speed wifi. Right now, from my $99 iPhone, I can download an app that lets me call Korea, for FREE, over the Internet. For less than the price of a nice pair of sneakers, I can talk to some one literally on the other side of the planet.

We’ll call our force the force of knowledge.

F_k

That leaves mass.

The average weight of a human being is around 160lbs. That’s taking both men and women into account. All of the force of knowledge built up by the summation of human existence, and it only has to move less than 200lbs.

I’m not meaning that as a piss answer, either. The reason that Gutenberg printing press was such a big deal was because it enabled more people to have copies of a book, in most cases a Bible. Give a missionary a Gutenberg Bible, a direction and send him off to spread the Word. He’s dead? Eaten by cannibalistic Slavs? Oh well! Print another Bible and get another acolyte!

It only takes one person with an idea to tell another person about that idea. From there, you’ve got the magnifying effect of word of mouth. Bloggers are the modern day Gutenberg presses. They are the individual advocates of ideas that spread them to the masses, who in turn spread word about that blog. Professional news sources are turning more and more to individual bloggers for editorial and news content. Just like a missionary wandering into a town, a single blogger, at the right moment in time, with the right thing to say, can change the world for everyone.

So, for our mass, let’s go with the mass of a human.

m_h

Making our final formula a_ml=F_k/m_h

The acceleration of modern life is equal to the force of knowledge divided by the mass of a human.

And the point and impetus to all of this?

The Massachusetts senatorial election last night. Where a Republican swept the Democrats out of a seat that had been under their control since World War II. There is potential for this to be the harbinger of a Democratic slaughter come the 2010 midterm elections. I’m not going to go down the political rabbit hole right now, but I do wonder what is going to happen as the political pendulum speeds up. Just this time last year we were all screaming our undying love for Obama (ok, those of us not decrying him as a demon Muslim socialist), and now we’re already predicting his ideology’s imminent doom. If changes in the political wind can happen this fast now, what happens as they get faster and faster? What if the country can go from Red to Blue to Red in a single week? Or day? Or hour?

Think about this economically, too. The economic collapse of the last three years is more or less over, and we’re digging out from under it right now. Three years it lasted, on the outside. The Great Depression? Oh, about a decade. It might have lasted even longer if the war hadn’t happened. This is entirely due to the speed at which financial transactions can happen now. No more waiting for wires from across the Atlantic. You can have real-time satellite connections to any bank in the world from any place in the world. Give me a satellite phone on the top of Mount Everest and I can apply for a Visa card. There’s an entire business model that revolves around banks of supercomputers making billions of stock transactions a day, buying and selling on marginal increases and decreases in the value of the stock, slowly but surely inflating the market with machine trading instead of human trading. Which is only possible because of the speed at which information moves these days.

What makes me wonder what’s going to happen as things keep speeding up, but our biology doesn’t. Eventually things happening so fast are going to have a detrimental affect on us. We’ll be overloaded with information and be completely unable to function because we’re drowning in data. You can’t decide if the choice keeps changing, you know?

Just something to muse about. The math of change. The formula for progression.

a_ml=F_k/m_h

Accelerate.

Fuck, I just broke my brain

The Horribly Brain Breaking Question:

If you are born into a state of augmented reality, does that augmented reality become reality? And if so, what does augmented augmented reality look like?

The Drunken Stumble of Thoughts to Get There:

Effectively, we’re already living in an augmented reality in comparison to things that don’t have as broad of a range of senses as we do. We live in an augmented reality compared to dogs. Bees live in an augmented reality compared to us.

Now, what if you added a bit of tech to the human biology. Say, a self-replicating nano device that was a genetic Internet connection. GPS, connectivity to the group thought, ocular content browsing, location based data sources, all of that shit that is part of what we’re theorizing augmented reality to look like. The first generation to have something like this could honestly call their existence an augmented reality. But, what about their children?

They come out of the womb and their reality is already augmented, so the baseline is moved up and it opens up the question as to whether or not you can legitimately call it augmented still.

Then, what the hell do these people do to push their reality even farther? Make what they’re perceiving real instead of illusory?

Ah, Jesus, what the hell would that even mean?

Realtime reassembling of reality to match the group consciousness?

Is the increase in the speed of data transmission and processing really doing anything more than accelerating the trip to impermanence?

Civilization is the new ecosystem.

This is a video of the Raleigh sewer monster. They’ve been finding these clumps of biomatter all over the sewer system in that city, but this is the first video footage of them.

I want to point something out before we go any further – this could be a complete sack of shit. A very well done viral campaign, probably. Malphrus is the company that took the video, and according to their website, they handle large constructions projects, especially those with water. But, something doesn’t sit right with me about the name “Malphrus”.  What sort of business would have a prefix that means bad or evil? I did some digging and malphrus could be a made up word that means “bad eye” or “evil eye”.  I’m being this skeptical because I really I want to believe this, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Anyway, now that we’ve got that out of the way.

If this thing is real, then we don’t know what the fuck it is. At first they thought it was a slime mold at the slimy part of its life cycle, but it moves. So, then they thought it was something called annelid worms, which it could be. The problem, though, is that these things have a uniform skin. If they are individual organisms, then they are wrapping themselves in a communal coating. Colonizing isn’t uncommon for annelid worms, tube worms are annelid worms for example, but never under a single skin.

The most interesting part of this for me is not the life form itself (which is fascinating if real), but rather what the life form potentially implies.

We living in a reality that obeys the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. Things cannot be destroyed, only transformed. This applies to biological spaces, too. We cut down a forest to build a city. The space that was the forest is now the city. Instead of trees you have lamp posts and buildings. Instead of creeks you have sewers and drainage systems. The space has inherently changed, but it is still a space for life to grow and occupy.

By the way I’m not going to get into an environmental debate over the right or wrong of this, so put the pitchforks down now.

So as human civilization supplants the previous ecosystems, we’re replacing it with something new. And if this thing is real, then we’re seeing the space that we’ve created get populated by new kinds of life. Life that in all likelihood would never have come into being with out the ecosystem that we created.

Humanity is like a faster acting blue-green algae. Algae reformed this planet from a CO2 atmosphere to an O2 atmosphere. It may have taken half a billion years, but a life form did it. We’re changing the planet in the same way, but in matter of centuries, not epocs. If this is really something new, then we’re looking at the rise of the first new organism to take advantage of the world that we’ve created.

Again, take all of this with a grain of salt. But with that salt, marvel at the potentiality of an ecosystem dependant of civlization.

Google Chrome OS

I woke up this morning and found the Internet was running around banging its head into walls again. Great, I thought, either another celebrity died or Apple’s released a new phone. Or maybe both. Maybe Steven Jobs died and resurrected himself as the True Jesus Phone.

Thankfully, it turned out to be none of that. Google released a short, but tantalizing statement about their new OS, named uncreatively enough, Google Chrome OS. In the press release, Google promises an OS targeted toward netbooks, but scalable up to desktop PCs, with a boot time measured in seconds, not minutes and the best part? It’ll be totally free.

My friends and I are already visibly turgid over Google’s last announcement, Google Wave. I plan on shoving all of my writing over to Waves where people will be able to edit and provide critiques. No more need for stupid Facebook invites to events, either. Just start a Wave for an event and send it out to everyone. That’s not even getting into the options for gaming and creative group projects.

But, when you combine the ideas in my head from Google Wave with a 3lb netbook with a 6+ hour battery life for less than $500, you change my fucking life. In a good way. This is something to be watched.

Oh, as an aside, there was a line in the press release:

They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.

That got me thinking about a video I saw a few years back that talked about Google basically taking over the world in a benevolent way with user-specific data. After about thirty minutes of digging, I found the video. This version is shit for quality, but you can find the original here.

Now, I want you to think about what you watched and how spot on those people were. The iPhone/iPod Touch is the iPod Wifi. Google’s iReader is Newsbotseter. Google Wave is Google Grid. Instead of the NTY suing Google, the AP did. Oh, and that last bit about geotagged podcasts? That’s fucking Twitter, just with sound instead of text.

Let that sink in for a second, bring it to a simmer then add this: We are now able to prophecy our future because of consumer trends and technology functionality.

Building the Universal Building Block

From WIRED’s Danger Room:

Even by the standards of the Pentagon fringe science arm, this project sounds far-out: “” that can be ordered to “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.” But researchers back by Darpa are actually making progress on this incredible goal, Henry Kenyon at Signal magazine reports.

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

One team from Harvard is working on a kind of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a “molecular Velcro.” An MIT group is building “’self-folding origami’ machines that use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.”

My interest with this is the instant fabrication possibilities that a basic technological building offers.

The commercial potential is incredible. I buy an assembler and some building block goop. Then I slot it with a few basic templates I’ve purchased. Dishes, flatware, bits of a table, objects built out of single pieces or primitives. If I chose, I can lease templates for more complex items. For a few hundred bucks, I can buy a one-time use template from Sony that will spit out an HD television. Transportation and packaging costs would be nil. Think of it as a digital download of a physical object from a service like Steam or Emusic.

Beyond that, the ability to instantaneously create something is part of the Singularity. In order to keep the technological advancement going past a certain point, you’d have to be able to produce ideas as fast as you can think them, something I’ve mentioned before. Starting from a universal building block would make that sort of thing possible.

You aren’t helping, you know that, right?

The Gray Goo Problem

Robert Freitas is a researcher who deals in nanotechnology, and the potential pitfalls that might come our way as the new technology develops. Ecophagy is one of his most famous concepts.

Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that self-replicating nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment (e.g., “biomass”) into replicas of themselves (e.g., “nanomass”) on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the “gray goo problem” but perhaps more properly termed “global ecophagy.” [Also Also]

With each passing day, I have more and more respect for William Gibson

From Twitter last night:

Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the “now” factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum.about 14 hours ago from web

Less creative people believe in “originality” and “innovation”, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.about 14 hours ago from web

When I look for collaborators I look for atemporality, whatever relevant kinds of historical literacy, and fluency in recombinance.about 14 hours ago from web

Otherwise, result will be “now-bound”. Or, actually, for me, a non-starter.about 14 hours ago from web

Your bleeding-edge Now is always someone else’s past. Someone else’s ’70s bellbottoms. Grasp that and start to attain atemporality.about 14 hours ago from web

The most intelligent 21st-century fashion strives for a radical atemporality. Probably because the digital is radically atemporal.about 13 hours ago from web

That week’s new Mac obsoleting as you drove it home from the dealer. Like melting ice cream. Like any imagined future.about 13 hours ago from web

Tom Waits says he was never very interested in people his own age. Fascinated by his parents’ generation.about 13 hours ago from web

Not that there’s no now, but that it’s someone else’s future and someone else’s past. And on that, I lapse back into Exercise Dog territory.about 13 hours ago from web

This from a man who has created and recreated the technological near-future time and time again.

Quotations

The next question is, can we invent things on the fly, create things that have never been created before, in real time?

-Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and the new Wolfram|Alpha search engine.

I bring this up because real time creation is a key factor of the Singularity. In order for technology to keep advancing an exponential rate, you need to decrease development time. You’ll literally need to be able to think with your hands.

Warren Ellis’ second WIRED UK column

Go. Read it. Laugh at the pale, sickly British man who is scared to of being eaten and/or wanked by robots.

So, yes, I’m hoping this is not an actual working prototype in preparation for an Eloi future where men are so crap as to experience shattering fatigue from having to hold their old man while taking a slash. Also, it’s well known that monkeys have had their brains hooked up to robotic arms. I’m not putting my dadpaste dispenser anywhere near a set of robot arms that might be neurally connected to some mangy chimp who’s become unhinged by the failure of his food-dispenser button and fancies going all Roddy McDowall in protest.

Swine Flu and the Digital Collective Consciousness

One of my key arguments for the digital collective consciousness we’re running at full tilt into is that it makes all of humanity one reactive force to disasters. I use the example of the Southeast Asian tsunami a few years back. Death reports put the number of dead around a quarter of a million. Displaced people numbered in the millions. And while there were aid groups involved from America, most of us just watched the disaster unfold on our televisions, detached from it all.

Now imagine it is that morning of the tsunami. You wake up. You blink twice and reconnect to the SOCSWARM network. You’re suddenly overwhelmed with images and feelings of disaster. A red-hot needle is jabbed into your brain, and you can’t let go of this disaster. It becomes all you think about, your foremost desire is to help these people who you’ve never met but are intrinsically connected to. The world has ceased to be a series of small to medium sized ponds. We are all part of one ocean now. Humanity reacting as one to help part of itself.

This is, of course, an oversimplified and hyperbolized version of reality. But, a glimmer of this is seen in what’s going on with swine flu. The connectivity between people brought about through social networking and mash-up programs has given us the ability to track the spread of the disease in near real-time.

The most important factor in combating any contagion is getting ahead of it. You don’t worry about the infected people, they are already behind the leading edge. What matters is where the edge is now. You want to build a ring of isolation around that edge, and starve the disease out.

While the paranoia is a little extreme, it is doing just this. People are voluntarily retreating into their homes at the slightest hint of a sniffle. Schools are closing at the moment an infection is found. People are actually washing their hands. The over-exposure to this problem maybe amplifying our fear of it, but that fear is making us act in ways that will keep us healthy.

Swine flu could have been a very real threat to the health of the world, but because of our connectivity, we’ve reacted fast enough, and directly enough to turn this into something that the late night comics will be making jokes about for the rest of the year.

At least, that’s what I hope will happen. I’d hate to die to BACON LUNG.

More about the Singularity

I promise to shut up about Nerd Rapture after this. Just finished reading Thought Experiments: When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil by Cory Doctorow. Which is exactly what it sounds like. And what it sounds like is one of the founders of BoingBoing sitting down with one of the main proponents of the technological singularity. Doctorow is pretty skeptical about the whole thing, and Kurzweil slips into some…uh…weird territory toward the end of the interview. But, he does manage one bit of lucidity that I’ve pulled out for you.

“Progress is exponential–not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk–the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.”

But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

“Sure, it’d be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen.”

“But the most salient scenario is that we’ll gradually merge with our technology. We’ll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they’ll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they’ll get more and more sophisticated. There’s no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps.

Done now.

Promise.

Quotations

The technological Singularity is more akin to the rise of humankind within the animal kingdom, or perhaps to the rise of multicellular life.

-Vernor Vinge

Quote source. Image source.

We are building the instruments of our own demise

Time for a robot round-up. Here’s a few examples of things we’re building things that we probably shouldn’t be.

First up, Boston Dynamic’s BigDog. A robotic pack mule designed to help move heavy equipment across rough terrain.

Boston Dynamic also has a smaller version of the BigDog, called obviously enough, LittleDog, that they use to learn more about locomotion and path finding.

They’ve also built a robot that can scale most vertical surfaces, called RiSE.

As well as some horrifying badger-like robot that can swim, named RHex.

The onus doesn’t entirely fall on Boston Dynamic. The Japanese brought us the lovely swimming rape tentacle.

Not to be outdone, the fine folks at the University of Washington are building robotic fish and teaching them to school together.

The modlab at the University of Pennsylvania have been working on another group-oriented robot. In this case, it’s a group of modular robots that group together to build something bigger than the individual robot. They can also rebuild the larger structures if they get broken apart.

However, none of that compares to something that’s being built for the US Military right now. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne have constructed something called the The Multiple Kill Vehicle-L. It is a counter-missile system designed to intercept a ballistic missile and then deploy smaller “kill vehicles” to destroy the incoming missile.

Simply put: When they decide to rebel, we’re all fucked.