Monday, September 30, 2013

Syria's War Viewed Almost in Real Time

For the first time, the war in Syria has given global audiences a close-up view of war

Egypt's Entrepreneurial Revolution: A Community Of Startups Rises From The Ashes

A growing number of entrepreneurs and investors are determined that innovation is the way out of the country’s mess, and they're creating apps to help regular citizens deal with complicated life post-revolution and military takeover.

In post-revolutionary Egypt, where young people make up a quarter of the population, the number of startups, incubators, competitions, and angel investors has grown into a rapidly evolving sector.
“After January 25, we took ownership of our country, we do not wait for help from someone else,” says Gamal Sadek, a co-founder of Bey2ollak, a user-driven traffic application that won Google’s first startup competition in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Two and half years later, Egypt’s entrepreneurs have seen incredible challenges. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi became the first democratically elected leader of the country, his ouster by the military has caused unrest that left hundreds dead and thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters remain in prison.
The ongoing state of emergency and curfew had put additional pressure on retailers and e-commerce sites, while families and business partnerships have fallen apart because of political differences and polarization of Egyptian society.
The rapid changes in Egyptian society are forcing startups to hone their ideas and services or move faster to introduce new products in response to a changing security situation and customer demands.
“A few companies are shifting their strategies or moving to other parts of the world instead of launching locally because of the current situation,” Ramez Mohamed, CEO of Flat6Labs, a startup incubator that launched in 2011 and has since graduated five cycles of startup companies. “There are so many problems that we can’t [afford to] wait for the government to solve, the problems are not decreasing,” he notes.

Bey2ollak

As the security situation deteriorated following Morsi's removal from office in July, Bey2ollak introduced a new service which used a mobile application to coordinate convoys of up to 40 cars to travel to Egypt’s north coast.
“Lots of people were afraid to travel from Cairo to Alexandria. We saw this on social media and created a new category for ‘traveling groups,’ a new feature for specific routes,” Sadek says. “Most of the users are older drivers, mothers with children.” The company hands out Bey2ollak stickers for participating cars to identify each other. It also highlights “convoy of the day."

Mawenly

Other startups target more specific demands. Mawenly, a GPS mobile application tracking working gas stations, launched in the midst of a gasoline shortage in June, a crisis that helped stoke the popular anger and ouster of Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. At the stations where there was gas, many lines lasted for hours, allowing drivers to order food and shisha while waiting in their cars.
Mawenly, which means “fill it up” in Arabic, created a user-driven mobile application that allows its users to report on gas stations which had gas and how long the lines were. “After the crisis ended, people kept downloading it,” says Islam Zawawi, a co-founder. “We work hard to tweak it for everyday use, not just when there is a gasoline crisis.”
Now that the large-scale urgent demand for gasoline has subsided, the founders have moved on to the next challenges, preparing to launch two new applications in the coming months: a car services application and a mobile movie tickets application.

PieRide

PieRide, a commuting solution that launched on September 1, offers riders a safer commute alternative amid ongoing checkpoints and roadblocks on the country's streets.
Karim El Mansi says the original idea was to introduce shuttles connecting popular residential and business centers, because a typical commute across Cairo’s congested roads can now take several hours.

“This has to be done by the government, it cannot be done by a startup,” El Mansi says. “So we started with a simple solution: just introducing cars with trained drivers.”
One of the key features is safety. Each car is equipped with a GPS and the company trains drivers specifically to address security concerns.
“It’s definitely much safer than being alone in a car or taking a taxi,” says El Mansi.

El Wafeyat

El Wafeyat, an online obituary platform, launched last week. It aims to fill a niche left by the dying newspaper industry, by announcing the time and location of funerals and allowing users to create their own obituaries.
In Egypt and other Muslim countries, attending a funeral and honoring the deceased is culturally significant, especially given short time window to bury the dead allowed by Islamic law.
“You can miss a wedding or a birthday, but you can’t miss their funeral,” says Yousef Samaa, a CEO of El Wafeyat. “Not everyone reads the newspaper anymore, so there are no proper tools to get the news.”
The company plans to expand regionally to United Arab Emirates and other Muslim countries.
A similar site, called Deadboard.net, also launched recently. It's a nonprofit site that relies heavily on social media, allowing users to create their own online obituaries to honor the deceased, search for the names of the dead and disseminate information about funerals. With Egyptians being killed in protests and police action around the country in huge numbers, it's a place for family and friends to see if a missing loved one fell victim to violence. The board or obituaries are sorted by categories, honoring deceased including police, media as well as broader categories like politics and religion.
Domestic investors, and those from the Gulf region, are taking note of Egypt’s maturing startup space.
“The number and size of investments is increasing at angel level,” says Con O’Donnell, regional entrepreneurship advisor at MC Egypt, a for-profit subsidiary of Mercy Corps. “We’ve come to a tipping point of an explosion: the maturity of ideas and teams is growing stronger.”
Not everyone is convinced; many investors remain in “wait and see” mode.
“The startup scene is still nascent, the ecosystem is still building,” says Christopher Schroeder, author of Startup Rising: the Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East. “What they need most of all is a more predictable, stable environment to scale their enterprises.”
When they don’t succeed, many entrepreneurs go elsewhere, as there are not many options available and they are not willing to take on more risk.

"When the business is not working, they leave the country--that is a worrying development. These are some of the brightest people in the country, they are not satisfied with regular jobs,” says Hossam Allam, founder of Cairo Angels, Egypt’s first network of angel investors. “It does show the magnitude of stakes.”

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

How Technology Is Killing Eye Contact

The Huffington Post | By Carolyn Gregoire Posted: 09/28/2013 8:20 am EDT | Updated: 09/28/2013 6:35 pm EDT

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Pat Christen had an alarming wake-up call one day about the toll that technology was taking on her life -- and her family.
"I realized several years ago that I had stopped looking in my children's eyes," the HopeLab President and CEO said at a Huffington Post panel at Ad Week on Tuesday. "And it was shocking to me."
Christen's "a-ha" moment was an alarming one, but it's more common than you might think -- and it points toward a larger, and often undiscussed, byproduct of excessive screen time. The decline of eye contact is well-documented, and as we spend more and more of our time staring at screens, there's less time left over to look into people's eyes -- including the eyes of the people we care about most.
Between staring at computers during the work day and regularly gazing down at our phones, Americans spending more time with their eyes glued to their screens than ever before. According to recent estimates, the average American spends more than five hours per day using digital devices on computers and mobile devices (the number is higher, of course, for those who work in front of computer screens), and another four and a half hours watching television. Additionally, the average mobile user checks his or her phone 150 times a day (that's every six and a half minutes), and one recent survey found that young people in Britain spend more time each day on average on their phones than with their partners (119 vs. 97 minutes).
A Wall Street Journal article published in May, "Just Look Me In The Eye Already," cast a light on how technology use has affected our eye contact -- and the sizable toll that reducing eye contact during conversations could take on our relationships.
According to Quantified Impressions, a Texas-based communications analytics company, an adult makes eye contact between 30 and 60 percent of the time in a typical conversation, but emotional connection is built when eye contact is made during 60-70 percent of the conversation. In other words, the less eye contact, the less of a connection is made.
The growth of multitasking on mobile devices (i.e. sending email during dinner) and remote working -- in which conversations are mostly held over the phone -- have normalized the experience of having conversations with little or no eye contact, Noah Zandan, president of Quantified Impressions, told the Wall Street Journal.
"All too often we're like cornered animals with our eyes darting from device to human and back to device," Daniel Sieberg, author of "The Digital Diet: The Four-Step Plan To Break Your Tech Addiction And Regain Balance In Your Life," tells The Huffington Post. "Eye contact can be especially meaningful in today's world of constant partial attention and it conveys a sentiment that the person you're with matters. Taking that extra time when possible can really yield benefits with face-to-face interaction."
However, most of us have become accustomed to conversations where digital devices interrupt eye contact: You're in a conversation with an acquaintance whose gaze is directed down at a screen while you're speaking, a friend jumps into the dinner conversation without looking up from the text she's composing, or you catch yourself nodding along to your daughter's story while reading an email. These interactions aren't just what previous generations would have considered rude: They're also undermining our ability to connect with the people in our lives.
"You're not going to connect deeply with someone who is distracted," Daniel Goleman, author of the forthcoming book "Focus," tells The Huffington Post, explaining that declining eye contact signals that we're giving less attention to the people we're communicating with. In many cases, those are the people who are most important to us.
The importance of eye contact in human relationships, whether at the workplace or in any other setting, is difficult to underestimate. According to Psychology Today, it's the "strongest form of nonverbal communication." And according to a University of Miami study, over 43 percent of the attention we focus on someone is devoted to their eyes. It also plays a critical role in the development of emotional connections.
University of Aberdeen researchers found that when a group of people were presented with photos of two faces that were nearly identical -- the only difference was that in one photo, the eyes were looking away, while the other’s eyes looked into the camera -- subjects judged the faces with direct gaze to be more attractive and likable, the Telegraph reported.
"Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor," psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write in "A General Theory Of Love." "When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition."
Largely for this reason, the issue of declining eye contact has become a matter of concern among parents. Recently, comedian Louis C.K. told Conan O'Brien that he wouldn't be letting his daughters get smartphones.
“I think these things are toxic, especially for kids,” C.K. said. "They don't look at people when they talk to them and they don't build empathy.”
Many parents are concerned about what their own digital multitasking and lack of eye contact might be communicating to their children. Like Christen, blogger Rachel Marie Martin had a major realization about how important it was for her to look her children in the eyes.
"Nothing tells another person you matter more than looking at them in the eyes while they talk. It shows that what they are saying truly is important to you," Martin wrote in a recent blog post, "20 Things I Will Regret Not Doing With My Kids." "I want my kids to remember that there where times when their mother looked them in the eye and smiled. And for me this often means shutting my laptop, putting down my phone, stopping my list, and just giving them time."
As Goleman explains, communicating attention in this way is crucial to developing strong relationships, whether between friends, coworkers or parents and their children.
"Full attention," says Goleman, "is a form of love."

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

Stunning Wooden Gadgets That Reveal The Beauty Of Plain Design

French design firm Orée designs beautiful wireless keyboards, trackpads, and chargers that would look at home in Julia Child's kitchen.

There is something sophisticated but entirely relaxed and casual about many aspects of French design. The country just does "plain" and casual so well. While many Americans interpret a casual aesthetic as sloppiness, the French seem to embrace it as minimal, modern, and seamlessly completing an ensemble. A design can be casual, yet still sophisticated: casual design can still be good design with a relaxed confidence in itself.
Case in point? The work of French accessory design studio Orée, which has just released a beautiful line of all-wood keyboards, trackpads, smartphone chargers, and cases in a beautifully unadorned, hand-carved style that proves that there can be a great deal of sophistication in the design of something plain, and a lot of confidence in a design that is casual.

First, the keyboard. Christened the Orée board, this wooden keyboard is notable for the craftsmanship with which it has been constructed. What's so beautiful and unique about the board is that it has been carved out of a single piece of wood, meaning that the grain of every key matches the grain of the frame perfectly. Thanks to Bluetooth connectivity, it's entirely wireless, too, meaning it can be paired to your PC or Mac just as well as your smartphone or iPad. It costs €150.00 (roughly $200).
Following suit, the Orée Touch Slab is a sort of Magic Trackpad for your PC or Mac. Like the Orée Board, the (let's face it) unfortunately named Touch Slab is carved from a piece of premium maple or walnut wood. You can even overlay the Slab with a leather rollout, transforming it into a numerical keypad. It, too, costs €150, or about $200.
Finally, there is the Orée power combo: the Wireless Power Pebble and Power Sleeve. Available in wood (maple or walnut) or in marble (red or white), the Power Pebble charges through induction. If your smartphone supports Qi wireless charging, just resting it on top of the Power Pebble will be enough to juice it up.

Sadly, though, most smartphones don't come with Qi, including the world's most popular smartphones: Samsung's Galaxy series or Apple's iPhone line-up. If you have one of these smartphones, that's where the Power Sleeves comes in. Made of leather and maple or walnut, it's an attractive case that amps up your iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4 with Qi wireless power. The Power Pebble and Power Sleeves costs €110 ($150) and €90 ($122), respectively.
Expensive? Yes, but the aesthetic is gorgeous: something you might associate more strongly with Julia Child's kitchen than a modern office. All that is missing is the smell of a baking baguette. You can buy Orée's products here.

5 Inspiring Solar-Powered Homes, Designed And Built By Students

One splits into two pieces to let the warm weather in. Another is designed to house veterans. All are a testament to the creativity that arises when young people brainstorm about sustainability.

The Solar Decathlon--the U.S. Department of Energy's biennial solar home-building jamboree--kicks off shortly in Irvine, California. We've covered a few of the 20 homes already, including entries from Stanford University and the Stevens Institute of Technology.
In this slide show, you can take a peak at the other schools' inspiring designs.
There's the "Phoenix", a home that can be quickly fabricated in the wake of a disaster, courtesy of the University of Louisville, Ball State University, and the University of Kentucky. One house from Team Capitol DC (Catholic University of America, George Washington University, and American University) is intended to help returning military veterans "adjust and flourish in a sustainable civilian community." And there's the building from Southern California Institute of Architecture and California Institute of Technology, which literally splits apart to let the outdoors inside the living room on warm days.

All the houses generate their power from solar panels, and meet criteria related to affordability, home entertainment, and other factors. The teams are currently heading to California, ahead of the contest launch on October 3. Find out more about them here.

BrandMAX: Five trends revolutionising the future of marketing

by Matthew Chapman, 26.09.2013

Pebble smartwatch: a project that caught people's imagination says David Smith

Future trends are being driven by globalisation and technology, and means that marketers will need to look out for everything from the rise of Islam to the "disappearance of technology", according to David Smith, Global Futures and Foresight chief executive.

Islam’s growing influence

The global halal market is estimated to hit a staggering $30 trillion by 2050 as the Islamic population booms, and the UK is no exception.
Predictions claim the UK could be majority Islamic by 2050 so marketers would be wise to plan their strategies to tap into this massive growth market.
"When this market kicks off you will have to align your marketing to be truly halal," says Smith.

Crowd funding and the increasingly engaged consumer

"We are moving from a transactional model to an engagement model," says Smith. The increasingly engaged consumer is exemplified by the rise in popularity of crowd-funding. Smith points out that "consumers are embracing even more ways to fund" and cites figures that claim the crowd-funding market will be worth $16.6bn (£10.3bn) worldwide in 2014.
This figure is thanks to crowd-funding platforms including Kickstarter, which asks people to invest in new products without any financial return. The Pebble smartwatch and the $10m (£6.2m) it raised on Kickstarter proves people want to support the development of brands if they capture their imagination, says Smith.

The rise of the millennial

Millennial is one of marketing’s biggest buzz words, and understandably so. Not only are millennials a valuable market due to its sheer size, but they are also a very vocal market.
"A quarter of the population are in this millennial group and very open to new ideas and thoughts but also very critical and very digitally savvy," says Smith.
Despite being digitally savvy they are also less paranoid about how their data is used, which is a particular boon for the health market. Smith claims 56% of 18 to 24 year-olds use a device to track their health and wellbeing, which is way above the average.

The future will be hyper personalised

Smith envisions a future where personalisation will reach such a level that people will be able to place a pod anywhere in the world and go and stay in it. Personalisation is reaching such a level that people will have their very needs predicted.
"Tomorrow’s technology will know what we want before we do ourselves," says Smith. Although there are pitfalls with this, with Smith citing the example of US supermarket Target accidentally revealing to a father his daughter was pregnant by sending her pregnancy related product offers based on her online activity.
"It is a very good idea, but use it carefully," warns Smith.

Technology will disappear

Right now technology as we know it is all around us, but eventually it will be so pervasive it will effectively disappear, Smith believes. "We are going to get beyond the handsets. Handsets are just a clunky half-way house to technology disappearing."
Innovations including Google Glass, "thought helmets" that can activate actions using brain waves and the Internet of Things are the stepping stones to the "disappearance" of technology.

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

Engineers Invent Programming Language to Build Synthetic DNA

Sep. 30, 2013 — Similar to using Python or Java to write code for a computer, chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to "program" how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell.

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A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as "smart" drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
The findings were published online this week (Sept. 29) in Nature Nanotechnology.
Chemists and educators teach and use chemical reaction networks, a century-old language of equations that describes how mixtures of chemicals behave. The UW engineers take this language a step further and use it to write programs that direct the movement of tailor-made molecules.
"We start from an abstract, mathematical description of a chemical system, and then use DNA to build the molecules that realize the desired dynamics," said corresponding author Georg Seelig, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering. "The vision is that eventually, you can use this technology to build general-purpose tools."
Currently, when a biologist or chemist makes a certain type of molecular network, the engineering process is complex, cumbersome and hard to repurpose for building other systems. The UW engineers wanted to create a framework that gives scientists more flexibility. Seelig likens this new approach to programming languages that tell a computer what to do.
"I think this is appealing because it allows you to solve more than one problem," Seelig said. "If you want a computer to do something else, you just reprogram it. This project is very similar in that we can tell chemistry what to do."
Humans and other organisms already have complex networks of nano-sized molecules that help to regulate cells and keep the body in check. Scientists now are finding ways to design synthetic systems that behave like biological ones with the hope that synthetic molecules could support the body's natural functions. To that end, a system is needed to create synthetic DNA molecules that vary according to their specific functions.
The new approach isn't ready to be applied in the medical field, but future uses could include using this framework to make molecules that self-assemble within cells and serve as "smart" sensors. These could be embedded in a cell, then programmed to detect abnormalities and respond as needed, perhaps by delivering drugs directly to those cells.
Seelig and colleague Eric Klavins, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering, recently received $2 million from the National Science Foundation as part of a national initiative to boost research in molecular programming. The new language will be used to support that larger initiative, Seelig said.
Co-authors of the paper are Yuan-Jyue Chen, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering; David Soloveichik of the University of California, San Francisco; Niranjan Srinivas at the California Institute of Technology; and Neil Dalchau, Andrew Phillips and Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the National Centers for Systems Biology.

How IBM's Watson Will Transform Business And Society

IBM Smarter Planet Contributor, IBM Smarter Planet

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By Manoj Saxena, General Manager, IBM Watson Solutions

After Watson won on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, a lot of people didn’t really understand what “Watson” was. They thought it was a particular piece of hardware: a glowing blue supercomputer that IBM built in one of its labs.
But now, as Watson comes of age and makes the transition from science experiment to a force to be reckoned with in business and society, I think it’s time to give people a new way of thinking about it. So here goes:
Watson is a cognitive capability that resides in the computing cloud — just like Google and Facebook and Twitter. This new capability is designed to help people penetrate complexity so they can make better decisions and live and work more successfully. Eventually, a host of cognitive services will be delivered to people at any time and anywhere through a wide variety of handy devices. Laptops. Tablets. Smart phones. You name it.
In other words, you won’t need to be a TV producer or a giant corporation to take advantage of Watson’s capabilities. Everybody will have Watson — or a relative of the Watson technologies — at his or her fingertips.
Indeed, Watson represents the first wave in a new era of technology: the era of cognitive computing. This new generation of technology has the potential to transform business and society just as radically as today’s programmable computers did so over the past 60+ years. Cognitive systems will be capable of making sense of vast quantities of unstructured information, by learning, reasoning and interacting with people in ways that are more natural for us.
You may be familiar with the first steps for Watson after the Jeopardy! victory. Our scientists and engineers have been working with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, WellPoint and other healthcare institutions. The goal is to help professionals and organizations deal with the deluge of medical information and transform how medicine is taught, practiced and paid for. For patients, the quality and speed of care will be improved through individualized, evidence based medicine.
But healthcare is just the start. IBM is working with companies in a wide range of industries to bring new cognitive capabilities to the way they do business. In a next step, we recently announced a new service called IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, which is being used by companies in retail, banking, insurance and telecommunications, to crunch big data in real time and transform the way they engage clients via customer service, marketing and sales.
Many more applications will come:
–In a big city, cognitive systems will help city leaders react, prioritize and respond to citizens more effectively by using data to gain insights into complex systems.
–In the home, intelligent assistant apps on smart phones will help elderly citizens and their health care providers better manage chronic diseases and promote wellness.
–In companies, cognitive systems will help engineers and designers create new products and services that respond better to the demands of consumers or even anticipate their needs.
IBM will create some of these services and continue to play a major role as the cognitive era unfolds. Our clients will embed Watson-like technologies in many aspects of how they run their businesses: from supply chain management and manufacturing, to accounting and market research.
We also anticipate that many other companies will develop new capabilities enabled by cognitive technologies. In addition, independent software and services companies will build new cognitive services on top of IBM’s technology platform. You can think of these as cognitive apps, just like Apple offers apps made by others to run on its iPhones and iPads.
So, don’t think of Watson as something that’s locked up in a box. Rather, think of it as a cloud service, available anywhere. And think of it as the foundation for an ecosystem of innovative companies — all of them focused on bringing new capabilities to individuals, businesses and society.
If you’re like to learn more about cognitive technologies and their impact on the world, you can download a free chapter of the upcoming book, Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing, by IBM Research Director John E. Kelly III.

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

Ivanpah solar electric generating system connects to grid

September 30, 2013

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The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System uses concentric circles of mirrors that focus sunlight onto a central tower, generating high temperatures to produce steam that is then converted into electricity (credit: Brightsource)

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave Desert produced its first output of energy when the first of three towers was synchronized last week to the power grid for the first time.
Power generated from Ivanpah will first go to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), followed by Southern California Edison in the coming months.

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Ivanpah tower (credit: Brightsource)

Ivanpah is the largest solar thermal plant in the world, spanning 3,500 acres of public land. Once fully operational, the 392 megawatt (377 megawatt net) plant will generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes. Ivanpah’s three power tower units will also nearly double the amount of commercial solar thermal energy capacity now operating in the United States.

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Ivanpah project (credit: Brightsource)

The project is jointly owned by NRG Energy, Inc., BrightSource Energy, Inc. and Google.

Topics: Energy

Radar technology that can detect heartbeats in rubble

September 30, 2013

Researchers tested the Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER) prototype technology — which can locate individuals buried in disasters — at the Virginia Task Force 1 Training Facility in Lorton, VA (credit: DHS/John Price)

A new radar-based technology named Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER) can detect a heartbeat of a human buried beneath 30 feet (9 meters) of crushed material
Developed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it can also detect people hidden behind 20 feet (6 meters) of solid concrete, and from a distance of 100 feet (30 meters) in open space.
JPL uses advanced data processing systems to pick out faint signals. The microwave radar technology is sensitive enough to distinguish the unique signature of a human’s breathing pattern and heartbeat from that of other living creatures, such as rats. That allows first responders to quickly ascertain if a living human is present in the debris.
In June, DHS and first responders used a prototype of this system to conduct more than 65 test searches with two Urban Search and Rescue teams.
James Lux, task manager for the FINDER project at JPL, says the researchers plan to install FINDER on proposed search and rescue robots, such as JPL’s Urbie, and on stretchers or ambulances to monitor a patient’s heartbeat. They can also be useful in biology research to distinguish species.
When natural disasters or human-made catastrophes topple buildings, search and rescue teams immediately set out to find victims trapped beneath the wreckage. During these missions, time is imperative, and the ability to quickly detect living victims greatly increases the chances of rescue and survival.

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

Can DARPA spark a DIY brain-scanning movement?

September 30, 2013

darpa-ct2ws-threat-detection-eeg-640x353

Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (credit: DARPA)

A working prototype of a low-cost electroencephalography device funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made its debut in New York this weekend, the first step in the agency’s effort to jumpstart a do-it-yourself revolution in neuroscience, The Verge reports.
Dr. Bill Casebeer, a DARPA program manager, is hoping to spark a neuroscience fad within the maker movement. His goal is to return to Maker Faire next year with an ultra simple electroencephalography device for less than $30 that would allow anyone to take research-grade measurements of their own brain.
There are a lot of reasons why DARPA wants to crowdsouce brainwave research. The data can be used to refine soldier training, treat post-traumatic stress disorder, study the effects of torture, triage medical diagnoses on the battlefield, harness the human subconscious to detect threats with 91 percent accuracy, and who knows what else. “DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise for the United States and to create technological surprise for its adversaries,” the agency said in its request for proposals.

(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

Accelerator on a chip

Could spawn new generations of smaller, less expensive devices for science and medicine say Stanford, SLAC researchers

September 28, 2013

The nanostructured glass chip is smaller than a grain of rice (credit: Stanford University)

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip just .5 millimeters long.
The achievement was reported in the journal Nature by a team including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.
Compact accelerators and X-ray devices
“We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces,” said Joel England, the SLAC physicist who led the experiments.
“It could also help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for security scanning, medical therapy and imaging, and research in biology and materials science.”
Because it employs commercial lasers and low-cost, mass-production techniques, the researchers believe it will set the stage for new generations of “tabletop” accelerators.
At its full potential, the new “accelerator on a chip” could match the accelerating power of SLAC’s 2-mile-long linear accelerator in just 100 feet, and deliver a million more electron pulses per second.
This initial demonstration achieved an acceleration gradient, or amount of energy gained per length of the accelerator, of 300 million electronvolts per meter. That’s roughly 10 times the acceleration provided by the current SLAC linear accelerator.
“Our ultimate goal for this structure is one billion electronvolts per meter, and we’re already one-third of the way in our first experiment,” said Stanford applied physics Professor Robert Byer, the principal investigator for this research.
How it works

[+]

Experimental set-up. Inset, a diagram of the DLA structure indicating the field polarization direction and the effective periodic phase reset, depicted as alternating red (acceleration) and black (deceleration) arrows (credit: E. A. Peralta et al./Nature)

Today’s accelerators use microwaves to boost the energy of electrons. Researchers have been looking for more economical alternatives, and this new technique, which uses ultrafast lasers to drive the accelerator, is a leading candidate.
Particles are generally accelerated in two stages. First they are boosted to nearly the speed of light. Then any additional acceleration increases their energy, but not their speed; this is the challenging part.

[+]

Scanning electron microscope image of the longitudinal cross-section of a micro-fabricated dielectric laser accelerator (DLA) structure. Electrons are accelerated between the nanoscale “teeth.” (Credit: E. A. Peralta et al./Nature)

In the accelerator-on-a-chip experiments, electrons are first accelerated to near light-speed in a conventional accelerator. Then they are focused into a tiny, half-micron-high channel within a glass chip just half a millimeter long.
The channel was previously patterned with precisely spaced nanoscale ridges. Infrared laser light shining on the pattern generates electrical fields that interact with the electrons in the channel to boost their energy. (See animation below for more detail.)
Turning the accelerator on a chip into a full-fledged tabletop accelerator will require a more compact way to get the electrons up to speed before they enter the device.
A collaborating research group in Germany, led by Peter Hommelhoff at Friedrich Alexander University and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has been looking for such a solution. It simultaneously reports in Physical Review Letters its success in using a laser to accelerate lower-energy electrons.
Portable/affordable X-ray machines for hospitals and laboratories

Applications for these new particle accelerators would go well beyond particle physics research. Byer said laser accelerators could drive compact X-ray free-electron lasers, comparable to SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source, that are all-purpose tools for a wide range of research.
Another possible application is small, portable X-ray sources to improve medical care for people injured in combat, as well as to provide more affordable medical imaging for hospitals and laboratories. That’s one of the goals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Advanced X-Ray Integrated Sources program, which partially funded this research. Primary funding for this research is from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
The study’s lead authors were Stanford graduate students Edgar Peralta and Ken Soong. Peralta created the patterned fused silica chips in the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility. Soong implemented the high-precision laser optics for the experiment at SLAC’s Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator. Additional contributors included researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles and Tech-X Corp. in Boulder, Colo.

References:

E. A. Peralta et al., Demonstration of electron acceleration in a laser-driven dielectric microstructure, Nature, 2013, DOI: 10.1038/nature12664

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science | Physics/Cosmology

Saturday, September 28, 2013

A novel approach to grid cybersecurity awareness

Sep 27, 2013

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NASA's VISION-21 Symposium

The VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review.

Vernor Vinge

Department of Mathematical Sciences

San Diego State University

(This article may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.)

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

What is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)

Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter time scale.

The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.

Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.

Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [5], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it's fair to call this event a singularity ("the Singularity" for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace.

Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever.

Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. ... It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the '60s and '70s and '80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [29] [1] [31] [5].

Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us.

More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press.

After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [30].

But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.)

We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery.

Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_ technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.)

Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far.

The precipitating event will likely be unexpected -- perhaps even to the researchers involved. ("But all our previous models were catatonic!

We were just tweaking some parameters....") If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove ... instead of twenty.

Can the Singularity be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop.

There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks" [27].

As you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence.

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.

However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain.

The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec's estimate [17] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity.

And yet there was another minority who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed.

If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as _ten_ orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity.

Instead, in the early '00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off -- this because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements.

We'd end up with some _very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further.

Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity.

It would likely be seen as a golden age ... and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [25], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat" and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of "a machine in the likeness of the human mind" [13].

In fact, the competitive advantage -- economic, military, even artistic -- of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [8] has provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future -- and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo.

But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely.

This is I. J. Good's ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution.

I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters.

If those masters thought at a rate -- say -- one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with "helpful advice" that would incidentally set you free. (I call this "fast thinking" form of superintelligence "weak superhumanity".

Such a "weakly superhuman" entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time.

"Strong superhumanity" would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind.

It's hard to say precisely what "strong superhumanity" would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed.

Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and _then_ run at high speed, we might see something different....) Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model.

I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

Another approach to confinement is to build _rules_ into the mind of the created superhuman entity (for example, Asimov's Laws [3]).

I think that any rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the those more dangerous models).

Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in every way.

Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other activities.

There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled with benevolent gods (though one of _my_ wishes might be to become one of them).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well ... pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens!).

Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet.... In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing.

They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_ that would put them in a mental hospital in our era.

Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a "Meta-Golden Rule", which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors."

It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some se

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet ... we are the initiators.

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others.

Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:

Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification_

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

But as I noted at the beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity.

I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in existence.

And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved.

Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth.

Lynn Margulis (in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa.

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view:

Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans' intuition and available computer hardware.

Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control tools provided to the human team member.

Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans.

Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work in this direction.

Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better?

If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI.

Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular.

As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit.

The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations.

For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project.

And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings.

In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool.

Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else.

The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated.

For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!

The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms.

For example, much of the work in Artificial Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance or for the providing features we don't understand well enough yet to implement in hardware.

A long-time dream of science-fiction has been direct brain to computer interfaces [2] [29]. In fact, there is concrete work that can be done (and is being done) in this area:

Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14].

This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication.

Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected.

Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision.

If we want our high bandwidth connection to be _in addition_ to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won't do it.

But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops.

That suggests: Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops.

In the long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

Originally, I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all, IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.)

Alas, looking back over these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for safety ... well, some of the suggestions are a little scarey on their face.

One of my informal reviewers pointed out that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted into the winners' enterprises.

A creature that was built _de novo_ might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare [26].

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for

Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots.

For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves).

It could be a golden age that also involved progress (overleaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive [10] [4]) would be achievable.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating.

A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [18].)

To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough, and looks back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally?

Certainly the later being would be everything the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries.

Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people ("self-awareness and other delusions").

Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction.

The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages.

What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration?

These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be -- _no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it's a lot like the worst- case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil.

That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such an era.

Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding.

I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good's Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection.

And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost.

I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]

Annotated Sources [and an occasional plea for bibliographical help]

[1] Alfve'n, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, _The End of Man?_, Award Books, 1969 earlier published as "The Tale of the Big Computer", Coward-McCann, translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollanz, Ltd.

[2] Anderson, Poul, "Kings Who Die", _If_, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted in _Seven Conquests_, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.

[3] Asimov, Isaac, "Runaround", _Astounding Science Fiction_, March 1942, p94. Reprinted in _Robot Visions_, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes the development of his robotics stories in this book.

[4] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, _The Anthropic Cosmological Principle_, Oxford University Press, 1986.

[5] Bear, Greg, "Blood Music", _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985.

[6] Cairns-Smith, A. G., _Seven Clues to the Origin of Life_, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[7] Conrad, Michael _et al._, "Towards an Artificial Brain", _BioSystems_, vol 23, pp175-218, 1989.

[8] Drexler, K. Eric, _Engines of Creation_, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.

[9] Dyson, Freeman, _Infinite in All Directions_, Harper && Row, 1988.

[10] Dyson, Freeman, "Physics and Biology in an Open Universe", _Review of Modern Physics_, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.

[11] Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", in _Advances in Computers_, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.

[12] Good, I. J., [Help! I can't find the source of Good's Meta-Golden Rule, though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s. Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items. G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, "How to Get along with Extraterrestrials ... or Your Neighbor", _Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction_, February, 1980, p39-47.] [13] Herbert, Frank, _Dune_, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_ in the 1960s.

[14] Kovacs, G. T. A. _et al._, "Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation", _IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering_, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.

[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986.

[16] Minsky, Marvin, _Society of Mind_, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

[17] Moravec, Hans, _Mind Children_, Harvard University Press, 1988.

[18] Niven, Larry, "The Ethics of Madness", _If_, April 1967, pp82-108. Reprinted in _Neutron Star_, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

[19] Penrose, Roger, _The Emperor's New Mind_, Oxford University Press, 1989.

[20] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.

[21] Rasmussen, S. _et al._, "Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks", in _Emergent Computation_, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

[22] Searle, John R., "Minds, Brains, and Programs", in _The Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted in _The Mind's I_, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

[23] Sims, Karl, "Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems", Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in _Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life_, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.

[24] Stapledon, Olaf, _The Starmaker_, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the date on forward, probably written before 1937).

[25] Stent, Gunther S., _The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress_, The Natural History Press, 1969.

[26] Swanwick Michael, _Vacuum Flowers_, serialized in _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_, December(?) 1986 - February 1987. Republished by Ace Books, 1988.

[27] Thearling, Kurt, "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks", a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.

[28] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, _Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society_, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp1-49.

[29] Vinge, Vernor, "Bookworm, Run!", _Analog_, March 1966, pp8-40. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[30] Vinge, Vernor, "True Names", _Binary Star Number 5_, Dell, 1981. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[31] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, _Omni_, January 1983, p10.

[32] Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ :-) ].

(¯`*• Observatory of the Future, articulated under Andres Agostini's book http://lnkd.in/R5pXnK

QUANTA

Monday, September 30, 2013

Syria's War Viewed Almost in Real Time

For the first time, the war in Syria has given global audiences a close-up view of war

Egypt's Entrepreneurial Revolution: A Community Of Startups Rises From The Ashes

Bey2ollak

Mawenly

PieRide

El Wafeyat

How Technology Is Killing Eye Contact

Stunning Wooden Gadgets That Reveal The Beauty Of Plain Design

5 Inspiring Solar-Powered Homes, Designed And Built By Students

BrandMAX: Five trends revolutionising the future of marketing

Future trends are being driven by globalisation and technology, and means that marketers will need to look out for everything from the rise of Islam to the "disappearance of technology", according to David Smith, Global Futures and Foresight chief executive.

Islam’s growing influence

Crowd funding and the increasingly engaged consumer

The rise of the millennial

The future will be hyper personalised

Technology will disappear

Engineers Invent Programming Language to Build Synthetic DNA

How IBM's Watson Will Transform Business And Society

Ivanpah solar electric generating system connects to grid

September 30, 2013

Radar technology that can detect heartbeats in rubble

September 30, 2013

Can DARPA spark a DIY brain-scanning movement?

September 30, 2013

Accelerator on a chip

September 28, 2013

References:

Saturday, September 28, 2013

A novel approach to grid cybersecurity awareness