Slashdot Mirror

Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"

At Kurzweil AI, an article proclaims that the next wonder material for computer chips may be an unexpectedly common one: "Move over, graphene. 'Stanene' — a single layer of tin atoms — could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate, according to a team of theoretical physicists led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University." (Original paper is available here, but paywalled.)

aurtherdent2000 writes "We humans enjoy not having knives inside of us. Robots don't know this (Three Laws be damned). Therefore, it's important for humans to explain this information to robots using careful training. Researchers at Cornell University are developing a co-active learning method, where humans can correct a robot's motions, showing it how to properly use objects such as knives. They use it for a robot performing grocery checkout tasks."

The recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents, Ray Kurzweil's accolades are almost too many to list. A prolific inventor, Kurzweil created the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. His book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times best seller. and is considered one of the best books about futurism and transhumanism ever written. Mr. Kurzweil was hired by Google in December as Director of Engineering to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing." He has agreed to take a short break from creating and predicting the future in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.

dgharmon points out news at CNET and on Ray Kurzweil's own site that Kurzweil will join Google as Director of Engineering. Specifically, "he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."

cmansley writes "NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"

On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."

marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergence of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.

Maria Williams writes "KurzweilAI.net says: Tomorrow's biggest danger may be nanoweapons (grey goo and other) created with molecular manufacturing. The Lifeboat Foundation proposes development of detection methods, such as infrared satellite surveillance for nanobot signatures, along with a three-layer defense system, with devices such as an orbiting mirror to focus concentrated sunlight on an ecophagic outbreak."

Maria Williams writes "KurzweilAI.net reported that: This year's recipients of the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award are Robert A. Freitas Jr.and Bill Joy, who have both been proposing solutions to the dangers of advanced technology since 2000. Robert A. Freitas, Jr. has pioneered nanomedicine and analysis of self-replicating nanotechnology. He advocates "an immediate international moratorium, if not outright ban, on all artificial life experiments implemented as nonbiological hardware. In this context, 'artificial life' is defined as autonomous foraging replicators, excluding purely biological implementations (already covered by NIH guidelines tacitly accepted worldwide) and also excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue." Bill Joy wrote "Why the future doesn't need us" in Wired in 2000 and with Guardian 2005 Award winner Ray Kurzweil, he wrote the editorial "Recipe for Destruction" in the New York Times (reg. required) in which they argued against publishing the recipe for the 1918 influenza virus. In 2006, he helped launch a $200 million fund directed at developing defenses against biological viruses."

prostoalex writes "The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0.""

tanmay writes "Android technology has moved a step forward with the creation of a high-tech polymer called 'f'rubber,' which resembles human skin. Its creator, David Hanson has implemented it in a robot called Hertz, as this report from CNN gives us the details. Another question that the report brings up is the need to make robots resemble humans. Ray Kurzweil thinks Hanson's work is significant because realistic facial movement will play an important role in the way future androids respond to humans, and has the following to say, 'Intelligence significantly below that of normal humans stands out more with a robot that looks strikingly human. This creates the impression of a human with impaired intelligence, which may strike some as disturbing.'"

tuba_dude writes "Attorney Dr. Martine Rothblatt filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent a corporation from disconnecting an intelligent computer in a mock trial at the International Bar Association conference in San Francisco. Assuming Moore's law holds, ethics might be in for some major revisions in a couple decades. High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years. In this mock trial, an AI asks a lawyer for help after learning of plans to shut it down and replace its core hardware, essentially killing it. The transcript provides an in-depth look at what could become a real issue in the future."

KamehamehaWarrior writes "Peter B. Lloyd, author of Taking The Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, believes that many of the plot developments in "The Matrix" that seem to contradict the laws of physics, biology, etc. can actually be explained with a closer look at the science. He addresses issues such as "Can humans really be an energy source? How does the Matrix know what fried chicken taste like? Why do the rebels have to enter and exit the Matrix via a telephone system (that doesn't actually exist)?""

bluemug writes "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science radio show Quirks and Quarks aired a piece this weekend about Ray Kurzweil's ideas on downloading human minds to silicon. (The interview is available in MP3 or OGG.) Kurzweil figures we'll have strong AI by 2029 and be able to copy a human mind about a decade after that. Book your appointment now!"

celady writes: "From KurzweilAI.net, apparently DARPA, the main research and development center for the department of defense, is going to fund an all-terrain robot race . The robots will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas completely without human intervention. This could prove useful in the battlefield someday. DARPA really has some interesting projects going on. This one is BORING compared to the Vortex Combustor and the Chip-Size Atomic Clock. Watch the DARPA site for updates."

EReidJ writes "Washingtonpost.com has a story about what biotechnology means to being post-human. While the article gets a little dorky at times, and the comic-book references somewhat over-the-top, it manages to penetrate well past the surface of what most articles would do. (And come on, admit it, how many of us have daydreamed well into our twenties about doing the kinds of things they only comic book heros can do?) They reference a lot of good material, talk to Kurzweil and Max Moore, and use the excellent Science Magazine issue on this subject for a lot of their material."

Slashed back tonight: The (slight) return of the Y2K behemoth, good news for those locked out of port 80 by the recent unpleasantness, one interested party's response to Stephen Hawking's genetic-engineering ideas, and even an update on the Scarfo key-logging story.

Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.

He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.

AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.

Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.

All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"

And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."

You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."

Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.

So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."

The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."

Slashed back tonight: The (slight) return of the Y2K behemoth, good news for those locked out of port 80 by the recent unpleasantness, one interested party's response to Stephen Hawking's genetic-engineering ideas, and even an update on the Scarfo key-logging story.

Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.

He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.

AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.

Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.

All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"

And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."

You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."

Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.

So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."

The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."