Friday, January 3, 2014

15 Tech Predictions for 2014

Tech Connect

Published January 03, 2014

FOXBusiness

No matter how you look at it, making predictions is risky business and making technology predictions is riskier still. It’s almost as silly as shooting darts at Jell-O – hitting the target is downright impossible.
Between the uncertainty over killer apps, the unpredictability of innovation, and hot new companies that can change competitive landscapes overnight, there are so many variables you’ve got to be crazy to risk making calls over a time horizon as short as a year.
Well, call me crazy, but here are 7 things that, according to my crystal ball, will happen in 2014 – plus 8 more predictions in the lightning round.
A killer app will emerge in wearable computing. It’s probably more likely to come from Apple’s long-rumored iWatch than Google Glass or any other device for the simple reason that Apple has an insane track record of creating category-killing devices. As for the app itself, I’m willing to bet that it’s something you can already do on other devices, except now it’ll be completely hands-free.
A killer app will not emerge in 3D printing. While 3D printing technology is beginning to look interesting, it’s still in what I would characterize as an enthusiast phase. That said, personal computing and gaming started out more or less the same way. Still, if you’re going to fire a live round from a gun you printed, just remember, arm’s length is not a very safe distance from an exploding projectile.
Millions will lose their wallets. Apple has more credit cards on file than any other company on Earth, courtesy of iTunes, and for years it’s been filing all sorts of patent applications for a digital wallet service called iMoney. I think there’s a 50-50 chance the new service will launch this year, either with iWatch or iPhone 6. Don’t leave home without it.
There will be IPOs – lots of IPOs. While the IPO market took a dive following the dot-com bust, we’ve seen that trend reverse in recent years. In terms of proceeds and number of deals, 2013 was the best year for U.S. IPOs

since 2000. Data from CB Insights suggests the tech IPO pipeline for 2014

may be even stronger than 2013 with Alibaba, Square, Box, Dropbox, Coupons.com, Lending Club, Pivotal, and GrubHub Seamless rumored to be in the mix.
Nobody will conquer the living room. For what seems an eternity, the broadcast, media, cable, and technology powers-that-be have waged an all-out war for control of the living room, leaving consumers as collateral damage. Whether Apple or anyone else can pull off a seamless integration of this fragmented mess is anyone’s guess but I wouldn’t hold my breath for 12 months, if I were you.
Microsoft will hire a new CEO. Yes, I’m well aware of the 100% certainty of that statement. But whether the software giant’s board brings in an outsider such as Alan Mulally (my choice) or promotes an insider like Satya Nadella, we won’t know if it was a good choice for years to come. And, as I’ve said time and again, the task of reinventing a company that big, that complex, and that competes in so many different markets, is incredibly challenging.
Time travel will become a reality. Amazon will create an ecommerce service with drones equipped with tachyon drives that will allow them to go faster than the speed of light. In other words, you’ll actually receive your packages before you order them. (Yes, that was, in fact, a joke.)
In case you can’t get enough of this sort of thing, here is a lightning round of eight more tech predictions, some of which fly in the face of what other commentators are putting out there:
Somebody will create an app that will tell you with 100% certainty when a politician is lying – because his lips will be moving (wait, you heard that one before?).
There will be no real, legitimate backlash over privacy concerns. As Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy famously and correctly said nearly 15 years ago, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
Google will not overtake Apple to become the most valuable technology company on Earth – at least not yet – but the search advertising giant will continue to bring you ads on any device, on any application, wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing.
While interim CEO John Chen was a good choice, and he may very well help the company survive on enterprise services, BlackBerry will not rise from the dead as a smartphone powerhouse.
Twitter will not become less annoying and people will not stop doing anything they can to gain more followers ... for no legitimate or logical reason.
The Internet of Things won’t change your life. While it is very cool stuff that will affect us all in many ways, smart cities, smart highways, and smart grids are industrial things that happen very, very slowly. Like the Earth’s rotation, you won’t notice a thing.
Just as with weight loss systems, diets, and pills, more and more people will spend more and more money on fitness devices like Fitbit and Fuelband and still, remarkably, continue to become more obese and less healthy.
It will slowly begin to dawn on consumers and the auto industry that range anxiety and having to plug an electric car into a socket is incredibly dumb and a giant leap backwards from hybrid technology where the car actually charges its batteries itself. I’m just saying.
Steve Tobak is a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultant and former senior executive of the technology industry.

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Cloud computing 2014: Moving to a zero-trust security model

Snowden leaks aren't driving companies away from the cloud; but the disclosures have made them a lot more careful

By Jaikumar Vijayan

December 31, 2013 06:45 AM ET

8 Comments

Computerworld - The leaking of classified documents detailing the data collection activities of the U.S. National Security Agency earlier this year reignited some long-standing concerns about the vulnerability of enterprise data stored in the cloud.

But instead of scaring businesses away from using hosted services, as some experts predicted, the leaks about the NSA spy programs are driving some long overdue changes in enterprise and service provider security and privacy policies.
When Edward Snowden first began spilling details of the NSA's surveillance practices to selected reporters in June, industry analysts had expected that the revelations would put a severe crimp on plans for cloud deployment.
For instance, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in August said the leaks could cause U.S. cloud providers to lose 10% to 20% of the foreign market to overseas competitors -- or up to $35 billion in potential sales through 2016.

Cloud watch

Data encryption

Encryption has gained a lot of attention since the Snowden leaks. Major service providers like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google set the tone by adding end-to-end encryption of data they host and manage for customers.
For instance, Google Cloud Storage now automatically encrypts all new data before it's written to disk. Such server-side encryption will soon be available for older data stored in Google clouds.
Since the NSA programs were disclosed, Microsoft has announced that it plans to ramp up encryption support for various services, including Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive and Windows Azure.
By the end of 2014, Microsoft expects to have measures in place for encrypting data in transit between customer locations and its data centers, and while in transit between its own data centers.
Like Google, Microsoft says it plans to encrypt all stored data in the cloud
Several other cloud services providers, like Dropbox, Sonic.net and SpiderOak, have announced support for similar data encryption programs, and for features like 2048-bit key lengths and the "Perfect Forward Secrecy" method for future-proofing encrypted data.
Experts say such measures are vital to protecting data traveling between customer companies and cloud service providers.
Information in the classified documents about NSA attempts to weaken encryption algorithms, and to tap fiber links connecting service provider data centers provided much of the impetus for these efforts.

Key management and data ownership

The U.S. government's position in its dispute with Lavabit, a secure email services provider, that cloud service firms must hand over their encryption keys when asked, has focused considerable attention on key management and data ownership.
While encryption efforts by service providers are a vital part of improving cloud security, they only go so far, says Eric Chiu, president of HyTrust, a cloud infrastructure management company.

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Best of 2013: US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

In September, network theorists working for the US military worked out how to identify the small “seed” group of people who can spread a message across an entire network

Viral messages begin life by infecting a few individuals and then start to spread across a network. The most infectious end up contaminating more or less everybody.
Just how and why this happens is the subject of much study and debate. Network scientists know that key factors are the rate at which people become infected, the “connectedness” of the network and how the seed group of individuals, who first become infected, are linked to the rest.
It is this seed group that fascinates everybody from marketers wanting to sell Viagra to epidemiologists wanting to study the spread of HIV.
So a way of finding seed groups in a given social network would surely be a useful trick, not to mention a valuable one. Step forward Paulo Shakarian, Sean Eyre and Damon Paulo from the West Point Network Science Center at the US Military Academy in West Point.
These guys have found a way to identify a seed group that, when infected, can spread a message across an entire network. And they say it can be done quickly and easily, even on relatively large networks.
Continue reading…

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Surveillance network built to spot secret nuclear tests yields surprise scientific boon

Video: Undersea acoustic monitors set up to detect illegal nuclear activity pick up all sorts of other sounds as well, ranging from whales to earthquakes.

By Joby Warrick, Published: January 1 E-mail the writer

VIENNA — It records sounds that no human ear can hear, like the low roar of a meteor slicing through the upper atmosphere, or the hum an iceberg makes when smacked by an ocean wave.
It has picked up threats invisible to the human eye, such as the haze of radioactive particles that circled the planet after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011.

Latest from National Security

NSA seeks quantum computer that could crack most codes

Steven Rich and Barton Gellman JAN 2

Documents provided by Snowden show race for a machine light-years ahead of those using zeroes and ones.

Syria blamed for missed deadline on chemical arsenal

Joby Warrick DEC 30

U.S. officials cite Syrian foot-dragging as deadline nears for removing chemical weapons stockpile.

Global surveillance network yields surprising science boon

Joby Warrick JAN 1

A planetary monitoring system meant to spot nuclear explosions helps scientists track natural disasters.

Snowden, in interview, says his mission’s accomplished

Barton Gellman DEC 23

His leaks have fundamentally altered the U.S. government’s relationship with its citizens, the rest of the world.

Full coverage: NSA Secrets

Read all of the stories in The Washington Post’s ongoing coverage of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

The engineers who designed the world’s first truly planetary surveillance network two decades ago envisioned it as a way to detect illegal nuclear weapons tests. Today, the nearly completed International Monitoring System is proving adept at tasks its inventors never imagined. The system’s scores of listening stations continuously eavesdrop on Earth itself, offering clues about man-made and natural disasters as well as a window into some of nature’s most mysterious processes.
The Obama administration hopes the network’s capabilities will persuade a reluctant Senate to approve a nuclear test-ban treaty that stalled in Congress more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, without the treaty and wholly without fanfare, new stations come on line almost every month.
“We can pick up whale sounds, and ice sheets cracking,” said Thomas Muetzelburg, a spokesman for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), the Vienna-based group that operates the network. More importantly, he said, “we can reliably detect nuclear tests.”
The monitoring system is a latticework of sensors — including radiation detectors and machines that measure seismic activity or low-frequency sound waves — spread out across 89 countries as well as the oceans and polar regions. Like a giant stethoscope, it listens for irregularities in Earth’s natural rhythms, collecting and transmitting terabytes of data to a small office in the Austrian capital.
The network was designed to help enforce the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which outlawed explosive testing of nuclear weapons. But while the treaty has never entered into force — the United States and seven other countries have declined to ratify it, in part because of concerns over verification — the monitoring network has steadily grown over the years, from a handful of stations in 2003 to more than 270.
The network has emerged as one of the most compelling arguments for the treaty, advocates say. Arms-control officials in the Obama administration have cited the network’s advances in arguing for a new push for Senate ratification of the nuclear test ban, despite opposition from prominent Republicans who argue that the pact undermines U.S. interests.
“There has been a growing realization, especially after Fukushima, that the International Monitoring System has improved to an impressive level,” Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department’s assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance, said in an interview. “It became clear that the time is right to go out and talk about these accomplishments and what the treaty can do for U.S. national security.”
The test-ban treaty has not come up for a vote in the Senate since 1999, when it was soundly defeated. The vote embarrassed the Clinton administration and drew criticism from countries around the world, including Russia, which is among the pact’s 161 signatories.
At the time, the United States had already halted testing of its nuclear weapons under an undeclared moratorium that began in 1992. Still, most Republicans and many Democrats opposed the treaty on the grounds that it offered false security; at the time, there was no global system in place that could reliably detect cheating.
The International Monitoring System was designed to address those concerns. Construction began on the first listening stations in 2000, and dozens were operating by 2006, when the network experienced its first major test — an underground detonation that signaled North Korea’s emergence as a nuclear weapons power. The country’s communist government would conduct two additional nuclear tests, in 2009 and last February.
“We detected the announced 2006 test even though only 60 percent of the network was in place,” said Muetzelburg, the CTBTO official. He said 21 of the system’s stations registered that event, compared with 94 seismology stations detecting North Korea’s test in 2013.
As it turned out, the network’s listening posts did more than simply pick up the tests’ underground shock waves. Numerous stations also picked up trace amounts of radioactive xenon, a gas emitted in nuclear explosions. From studying the xenon plume, scientists could even calculate how long North Korea waited to open the sealed entrances to its underground test chambers.
Arms-control experts say the North Korean tests show that the monitoring system is up to the challenge for which it was designed — deterring secret nuclear weapons tests. While today’s advanced computers can conduct simulations of a nuclear explosion, few countries would seek to field a nuclear arsenal — or modernize an existing one — without testing whether the technology works, according to a senior European diplomat involved in arms-control negotiations.
“This actually works in the favor of the United States, because it effectively freezes its nuclear advantages in place while inhibiting other countries from developing nuclear weapons,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Arms-control advocates worry that a failure to approve the treaty will eventually result in increased competition among countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or upgrade their arsenals. If all hope for passage dies, support for the monitoring network — which costs more than $120 million annually in member-state dues to maintain — will probably dry up as well, proponents say, leading to the loss of a scientific asset with benefits to the entire planet.
In the past two years alone, advocates note, the network has contributed to scientists’ understanding of a variety of natural disturbances. When a deadly tsunami damaged Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor, the network’s sensors tracked the spread of airborne radioactive contamination across the Pacific Ocean to North America and beyond. And last year, when an asteroid exploded over Russia’s Chelyabinsk province, the system’s monitors were able to track the trajectory and size of the space rock as it plummeted toward Earth.
Current and former U.S. officials who have followed the network’s evolution say its capabilities are impressive, but they acknowledge that it may not be enough to sway doubters in Congress. While President Obama has promised to push for ratification of the test-ban treaty, former lawmakers say the public support necessary to win passage has not materialized.
“It looks pretty far away at this moment,” said former senator Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a champion of arms control during his three decades in Congress who opposed the test-ban treaty in 1999, in part because of concerns over verification. “Just getting the START treaty across the finish line was such a struggle, and it was relatively modest.”
Gottemoeller, the State Department official, noted that support for the 1960s ban on aboveground nuclear tests was prompted by a global concern about radioactive contaminants in milk. “The Limited Test Ban Treaty grew out of a mother’s movement,” she said. “We need to generate that kind of public support.”

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The Faster a New Technology Takes Off, the Harder It Falls

By Larry Downes and Paul Nunes
01.03.14
6:30 AM

Image: mjaniec/Flickr

First, a eulogy: The bell curve is dead.
That familiar model for technology adoption (first popularized by the noted sociologist Everett Rogers) — with clearly defined market segments adopting new technologies in predictable groupings — no longer applies. Following this work, Geoffrey Moore wrote in 1991’s Crossing the Chasm that successful new product introductions followed Rogers’s five discrete stages, moving from early adopters to mainstream users only after crossing a sales “chasm” in which the marketing message changes from the new and exciting to the familiar and incremental.
But today, new products and services enter the market better and cheaper right from the start. So producers can’t rely on a class of early adopters and high margins to build up a war chest to spend on marketing to larger and later markets. For better and for worse, thanks to near-perfect market information, consumers are too savvy for that. Everyone knows right away when some new offering gets it right — or, conversely, gets it wrong.
The bell curve, once useful as a model of product adoption, has lost its value as a planning tool. This kind of disruption has its own unique life cycle, and with it its own best practices for marketing and sales, product enhancement, and eventual product replacement.

Markets take off suddenly, or they don’t take off at all. Since adoption is increasingly all-at-once or never, saturation is reached much sooner in the life of a successful new product. So even those who launch these “Big Bang Disruptors” — new products and services that enter the market better and cheaper than established products seemingly overnight — need to prepare to scale down just as quickly as they scaled up, ready with their next disruptor (or to exit the market and take their assets to another industry).
While every Big Bang Disruptor has its own unique trajectory, the examples in our study suggest a new model for the adoption of better and cheaper innovations, one that is radically different from the traditional view of and Rogers and Geoffrey Moore. The life cycle of Big Bang Disruption looks less like a gently sloping bell curve and more like a cliff: as dangerous to competitors on its way up as it is to innovators on the way down.

We call it, for obvious reasons, “the shark fin.”
The process of Big Bang Disruption begins as a series of low-level, often unrelated experiments with different combinations of component technologies. This relative calm may give incumbents the false sense that nothing is happening, or in any event that whatever might be happening is not doing so quickly enough to warrant a competitive response.
Yet when the right combination of technologies is assembled and paired with the right business model, takeoff is immediate. Customers from a wide range of segments, including mass market consumers, adopt the disruptor as quickly as its producers can supply it. Market penetration is often nearly instantaneous.
Next, as the disruptor quickly approaches saturation, adoption drops at nearly the same pace with which it took off, leading to a period of rapid if uneven decline. During this period, early warning systems, careful planning, and the agility to quickly scale up and then down are essential both to capitalize on the opportunity of a Big Bang Disruptor as well as to survive the chaos it can bring to existing markets.

The Rise and Fall of Microsoft’s Kinect

One example of this process was the introduction of an add-on device for Microsoft’s Xbox 360: the Kinect. It initially sold for $150, but it revolutionized home gaming — capturing the imagination of diehard players and casual gamers alike. And while it appeared to come out of nowhere, antecedents could be seen in and out of the gaming industry. Integrating motion and other sensors with facial recognition, for example, had long been in development in many industries, especially in security systems.
Speech recognition, likewise, had already been used in products and services supporting hands-free computing tasks such as automated phone support and in applications including GM’s in-vehicle OnStar system and the popular Siri, which Apple acquired in 2010. Facial recognition had been used for high-end military applications for years and was the subject of extensive experiments by the advertising industry.
Even other game consoles, notably Sony’s PlayStation 3, had experimented with handheld controllers fitted with motion sensors. Sony’s add-on device, the Move, sold fifteen million units in its first two years.
No one, however, had ever put all these components together or integrated them with a catalog of new games designed specifically to take advantage of the powerful hardware and software Microsoft used for Kinect. The new device looked less like its predecessors than it did a technology from the future.
Kinect was an enormous hit, selling eight million units in just the first sixty days. According to Guinness World Records, that made Kinect the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history. A little over a year after launch, twenty-four million Kinects had been sold, pushing sales of Xbox 360 consoles and games along with it. In 2010, Microsoft took the top spot in the fiercely competitive console market for the first time since Xbox 360’s launch in 2001.
For Big Bang Disruptors, however, catastrophic success invariably leads to rapid market saturation — and with it decline and sunset. Within six months, the pace of Kinect sales dropped precipitously. Though stragglers continued to buy the product in peaks and valleys over the next year, the product had largely fulfilled its mission in its first ten months. For Microsoft — and other game developers — it was time for another innovation.

Big Bang Disruptors like the Kinect, however, can have second lives as new innovators deconstruct them and recombine their parts into something new. Kinect continues to find unexpected uses outside of gaming, thanks in part to Microsoft’s willingness to make its developer tools and interfaces widely available. Telemedicine researchers in the UK, for example, have adapted Kinect for remote tracking of hand and finger movements to guide patients recovering from strokes. Kinect’s technology is also being used in the construction of miniature satellites, where Kinect will handle in-orbit docking.

Farther afield, the economies of scale that comes from production of millions of Kinect units has made it cost-effective to use some of its components for a fast-evolving market of health, fitness, and monitoring devices. Companies including Fitbit, Jawbone, and Nike, as well as other startups, are selling low-cost wearable computers that use accelerometers and other sensor technology to track and record an increasingly wide range of vital signs and measurements, including steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, temperature, and sleep patterns.
With the shark fin, companies that have long operated as the flippers of their industry, controlling its speed, direction, and destination, suddenly find themselves the pinball, bouncing around at the whim of forces outside their control. To ensure their future as the former and not the latter, they need to understand where Big Bang Disruptors come from, how they enter and exit the market, and what they leave in their wake.
This is the first book selected for the inaugural Book Club at CES, as their book of the year. It will be released January 7.
Excerpted from Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright 2014 by Lawrence Downes and Paul Nunes.

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Taking On Trash By Converting Plastic To Currency

In Peru, one entrepreneur is giving a reason for citizens to pick up litter: They can get useful items, services, and even 3-D print their own parts from plastic in return.

Go to many beaches in the developing world and you'll see the same thing: piles of plastic garbage on the sand or in the water. Plastic pollution is a global problem, and an intractable one. People rely on plastic because it's cheap. But none of it decomposes, and, often there's no formal recycling service.
Vancouver entrepreneur David Katz's solution: Give people incentives to collect garbage by creating value from the waste. In other words, make plastic pollution a "currency." Katz's organization, Plastic Bank, has a plan to set up recycling facilities in poorer countries, where locals can exchange plastic for a range of useful items and services.
"If we can reveal the value in the things around us, then we can give people the opportunity to make a better life with that," he says.
Katz runs a successful GPS tracking business, but he's long been horrified by plastic pollution and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the Plastic Bank after attending a meeting at the Singularity University in California, where he met Lorenzo Sousa, the founder of the railway company PeruRail. The businessmen plan to open the first Plastic Bank facility in Peru next April.
Pickers will be able to exchange mixed plastics for shoes, food, and other basic goods, and even use 3-D printing facilities to make their own items or parts. "Perhaps they're working with waste from a gas station and the mechanics need components they can print on site. It gives them an opportunity to take the waste out of the environment and make something worth $5, $10, or $20," Katz says.

The center will also offer training, so waste collectors can scale up their entrepreneurship and maybe create their own recycling facilities.
Katz says that a "major corporation" has agreed to take the plastic and create new products from it. He won't reveal the name of the company, but says it can see marketing value in the concept. "Knowing that the plastic came from a waterway and that it helps people out of poverty through its collection and reuse--that's a strong story."
After Peru, Katz wants to go other countries like Columbia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. He's looking for local partners now. "I don't have every answer yet. But I know it's something that has to be begun at least," he says. "If I begin it, I'll find the answers, and, most importantly, I'll reveal the questions I need to answer."

These Scientists Studied Why Internet Stories Go Viral. You Won't Believe What They Found

Science confirms what Buzzfeed and Upworthy already know: In the hierarchy of digital contagion, content that evokes powerful emotions floats mercilessly to the top.

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal profiled Gawker editor Neetzan Zimmerman, whose job is to post content that's poised to go viral. Zimmerman does his job quite well. His posts generate about 30 million pageviews a month--tops at the site by far, six times what the second-leading staffer generates. Zimmerman's success is not the result of some computer formula; on the contrary, rather, "he understands the emotions that might compel a human being to click on something online," the Journal's Farhad Manjoo writes.
If the traffic numbers don't already show the wisdom of Zimmerman's approach, the behavioral evidence certainly does. Recent research suggests that emotions hold the secret to viral web content. Articles, posts, or videos that evoke positive emotions have greater viral potential than something that evokes negative feelings, but both do a better job recruiting clicks than neutral content. The finer details tell a similar story: triggering high-arousal emotions, such as anger or humor, is a surer path to click gold than triggering low-arousal ones, such as contentment or sadness.

Take a recent a study published in the November issue of Computers in Human Behavior. A research team led by Rosanna E. Guadagno of the National Science Foundation showed 256 test participants one video from a collection that spanned the emotional spectrum. Some saw a cute or funny clip that had gone viral on YouTube. Others saw a hit that evoked anger or disgust. Still others saw a neutral video about basket-weaving.

After the viewing, participants were asked whether or not they would share that video with someone else. Those who'd seen the funny or cute video were significantly more likely to say they'd forward it than any of the other test participants. Those who'd seen the video causing anger or disgust were significantly more likely to say the same than those who'd seen the neutral clip. A follow-up test with 163 more participants found the same pattern of viral potential: positive emotions best negative ones, any emotion bests none at all.
Part of what makes emotional content so susceptible to spreading is that emotions themselves are contagious. Researchers have long known that people can "catch" the emotions of someone around them, so to speak, through direct exposure to that person's expressions and tones and gestures. They also believe this process of emotional contagion can occur indirectly--say, by receiving a forwarded video clip or article.

The physiological arousal produced by certain emotions may also help explain why some web content goes viral and some doesn't. A few years ago, Wharton behavioral scholars Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman analyzed roughly 7,000 articles that appeared on the New York Times website to see which ones made the "most emailed" list. After controlling for factors like page prominence and author fame, the researchers found that emotional content indeed went viral more often than non-emotional pieces.

But Berger and Milkman didn't stop their analysis there. Within the emotional articles, they recognized that content evoking high-arousal emotions (in this case, awe, anger, and anxiety, emotions that tend to whip us into action) went viral more often than articles evoking a low-arousal emotion (sadness, an emotion that often leaves us subdued). The odds that an article would end up on the "most emailed" list increased 34% when it elicited one standard deviation more anger, the equivalent of letting the article spend an extra 3 hours as the lead story on the Times website.
Berger, author of the 2013 book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, extended this finding even further during a separate laboratory study. He asked some test participants to sit still before reading a neutral article, and asked others to jog in place for a minute before reading the same piece. Then he gave both groups the option of emailing the article to someone else. Three-quarters of the joggers forwarded it against only a third of the sitters--a further sign, in Berger's eyes, that arousal plays a major role in social transmission.

"More arousing content should be more likely to spread quickly on the Internet and should be more likely to capture public attention," he concluded in Psychological Science.
Knowing that emotional arousal contributes to digital contagion should help designers and other creative types craft catchier content (if that's their goal). Public officials might take note, too, especially as they try to distribute information through service announcements that tend to be dry by nature. A public health spot that evokes sadness, for instance, may be less likely to make the rounds than something that causes angst or indignation--though both should be more effective than something safe.

Then again, many factors influence whether or not something goes viral. Interesting content is a must, and catching the eye of a major Twitter personality can't hurt. A heavy marketing push can also boost a video's exposure; (in fact, one of Neetzan Zimmerman's biggest fears, according to the Journal, is that advertisers will co-opt viral news). And, of course, there's the difficulty in evoking strong feelings in the first place. It's one thing to understand the emotions that compel a person to click. It's another thing entirely to produce them.

NSA seeks to develop quantum computer to crack nearly every kind of encryption

January 3, 2014

[+]

SEM micrograph of typical Cooper-pair device (credit: Laboratory for Physical Sciences)

Is this device above — part of a quantum-computing research project at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Maryland — the core of a future NSA quantum computer for cracking nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world?
According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” is part of a $79.7 million research program titled “Penetrating Hard Targets,” The Washington Post revealed Thursday.
Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at this laboratory, the newspaper says. On its website, the lab mentions its work on quantum mechanical effects in superconducting circuits at a temperature of about 10 mK (barely above absolute zero), using a superconducting charge qubit or Cooper-pair box.
According to the Post, the NSA is expected to be able to have some building blocks by the end of September, which it described in a document as “dynamical decoupling and complete quantum control on two semiconductor qubits.”
Another project, called “Owning the Net,” aims at quantum-based attacks on encryptions, the Post says.
“The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” the Post said, based on an internal document provided by Snowden.

(¯`*• 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

Turning off the ‘aging genes’

Computer algorithm developed by TAU researchers identifies genes that could be transformed to stop the aging process

January 3, 2014

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(Credit: iStock)

Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a computer algorithm that predicts which genes can be “turned off” to create the same anti-aging effect as calorie restriction*. The findings, reported in Nature Communications, could lead to the development of new drugs to treat aging.
“Most algorithms try to find drug targets that kill cells to treat cancer or bacterial infections,” says Keren Yizhak, a doctoral student in Prof. Eytan Ruppin’s laboratory. “Our algorithm is the first in our field to look for drug targets not to kill cells, but to transform them from a diseased state into a healthy one.”
Ruppin’s lab is a leader in the growing field of genome-scale metabolic modeling or GSMMs. Using mathematical equations and computers, GSMMs describe the metabolism, or life-sustaining, processes of living cells. Yizhak’s algorithm, which she calls a “metabolic transformation algorithm,” or MTA, can take information about any two metabolic states and predict the environmental or genetic changes required to go from one state to the other.
“Gene expression” is the measurement of the expression level of individual genes in a cell, and genes can be “turned off” in various ways to prevent them from being expressed in the cell. In the study, Yizhak applied MTA to the genetics of aging. After using her custom-designed MTA to confirm previous laboratory findings, she used it to predict genes that can be turned off to make the gene expression of old yeast look like that of young yeast. Yeast is the most widely used genetic model because much of its DNA is preserved in humans.
Some of the genes that the MTA identified were already known to extend the lifespan of yeast when turned off. Of the other genes she found, Yizhak sent seven to be tested at a Bar-Ilan University laboratory. Researchers there found that turning off two of the genes, GRE3 and ADH2, in actual (non-digital) yeast significantly extends the yeast’s lifespan.
“You would expect about three percent of yeast’s genes to be lifespan-extending,” said Yizhak. “So achieving a 10-fold increase over this expected frequency, as we did, is very encouraging.”
Hope for humans
Since MTA provides a systemic view of cell metabolism, it can also shed light on how the genes it identifies contribute to changes in genetic expression. In the case of GRE3 and ADH2, MTA showed that turning off the genes increased oxidative stress levels in yeast, thus possibly inducing a mild stress similar to that produced by calorie restriction.
As a final test, Yizhak applied MTA to human metabolic information. MTA was able to identify a set of genes that can transform 40 to 70 percent of the differences between the old and young information from four different studies. While currently there is no way to verify the results in humans, many of these genes are known to extend lifespan in yeast, worms, and mice.
Next, Yizhak will study whether turning off the genes predicted by MTA prolongs the lifespan of genetically engineered mice.
One day, drugs could be developed to target genes in humans, potentially allowing us to live longer. MTA could also be applied to finding drug targets for disorders where metabolism plays a role, including obesity, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer.
* Restricting calorie consumption is one of the few proven ways to combat aging. Though the underlying mechanism is unknown, calorie restriction has been shown to prolong lifespan in yeast, worms, flies, monkeys, and, in some studies, humans.

Abstract of Nature Communications paper
The growing availability of ‘omics’ data and high-quality in silico genome-scale metabolic models (GSMMs) provide a golden opportunity for the systematic identification of new metabolic drug targets. Extant GSMM-based methods aim at identifying drug targets that would kill the target cell, focusing on antibiotics or cancer treatments. However, normal human metabolism is altered in many diseases and the therapeutic goal is fundamentally different—to retrieve the healthy state. Here we present a generic metabolic transformation algorithm (MTA) addressing this issue. First, the prediction accuracy of MTA is comprehensively validated using data sets of known perturbations. Second, two predicted yeast lifespan-extending genes, GRE3 and ADH2, are experimentally validated, together with their associated hormetic effect. Third, we show that MTA predicts new drug targets for human ageing that are enriched with orthologs of known lifespan-extending genes and with genes downregulated following caloric restriction mimetic treatments. MTA offers a promising new approach for the identification of drug targets in metabolically related disorders.

References:

Keren Yizhak, Orshay Gabay, Haim Cohen, Eytan Ruppin, Model-based identification of drug targets that revert disrupted metabolism and its application to ageing, Nature Communications, 2013, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3632

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech

Fully self-driving cars expected by 2030, says forecast

New IHS Automotive study forecasts nearly 12 million yearly self-driving cars sales and almost 54 million in use on global highways by 2035

January 3, 2014

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Fully self-driving cars are expected by 2030 (credit: Google)

Self-driving cars (SDC) that include driver control are expected to hit highways around the globe before 2025 and self-driving “only” cars (only the car drives) are anticipated around 2030, according to an emerging technologies study on Autonomous Cars from IHS Automotive.
In the study, “Emerging Technologies: Autonomous Cars — Not If, But When,” IHS Automotive forecasts total worldwide sales of self-driving cars will grow from nearly 230 thousand in 2025 to 11.8 million in 2035 — 7 million SDCs with both driver control and autonomous control and 4.8 million that have only autonomous control.
In all, there should be nearly 54 million self-driving cars in use globally by 2035.
The study anticipates that nearly all of the vehicles in use are likely to be self-driving cars or self-driving commercial vehicles sometime after 2050.
The price premium for the SDC electronics technology will add between $7,000 and $10,000 to a car’s sticker price in 2025, a figure that will drop to around $5,000 in 2030 and about $3,000 in 2035 when no driver controls are available.
Benefits of self-driving cars
“There are several benefits from self-driving cars to society, drivers and pedestrians,” says Egil Juliussen, principal analyst for infotainment and autonomous driver assisted systems at IHS Automotive. Juliussen co-authored the study with IHS Automotive senior ADAS analyst Jeremy Carlson.
“Accident rates will plunge to near zero for SDCs, although other cars will crash into SDCs; but as the market share of SDCs on the highway grows, overall accident rates will decline steadily,” Juliussen says. “Traffic congestion and air pollution per car should also decline because SDCs can be programmed to be more efficient in their driving patterns.”
The study also notes some potential barriers to SDC deployment and two major technology risks: software reliability and cyber security. The barriers include implementation of a legal framework for self-driving cars and establishment of government rules and regulations.
Autonomous cars by 2020
[+]

Several automakers have said publicly they will have autonomous cars by 2020, or earlier. Autonomous car technology is already affecting driver assist systems such as adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, and collision mitigating brake systems.
Additionally, the IHS study says the first group of autonomous cars will have so-called Level 3 capability — limited self-driving that enables the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic and environmental conditions and includes auto pilot for highway travel and parking.
Coming later in the decade will be SDCs with Level 4 capability — self-driving but with human controls.
North America is forecasted to account for 29 percent of worldwide sales of self-driving cars with human controls (level 4) and self-driving only cars (level 5) in 2035, or nearly 3.5 million vehicles. China will capture the second largest share at 24 percent, or more than 2.8 million units, while Western Europe will account for 20 percent of the total, 2.4 million vehicles.

References:

IHS Automotive, Emerging Technologies: Autonomous Cars - Not If, But When, 2014

Topics: AI/Robotics | Computers/Infotech/UI | Innovation/Entrepreneurship

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change

December 31, 2013 World

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Ray Kurzweil is sitting in an office in San Francisco’s tallest building overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Over 45 minutes, speaking rapidly in monotone sentences dense with facts and ideas, Google’s director of engineering has outlined a future for the world that would seem incredible, were it not that this man has a 30-year track record of making seemingly bonkers predictions that have proved to be accurate. Among other things, Kurzweil predicted that the internet would become central to our lives when it was still a niche and unreliable network in the Eighties; he pinpointed when computers would be able to beat humans at chess, eight years before the world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue; and he foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Kurzweil doesn’t just foretell the future, though — he is also responsible for helping to shape it. A maverick thinker who grew up in Queens, New York, the son of a Jewish conductor and artist, he wrote his first computer program in 1963 aged 15, went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, having created the world’s first flatbed image scanner, the first music synthesizer capable of re-creating orchestral instruments, and the world’s first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind (the first of which was bought by Stevie Wonder, beginning an enduring friendship between the two men).
One of his current projects is the Google Brain. Working with a young generation of artificial intelligence wizards, he confidently predicts that by 2029 the company will have successfully created a computer system capable of understanding natural language and human emotion. “Right now a kid in Africa with a smartphone can access all of human knowledge, something that the President of the United States could not do even 16 years ago,” he says. “And that sort of rapid progress is only going to continue exponentially.”
Larry Page, Google’s CEO, has also got Kurzweil moonlighting on another of his little pet projects — “solving death”. He is an adviser at the company’s ambitious new Calico venture, which aims to find a cure for ageing. The solution can’t come quickly enough for the 65-year-old, who is personally pursuing immortality. A man who is so excited by the possibilities of life that he never wants it to end, he takes 150 vitamins a day with the aim of extending his life until technology has reached a point that we can implant nanobots in our bodies to back up our immune systems. And after that? “We’ll get to a point where we can actually back up our brains to the cloud,” he says “We routinely back up our phones and notebook computers, but we don’t yet back up the most important information we have, which is our memories and skills, our personality.”
Sounds bonkers? Well, just wait until you read what else he thinks is around the corner . . .
2017: Self-driving cars
“Google self-driving cars have gone half a million miles without human drivers on highways and city streets, with no incidents. Within ten years they will be ubiquitous. Humans have a fairly narrow field of view, these cars have sensors, both visual and laser, and artificial intelligence to be able to assess what’s going on in their environment. Ultimately these cars will communicate with each other and co-ordinate their movements. You also won’t need to own a car, there’ll be a pool of them circulating, and you’ll just call one from your phone when you need it.”
2018: Personal assistant search engines
“Right now, search is based mostly on looking for key words. What I’m working on is creating a search engine that understands the meaning of these billion of documents. It will be more like a human assistant that you can talk things over with, that you can express complicated, even personal concerns to. If you’re wearing something like Google Glass, it could annotate reality; it could even listen in to a conversation, giving helpful hints. It might suggest an anecdote that would fit into your conversation in real time.”
2020: Switch off our fat cells
“It was in our interest a thousand years ago to store every calorie. There were no refrigerators, so you stored them in the fat cells of your body, which now means we have an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, medicine is now information technology, and we’re learning how to reprogram this outdated software of our bodies exponentially. In animals with diabetes, scientists have now successfully turned off the fat insulin receptor gene. So these animals ate ravenously, remained slim, didn’t get diabetes, and lived 20 per cent longer. I would say that this will be a human intervention in five to ten years, and we will have the means of really controlling our weight independent of our eating.”
2020: Click and print designer clothes at home
“Currently there is a lot of overenthusiasm about 3-D printing. Typically where people are prematurely very excited it leads to disillusionment and a bust, like the dot.com crash. I think we’re about five years away from the really important applications. By the early 2020s we’ll be replacing a significant part of manufacturing with 3-D printing. We’ll be able to print out clothing and there’ll be an open source market of free designs. There will be personal 3-D printers, but also shared ones in your local Starbucks, for example.”
2023: Full-immersion virtual realities
“Computer games have pioneered virtual reality, and within ten years — but probably more like five — these will be totally convincing, full-immersion virtual realities, at least for the visual and auditory senses, and there will be some simulation of the tactile sense. To fully master the tactile sense we have to actually tap into the nervous system. That will be a scenario within 20 years. We’ll be able to send little devices, nanobots, into the brain and capillaries, and they’ll provide additional sensory signals, as if they were coming from your real senses. You could for example get together with a friend, even though you were hundreds of thousands of miles apart, and take a virtual walk on a virtual Mediterranean beach and hold their hand and feel the warm spray of the moist air in your face.”
2030: Vertical meat and vegetable farms
“There will be a new vertical agriculture revolution, because right now we use up a third of the usable land of the world to produce food, which is very inefficient. Instead we will grow food in a computerised vertical factory building (which is a more efficient use of real estate) controlled by artificial intelligence, which recycles all of the nutrients so there’s no environmental impact at all. This would include hydroponic plants, fruits and vegetables, and in vitro cloning of meat. This could also be very healthy — we could have meat with Omega-3 fats instead of saturated fats, this sort of thing.”
2033: 100 per cent of our energy from solar
We are applying new nanotechnologies to the design of solar panels, and the costs are coming down dramatically. A recent report by Deutsche Bank said that ‘the cost of unsubsidised solar power is about the same as the cost of electricity from the grid in India and Italy. By 2014 even more countries will achieve solar grid parity’. So I do believe that within 20 years we could get all our energy from solar energy. I presented this not so long ago to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was actually my classmate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and he said: “Ray, do we have enough sunlight to do this with?” and I said: “Yes, we’ve got 10,000 times more than we need.”
2040: Stay young for ever
“Twenty years from now, we will be adding more time than is going by to your remaining life expectancy. We’ve quadrupled life expectancy in the past 1,000 years and doubled it in the past 200 years. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and so that pace is only going to continue to accelerate. There are three bridges to life extension. Bridge 1 is taking aggressive steps to stay healthy today, with today’s knowledge. The goal is to get to bridge 2: the biotechnology revolution, where we can reprogram biology away from disease. Bridge 3 is the nanotechnology revolution. The quintessential application of that is nanobots — little robots in the bloodstream that augment your immune system. We can create an immune system that recognises all disease, and could be reprogrammed to deal with new pathogens.”
The future of travel
Dominic Harrison, director of global trends at Future Foundation
Climate-change tourism
People already travel to places such as Cuba to go and see a Communist state before Castro dies, and there are tours to North Korea. What we expect to start seeing is travel to places such as the Amazon rainforest for a last peek at the wonders of nature, or the Alps to check out the glaciers for the last time. Disappearing planet — see it before it goes.
Try before you buy
We are increasingly planning holidays meticulously before we leave, and we term this “the end of adventure”. There are apps such as Hyperlapse on Google Street View, or Shnergle, which allows individuals to “check out a place you’re interested in visiting in near real time to help you decide if you want to go”.
Future of food
Dr Morgaine Gaye, food futurologist
Condiment explosion
The range, variety and provenance of condiments is going to develop hugely next year. They will even become foods in their own right. Vinegar is set to become the non-alcoholic drink of choice, in hedgerow flavours with an artisan twist. On the back of the popularity of wasabi, mustard varieties are going to gain complexity and nuance, and will become a commonplace flavouring in a wider variety of unlikely foods and desserts.
Michelin-starred insects
Currently a fun food fad, insects will become mainstream in about 2016, firstly being used discreetly to create other foods, such as meat sauces, nut replacements and burgers or sausages. Mini-livestock (insects) are already becoming more popular as countries begin to embrace the possibilities of entomophagy, most notably the Netherlands, where it has been pioneered by Wageningen University, which started promoting insects as food in the 1990s.
Future of fashion
Suzanne Lee, fashion futurologist and founder of BioCouture
Digital fashion
Laboratories such as London’s Studio XO are creating extraordinary outfits for the likes of Lady Gaga and driving tech into the fashion mainstream. Their digital mermaid bra for Azealia Banks was studded with hundreds of Swarovski crystals and LEDs, which diffracted light, animating the crystals in time to the music. Other fashion tech labels, including CuteCircuit, sell LED T-shirt dresses that react to the wearer’s movement, others receive and display tweets in real time. Expect your clutch purse to be Facebooking soon.
Grow your own clothes
We are beginning to get living organisms like mammalian cells, bacteria, fungi and algae to grow materials for us. At my company Biocouture we are busy growing material from bacteria for a skirt that will be exhibited in Selfridge’s next month. Modern Meadow, a spin-off of a US-based tissue engineering company, is aiming to produce cultured leather handbags by 2015.
British cultural trends
Lucie Greene, LS:N Global editor
Rise of the Amortals
Our population is ageing, but far from being a burden on the economy, Sarah Harper at the Oxford Institute of Ageing believes that the age of retirement is becoming meaningless, because people have to work much longer. This later stage in life will become the exciting third age, and it will transform the way we think about our careers and plan our families.
Slash-slash career paths
Traditional career paths aren’t open to millennials so they’re making money using things such as Airbnb, eBay, or the new websites StyleOwner and Nuji, which allow you to create your own virtual shopfront of your favourite things, like Pinterest, and if anything is sold you get a payment. They can rent out their rooms, and market their taste.
THE TIMES

(¯`*• 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

Vitamin E may delay decline in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s Disease, study finds. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vitamin-e-may-delay-decline-in-mild-to-moderate-alzheimers-disease-study-finds

Vapor nanobubbles rapidly detect malaria through the skin. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vapor-nanobubbles-rapidly-detect-malaria-through-the-skin

Ultrathin ‘diagnostic skin’ allows continuous patient monitoring. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/ultrathin-diagnostic-skin-allows-continuous-patient-monitoring

Hubble sees cloudy ‘super-Earth’ 40 light-years away. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/hubble-sees-cloudy-super-earth-40-light-years-away

The NSA is Building the Foundation for a Global Police State. At http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-nsa-is-building-the-foundation-for-a-global-police-state/5363186#!

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ORGANIZATIONS .. I HAVE WORKED WITH !

(¯`*•. As a consultant, manager and strategist, Andres has worked with institutions such as:

► Toyota,
► Mitsubishi,
► World Bank,
► Shell,
► Statoil,
► Total,
► Exxon,
► Mobil,
► Citgo,
► PDVSA,
► GE,
► GMAC,
► TNT Delivery Express,
► GTE,
► Amoco,
► BP,
► Abbot Laboratories,
► World Health Organization,
► Ernst Young Consulting,
► SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation),
► Pak Mail,
► Wilpro (Williams Company),
► Phillips Petroleum Company,
► Dupont,
► Conoco,
► ENI (Italy’s petroleum state-owned firm),
► Chevron, and
► LDG Management (HCC Benefits).

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

Friday, January 3, 2014

15 Tech Predictions for 2014

Cloud computing 2014: Moving to a zero-trust security model

Snowden leaks aren't driving companies away from the cloud; but the disclosures have made them a lot more careful

Cloud watch

Data encryption

Key management and data ownership

Best of 2013: US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

Surveillance network built to spot secret nuclear tests yields surprise scientific boon

By Joby Warrick, Published: January 1 E-mail the writer

NSA seeks quantum computer that could crack most codes

Syria blamed for missed deadline on chemical arsenal

Global surveillance network yields surprising science boon

Snowden, in interview, says his mission’s accomplished

Full coverage: NSA Secrets

The Faster a New Technology Takes Off, the Harder It Falls

The Rise and Fall of Microsoft’s Kinect

Taking On Trash By Converting Plastic To Currency

These Scientists Studied Why Internet Stories Go Viral. You Won't Believe What They Found

NSA seeks to develop quantum computer to crack nearly every kind of encryption

January 3, 2014

Turning off the ‘aging genes’

January 3, 2014

References:

Fully self-driving cars expected by 2030, says forecast

January 3, 2014

References:

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change

Vitamin E may delay decline in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s Disease, study finds. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vitamin-e-may-delay-decline-in-mild-to-moderate-alzheimers-disease-study-finds

Vapor nanobubbles rapidly detect malaria through the skin. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vapor-nanobubbles-rapidly-detect-malaria-through-the-skin

Ultrathin ‘diagnostic skin’ allows continuous patient monitoring. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/ultrathin-diagnostic-skin-allows-continuous-patient-monitoring

Hubble sees cloudy ‘super-Earth’ 40 light-years away. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/hubble-sees-cloudy-super-earth-40-light-years-away

The NSA is Building the Foundation for a Global Police State. At http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-nsa-is-building-the-foundation-for-a-global-police-state/5363186#!

QUANTA

Friday, January 3, 2014

15 Tech Predictions for 2014

Cloud computing 2014: Moving to a zero-trust security model

Snowden leaks aren't driving companies away from the cloud; but the disclosures have made them a lot more careful

Cloud watch

Data encryption

Key management and data ownership

Best of 2013: US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

Surveillance network built to spot secret nuclear tests yields surprise scientific boon

By Joby Warrick, Published: January 1 E-mail the writer

NSA seeks quantum computer that could crack most codes

Syria blamed for missed deadline on chemical arsenal

Global surveillance network yields surprising science boon

Snowden, in interview, says his mission’s accomplished

Full coverage: NSA Secrets

The Faster a New Technology Takes Off, the Harder It Falls

The Rise and Fall of Microsoft’s Kinect

NSA seeks to develop quantum computer to crack nearly every kind of encryption

January 3, 2014

Turning off the ‘aging genes’

January 3, 2014

References:

Related:

Fully self-driving cars expected by 2030, says forecast

January 3, 2014

References:

Related:

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change

Vitamin E may delay decline in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s Disease, study finds. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vitamin-e-may-delay-decline-in-mild-to-moderate-alzheimers-disease-study-finds

Vapor nanobubbles rapidly detect malaria through the skin. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/vapor-nanobubbles-rapidly-detect-malaria-through-the-skin

Ultrathin ‘diagnostic skin’ allows continuous patient monitoring. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/ultrathin-diagnostic-skin-allows-continuous-patient-monitoring

Hubble sees cloudy ‘super-Earth’ 40 light-years away. At http://www.kurzweilai.net/hubble-sees-cloudy-super-earth-40-light-years-away

The NSA is Building the Foundation for a Global Police State. At http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-nsa-is-building-the-foundation-for-a-global-police-state/5363186#!