Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon hosted a panel on The Future of of Fit (and Fat). The panelists were PJ Manney, Brian Wang, and fitness expert and entrepreneur Shawn Phillips.
Shawn Phillips is an author, entrepreneur, and expert in the area of performance training and nutrition. He created the Full Strength® Premium Nutrition Shake, clinically proven to swap body fat for lean muscle. He is the author of ABSolution: The Practical Guide to Building Your Best Abs and has just released Strength for Life, published by Ballantine/Random House.
PJ Manney is a writer and futurist and a leading voice in the H+ movement. She has written extensively on transhumanism and related topics, as well as for television (Xena Warrior Princess and Hercules the Legendary Journeys) , and has a novel under development. PJ is the Chairman of the board of directors of the World Transhumanist Association, she's a senior associate at the Foresight Nanotech Institute, and she is on the scientific advisory board for the Lifeboat Foundation.
Brian L. Wang, M.B.A. is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation. Brian is a long time futurist who has been involved with nanotechnology associations since 1994. He is now a member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) Task Force where he moderates the technology sub-task force. He is also on the Nanoethics Group Advisory Board. He is also the mastermind behind Next Big Future.
Check out the notes on the podcast and the podcast itself over at the Speculist.
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The largest road safety research project ever launched in Europe will usher in a series of powerful road-safety systems for European cars. But, in the long term, its basic, experimental research could lead to a car that is virtually uncrashable. The technology would be pushed to make crashes increasingly unlikely and mitigate crashes when they do occur. Tiny differences have a huge impact on car safety. Dropping speed by 1km/h can reduce accidents with injury by 3 per cent, while braking fractions of a second sooner is enough to reduce the damage caused dramatically.
A truck exits suddenly from a side road, directly into your lane only dozens of metres ahead. Suddenly, your car issues a warning, starts applying the brakes and attempts to take evasive action. Realising impact is unavoidable; in-car safety systems pre-tension the safety belts and arm the airbag, timing its release to the second before impact.
PReVENT has a budget of over €50 million and 56 partners pursuing a broad, but highly complementary programme of research. A dozen sub-projects focus on specific road-safety issues, but all projects support and feed into each other in some way.
PReVENT project WILLWARN uses wireless communication with other vehicles to alert the driver about potentially dangerous situations ahead, while MAPS&ADAS reads sat-nav maps to track approaching hazards, like bends, dips or intersections. SASPENCE looks at safe driving distances and speed, while LATERALSAFE finally brings active sensing to the blind spot.
Two projects, APALACI and COMPOSE, take this a step further, actively tracking the speed and trajectories of surrounding vehicles and other road users in real time. If one vehicle suddenly stops, or a pedestrian suddenly steps onto the road, they swing into action to rapidly calculate the implications.
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As Mr Miyagi said in Karate Kid.. If do right, no can defence
The U.S. Navy can't stop China's most sophisticated anti-ship missile (purchased from Russia) -- and won't even start testing a defense until 2014. I don't think it is an issue between China and the USA because I do not believe they will be fighting. More relevant is if Iran gets the missile. Then it would be important for the USA to use spies, satellites and other means to find any missiles and destroy them before putting the navy within range. If Iran got it then it would change the tactics in any Iran/USA war. A war over Taiwan is not in the offing as the Taiwan presidential and legislative election has placed pro-Chinese politicians in Taiwan. They are going to moving to a common market. If Taiwan and China move to a European Union type situation then there will not be war.
UPDATE:
It was pointed out to me that the US tactics would not be that greatly effected.
1) Pound them using air force. Air craft carriers are used because US does not have enough landbased friends. B52's do most of the damage. Navy is for precision attacks. In the Iran case, airforce from Iraq, Afganistan, Dubai, and Suadi would mash them into stone age.
2) Drive army in from a friend. In this case, Iraq and Afganistan. [if wanting a land assault which the US probably does not except for some kind of smash and dash]
3) Navy would sit well offshore and cheer them on.
However, the US military pumping up its enemies would get the Admirals desired project or pet weapon system funded.
The Sizzler starts at subsonic speeds. Within 10 nautical miles of its target, a rocket-propelled warhead separates and accelerates to three times the speed of sound, flying no more than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level. On final approach, the missile 'has the potential to perform very high defensive maneuvers,' including sharp-angled dodges, the Office of Naval Intelligence said in a manual on worldwide maritime threats.
The U.S. Navy, after nearly six years of warnings from Pentagon testers, still lacks a plan for defending aircraft carriers against a supersonic Russian-built missile, according to current and former officials and Defense Department documents.
Air power australia has photos of the Sizzler supersonic missileHat tip to Wired defense blog
The missile, known in the West as the ``Sizzler,'' has been deployed by China and may be purchased by Iran.
The Defense Department's weapons-testing office judges the threat so serious that its director, Charles McQueary, warned the Pentagon's chief weapons-buyer in a memo that he would move to stall production of multibillion-dollar ship and missile programs until the issue was addressed.
``This is a carrier-destroying weapon,'' said Orville Hanson, who evaluated weapons systems for 38 years with the Navy. ``That's its purpose.''
FURTHER READING
China's off the shelf air defense
Sino defence forum discusses the Sizzler missile and the Sunburn (supersonic all the time)
The Sizzler is smaller in size and lighter. I think the main difference is that the sunburn travels at supersonic speeds all the time, therefore requiering a big load of fuel, wich in turn makes the missile big and heavy. The Sizzler cruises at subsonic speeds and goes supersonic in terminal phase. But there are different versions of the "Club" some are "conventional" subsonic CMs over the entire flight. The Sizzlers range is longer than the Sunburn's.
And I think the Sizzlers also have the capability of interoperability. Meaning they can exchange info. One "lead" missiles flies at high altitude searching for targets with it's radar, while the other missiles of a barrage stay low and recieve info from the lead-missile.
Sino Defence has info on the missile
For political reasons, China may get small indigenous air craft carriers around 2013 (not nuclear powered, competitive with non-USA aircraft carriers other than the expected future French aircraft carrier
Here is a more complete list of arsenal of China's navy.
3M-54E (SS-N-27) Anti-Ship Cruise Missile
Sunburn 3M-80E (SS-N-22) Ship-to-ship Missile
The purchase of the 3M-54E1 with 300 kilometer (180 mile) range back in 2005
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What is required to enable effective limb regeneration in humans in detail ? by Ken Muneoka [Professor Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Tulane University]
, Manjong Han [Professor Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Tulane University] and David M. Gardiner Researcher, Developmental & Cell Biology
School of Biological Sciences at U of California at Irvine.
Researchers now understand in detail the steps that occur when a salamander regenerates a limb and they understand the differences for human scarring and human fetal regeneration or limb growth. The early responses of tissues at an amputation site are not that different in salamanders and in humans, but eventually human tissues form a scar, whereas the salamander’s reactivate an embryonic development program to build a new limb. Learning to control the human wound environment to trigger salamanderlike healing could make it possible to regenerate large body parts. A few years to get really good at making mice regenerate and then another ten years to make it happen in humans and get the process approved by regulatory authorities.
The one human tissue type within a limb that lacks regenerative ability is the dermis, which is composed of a heterogeneous population of cells, many of which are fibroblasts—the same cells that play such a pivotal role in the salamander regeneration response. After an injury in humans and other mammals, these cells undergo a process called fibrosis that “heals” wounds by depositing an unorganized network of extracellular matrix material, which ultimately forms scar tissue. The most striking difference between regeneration in the salamander and regenerative failure in mammals is that mammalian fibroblasts form scars and salamander fibroblasts do not. That fibrotic response in mammals not only hampers regeneration but can be a very serious medical problem unto itself, one that permanently and progressively harms the functioning of many organs, such as the liver and heart, in the aftermath of injury or disease.
Studies of deep wounds have shown that at least two populations of fibroblasts invade an injury during healing. Some of these cells are fibroblasts that reside in the dermis, and the others are derived from circulating fibroblastlike stem cells. Both types are attracted to the wound by signals from immune cells that have also rushed to the scene. Once in the wound, the fibroblasts migrate and proliferate, eventually producing and modifying the extracellular matrix of the area. This early process is not that dissimilar to the regeneration response in a salamander wound, but the mammalian fibroblasts produce an excessive amount of matrix that becomes abnormally cross-linked as the scar tissue matures. In contrast, salamander fibroblasts stop producing matrix once the normal architecture has been restored.
Our research group has already described a natural blastema in a mouse amputation injury, and our goal within the next year is to induce a blastema where it would not normally occur. Like the accessory-limb experiments in salamanders, this achievement would establish the minimal requirements for blastema formation. We hope that this line of investigation will also reveal whether, as we suspect, the blastema itself provides critical signaling that prevents fibrosis in the wound site.
If we succeed in generating a blastema in a mammal, the next big hurdle for us would be coaxing the site of a digit amputation to regenerate the entire digit. The complexity of that task is many times greater than regenerating a simple digit tip because a whole digit includes joints, which are among the most complicated skeletal structures formed in the body during embryonic development. Developmental biologists are still trying to understand how joints are made naturally, so building a regenerated mouse digit, joints and all, would be a major milestone in the regeneration field. We hope to reach it in the next few years, and after that, the prospect of regenerating an entire mouse paw, and then an arm, will not seem so remote.
Understanding how limbs are formed
Limbs are formed by a series of interactions that occur between a specialized group of ectodermal cells at the tip of the limb bud that forms a structure called the apical ectodermal ridge (AER), and the mesenchymal cells that underlie the AER. The apical ectoderm produces factors that are necessary for distal outgrowth by the mesenchyme. Mesenchymal cells interact with one another and with the AER to establish spatially distinct patterns of gene expression followed by the differentiation of specific structures. The primary focus of my research is to understand how cells become distinct from one another. In the 1980’s Ken Muneoka cell lineage work on developing and regenerating amphibian limbs demonstrated similarities between development and regeneration, and also established the over-contribution of fibroblasts in the regeneration response. To begin to address regeneration in higher vertebrates, Ken Muneoka pioneered in utero surgical techniques that make it possible to carry out regeneration studies on the developing mammalian limb. In the early 1990’s Ken Muneoka participated with Susan Bryant’s lab in a study that demonstrated retinoic acid acted to induce a mesenchymal signaling center in the limb bud called the Zone of Polarizing Activity (ZPA). This finding has now been demonstrated with loss of function studies and with more sophisticated molecular probes with the same conclusion.
FURTHER READING
Digit regeneration in fetal Mice is regulated by Msx1 and BMP4 [2003]
Limb regeneration in higher vertebrates : Developing a roadmap [2005]
Regenerating Life [2005]
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have established the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine
national center of expertise in regenerative medicine focused on developing and delivering therapies that reestablish tissue and organ function impaired by disease, trauma or congenital abnormalities
Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials
Cellular therapies
Medical devices and artifial organs
Tengion, a clinical stage biotechnology company, has pioneered the Autologous Organ Regeneration Platform™ that catalyzes the body's innate ability to regenerate.
Tengion Launches Third Phase 2 Clinical Trial of Regenerated Human Bladder
Tengion is also working on a neo-kidney (not in clinical trial yet) and Tengion Neo-Vessel™ Neo-vessels are being developed with the goal of using a patient's own cells to build blood vessels for patients that need vascular access for dialysis and for patients who are receiving peripheral by-pass surgery or coronary artery bypass surgery.
CBS news coverage of regenerative medicine progress.
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Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an article where he promotes the World Transhumanist Association discussion topic: Is Star Trek a Fascist Society?
I have seen the 726 episodes across 6 TV series and 10 (and soon 11) movies and many of the books, two Vegas rides, etc… Their continuing mission (not always successful) is to have high ratings, sell movie tickets, dvds and books and merchandise and to boldly make a buck where ever they can. So Star trek is capitalistic and not fascist.
Most writers do not know how to write to deal with the consequences of future tech in a logical way and to then enable the story to continue in an engaging way for 4 decades of shows.
“Hard science fiction generally isn’t fascist, but one can make a plausible case that Star Trek being fascist.
Star Trek is not hard science fiction. They occasionally make an attempt to sprinkle in some science but if it interferes with a story then out that goes. Technobabble is for a venere of science to help with the suspension of disbelief.
G) Everyone apparently has some kind of mind-block against realizing that the transporter beam could make copies of all the crew and keep them young and immortal.
I blame the Q continuum, the aliens of Talos IV, Gary Seven aliens, and the Organians for the mindblocks. They must have their own version of the Prime Directive to keep the Federation, Klingons etc… down. There should be a movement to “lift the mindblocks. lift the mindblocks”. There actually have been widespread use of mindblocks as a plot device. [726 shows, what are you going to do ?]
Q keeping Picard down
Talos IV aliens
Sure, sure Kirk and Spock and McCoy did dress up as Nazis is was part of disguise and plan to free the Ekosians from the huge error made by a civilian historian (history professors - gotta watch out for them) named John Gill.
All of the technology is under utilized. All the technology that they have and that they should have. The phasers are weak relative to the kinetic energy weapons that they could have. Writers not willing to go outside a comfort zone or create more real life costs.
H) The Prime Directive maintains human (and allied) supremacy over the hapless lesser peoples who are denied political and technological progress in order supposedly to respect their cultural “difference.”
Nazi fascist aliens are keeping our fictional Star Trek humans down. Which already were episodes of ST Voyager and ST Enterprise (Nazi holodeck aliens and Nazi aliens)
Hirogen Nazi
So it may be more of a caste system where more advanced races hinder or do not share with less advanced races OR it could be the writers choosing to keep things episodic and hitting the reset button before the end of each hour. One could ask why didn't Jerry Seinfeld (in his show a successful comedian who had a TV show picked up for a while) not have the money to move to a better apartment over ten years. Perhaps mindblocks ?
A) They have no politics. It’s a military dictatorship.
A lot of the “power” is concentrated in a few exceptional individuals each of the set of 7 or so primary characters with a focus on 3 or 4 of them. Similar observations could be made of Jack Bauer, Rambo, Chuck Norris, Spy Kids, Bugs Bunny etc… and their “universes”.
I think that the focus of the trek universe shows and movies is on the “military part”. Much the way the TV show MASH was military focused or Law and Order has a police and criminal justice focus or ER has a doctor focus. They have had shows in TNG (next generation) where they show the civilian side. The billions and I think trillions of people in the federation are actually mostly civilian. It is just that they are mostly useless to the stories. DS9 and TNG had shows talking about many civilians having a somewhat negative view of starfleet. Sarek did not want spock to be part of starfleet. Sisko dad during the military emergency etc… Pickard after best of both worlds considered civilian life.
B) They have no money. It’s a command economy.
People who only watch some shows. >-|
Parts of the economy have some money. (gold pressed latinum - is used by some humans and races beyond just Ferengi). The Federation happens to have a big universal guaranteed income and medical care. It does show a lack of motivation and ambition in the civilians in this situation.
C) All conflict is racial. Humans v. Klingons v. Romulans etc.
People who only watch or remember some shows. >-|
There was the Klingon civil war, internal Romulan conflicts. They have shown many more human on human conflicts. For humans, they had a third world war history, Eugenics war, another nuclear war in 2050 etc…
D) The races have intrinsic cultural personalities which make them less attractive than the humans. Attractive members of alternate races try to
become more human: Spock and Worf trying to get a sense of humor. Data
trying to get emotions.
Green orion women.
F) Cognitive enhancement and life extension technologies are outlawed, or at least all R&D towards those goals have been stopped.
This was explained in several important shows and movies. They indicated that is where they got the anti-transhumanism, because of Khan Noonien Singh and the Eugenics Wars. Julian Bashir a main character on DS9, is the enhanced individual who turned out good.
Plus many humans who get enhanced seem to have trouble dealing with the power in the Star Trek universe. Charlie, Gary Mitchell etc...
E) Something terrible happened to Asians, Africans and Latins, because 90% of all humans are English-speaking whites.
Casting choices and biases and real life distribution of actors where they film. Plenty of blacks have been cast (many end up playing under makeup.)
Asians are noticeably missing but some are behind the cameras.
FURTHER READING
Article on nazis in Star trek from startrek.com
UPDATE: Godwin's law is that the larger a usenet discussion group is then the higher the likelihood of Hitler and Nazi comparisons.
Godwin's Law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons, and is often conflated with fallacious arguments of the reductio ad Hitlerum form.
Reductio ad Hitlerum, also argumentum ad Hitlerum, or reductio (or argumentum) ad Nazium – dog Latin for "reduction (or argument) to Hitler (or the Nazis)" – is a modern fallacy in logic. It is a variety of both questionable cause and association fallacy. The phrase reductio ad Hitlerum was coined by an academic ethicist, Leo Strauss, in 1950. Engaging in this fallacy is sometimes known as playing the Nazi card.
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Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on "watchful vigilance from underneath". The idea is that citizens should be working together to watch society and government to prevent abuse of power and to help detect and defend against terrorists and others who would act against society.
An interesting new development is that there are "do it yourself" DIY instructions on "How to build your own witness camera." The camera will detect people moving around, it silently starts recording to digital media.
The Witness Camera is a combination of a VGA CMOS camera, a passive-infrared movement sensor, a 1 GB SD-card (or bigger), and an AVR Mega32 microcontroller implementing a solid-state time-lapse recorder. It is a compact, complete, self-contained surveillance system designed with home users in mind. It can be installed in minutes wherever there is a mains plug, and it is affordable because of it is built using an handful of inexpensive parts.
The component prices are less than $100 for the camera part and maybe $150 for a display (you could already own a display system with your own computer.) Commercial systems range from $1000-2000+ and have hard drives and video disk or tape recording.
About $50 for the camera
$14 for the remote
$14 for the Passive IR
You need a out-of-sight place, spacious enough to accommodate the recorder and the video display ($150), because images can only be inspected using the original recorder.
Your mileage can vary, but you should be able to get about 50,000 frames at 320x200 (like the one below), or 25,000 at 640x480, using a 1 GB card (I haven’t tried bigger cards). This corresponds to more than 40 hours of overall recording.Actual time span is much more than that. Likely, the best location for the camera is in the foyer, where people stand just a few minutes per day. In my case; just 20 minutes on average, giving an impressive 120 days of storage capacity.
All fo the pieces should be fabricatable with rapid manufacturing and printable electronics. So this will get even cheaper and more capable.
The state of sousveillance and surveillance will be radically transformed over the next 4-8 years even without full blown nanofactories. Right now there are about 200 million vidphones (about 150+ million activated video cellphones) and camcorders (50+ million) and there are tens of thousands of closed circuit television and other monitoring. There are over one billion camera cellphones.
Power efficiency and power generation will make it easier for always on camcording
MIT and Texas Instruments have designed chips that are ten times more energy efficient and could run off of ambient energy (thus could be always on.) 5 years away from commercialization for the low power TI chips. A few years back in the
lab there has been work that makes digital CMOS cameras 50 times more energy efficient. The recent development of systems to generate (5 watts) power from people walking and taking the power from the breaking part of the step actually makes walking easier.
Superior Lidar, t-rays and better satellite and other remote sensing too.
Progress with computers and software automatically deciphering what is in the digital images. Quantum computers will also help with pattern recognition and faster image database searches.
So within 6 years there will be billions of vidphones/camcorders always on. 10-20 times as much as now.
- serious reel to reel fabrication of printable electronics integrated with upgraded fabbers (see what current 1 million dollar rapid manufacturing systems can make) could enable people to dump out smaller than USB stick versions of the witness camera for less than 5 dollars a piece. Within ten years it could go to less than rice grain sized and be producable for pennies a piece. Once we are past the $5 a piece level then people can wire up every aspect of themselves, their home, their office cubicle, their car etc...
FURTHER READING
Make magazine is has other ideas that are suitable projects for rapid manufacturing and future fabber machines.
Example: Do-It-Yourself robotic inflatables that navigate autonomously and intelligently. They are light-seeking helium-filled balloons that graze the landscape in search of light and cellphone signals
So you can fab your own witness cameras and mount them in your inflatable flying robots.
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Carnival of Space #40 is up at orbiting frog
I contributed my article on SpaceX's progress on the Falcon 9 rocket
Hobby space updates the activites of Bigelow Aerospace who are making an inflatable space hotel
Centauri Dreams lives up to its siet name with a talk about the Longshot space mission. It was a plan to develop technologies over 20-30 years for a 100 year mission to reach the alpha centauri solar system.
Longshot was conceived as being built with modular components on the ground and then launched to low-Earth orbit for assembly at the space station presumed to be operational there. The enabling technologies included a “pulsed fusion micro-explosion drive” (I’m quoting from the Project Longshot report) with a specific impulse of 1 million seconds, along with a long-life fission reactor with 300 kilowatts power output.
The Longshot pdf report is here
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Dwave Systems closed a $17M financing round as of the end of January 2008. These funds will be used primarily to push the level of integration of our chips into the low thousands of qubits by the end of the year. In parallel with this central effort we will be working on running experiments on smaller systems to map out features of these systems important to their operation as quantum computers.
On November 2007, the last iteration of D-Wave’s chip was 28 qubits (quantum bits). The CTO Geordie rose said they were on track to show a 512 qubit machine in 2008 and 1024 the year after that (by the end of 2008. The die has room for a million qubits. This new announcement seems to imply 2000-4000 qubits by the end of 2008. "low thousands of qubits by the end of the year [2008]".
The latest financing round was fully subscribed by existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), GrowthWorks Capital Ltd, BDC Venture Capital, Harris & Harris, bcIMC and Pender Fund.
This was the number 1 item on my list of technologies to watch in 2008 It is ahead of the Bussard fusion because the Bussard fusion prototype could answer a lot of the questions about the potential of that potentially bigger technology but not all of the issues will be answered until the commercial fusion system is funded, built and operating. By the end of 2008, the Dwave quantum computer should be operating (or not) at a commercial level. Thousands of qubits will have applications where it should be clearly superior to any conventional computer system.
2-5 months until the Q2, 2008, 512 qubit machine.
9-11 months until a Q4, 2008, 2000-4000 qubit machine.
That will be great to see.
Hopefully by 2009-2010 we can fill out that die and get up to 1 million qubits and start transforming business and science.
UPDATE: Is it Quantum computing ?
Scott Aaronson, Dwave critic, has finally met Geordie Rose, CTO of Dwave They met at MIT when Geordie presented four hard problems to get MIT help in solving.
These problems were as follows:
1. Find a practical adiabatic factoring algorithm. Because of the equivalence of adiabatic and standard quantum computing, we know that such an algorithm exists, but the running time you get from applying the reduction is something like O(n11). Geordie asks for an O(n3) factoring algorithm in the adiabatic model. It was generally agreed (with one dissent, from Geordie) that reducing factoring to a 3SAT instance, and then throwing a generic adiabatic optimization algorithm at the result, would be a really, really bad approach to this problem.
2. Find a fault-tolerance threshold for adiabatic quantum computing, similar to the known threshold in the circuit model. Geordie asserted that such a threshold has to exist, because of the equivalence of adiabatic and standard quantum computing. However, others immediately pointed out that this is not so: the equivalence theorem is not known to be “fault-tolerance-preserving.” This is a major open problem that many people have worked on without success.
3. Prove upper and lower bounds on the adiabatic algorithm’s performance in finding exact solutions to hard optimization problems.
4. Prove upper and lower bounds on its performance in finding approximate solutions to such problems. (Ed Farhi described 3 and 4 as “so much harder than anything else we’ve failed to solve.”)
Scott is leaving himself an out in case Dwave's system works in 2008: Scott says:
Even if D-Wave managed to build (say) a coherent 1,024-qubit machine satisfying all of its design specs, it’s not obvious it would outperform a classical computer on any problem of practical interest. This is true both because of the inherent limitations of the adiabatic algorithm, and because of specific concerns about the Ising spin graph problem. On the other hand, it’s also not obvious that such a machine wouldn’t outperform a classical computer on some practical problems. The experiment would be an interesting one! Of course, this uncertainty — combined with the more immediate uncertainties about whether D-Wave can build such a machine at all, and indeed, about whether they can even produce two-qubit entanglement.
Scott also shows that he still does not understand business:
also means that any talk of “lining up customers” is comically premature
Geordie responded:
The first is that there are already buyers and sellers of quantum computers for research (Bruker NMR machines) and our systems are already much more useful and interesting than these.
The second is that we expect that even for fairly small systems (~1,000 qubits, which we plan to do this year) this type of special purpose hardware can beat the best known classical approaches for instance classes where the class embed directly onto the hardware graph even if the “spins” are treated entirely classically, which we assume is a worst-case bound. Often forgotten in this type of conversation is the fact that there is a long history of simple special purpose analog hardware outperforming general purpose machines. If you want an example, look at Condon and Ogielski’s 1985 Rev Mod Sci article–their Ising model simulator beat the fastest Cray of the time in Monte Carlo steps/second. You can’t draw conclusions about the general utility of this type of approach without looking at details.
I would note that it is standard business practice to pre-sell tickets to things that are not complete and may or may not work.
Examples: Aptera electric car, Tesla electric car, Toyota Prius sign up lists, music concerts, Microsoft sells software subscriptions with the understanding that their should be major software upgrades (yet Vista and other major upgrades were delayed for years), Virgin Galactic has presold hundreds of tickets for its yet to be completed sub-orbital rocket.
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I was interviewed for a podcast by the speculist.com website
Some of things that I talked to them about was my view that many people are already making the choice to enhance some aspects of their body and mind using invasive and non-invasive approaches.
Collective individual choices for future technology and the choices that are not commonly understood in the context of changing technology. We are choosing our future now.
- 3 million in the USA choose steriods despite health downsides and
access restrictions. 4 out of 5 for appearance reasons
- 7 million worldwide use steroids
- 11 million (in USA) choose cosmetic surgery despite results that are sub-optimal and risks to health
- dietary supplements are a $22+ billion industry
- Maybe 1 in 10 use drugs for better results on academic tests.
It is not about "intelligence enhancement" it is about business productivity
and academic performance.
The drugs seem to help the performance of most students, but some do worse under its effect. Kids took practice tests with and without. If they thought it helped
then they took it for the test
Some felt it gave them a 200 piont boost on SAT scores
- non-invasive can work too (wikipedia, google etc...)
- cheap mind machine interfaces for PS3, Xbox etc...
these can mostly be grouped under crappy beta versions of human enhancement.
Better versions of those kinds of enhancements are in the works:
Myostatin inhibitors are better and safer than steroids.
Fake myostatin inhibitors are sold now.
Millions will use it for muscle disease, to counter muscle wasting from old age and for performance and appearance enhancement.
Apparently 4 times stronger effect than high dose steriods.
Need to consume (eat more food) more - which is why evolution did not select those genese, but can help increase muscle for fat burning to counter obesity. So not only is it safer it could provide health benefits to the obese, elderly and those with muscle diseases. Since 2005 there have been human trials.
Gene therapy -genetic engineering can provide more endurance, radiation resistance, life extension.
Unevenness of advancement- life extension
There is already more than 30 year life expectency differences between
different groups in the USA and around the world. There is 0.1-0.3 years added to life expectancy every year.
Many people do not want futurists to predict anything controversial or exceptional. Very rapid technological advancement, really powerful technology (AGI, versions of nanotech, certain space technologies, certain medical advancement etc...) While exceptional technology and breakthroughs are not what commonly occur every day, it is the exceptional breakthroughs that transform society over the longer term and we as a society need to lower the development barriers.
Yes, certain choices and societal forces could cripple the development of those technologies. The Space program has not advanced because all the plans have not been focused on making big and meaningful things happen. Actual purpose political pork. My goal is to think of ways of getting around those blockages and to push for a better future and to spot movement around blockages that are already happening. Part of the reason is that I think the current societal choice/technology mix is not sustainable and people ignore the negatives of the current balance. 56 million dead/year is not something to be tolerated. People ignore the slaughter and the real dangers of the now. Nuclear power could kill 2000 people over 40 years when there is a really bad reactor design but that has to be compared to 1 million/year from coal
and 3 million/year from air pollution.
I think of the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan on the opening Omaha beach sequence. Some soldiers mistakenly believed it was better to hide behind the steel crosses on the beach or to not creatively attack the pill boxes that had them pinned down. I think of the difficult goals of getting space colonized in a major way or
conquering diseases and making significant progress against age deterioration as pill boxes that have us pinned down on a dangerous beach. Just because the time has been stretched out to decades, centuries, millenia does not mean that we are not collectively on a dangerous beach. We can and should do a lot over the next 50 years and beyond. Every year 55 million people die from all the various causes and we are straining the ecosystem and facing growing dangers from the power of technology. Stepping back from where we are now to a "sustainable" position would be like retreating from the beack back into the sea. It is a bad plan because it would cost 5.5 billion lives and only save about 1 billion. Breakthrough out of being pinned down on the beach does not mean that everything is safe and utopia. There is still a struggle beyond with more risks and challenges. However, pressing forward in the most creative way with the best plans is the best course of action.
In terms of a radically better future, why not choose the best plans we can come up with. Why stick to clearly failed or flawed plans just because that is what we have been doing ? If something is not working as well as it could then there should be change. The choice for the future does not have to be perfectly safe. It just has to be better overall than the current situation and path. We can and should do a
lot better.
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DC-based research and consulting firm Social Technologies released a series of 12 briefs on their top 12 areas for high impact technology innovation through 2025.
1. Personalized medicine [I agree and have covered personal genomics ]
2. Distributed energy (DE) [Here I think nuclear energy has more potential]
3. Pervasive computing [Fully realizing smart phone and wireless device potential]
4. Nanomaterials [I have written about new carbon nanotube factories and a lot on "active nanosystems", all of the advanced nanotechnology for which my site is named]
5. Biomarkers for health [I have been writing about my proposals for widespread biomarker tracking and part 2 of the biomarker proposal]
6. Biofuels [A bridging technology where electrification of transportation is delayed or less suitable]
7. Advanced manufacturing [rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing, reel to reel systems, nanofactories]
8. Universal water [I have been covering desalination]
9. Carbon management [Shifting to lower carbon technology like nuclear power and wind power would be better than sequestering]
10. Engineered agriculture [I have been covering aquaculture, genetic engineering for crops, stem cell meat factories, and high rise green houses]
11. Security and tracking [I have tracked advancing imaging technology, surveillance technology, gigapixels, terapixels, sensors, spectrum analysis, lidar, persistent monitoring, RFIDs etc...]
12. Advanced transportation [I have covered electric bikes and scooters, platooning of vehicles, dual mode transportation, electric cars, high efficiency vehicles, advanced truck and diesel systems, transitioning from oil etc...]
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Congrats to the World Transhumanist Association for getting a topline feature on the New Scientist website.
Plus a discussion in the LA Times
Ray Kurzweil is making a Singularity is near Movie
Ray: ... I am making a movie based on the book Singularity is Near. It has an A-line documentary, and a B-line story. And in the B-line story, I have an AI that tries to pass the [Turing] test in 2029. It does not actually succeed in 2029, but she goes on to try again.
Ian: So this is a science fiction movie that you are producing right now, or someone is producing with you?
Ray. Yes. The movie is called "The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future." The A-line documentary has me interviewing 20 big thinkers on their ideas about the future, and their ideas on my ideas, people like Marvin Minsky, and Alvin Toffler and others. And then the B-line is an actual narrative story illustrating the ideas.
It sounds kind of like a Discovery Channel feature
2057
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Sir Arthur C Clarke makes several interesting observations of the past and the future.
On the past:
Launching Sputnik and landing humans on the Moon were all political decisions, not scientific ones, although scientists and engineers played a lead role in implementing those decisions. (I have only recently learned, from his long-time secretary Carol Rosin, that Wernher von Braun used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon—like the South Pole—was reached half a century ahead of time.
I hope that nations can at last see better reasons for exploring space, and that future decisions would be informed by intelligence and reason, not the macho-nationalism that fuelled the early Space Race.
For those who need some background on his next quote:
And in the heady days of Apollo, we seemed to be on the verge of exploring the planets through manned missions. I could be forgiven for failing to anticipate all the distractions of the 1970s that wrecked our optimistic projections—though I did caution that the Solar System could be lost in the paddy fields of Vietnam. (It almost was.)
One of the reasons that the Space program lost all momentum after Apollo was that the US budget was strained paying for the Vietnam war, which can be clearly seen in hindsight as a waste of money.
Time magazine discusses over $100 billion/year was spent in 1971Nasa spending was far less1971 3.381 billion in 1971 dollars or 12.356 billion inflation adjusted.
Arthur C clarkes three wishes for the future:
1. A method to generate limitless quantities of clean energy.
2. Affordable and reliable means of space transport.
3. Eliminating the design faults in the human body
[Note: I interpret item 3 as a a weakly transhumanist statement]
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Craig Venter indicates his support of the goal of cognitive enhancement, a core transhumanist objective, while discussing the movie Blade Runner
Blade Runner was a landmark film that was prescient in anticipating globalization, genetic engineering, and biometric security. It also had influence in architecture and in movies and anime. It presented a plausible future environment. It projected the ethnodemographic (more asians and hispanics in the USA) shifts and that large corporations would have superior technology to what is available to law enforcement.
Craig Venter says:
The movie [Blade Runner] has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that people want a slave class. As I imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, I think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? But people ask me whether I could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. I've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their cell. I don't see us, as a society, doing that
Ray Kurzweil's comment on Blade Runner:
"The scenario of humans hunting cyborgs doesn't wash because those entities won't be separate. Today, we treat Parkinson's with a pea-sized brain implant. Increase that device's capability by a billion and decrease its size by a hundred thousand, and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. It won't be, 'OK, cyborgs on the left, humans on the right.' The two will be all mixed up."
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