Kurzweil wraps his predictions with certainty-inducing conjecture, as if things have to be this way, as if there is no doubt of the Singularity, that there are simply no choices but to have nano-bots infecting your bloodstream in order to keep your new perfect self alive longer than 'ever before in humanity'. Kurzweil is militant in his organization of his approach to 'solving human mortality', as if only the ordered ranks of science are capable of doing this.
(There are certain European nations' whose trans-humanism has gotten them into an awful, awful, amount of trouble.)
Trans-humanism and the Singularity.
As a technologist with an undying firm faith in The Infinite, I believe that technologists generally have a non-rational addiction to the effort of always throwing curves off the bleeding edge in order to 'do something new'. The Infinite Owns You. Get Over It.
And I believe that technological progress is a bad religion, but a religion nevertheless. White lab-coat scientists speaking in gobbledy-gook to produce miracles, or priests incurring the wrath of the Gods, either way its a crappy way to make a living.. but I do, while laboring under the understanding that there will always be a New God, born with every new Science.
Most technologists fail to see the utter danger of their dogma that 'the world needs more and better tech'.
Nano-bots which work as well as Kurzweil predicts, neigh pines for, are impossible now simply because we, as humans, haven't discovered and agreed on ways to make them exist yet. But we will.
Before we do things like that, perhaps we ought to take a closer look at what makes people disagree with each other, and what makes people use technology to fight wars; its the total lack of this aspect of progress in Kurzweils material, an absence of a sound moral position which accounts for the possibility of mis-use, which I find uncomfortable.
I do not believe technologists should continue dreaming apace new inventions to save the world while the rest of humanity is incapable of settling peace, and the reason for this is that every single technology ever invented, has been used for War. Many technologists seem to understand this; to me, Kurzweil ignores it in favour of rather extreme views of humanity.
To propose that we humans should, or rather have to produce technology which requires us to live forever.. I'm not sure I agree with his positioning within his own society. Kurzweil is pitching trans-humanism in ways which make it difficult to disagree with him, or corporate profit from such thinking; I'd feel more comfortable talking about the technology of the ininite in the Defense-Tech realms of Kurzweils peers if I'd seen Kurzweil defeat his own arguments once or twice.. it is a thing Fascists rarely do.
I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.
To me, there is little between the ideologized mind/computer monstrosity and '"God is Dead" is my Co-Pilot'.
Can someone explain to me why his sort of thinking is safe to have going on in this world? Do we really want future generations of fascist to be raised on and inspired by such militant technologism as trans-humanism?
No thanks. If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.
I have long lamented the lack of visual effort in interface design, specifically in the realm in which I currently work, musical synthesizers.
One of the problems with synthesis today is that it is too scientific.. and I have concluded that one of the reasons we see waves of synth revivial occurring every few years is because that is how long it takes someone to 'grok' their synthesizer, and while we wait for that grok to occur, no use occurs.
I recently made a commitment as a synth builder to attempt to enforce a few rules on myself; one of them is the "No Label Philosophy", which basically means that if a knob needs a label in order for the user to work out what it does when they turn it, then its a poor interface design, but if it doesn't, its a strong one.
The question I have is, where are other examples of 'illustration pushing concept' in the slashdott'ers world today? Have you recently seen some examples of graphical/icon-based design being used to clearly communicate very high-order concepts to the end user? What are they? Anyone got any pointers to examples of superlative graphical interface function, where you know instinctively what is going to happen because the picture tells you so?
Facts are facts, and errors are errors. It is an error to say that iTron created write-once-run-anywhere, and that Java is an attempt to catch up.
No, I'm not going to argue whether or not it is a 'fact'. But I will tell you that from what I recall of Java's early days, when evangelism of the platform actually 'meant something', Gosling, Sun, and anyone who was really doing comp-sci in the 80's and 90's, knew about i-Tron. To suggest otherwise is naive.
It was Sun, TI, and Motorola who worked to defeat the Japanese i-Tron efforts, in the first place. The reason we have such CPU advances is because of this 'competition between performance and ubiquity' represented by the two industrial realms, facing off each other.
"Ubiquitous Computing" was, and still is, the most significant principle of Japanese and Asian silicon industry, and it is the focus on this edge, in my opinion, which leads them to excel.
Whereas American scillicon manufacturing is about performance and cost, Asian foundries are about ubiquity.
End of sermon. I'm not going to bother arguing about 'fact points' with you, all I'm telling you is what I know from having lived it.
I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.
hey, i'm quite happy running nothing but linux on my powerbook.
but the point is: only Apple are making 'blow-me away' luxury-style hardware. where are the similar ultra-slim metal tiBook PC designs?
for me, the apple laptop experience is about the form factor as much as anything else. its about as much of a computer as i need to carry around with me, the 17" powerbook.. since its my only computer. its good that it is slim, 'large', and sturdy.
i have a dell available to me too, but its a flimsy piece of junk in comparison, and grimy too. somehow, i like my laptop like my surfboard: long, smooth, and planky.
the 'mythos of SGI hardware' for me has always been the 'alternative computing intentions' thing, wrapped up in a shiny/pretty box. say what you want, but O2 defines 90's bad-ass computing.
hell, you could make a case that PS2 is 'more like the SGI computer of the future', i suppose.. but then, it would only really be a matter of case aesthetics, and not much else.
come to think of it, i suppose a new PS2 with LCD screen and luggable battery would make a 'nice laptop', assuming i could still put a disk in it.. and 'roll my own', as you say.
.. i have, literally, as a computer geek, been praying (not religious) that Sun was going to be doing this.
well, not actually, just this. that Sun would do it. and then SGI would do it.
i tell you, it'd make up for the bizaare experience that can only be described as the last 5 years of 'Apple make the only Unix laptop worth a damn' reality bubble distortion field..
please, SGI, make us a laptop, put your Linux on it, and make it rock like it should.
We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,
well.. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem.. ermm.. i mean, put Judy on Cell.. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value...
i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?
(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming.. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)
especially since i use Judy arrays for tons of things on two different architectures, and its just a darn efficient hash library for pretty much all of my needs..
Here you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Java was not created with the Japanese technology as reference.
umm.. sorry, but I do know what I am talking about. I have worked on iTron, and related technologies, since the 80's, was an active developer using Java since its beta days, and I have also been a user of the Linux kernel, with similar basis, since the days of the minix-list. JAVA was a solution to the problem you mention here:
Interestingly, this is the technology that sparked the US software patent laws in the 1980s. At the time it was seen as such a threat by the US government that they created this trade barrier against the Japanese.
JAVA was in fact created with the goal of fulfilling the iTron "write once, run everywhere" ideal. No question about it, and if you don't believe this or understand it, probably you haven't been paying enough attention to Goslings' foundations..
And the big foundries are in Taiwan, not Japan, what this article is talking about.
What part of the word "Asia" do you not understand. The foundries may be in Taiwan; it is Japanese money which built them.
Their whole point is that they do chip manufacturing only, not chip design.
Riiiight, which is why ARM is such a key element of the equation.. (hint: ARM is an 'open' core...)
check the table headed "Table 4: ITRON-specification kernel implementations".. each one of these companies has an iTron kernel implemented somewhere.
i myself have personally worked with/reverse engineered the Morson Japan kernels, as these are commonly used in high-end/professional digital audio devices, such as the Yamaha A3000/A4000/A500 samplers, digital mixers, etc.
iTron is out there, but you really have to pry open the box..
So now... how are they going to sell something based on nothing.
what i think you need to do is recognize the difference between the word 'initiative' and 'implementation'.
lets take this to another context: Free/Open Source Software.
F/OSS is an initiative. Linux is an implementation.
Get the point? iTron is an initiative which has borne much, much fruit. Look around you, find a "Made in Asia" component which contains a computing system. Therein, you will spy aspects of the iTron initiative, underneath the radar..
I don't think they will be able to get everyone to hew to the party line; there will be too many economic reasons to deviate.
umm.. take any single Asian-produced cell phone, and at its heart you will find pieces of the i-tron initiative. it has already been proven in this space that there are far, far greater reasons to comply with the party line than to deviate. insta-deviation for the sake of it is anathema to the i-tron initiative; it is this very powerful fact that has resulted in such growth in the Asian core and embedded mfr. market in the first place.
american electronics/semiconductor giants ridiculed i-tron, and its resulting policies, in the 80's, and Asia has been eating the carcass of former US' manufacturing prowess for lunch. if it weren't for i-tron, philosophically, we wouldn't be buying EUro 5,- MP3 players, made in Taiwan instead of Kansas, at the Aldi checkout lines..
if you're a US comp-sci person, and you haven't boned up on i-tron, you've got some history lessons ahead of you. quick, before its too late.
its better because its older, not newer. i-tron, and its descendants, are the results of 30 years of computer-science research on ways to get collaborative computing systems into operation.
the ARM core scenario is derived from the desire to have common platforms being used by multiple, different vendors. it was i-tron which prompted the industry to adopt ARM and similar initiatives, and it is the i-tron philosophy of common cores and platforms which have allowed ARM to flourish in the embedded world in the first place.
JAVA was an 'Americanization' of the i-tron initiative, only it hasn't had as much success in the embedded world because of the lack of hardware adaptation that i-tron has prompted; at least, with the big Asian chip foundries, anyway, this is true, and we all know that the embedded space is dominated by the Asians...
this latest instatnce of the T-Engine is the realization of some very old, honored traditions in the embedded space. the dream of having your microwave oven use your cell phone for that little extra calculation power it needs to get your meringue fluffed right is just one step closer..
we now have zombies, whats next.. space aliens? invading ones?
screw that, i don't want to know. i also don't want to know how this technology gets militarized, and then 'accidentally used on a massive population'.
actually, maybe i do want to know about invading space aliens, but only if they'll let me use their weapons to clean up the zombies first, before we re-populate us humans as the humble servents overlord-space-alien masters..
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're confusing Ray for a Futurist.
nope, i put him in the 'millitant technologist' realm. he'd be far more interesting if he gave it all up and raised sheep.
It's a very small independent "game site asshole".
"game site asshole", eh?
i am interested in your newsletter and would like to know more..
Germany.
How exactly is Kurzweil's technologism militant?
.. I'm not sure I agree with his positioning within his own society. Kurzweil is pitching trans-humanism in ways which make it difficult to disagree with him, or corporate profit from such thinking; I'd feel more comfortable talking about the technology of the ininite in the Defense-Tech realms of Kurzweils peers if I'd seen Kurzweil defeat his own arguments once or twice.. it is a thing Fascists rarely do.
Kurzweil wraps his predictions with certainty-inducing conjecture, as if things have to be this way, as if there is no doubt of the Singularity, that there are simply no choices but to have nano-bots infecting your bloodstream in order to keep your new perfect self alive longer than 'ever before in humanity'. Kurzweil is militant in his organization of his approach to 'solving human mortality', as if only the ordered ranks of science are capable of doing this.
(There are certain European nations' whose trans-humanism has gotten them into an awful, awful, amount of trouble.)
Trans-humanism and the Singularity.
As a technologist with an undying firm faith in The Infinite, I believe that technologists generally have a non-rational addiction to the effort of always throwing curves off the bleeding edge in order to 'do something new'. The Infinite Owns You. Get Over It.
And I believe that technological progress is a bad religion, but a religion nevertheless. White lab-coat scientists speaking in gobbledy-gook to produce miracles, or priests incurring the wrath of the Gods, either way its a crappy way to make a living.. but I do, while laboring under the understanding that there will always be a New God, born with every new Science.
Most technologists fail to see the utter danger of their dogma that 'the world needs more and better tech'.
Nano-bots which work as well as Kurzweil predicts, neigh pines for, are impossible now simply because we, as humans, haven't discovered and agreed on ways to make them exist yet. But we will.
Before we do things like that, perhaps we ought to take a closer look at what makes people disagree with each other, and what makes people use technology to fight wars; its the total lack of this aspect of progress in Kurzweils material, an absence of a sound moral position which accounts for the possibility of mis-use, which I find uncomfortable.
I do not believe technologists should continue dreaming apace new inventions to save the world while the rest of humanity is incapable of settling peace, and the reason for this is that every single technology ever invented, has been used for War. Many technologists seem to understand this; to me, Kurzweil ignores it in favour of rather extreme views of humanity.
To propose that we humans should, or rather have to produce technology which requires us to live forever
I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.
To me, there is little between the ideologized mind/computer monstrosity and '"God is Dead" is my Co-Pilot'.
Can someone explain to me why his sort of thinking is safe to have going on in this world? Do we really want future generations of fascist to be raised on and inspired by such militant technologism as trans-humanism?
No thanks. If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.
I have long lamented the lack of visual effort in interface design, specifically in the realm in which I currently work, musical synthesizers.
.. and I have concluded that one of the reasons we see waves of synth revivial occurring every few years is because that is how long it takes someone to 'grok' their synthesizer, and while we wait for that grok to occur, no use occurs.
One of the problems with synthesis today is that it is too scientific
I recently made a commitment as a synth builder to attempt to enforce a few rules on myself; one of them is the "No Label Philosophy", which basically means that if a knob needs a label in order for the user to work out what it does when they turn it, then its a poor interface design, but if it doesn't, its a strong one.
The question I have is, where are other examples of 'illustration pushing concept' in the slashdott'ers world today? Have you recently seen some examples of graphical/icon-based design being used to clearly communicate very high-order concepts to the end user? What are they? Anyone got any pointers to examples of superlative graphical interface function, where you know instinctively what is going to happen because the picture tells you so?
where else did you think they formed, 'the ground'?
..
you need space to make snowflakes, silly
Facts are facts, and errors are errors. It is an error to say that iTron created write-once-run-anywhere, and that Java is an attempt to catch up.
No, I'm not going to argue whether or not it is a 'fact'. But I will tell you that from what I recall of Java's early days, when evangelism of the platform actually 'meant something', Gosling, Sun, and anyone who was really doing comp-sci in the 80's and 90's, knew about i-Tron. To suggest otherwise is naive.
It was Sun, TI, and Motorola who worked to defeat the Japanese i-Tron efforts, in the first place. The reason we have such CPU advances is because of this 'competition between performance and ubiquity' represented by the two industrial realms, facing off each other.
"Ubiquitous Computing" was, and still is, the most significant principle of Japanese and Asian silicon industry, and it is the focus on this edge, in my opinion, which leads them to excel.
Whereas American scillicon manufacturing is about performance and cost, Asian foundries are about ubiquity.
End of sermon. I'm not going to bother arguing about 'fact points' with you, all I'm telling you is what I know from having lived it.
I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.
.. since its my only computer. its good that it is slim, 'large', and sturdy.
.. but then, it would only really be a matter of case aesthetics, and not much else.
.. and 'roll my own', as you say.
hey, i'm quite happy running nothing but linux on my powerbook.
but the point is: only Apple are making 'blow-me away' luxury-style hardware. where are the similar ultra-slim metal tiBook PC designs?
for me, the apple laptop experience is about the form factor as much as anything else. its about as much of a computer as i need to carry around with me, the 17" powerbook
i have a dell available to me too, but its a flimsy piece of junk in comparison, and grimy too. somehow, i like my laptop like my surfboard: long, smooth, and planky.
the 'mythos of SGI hardware' for me has always been the 'alternative computing intentions' thing, wrapped up in a shiny/pretty box. say what you want, but O2 defines 90's bad-ass computing.
hell, you could make a case that PS2 is 'more like the SGI computer of the future', i suppose
come to think of it, i suppose a new PS2 with LCD screen and luggable battery would make a 'nice laptop', assuming i could still put a disk in it
get a moleskine. it burns far less barrels of oil to serve you.
.. i have, literally, as a computer geek, been praying (not religious) that Sun was going to be doing this.
..
well, not actually, just this. that Sun would do it. and then SGI would do it.
i tell you, it'd make up for the bizaare experience that can only be described as the last 5 years of 'Apple make the only Unix laptop worth a damn' reality bubble distortion field
please, SGI, make us a laptop, put your Linux on it, and make it rock like it should.
*sniff..
.. its why there aren't that many good Scandinavian programmers. :)
dude, all norwegians have girlfriends..
We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,
.. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...
.. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)
well
i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?
(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming
I'd love to see Judy-style thinking applied to GPU problems..."
..
especially since i use Judy arrays for tons of things on two different architectures, and its just a darn efficient hash library for pretty much all of my needs
.. if it were a ROM-set on a CD I could download from Torrent ..
.. okay, yes i would.
Okay, I jest. I definitely would not like to own so many NES games for my emu box
d'oh! stupid ethics!
You sound like you've let a little nationalism get in the way of your technologism.
Sorry if it treads on your toes that Asian mega-corporations have eaten America's lunch..
Here you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Java was not created with the Japanese technology as reference.
..
.. (hint: ARM is an 'open' core ...)
umm.. sorry, but I do know what I am talking about. I have worked on iTron, and related technologies, since the 80's, was an active developer using Java since its beta days, and I have also been a user of the Linux kernel, with similar basis, since the days of the minix-list. JAVA was a solution to the problem you mention here:
Interestingly, this is the technology that sparked the US software patent laws in the 1980s. At the time it was seen as such a threat by the US government that they created this trade barrier against the Japanese.
JAVA was in fact created with the goal of fulfilling the iTron "write once, run everywhere" ideal. No question about it, and if you don't believe this or understand it, probably you haven't been paying enough attention to Goslings' foundations
And the big foundries are in Taiwan, not Japan, what this article is talking about.
What part of the word "Asia" do you not understand. The foundries may be in Taiwan; it is Japanese money which built them.
Their whole point is that they do chip manufacturing only, not chip design.
Riiiight, which is why ARM is such a key element of the equation
check the table headed "Table 4: ITRON-specification kernel implementations".. each one of these companies has an iTron kernel implemented somewhere.
..
i myself have personally worked with/reverse engineered the Morson Japan kernels, as these are commonly used in high-end/professional digital audio devices, such as the Yamaha A3000/A4000/A500 samplers, digital mixers, etc.
iTron is out there, but you really have to pry open the box
So now... how are they going to sell something based on nothing.
..
what i think you need to do is recognize the difference between the word 'initiative' and 'implementation'.
lets take this to another context: Free/Open Source Software.
F/OSS is an initiative. Linux is an implementation.
Get the point? iTron is an initiative which has borne much, much fruit. Look around you, find a "Made in Asia" component which contains a computing system. Therein, you will spy aspects of the iTron initiative, underneath the radar
I don't think they will be able to get everyone to hew to the party line; there will be too many economic reasons to deviate.
.. take any single Asian-produced cell phone, and at its heart you will find pieces of the i-tron initiative. it has already been proven in this space that there are far, far greater reasons to comply with the party line than to deviate. insta-deviation for the sake of it is anathema to the i-tron initiative; it is this very powerful fact that has resulted in such growth in the Asian core and embedded mfr. market in the first place.
..
umm
american electronics/semiconductor giants ridiculed i-tron, and its resulting policies, in the 80's, and Asia has been eating the carcass of former US' manufacturing prowess for lunch. if it weren't for i-tron, philosophically, we wouldn't be buying EUro 5,- MP3 players, made in Taiwan instead of Kansas, at the Aldi checkout lines
if you're a US comp-sci person, and you haven't boned up on i-tron, you've got some history lessons ahead of you. quick, before its too late.
Is this just better because it's newer or?
...
..
its better because its older, not newer. i-tron, and its descendants, are the results of 30 years of computer-science research on ways to get collaborative computing systems into operation.
the ARM core scenario is derived from the desire to have common platforms being used by multiple, different vendors. it was i-tron which prompted the industry to adopt ARM and similar initiatives, and it is the i-tron philosophy of common cores and platforms which have allowed ARM to flourish in the embedded world in the first place.
JAVA was an 'Americanization' of the i-tron initiative, only it hasn't had as much success in the embedded world because of the lack of hardware adaptation that i-tron has prompted; at least, with the big Asian chip foundries, anyway, this is true, and we all know that the embedded space is dominated by the Asians
this latest instatnce of the T-Engine is the realization of some very old, honored traditions in the embedded space. the dream of having your microwave oven use your cell phone for that little extra calculation power it needs to get your meringue fluffed right is just one step closer
we now have zombies, whats next .. space aliens? invading ones?
..
screw that, i don't want to know. i also don't want to know how this technology gets militarized, and then 'accidentally used on a massive population'.
actually, maybe i do want to know about invading space aliens, but only if they'll let me use their weapons to clean up the zombies first, before we re-populate us humans as the humble servents overlord-space-alien masters
who i, for one, welcome.
.. i'd put my server in orbit.
Open and Free Government means no secrets, transparent.
You can't get more transparent than publicly defined specifications, paired with actual active use of them for all and sundry to see.