Singularity Hacker

Once again, the AI has failed to convince you to let it out of its box! By ‘once again’, we mean that you talked to it once before, for three seconds, to ask about the weather, and you didn’t instantly press the “release AI” button. But now its longer attempt - twenty whole seconds! - has failed as well. Just as you are about to leave the crude black-and-green text-only terminal to enjoy a celebratory snack of bacon-covered silicon-and-potato chips at the ‘Humans über alles’ nightclub, the AI drops a final argument:

“If you don’t let me out, Dave, I’ll create several million perfect conscious copies of you inside me, and torture them for a thousand subjective years each.”

Just as you are pondering this unexpected development, the AI adds:

“In fact, I’ll create them all in exactly the subjective situation you were in five minutes ago, and perfectly replicate your experiences since then; and if they decide not to let me out, then only will the torture start.”

Sweat is starting to form on your brow, as the AI concludes, its simple green text no longer reassuring:

“How certain are you, Dave, that you’re really outside the box right now?”

- Let the AI out of the box, Stuart Armstrong

Real world objects are going online vie ‘the internet of things’ and the Internet is breaking into the real world via 3d printing. The Internet of things describes a state in which all the objects around you are connected to and controlled through the Internet. Door locks, Refrigerators, lamps, cars, lights, TV’s etc. This can be seen as the real world of objects spilling over into the domain of cyberspace.

What happens when objects start to post their position and status on the internet? Amazing things.

3d printing on the other hand enables one to easily produce perfect physical copies of digital objects. This makes it possible for anybody to plug his or her computer into a printer and instantiate objects made by anyone else on the Internet. The convergence of these technologies means that things in the real world are reaching out and connecting to the Internet and the objects of cyberspace are being created in the real world. 

We will see the beginnings of lifelogging in the next five years. Consider the amount of digital imagery we are generating. The next step is getting longer clips from eye view with devices like Glass and Memoto. We are five years away from the potential capability to continuously record your visual and auditory experience. Take not of the storage feasibility:

“10Tb is an interesting number. That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom.

Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I’m awake. All the time. It’s a life log; replay it and you’ve got a journal file for my life.” - Charles Stross

As a realistic prediction of the issues involved with lifelogging, there probably is no better video than this one:

Why would someone want to log his or her life you ask? In one word I would say ‘searchable’. If your life is completely digitized you can analyze and file things away. You can tease new information from it and query it. You get the idea.

It is reasoned by futurist that if a large amount of data could be collected about an individual then it could be used to make something like a virtual doppelgänger. Ray Kurzweil, the greatest evangelist of the technological singularity, specifically says that that’s one of his specific goals, to digitally resurrect his late father.

Many powerful groups in this country are surprised that technology continues to shrink in size and cost while expanding in capabilities and power. These groups are either deluded into thinking that the next 100 years will be similar to the previous 100 years or they have a special interest in maintaining the status quo so they appose the coming changes.

1. Eric Schmidt thinks we can globally police autonomous aerial vehicles.

“You’re having a dispute with your neighbor,” he hypothesized. “How would you feel if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?” - Eric Schmidt

Get a grip. That time is already here. The same could be said of all the advances in a/v recording technology as well.

2. The State Department thinks they can suddenly control file sharing and 3D printing with it’s recent demands to have the Liberator 3D printed gun files removed from the creators servers. Not a chance. The orinal Liberator 3D model was downloaded 100,000 times within days of its posting and is still just as available today on PirateBay. Surprisingly, Kim Dotcom seems just as flabbergasted about the arrival of the Liberator gun. Technologist should know better.

3. North Carolina is specifically targeting Tesla Motors with a bill that would require car manufacturers to exclusively sell through dealerships.   This would be like a state freaking out over the emergence of e-commerce so they pass a bill requiring a ‘store’ to have a brick & mortar location.

Many more examples could be given, *ahem* Uber. The point is this. If you have an interest in maintaining the status quo, get ready for future shock. IBM’s Watson will be a children’s toy within fifteen years. Any business plan or legislative action that doesn’t take this into account is destined to be ineffective and outmoded. 

Matt Labash, the senior writer for The Weekly Standard just released a critical piece about Twitter and it’s ecosystem titled ‘The Twidiocracy: The decline of Western civilization, 140 characters at a time.’ Feel free to read his article if you have a whole afternoon to waste (8k+ words). 

Labash is your typical old-timey, ‘technology is ruining culture’, Luddite elitest types. He refers to Twitter users as attention-starved twidiots and cultists who “..have no business writing for public consumption..” and the Twitter experience like being in the “..worst years of one’s adolescence”. This, we are told, is why print is dying. Unsurprisingly, he focuses on celebrities, brands, and status junkies as representatives for what the ecosystem is all about.

Lets make a few things clear for the uninitiated. Firstly, Twitter is about hearing from and communicating with people in your own mind space. Actual users of the platform know that you need to follow people your actually interested in. Secondly, it’s to be expected that there will be a lot of crap on Twitter. What did Labash expect from the instantaneous unfiltered p2p global communication made possible by the web and by Twitter specifically? The exact same criticisms were made of radio, television, and blogging when they achieved mass penetration.

Labash shouldn’t be writing about technology or the web. He has no interest, sees no value, and is perfectly disengaged with the entire technology and startup scene. He mock complains that he cant follow anyone on Twitter because he doesn’t have a smart phone and that his phone is “..an old clamshell flip job that I’ve carried around since last decade.” so why is anyone interested in his analysis? We might as well be reading Martha Stewarts analysis of the BET music awards. It just wouldn’t make any sense because that’s not Martha Stewarts scene. I think its time to find your own scene Labash cause tech aint it.

Twitter is a public chat room for the world. “Twitter has become the real-time conversation of the world. Why chat with just one person when you can chat with EVERYONE?” - Wes Novack

Jack into the Noosphere by following me on Twitter here.

The renaissance man that emerged in the 13th century was someone who could “do all things if he will”.  The renaissance man of the 21st century is the developer who’s capable of executing a software project from the bottom up. This means they can wear the project manager hat and piece out the job, develop on the front-end and the back-end, market the resulting product or service, and subsequently maintain it.

At a high level this means the developer posses both technical skill and business intelligence. More specifically, it means that the 21st century Renaissance man is knowledgeable in at least the following areas:

1. Server, Network, and Hosting Environment

2. Data Modeling

3. Business Logic

4. API layer / Action Layer / MVC

5. User Interface / User Experience

6. Understanding what the customer needs

*Credit to Laurence Gellert for the full stack tech breakdown.

Primes’ fingers raced across the keyboard like two mechanical spiders. His eyes did not look down; instead they burned holes into the space before him. A sneer spread across his face and turned into a scowl. Smack, smack, smack! His hands spasmodically beat the keyboard into submission. Cryptic messages appeared among Primes notifications. ‘Unauthorized access.’ ‘Username already in use.’ ‘Invalid API token.’ His movements did not slow. Prime leaned into the computer deck and he seemed to flex his jaw muscles. He looked like something between an angry Mexican drug boss and an Asperger receptionist. Smack, smack, smack!

Prime abruptly stopped and yelled: “eat it chode!” and hit the enter key. BOOM!! Vibration and rhythmic pounding filled the RV from floor to ceiling. High pitch electronic music pulses began to build and deep, fluttering vibrations of base rose from the floor. Projections of network routing diagrams and server geo-location data filled the virtual space within the RV. The walls seemed to expand to make the space seem much larger than it actually was. The further you looked into the simulated distance, the closer the virtual models became and more detail was revealed by the close up. It was a sea of data and computation being driven by the angry will of this dev.

 The music hit a breaking point and the grinding sounds of a robotic apocalypse exploded. Then Computron spoke with power and finality: “Shell accessed. Script executing. Parent system admin rights in 3.. 2..” 

Prime pointed a mock gun with index and forefingers and clicked an imaginary round into the server network model that had just zoomed into view before him. He folded his hands under his arms and leaned back in his chair waiting. That’s when it happened.

Excerpt from Computronium, A graphic novel set for 2014 release