TheMachine

It seems more top-tier economists are coming around to the idea that robots and technology could be having a greater influence on the economy (and this crisis in particular) than previously appreciated. Paul Krugman being the latest.

Yet 3D printing is just one of many production technologies and trends which are transforming the way companies will be able to make things in the future. The old rules of manufacturing, such as "you must seek economies of scale" and "you must reduce unit-labour costs", are being cast aside. New machines can print every item differently. More flexible robots are getting cheaper and better at doing all the boring and dirty stuff.

"We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware." And also: "We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling." An interesting and beautiful post, but then again, I'm not entirely convinced, more specifically about the implicit conceptualization of our own Paleo-past. I think our ancestors and many animals had something called consciousness, while all those fascinating machines and networks of today don't have any consciousness at all. The fact that we add cameras and sensors to the networks does not yet mean these networks acquire something like a body. It would be interesting to study how the proponents of cyborg-thinking conceptualize the relationship between mind, body and consciousness. Or am I mistaken here? 

"I ask us - in journalism and in education (and in journalism education) - to aspire to being services. That requires us to start by thinking of the ends." This is so right. Aspire being services, in education as in journalism, as both activities have so much in common. 

"Microsoft has it's own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. It's an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. " The information is based on a patent application, so don't expect a Microsoft Glass for Christmas. 

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

Sean Lawson, Forbes:  "If the United States has not yet fully militarized cyberspace, it has taken significant steps in that direction. " Interesting metaphors in this article. Is cyberspace like an ocean, and is it just a normal thing to have a kind of cyberspace-navy? Or is this going much further, with the military trying to expand their role drastically? 

"WeMo lives on your iPhone and uses your home Wi-Fi and mobile internet. Setting up and using it is a snap."

an open-source platform that simplifies this kind of mobile data collection. They want to enable a new generation of apps that can detect social and behavioral trends in communities.

"Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that "complex systems break in complex ways" - that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy."

"More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next - letting you keep your eyes on the road."

Introduced this past June with Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean," Google Now is designed to ambiently give you information you might need before you ask for it. To pull off that ambitious goal, Google takes advantage of multiple parts of the company: comprehensive search results, robust speech recognition, and most of all Google's surprisingly deep understanding of who you are and what you want to know.

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.

Another great story from Singularity Hub. If this Kickstarter project is successful, it will enable us to explore the oceans by just using our laptop or tablet.  Which in a way reminds me of those cute iPad-robots enabling people to move around , see, hear and communicate from  whatever distance. So yes indeed, let's do this in the oceans as well!  "Eduardo Labarca wants to bring the ocean you. Not through the kind of striking, high-definition imagery that Planet Earth brought, but through an immersive experience where you actually get to navigate the corals, chase the fish, explore the shipwreck yourself. Which is why Labarca created AcquatiCo, a web-based ocean exploration platform. A Kickstarter campaign has been launched for the startup. If successful, it will be the first step in the company's goal of giving people unprecedented access to the ocean's treasures using just their computers, tablets or smartphones. I got a chance to talk with the Singularity University graduate and ask him about AcquatiCo, and his vision to "democratize the ocean." "