This is a very cool idea for creating AI …
I am an advocate that AI will emerge, not within a single computer, but within a community of computers. Obviously the Internet is such a community, and we humans are a good way to “program” that AI. Mindpixel is such a project, which can use the network effect to create a huge wealth of knowledge in a system that can then be tapped for various purposes. This is a very cool implementation of a truly distributed AI …

Mindpixel project will apply psych test to AI model [Nanodot: News and Discussion of Coming Technologies]

Impressive Internet statistics … evidence of much …
I came across this web site on another stock discussion thread. I really liked the statistics and information that is provided here for a few reasons.

The original post was made about measuring the impacts of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center on the Internet and Internet connectivity. The writer commented on the hundreds of networks which were effected during that fateful Tuesday event. The measurements of the BGP routing tables were used to see what occurred.

Obviously this relates directly to ways that we can monitor, manage, and maintain the human organism that we are creating. The mass connectivity that is forming at a global level, can now be looked at in many new ways, and I can envision when we have new tools which will relate the various networks to the services that are provided by them. This will then provide information on where redundancy makes sense, and where we are going to want to build in extra security services.

The last area that I can see here is the relation to the Singularity. If you are following the writing on the Singularity then you might have seen the work of Ray Kurzweil and his propositions on the measuring of accelerating change. He has presented a series of graphs which measure various attributes of human evolution and technological evolution. If you look a these graphs of BGP route increases, you’ll recognize the predictable pattern …

Another interesting computer being proposed and built in India …
I really like this one for a couple of reasons:
1. This is being developed in India! I am a huge fan of India, and the potential of this country to evolve into a dominant world force.
2. This is running Linux … not a crippled partial operating system, but a full blown PC operating system.

India to Compute on the Cheap. In a country of nearly 1 billion people, there are only about 2 million PCs. This could change with the ‘Simputer,’ a Net-accessible computer that could cost about $200. Swaroopa Iyengar reports from India. [Wired News]

More early experiments of Mirror Worlds …
For those of you who have not read the book Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter, this description by Dan Gillmor starts to fit the bill. Gelernter writes about software systems which allow the real-time observation of almost anything on earth, anywhere, at anytime. And the ability to zoom into business and personal processes that are automated to see what is really going on from the macro-scale to the micro-scale. I agree completely with Gelernters basic premise that this type of software is inevitable … and I can see many ways that it is starting to appear …

Dan Gillmor: “Imagine, for example, that you’re looking at a map of major Bay Area highways. The map is embedded in a PC spreadsheet or Web browser. Every 30 seconds, it updates the average traffic speeds noted by road sensors at various locations along those highways. I saw such a map earlier this week in Mountain View, at the offices of KnowNow.” [Scripting News]

Some perspectives on Xybernaut and Wearable Computers …
I wrote this on the Xybernaut thread on SiliconInvestor … a stock and market discussion board. I figured that I would post it here also …

Hello Truthseeker,

> Is this crap paid for? i only ask because xybr has been
> recommended by fraudulent analysts in the past such as
> Donner Corp and Access1Financial/Mark Bergman.

I have no way to speak for anyone but myself … so I can not answer your question about this press release.

I *am* (and have been for quite some time) an advocate of the wearable computer marketplace. I do a lot of research into leading edge trends, and use evolutionary theory to create frameworks for predicting future trends.

I am not sure who the companies are going to be, but I can see that there are some very powerful indications (to me) that wearable computers will become a very fundamental part of being human … in the core industrial and technological communities of the world.

Some of these indications are:

1. Communications, and the devices that facilitate communications, are a fundamental part of an efficient organization of any kind.

2. The ability to effectively organize, communicate, and share information within an organization is directly related to the effectiveness of that organization. This includes effectively “staying in communications” within the organization – hence pagers, cell phones, and demand for “always on” wireless connectivity.

3. Practices, methods, and devices which enhance and extend the human beings ability to organize, communicate, and share information are coming into higher and higher demand … for obvious reasons. These are what transform a human being into what I call a “Humaneural” element within an organization.

4. Devices which can enhance and extend our human capabilities, adding to our abilities to “sense” the world around us, to “remember” more information for future use, and to “augment” our perspective of the world around us are increasingly becoming integral in our daily life experience. The lines between where we end, and these devices end, are going to blur more and more in the coming years. (e.g. think about pacemakers, hearing aids, contact lenses, and now cell phones, and PDAs)

5. Our ability to create more and more powerful computers, in smaller and smaller form factors is nearly limitless … and is only a matter of time.

6. Microsoft, even with all of the criticism, is not going away any time soon. The demands for their products, and their evolutionary process of creation, will only continue until something massively disrupts or shifts the market.

7. Any company, IMHO, creating hardware products which will bring Microsoft software platforms, and Linux software platforms, closer to being tightly integrated into the human experience is on the right track. This includes the core compute platform, along with the peripherals which integrate with the human senses – eyes, ears, mouth, etc.

I believe that over the next 5-10 years we are going to witness some incredible evolution of what it is to be human. We are going to see people who will become more and more dependant on “new” senses which result from a net-connected world.

In the business/organizational world, this means more effective and immediate access to information to react to market conditions, and deliver to customer/employee demands. In the personal world, this means being in communication with the important communities and organizations in ones life on a full time basis … being available to those communities, and having those communities be available … on demand.

I believe that Xybernaut is on the right track when I compare their vision of the future to the PDA and cell phone visions. I can not promise that they will, as a organization, transform from an innovative company to a dominant force in the industry … but I believe that they are heading in the right direction …

This is probably more than you were looking for … but I felt like rambling … 😉

Scott C. Lemon

As we approach the Singularity … and Gattaca?
These articles are an interesting overview of what the government sees coming … and what is going to be inevitable. The ability to map the genome is now here … the inexpensive way to test for the presence and patterns of genes is coming … and so the scenarios that are presented in the movie Gattaca are not so far away.
What I find amusing about these types of efforts by the government is that they are simply creating delays on what will occur. If the work is not done in the USA, it will be done elsewhere. I can see the day that 7-11 stores are going to have gene-sequencing kiosks to verify the genetic background of your friends, family, and potential mates or employees … 😉

Bush discusses genetic discrimination in radio address. Nando Times Jun 24 2001 9:29PM ET [Genetics news]

Synchronization … and the future …
In my research into evolutionary theory, and optimal systems development, I have made the observation that replication and duplication of information is a naturally occurring solution. If we look at even our own DNA, we can see that the instructions that define the construction of our own human bodies is replicated and duplicated in every cell in our bodies.
Relating this to my research into identity, I have come to the conclusion that identity information is not going to be accessed by reference, but instead will be synchronized to all of the places that it will be used. This synchronization is key to how identity will be maintained by end-users, and the communities that they belong to.
It’s too bad that Yahoo! is dropping this service now … since they will be putting it back into place if they are going to move forward in the future of identity management …

Yahoo cuts a useful sync service. Up until recently, you could sync your Yahoo Address Book with your desktop, or PDA or mobile phone. You could use the Yahoo Yellow Pages to quickly add local businesses to your address book, and then download the results to carry around with you. It was a fantastic way to fill up your mobile phone with all the local Pizza delivery, Chinese take out, and car repair places. An real example of a online service removing a little bit of drudgery from our lives. [kuro5hin.org]

The Singularity …
As I have continued my research into evolutionary theory, and have now attended several conferences where Ray Kurzweil has presented, I am in alignment with those who see the Singularity coming upon us. It is not good or bad … it simply is, and will be. To me, the Singularity is a point where the evolution of humanity into a planetary-scale organism occurs. It might sound funny, but it is similar to the “assimilation” that we hear about on Star Trek. It is the creation of a new entity on earth … a new substrate … beyond both the genetic and memetic substrates that exist today. It is the creation of a new form of bond … a new form of communications. I’ll be writing more as I learn more and theorize more! 😉

Singularity – In another 100 years (sans major wars, famines, or diseases) computers will be unimaginably smarter than humans and other advances in sciences like biotech and nanotech will have made our physical bodies irrelevant. This seems like common sense to me. In fact, I don’t argue with the people who say it might happen sooner. This possibility, commonly called singularity, has many followers. In a way, it is as if the whole world is realizing that we’ve already built a tower ten times the size of Babel and God hasn’t woken up yet — and if we can have just a few more minutes, we’ll be able to finally sneak in and see what heaven is like. Of course, even the conservative estimates of singularity would say that a human intellect compared to a cockroach is a charitable comparison when the human intellect is pitted agsinst the computers of singularity. The idea that these computers will even comprehend that humans want the computers to be our servants is perhaps as believable as the guy who talks to cockroaches and knows what they want. In other words, the world of singularity is certainly not a world for humans — at least not humans in any form remotely comprehensible to us today (and if humans morph into transcendental unified trans-bloogified entities, we aren’t really humans anymore, are we?). So there is quite a bit of speculation about whether it will be “good” or “bad” when (if) we get a chance to blow the lid off this thing. I personally don’t see how such distinctions will be possible, any more than a rock can contemplate the “goodness” of the current world. I also know that sitting around speculating about it is not going to do much more than give the crabs a chance to cook up a scheme to pull the tower back down. And one cannot judge harshly those who decided that the tower was the road to hell. If the crab climbs out of the pot, what’s to say that he won’t attract the attention of a hungry predator and get the whole pot gobbled up? Maybe the other crabs are wise to question exactly what it is that seems to be hypnotizing Jonathon Livingston Crab and making him so anxious to leave the safe comfort of the bucket? All vanity, anyway… [Better Living Through Software]

Interesting read … all sorts of perspective on changes to the human brain in recent years … myopia caused by reading more and more?
http://www.mailgate.org/sci/sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy/msg00021.html

ABSTRACT: Storfer’s (2000) argument that there was a parallel
increase in myopia, brain size, and intelligence due to
urbanization (complex visual inputs) during the last century is
analyzed in this commentary. Sex differences, sex hormones, and
human handedness also need to be considered. In his excellent
monograph, Storfer (1999) argues that human brains gradually
increased in size during the past century along with a dramatic
upsurge of myopia, which is highly correlated with human
intelligence. Storfer also argues that these adaptive changes
following urbanization may occur by adaptive epigenetic inheritance
without violating the basic concepts of Darwin’s theory.

With wireless wearable computers, this will get even more impressive …
With our wearable computer research, and digital identity project, we are also looking to add a lot of geospacial applications … this is nothing! There are going to be so many virtual object servers out there in a world, they’ll be fighting for your attention. A virtual object server might contain all sorts of objects, which will appear to you in your VR (virtual reality) or AR (augmented reality) goggles as you wander around in the physical universe … this stuff is coming quickly.

Handhelds: Tagger’s Best Friend?. Call it digital graffiti: a fledgling wireless application that allows users to leave floating messages wherever they go. Sounds spacey — and prone to abuse, observers say. By Aparna Kumar. [Wired News]