Sometime this year Earth’s human population passed 7 billion people. Sometime this year, for the first time, more than 50% of humanity lived in cities and towns. The predictions are that humanity’s population will peak around 10 billion or so in 2050 and then go into a slow decline. Even in the poorest parts of [...]
Yes, I think it can. Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But [...]
So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but, this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something [...]
The Blue Brain Project requires one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to simulate a single cortical column of a rat’s brain. This project of computational neurology has been running since 2005. In my opinion, this project, out of all the research projects related to artificial intelligence, is the mostly likely to tell [...]
So, about a week ago, Jamais Casico put up a page where he asked the following three questions: What do you fear we’ll likely see in fifteen years? What do you hope we’ll likely see in fifteen years? What do you think you’ll be doing in fifteen years? Here are my attempts to answer them.
Okay. This is another strange essay brought on by, in equal measures, pop-tarts, the death of Jerry Falwell, reading odd websites and doing laundry in the small hours of the morning. As stated elsewhere on this site, I believe that aging is a disease that will be cured one day. I hope it will be [...]
I believe some pretty sketchy things: I believe that the premise of strong AI is sound. I believe that artificial life is already here. I believe the premise of molecular nanotechnology is sound. I believe the premise of cryonics. I believe the premise of brain taping. Given that I believe all that (I blame years [...]
Why is it that education seems so resistent to technological improvement?
By way of Amor Mundi, I found a link to this really interesting site called, the Open Prothesthics Project. This is nifty to me on several levels. It ties into accessibility and assistive technology. It ties into open source engineering. GPL doesn’t have to be just about software. It can tie into stuff like fab labs. [...]
A week ago I read a short story by Tad Williams about the spontaneous emergence of sapience from the Internet. It wasn’t really that good. Arthur Clarke did it many decades earlier and did it much better. Anyway, uninformed amateur scientist that I am, I’m skeptical that consciousness will emerge from our computer networks as [...]