Seven Steps for a Better World
The puppet show these past few weeks — the U.S. government shutdown/debt-limit drama playing on all channels — seems to have more of us than ever buying into the Us v. Them meme. Us v. Them has been around for …
Techlepathy
Yeah, just go ahead and mindtweet me. Telepath me that thought, would you? Not now, I’m telephathing! Wasn’t it Orson Scott Card’s sequel to Ender’s Game (Speaker for the Dead) that featured a matured Ender Wiggin with a technology-based telepathic …
Awesome 2.0
I took a fiction writing course once during a hazy undergrad phase. One memorable story I recall, written by a classmate, featured a character named Awesome. That was before awesome was awesome. The character Awesome was ironically named. But the …
Microbots in Surgical Scrubs
You may recall the hypothetical respirocyte from the turn of the century. The salad days of the Network Age were filled with promise — anything was possible then, as new companies like google and yahoo seemed to transcend old school …
Seeing Data
Just came across this fabulous article by Marcus Woo … Seeing Data. Big data, by definition, implies drinking in vast quantities of information that must necessarily be distilled down into a mixture which we humans can tractably consume and digest. …
Telekinesis Now
By sensing a disturbance in the force, as it were, Network Age telekinesis at home is soon upon us. Through the analysis of ambient Wi-Fi signals a team at the University of Washington has developed code that senses very subtle …
Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer
Wired article worth the read: Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer on Way to Chess World Record There are several Network Age themes of note in this one article. Consider: – Education has fundamentally changed. Immersion is emerging as a best practice. …
Bio Hack
After the winter holidays in 2012 I played CMU’s Eterna for several weeks, often for hours at a stretch. My addiction lasted about 6 weeks or so, as I recall. Eterna isn’t a game, really, although the ranking system did …
When Will AI Be Created?
I found this article from the good folks at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to be a good read. To save you the trouble, the bottom line is, nobody knows. Some folks say maybe by 2040. Others, sooner (Kurzweil), like …
Quantum Hack
NY Time Blog headline this morning: Google Buys a Quantum Computer Teaming with NASA, they’re forming the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab (QAIL) to focus on machine learning. Better search will come, one supposes. I missed the announcement of the first …