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Relevant link: We, Borg.

How do you feel about the proposal to use Wolfram as an unit measure for Ego? http://www.aleph.se/andart/arc...

The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.

Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.

This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs or PHBs.

Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage trying to protect their positions of power.

The logical conclusion would be to link brains together as we link their hemispheres currently. For that, you'll need about 10 Gbps per person, compression notwithstanding.

We can't stop here, this is B0rg country.

No, don't stop there. Ultimately all we the sensations experience and reason about passes through our brains, so why take the long road? If the brain can handle the bandwidth, just connect it directly.

Now there's Borg for ya!

Well you deserve your + 5 funny, however my first thought was about this sigularity Where an superior AI becomes selfaware and decides that humans are no longer important. this is a concept that is long known and together with the gray goo an hard to imagine future fear for humanity.

All other projects that was totally fouled up by NASA like NASP (and even insisting on taking over DC-X and fucking that up, too) was pure incompetence?

While the DC-X may very well have been intentional incompetence (since they really wanted the X-33 to fly), it was still incompetence. Or more precisely, no one was allowed to do their jobs, so nothing got done in a useful way. After all, why was the President dictating how the next craft should be designed? Was he an engineer? A scientist? Someone who would have any *clue* about what such a design as the shuttle would mean?

If President Nixon had listened to his people about what the actual options were for space craft (as opposed to what he wanted them to be), we wouldn't be in this pickle.

(If you didn't give the job to Burt Rutan; then you'd probably also get a moon base for that kind of money.)

Rutan's a pretty smart guy, but please keep the fanboy stuff to a minimum. Things are more complicated than they may seem.

I just wonder what we could have had.

I can tell you exactly what would have happened.

1) Von Braun would have continued the Saturn V program.

2) He would have launched an Orion on the back of a Saturn.

3) We'd have been to Mars by the 1980's.

Does that answer your question?

• World Transhumanism Association
• Singularity Institute
• KurzweilAI.net
• Extropy Institute
• Transtopia
• Better Humans

• Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
• Transhumanism at del.icio.us

It is, in effect the new frontier for innovation by companies such as Alvarion. Intel is pushing hard in this areas as they see this domain as an untapped area where they can gain traction.

This article is informational: http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp%3FArticleID%3D 3753

Of course, WiMax, is being promised as that solution to the perennial problem, the Last Mile , which is kind of what this guy is trying to illustrate.

Unfortunately though, the cost of driving a truck around, far outweighs the benefit of providing bandwidth for 'free' - One is reminded of the old calculation for the bandwidth of a truck, somewhat updated here, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of an Interstellar Truck"

A gentle but fairly thorough taste can be found in Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Also check out http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=1
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/

I am sure interested entities can google more.

A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.

My point (which I didn't communicate well) was that it's quite ironic that Pascal's wager, which was used to argue that you should "fear God lest he might exist and ye might be punished if you don't" is now trotted out seriously in favor of cryonics. The bit about taking Pascal's original wager into account when considering cryonics was intended to illustrate, and show that they both fail because of the inherent flaws in the form of argument they employ.

Maybe it is smart to believe in God or to take out a policy from Alcor, but thinking either because of 2x2 matrices is indeed dumb.

The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era Vernor Vinge

Or not.

So if that's a goal of ours, perhaps it's a goal of another race's. And perhaps they got a head start on us, and that large percentage of "dark matter" actually consists of Dyson Spheres which capture everything, so are "undetectable" by us. That's pretty scary, to think that we just lost that much playground, and will eventually have to deal with the bully--on his own terms perhaps.

I mentioned this a year ago or so, and someone pointed me in the direction of Matrioshka Brains, so I will include some links for that as well. And an excellent discussion.

I would add to the last part that the larger planets could be taken apart by space elevators as well. They'd just start with the upper atmosphere; then work their way down. All the time the mass is getting smaller, and the elevators are pulling mass out so they can make themselves bigger in order to reach deeper. I think it's workable, and appears to be the most efficient way to do it--get the mass all out into "orbit" first. Actually, when you're about halfway done you can then start shipping what you mine off to other locations, and taking that amount of mass out of the elevators as well since they won't need to counterbalance as the planet's now smaller. (I don't know what the mathematical "middle point" where you start dismantling the elevators actually is--it could be something other than 50%.)

We could have "planet splitter seeds" which we shoot off to other stars, and they start with a tiny, correctly-placed elevator and build more of them as fast as is physically possible; the seed would be smart enough to calculate all the masses and start with the most effective one that would lead to the earliest date at which the entire mass of the star system is being used for computation.

The only problem is if we encounter life. Will our machines just assimilate it? Are the ones out there programmed to preserve us? Have they already done so?

It could be a bad virus that kills all mammals. Or the grey goo syndrome. Or global nuclear war. Or an ice age. Or an asteroid. Or if we're lucky and none of this happens, then in a few billion years, the Sun will expand, melt and disintegrate the Earth, and that'll be the end of it.

So, you see, we humans must (A) protect ourselves and (B) colonize other parts of the solar system or the galaxy.

Or we can just sit here and wait for doomsday and hope for a place in paradise.

Whew - after reading that link, I'm once again glad I fidget constantly. On the other hand, I worry that the increased energy burn might shorten lifespan, since the best age-extension techniques in animals involve calorie restriction. I need this body to last till we can upload minds!

This one.

Thanks for the link.. I was to lazy to give a link in my original post.

about 15 Years--once a true global network is in place, and you have a device with the equivalent of a T1 connected to the network. It's the size of a palm pilot with hi-res screen and can run for a month on a single battery. It has full video/audio capture/receive and runs equivalent to our current 5GHz processors.

At current rates of progress, this will be available between 15 and 20 years from now, for equivalent to about $40.

I'm sorry, but technology is going to yank every third world nation (and basically all of us) onto the same "platform". Introducing people to these technologies now, however premature they might seem, is a good idea.

Sometimes it's edifying to open yourself up to other fantastic possibilities for our planet... maybe we can make this world into a better place. The pessimism will only slow us down.

...Most stars will have burnt out in another 15 billion years or so, and the universe will be approaching a state of complete disorder, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But Freeman Dyson has shown that, despite this, life could adapt to the ever-decreasing supply of ordered energy, and therefore could, in principle, continue forever.

which referrs to freeman dyson's paper "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe

...The general conlusion of the analysis is that an open universe need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Life and communication can continue for ever, utilizing a finite store of energy, if the assumed scaling laws are valid.

so lets hope that those scaling laws hold up :D

(and yes, the kind of life he's referring to would be quite different than the kind that you and I are familiar with...)

If we only see ~5% of the Universe (and probably only understand about 0.00000001% of that), could it be that we really cannot see most of what is right in front of us?

Once we achieve the technology, that's my plan -- to "save" as much of the energy that's pouring out into space, so we can make the universe last longer. I'm sure advanced civilizations have similar thoughts.

The cool part is, if it's true, then it's a lot like realizing that you're already within the event horizon of a black hole. They've "eaten" 95% of the stars; they'll get to ours sooner or later. Will we be able to keep it?

We do have a tiny clue, but you're right that it's not enough to see the big picture from our current perspective. You can't teach an elephant to engineer a space shuttle any more than a human can be taught to understand "42".

--

more info @ the link above and Ander's Transhuman Resources

It's called Transhumanism

It's about improving the human being, through any means possible. One of those main means is technology. You might be thankful for your worthless organic eyes, but I want zoom damnit!!

You should consider that the post-human transition probably won't be so black and white. Rather than assume a superintelligence would dismiss its parents as 'redundant', I'd assume it'd help us join them -- and even if not, sentient AI isn't the only kind of computation capable of engineering a brain-to-machine bridge.

Progress is exponential... and we're on the knee of that curve. Can't avoid it. We've gotta deal.

--

If we want to colonize space, and colonize it fast, the way to do that is to create viable land titles on the Moon, Mars, and any other body people want to live on. The value generated by making those title transferable at a distance ("the miracle of capital") will be more that sufficient to fund the trips to those places.

The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization

As to all those people who believe that "the world" should own space locations, and keep them as parks, or Utopias - that will be the easiest way to ensure that they remain completely unused by humanity, until it's *super* easy, whereupon those places will become slums and shanty towns, just like the unpropertied areas in third world countries today.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Man, coincidince! I just finished reading this excellent essay on The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization, which convinced me that Mars missions are not actually wastes of money. They say these things come in threes, I wonder what the next one will be?

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Here's an abstract from a paper that discusses colonizing Mars in some detail. Very interesting.

"The economic viability of colonizing Mars is examined. It is shown, that of all bodies in the solar system other than Earth, Mars is unique in that it has the resources required to support a population of sufficient size to create locally a new branch of human civilization. It is also shown that while Mars may lack any cash material directly exportable to Earth, Mars' orbital elements and other physical parameters gives a unique positional advantage that will allow it to act as a keystone supporting extractive activities in the asteroid belt and elsewhere in the solar system. The potential of relatively near-term types of interplanetary transportation systems is examined, and it is shown that with very modest advances on a historical scale, systems can be put in place that will allow individuals and families to emigrate to Mars at their own discretion. Their motives for doing so will parallel in many ways the historical motives for Europeans and others to come to America, including higher pay rates in a labor-short economy, escape from tradition and oppression, as well as freedom to exercise their drive to create in an untamed and undefined world. Under conditions of such large scale immigration, sale of real-estate will add a significant source of income to the planet's economy. Potential increases in real-estate values after terraforming will provide a sufficient financial incentive to do so. In analogy to frontier America, social conditions on Mars will make it a pressure cooker for invention. These inventions, licensed on Earth, will raise both Terrestrial and Martian living standards and contribute large amounts of income to support the development of the colony."

There is already a possible way to write comments into DNA, so copyright notices are not beyond the realm of possibility.

As for copy protection, the more you pull and tug at DNA the more fragile it gets. It might be (genetics is not my field, free to point me in the right direction here) that if you try to copy copied DNA errors will creep into the transcribed code. I don't know.. I just get the feeling that you can only tug on the meat so much before it starts to unravel, you know?

We can't detect it. That's the key. An advanced civilization has perfected Dyson Spheres , and is enclosing the stars to capture the energy. They are able to capture every possible piece of energy, so that we detect nothing.

I suppose that's a side effect of perfecting your energy capture -- it's undetectable. We're in a race. A race to enclose the universe; whoever get the most energy wins.

Seriously, I think about these things. ;-)

Here's quite a good site for all things mega-construction related: Mega-Scale Engineering.

If you are found of Dyson spheres, beanstalks, spacehooks, terraforming and other stellar husbandry, check out the following site, full or ressources on these topics:

Megascale Engineering

Megascale engineering is about building/creating or using structures on a extremely large scale, at least 1000 kilometres in diameter, often incorporating highly advanced and/or speculative technology. Typical examples are orbit-to-ground Beanstalks, moving planets, Dyson Spheres and Stellar Husbandry.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Singularity or similar arguments that delve into nanotechnology and how it can advance the human race and all that jazz. Take a look at this FAQ here for a little of the "are we in a dream" scenario stuff.

All the more reason to push towards the Singularity before a "Grey Goo" nano-disaster... or a nuclear one... or a comet-strike... etc. Safeguarding the only known bastion of sapience in the Universe is of prime importance.

Which is why I sincerely believe the only way to avoid a Bill Joy-esque nightmare scenario of self-induced extinction is to push as rapidly as possible towards transcending the limitations of organic processing to avoid the tragic loss of the only known haven for sapience in the universe...

I can think of no worse fate than the eradication of the species by an unintelligent mechanical microbe we've created... replacement by/evolving into synthetic intelligences seems to be what will have to be our ultimate option.

--

Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.

Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.

Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...

Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)

For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life

Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.

Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.

Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...

Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)

For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life

• http://www.transhumanism.com/
• http://www.aleph.se/Trans/
• http://www.extropy.com/

While commenting on some problems regarding SETI searches, I provide a discussion of how O'Neill's colonies might be updated using biotechnology and nanotechnology. Steel and aluminium are terrible structural materials compared with diamond, buckytubes and sapphire. The combination of the short replicating times allowed by nanoscale self-replicating systems and the material properties of the strongest materials will allow us to rapidly go far beyond O'Neill's vision -- to the point of dismantling entire planets.

Government support or programs is not required to do this. Molecular Nanotechnology of the type being developed by Zyvex is required. In addition, we need the designs for the nanobots to take apart the asteroids or planets, construct the mass drivers and solar arrays, etc. The lack of molecular designs, is discussed in the Nano@Home proposal. Because we will be able to do the designs at home, a small dedicated group will eventually be able to bootstrap the development of space and achieve the vision O'Neill described. Because of the rapid increase in the available resources (matter and energy) per person, the large number of people living in poverty should disappear as well. The only potential problem I see is if Mind Uploading becomes feasible (or real AIs are developed) and unlimited copying of such entitites is allowed. This has been explored in more detail by Robin Hanson in If Uploads Come First.

The Mind Uploading Home Page

An Introduction to Mind Uploading and its Concepts

Aurora - Mind Uploading Resources

Whole Brain Emulation

Cybernetic Immortality

Uploading Sub-Page

Cheers,
RAK