Admit it: you want to play Iron Man’s Tony Stark, manipulating amazing inventions and taking over the world. June 2014, you’ll have your chance.
That’s when Meta’s aviator-style MetaPro “holographic” glasses — a consumer version of the $667 Meta 1 developer version* — will ship. Meta is taking pre-orders now for this pricey but powerful $3,000 gadget.
It will have 1280×720 pixels for… read more
Dear readers,
I am reviewing the recent news on Amazon’s interest in using unmanned drones to make product deliveries.
There is public discussion about the feasibility of this logistically, and some concerns about using drones in public due to privacy and other issues.
You can read some background on Amazon’s plans in this report by 60 Minutes:
CBS News | “Amazon unveils futuristic plan… read more
Is it stressful to view life as a sort of race against the clock, in which it’s presumably — at least partly — in your power whether you die like all past humans have, or find a way to survive indefinitely?
It seems like a lot of pressure to live with, no? I’m speaking purely from a personal, psychological/emotional point of view here.… read more
You get to vote: the American Brain Foundation, U. of Rochester Memory Care Center (both research ways to prevent neurodegenerative diseases); Infusio, a German wellness clinic; or the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF), a research charity I’m affiliated with seeking evidence that computational neuroscience and automation can revive the memory and minds of chemopreserved and cryopreserved brains in the future.*… read more
Wow, it’s happening already. Cornell robotics researchers are now teaching robots complex tasks such as performing as grocery-store checkout clerks.
Can robot butlers (as in Robot & Frank) be far behind?
This is a big step beyond what Cornell researchers in Prof. Ashutosh Saxena’s lab were teaching their smart robots the last time we (virtually) visited the lab in May.
We saw then… read more
In 2009, filmmaker and former AI programmer Raj Dye spent his summer following futurist AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo de Garis around Hong Kong and Xiamen, documenting their doings and gathering their perspectives.
The result, after some work by crack film editor Alex MacKenzie, was the 45 minute documentary Singularity or Bust — a uniquely edgy, experimental Singularitarian road movie, featuring perhaps the most philosophical three-foot-tall humanoid robot ever,… read more
Kurzweil-influenced futurism is sometimes dismissed as naive techno-optimism, but Ray Kurzweil himself is no Pollyanna.
It was Kurzweil who inspired Bill Joy to write the famously pessimistic Wired essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” and Kurzweil devoted an entire chapter of The Singularity is Near to the risks of advanced technologies.There, he wrote that despite his reputation as a technological optimist, “I often… read more
A recent paper by Milton Wainwright et al. [1] claimed that sampling of the stratosphere revealed a diatom frustule captured from a height of >25km.
The paper, published in Journal of Cosmology, also argues that the object came from space, with a probable origin in the watery environment of a comet.
There are a number of problems that I would have flagged had I been a… read more
“In findings that are as scientifically significant as they are crushing to the popular imagination, NASA reported Thursday that its Curiosity Mars rover has deflated hopes that life could be thriving on Mars today.”
So say the kill-joys at The New York Times.
Deftly side-stepping the blow, Michael Meyer, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration, explained: “This important result will help direct our efforts to examine the… read more
Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us.
By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be… read more
Talk-radio legend Art Bell launched Monday night his new nightly radio show, Dark Matter, with guest Dr. Michio Kaku.
Dark Matter airs on SiriusXM Indie Talk channel 104 (30-day trial available) at 10PM Eastern/7PM Pacific* (also available via Internet and apps), covering wild ideas at the edge of reality.
Art was a founder and original host of the … read more
Ray,
Your recent book on creating intelligence mentioned cuteness in passing, and it made me wonder: why are most baby animals so cute. Naked mole rat is a possible exception?
They can’t look cute so we become gaga, if not for we humans, then it has to be for the parents, and if cuteness is not an exclusively human concept, its origins must be way back in time… read more
William Hertling’s science-fiction collection of Singularity novels about the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) consists (so far) of Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, A.I. Apocalypse, and the recently published The Last Firewall.
I think The Last Firewall is the best of the lot: a fast techno-thriller set in a hybrid human/AI world with social tension and dominance conflicts, in where… read more
Set in the future when science first begins to stop aging, a daughter tries to save her father from natural death.
The story takes place roughly 30 years in the future at the moment when science has first figured out how to stop aging through genetics. It is framed around the gulf between generations that would occur with the first release of this technology.
A daughter who works… read more
I’ve been to two of the amazing biennial Toward a Science of Consciousness events and enjoyed them immensely, but I think this one April 21–26 next year in Tuscon will be the best yet.
It features three of the most interesting characters in neuroscience — Karl Deisseroth, Cristof Koch, and Henry Markram — and a bevy of other compelling speakers.… read more
