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Mike Wesch

The Law of Accelerating Returns - 0 views

  • Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a millennium. What would they come up with?
  • Downloading the Human Brain
  • This, then, is the Singularity. The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
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  • Needless to say, the Singularity will transform all aspects of our lives, social, sexual, and economic,
  • Some prominent dates from this analysis include the following: We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2023. We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for one cent around the year 2037. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2049. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for one cent around the year 2059.
  • Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity).
  • A Thought Experiment
  • By 2030, going to a web site will mean entering a full immersion virtual reality environment.
  • Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will ultimately expand our memories a trillion fold, and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern recognition, and cognitive abilities.
  • And in the same way that biological self-replication gone awry (i.e., cancer) results in biological destruction, a defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise.
  • A related question is "is death desirable?"
  • Plan to Stick Around
scross

Second Life affair ends in divorce - CNN.com - 0 views

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    A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world."> text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Adam Bohannon

PC World - Business Center: Anthropology's Technology-driven Renaissance - 0 views

  • Mobile phones with flashlights are just one example of a product that can emerge from this brand of user-centric design. Others include mobile phones with multiple phone books, which allow more than one person to share a single phone, a practice largely unheard of in many developed markets.
  • Others include mobile phones with multiple phone books, which allow more than one person to share a single phone, a practice largely unheard of in many developed markets.
Matthew Schuler

BBC NEWS | Technology | Deadly plague hits Warcraft world - 0 views

  • the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.
  • The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.
  • Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.
Matthew Schuler

Google Unveils Tool To Track Refugees Worldwide - TechNow News Story - KNTV | San Franc... - 0 views

  • Internet search giant Google Inc. unveiled a new feature Tuesday for its popular mapping programs that shines a spotlight on the movement of refugees around the world. The maps will aid humanitarian operations as well as help inform the public about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project.
Matthew Schuler

ABC News: Judge Allows Wikileaks Site to Re-Open - 0 views

  • The Wikileaks site claims to have posted 1.2 million leaked government and corporate documents that it says expose unethical behavior, including a 2003 operation manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Matthew Schuler

Brain implant, software enables patients to think out loud - Engadget - 0 views

  • Truth be told, we've already seen instances where technology has enabled individuals to speak without speaking, but a brain implant placed into Eric Ramsey's head could certainly raise the bar in this field.
Matthew Schuler

ABC News: Unmaking the Band, Facebook for Music - 0 views

  • Indaba, which launched earlier this year, provides a meeting ground for musicians. Anyone can upload a track — whether it's a beat, or a melody or a full-fledged song — and can solicit other musicians to record new or different parts. Similarly, musicians looking to add or build on other people's songs can search for these open "sessions," which are tagged by genre and instrument. They can ask to be invited to play and can send audition tracks.
  • Though the Indaba guys were at Harvard at the same time as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and plan to release their own Facebook application
Matthew Schuler

ABC News: Can a Videogame Help Fight Child Obesity? - 0 views

  • With childhood obesity rates tripling in the last 15 years, Kaiser Permanente has decided to do something about this growing epidemic: It plans to introduce a video game.
Matthew Schuler

Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life - Online World - MSNBC.com - 0 views

  • Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.
  • 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.
  • "People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior. "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.
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  • More than a quarter of respondents — or 28 percent — admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online. It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.
Matthew Schuler

ABC News: Get Credit: College Offers YouTube Class - 0 views

  • Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube. Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.
  • She hopes the course will raise serious issues about YouTube, such as the role of "corporate-sponsored democratic media expression."
  • YouTube is "a phenomenon that should be studied," student Darren Grose said. "You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general."
Matthew Schuler

ABC News: Hey, That's Me! Ads 'Photonap' Web Images - 0 views

  • You and your family are the "real thing." And maybe that's why so many companies (particularly big corporations) are so eager to get their hands on these photos that they seem to be using them without permission.
  • Case in point: A 15-year-old girl from Dallas discovered that a photo of her at a youth car wash posted on Flickr was later used in an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile in Australia. The photo was not displayed in a flattering way. She was portrayed as the dorky pen pal that Virgin wanted you to dump in favor of its text-messaging service. She only discovered she has been "photonapped" when a friend sent her a copy of the ad.
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