This just in from Aussie HIVE45 vidcaster Nathan Waters: “Someone is finally making *normal-looking* tech recording glasses! I have no affiliation with this product, but I would absolutely love if you added it to the news section to encourage more pledges for their Kickstarter funding. Here’s the link: Eyez by ZionEyez HD Video Recording Glasses for Facebook. “The issue so far has been… read more
At Peter Thiel’s invitation-only “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event in San Francisco on December 7, which brought together Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs with eight of the most visionary non-profits, Patri Friedman, grandson of legendary economist Milton Friedman, presented one of the most radical, imaginative concepts I’ve heard in some time. Here’s the text of his four-minute talk (video below — other Breakthrough Philanthropy speaker videos here).… read more
What we’re missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?
We’re missing a… read more
In “Against Naive Uploadism: Memory, Consciousness and Synaptic Homeostasis,” neuroscientist Seth Weisberg challenges the comparison of a neuron to a digital computer and the idea that an action potential (spike) fired by one neuron equals one calculation at each synapse. He also challenges the assumption that we are approaching computing power comparable to the human brain.
Overall, Seth Weisberg’s article is refreshing and clearly spoken, in that… read more
Physicists have designed several wild experiments to see if humans can see quantum images.
The latest, just described in the Physics arXiv Blog: Geraldo Barbosa at Northwestern University plans to use a laser beam shaped into an image, such as the letter A.
This laser beam hits a non-linear crystal, generating entangled pairs of photons that retain this image shape and are detected by human eyeballs.
(Hmm,… read more
Hi Ray,
It was nice to see you again at the Transcendent Man film screening. I enjoyed the movie and the discussion. The way I see it, over time we have been discovering the intelligence that is manifested in nature. This intelligence is much greater than our own — however, piece by piece, we have been stitching it together.
The point is that we have been making these discoveries… read more
Attention, telephone babblers, library whisperers, and hecklers: Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology want you to shut the bleep up.
They’ve developed the “Speech-jammer” gun, which will reduce you to incoherent stuttering from up to 90 feet away.
It works by recording your words and then sending them back with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds (it’s more effective… read more
Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope — the 100 meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world — at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced… read more
Bioprinting is printing with biological materials.
There’s a lot of work being done at research labs and big companies like Organovo on print human tissues and human organs, with an eye towards drug testing, and transplantation into humans.
Check out these amazing TED talks by Anthony Atala, for example:
Anthony Atala: Growing new organs
Anthony Atala: Printing a human… read more
Why can’t a robot be like a servant (to paraphrase My Fair Lady)? You know, one who would anticipate your every need — even before you asked?
The folks at the Personal Robotics Lab of Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell assistant professor of computer science have gone and done just that.
When we last (virtually) visited the lab, we learned that the roboticists taught “hallucinating” robots to arrange your room… read more
The tone of the Singularity Summit 2011 in New York was set by Ray Kurzweil, who presented many examples of accelerating developments, countering the arguments presented by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen in a recent article, The Singularity Isn’t Near.
Robots vs. humans
James McLurkin introduced the concept of swarms of small, light, and cheap robots that communicate with each other, solve… read more
Well, OK, maybe not totally destroying it, just making it unnecessary to rely on friends, libraries, books, notes, and other forms of “transactive memory” (external systems), thanks to the rise of Internet search engines, Wikipedia, and other Internet tools.
So says Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, co-author of an article in Science Express.
“Since the advent of search engines, we are… read more
The next generation of the Kinect (bundled with future Xbox consoles) may be “so accurate it can lip read,” the Technology Review Hello World headline breathlessly reads — evoking HAL 9000 in 2001.
What’s more, says Eurogamer, citing a nameless source, “Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing,… read more
We recently got a note from Evan Younger, vocalist/bassist for Brooklyn-based orchestral rockers Miracles of Modern Science mentioning a single he wrote, “The Singularity.” How could I resist? I punched up the podcast link.
Yes! Very nice! Powerful lyrics that definitely get it, and the music combines the richness and intelligence of acoustic strings with the energy of a rock beat. Accelerates my thinking. I have to say… read more
Are you a Facebook addict? Take the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale test, developed in Norway, and find out.
Do you (1) Very rarely, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, or (5) Very often: