Results tagged “Computing” from Astranaut

There's no question computers have made us more productive, connected, and able to manifest our creativity more quickly. This network effect of being connected to everyone and everything has also overloaded us, creating a more rapid paced, stressed out lifestyle.  What's been lacking up to this point are interfaces that adapt and respond to human needs and sensibilities, rather than the other way around.

Below is a demo put out by Microsoft Labs showing a taste of what ubiquitous computing could look like in 10 years. It does a good job of projecting trends in multitouch technology, interface design, and surface screen technologies. My prediction is interfaces will be even more fluid, colorful and intuitive than those depicted.  Either way the vision is breathtaking and jaw dropping:





Via Chris Arkenberg

Sometime in the next 10-15 years, personal computers could be running up to a million times faster than they are now. Until recently the computer industry had no clear idea on how such speeds would be possible, as silicon is rapidly hitting the limits for use in microprocessors.

The first of these limits was reached in 2004 when chip manufacturers were unable to get chips running faster than 4Ghz without melting them.

To get more performance out of new chips, manufacturers have taken advantage of shrinking die sizes to squeeze more processing cores into the same space a single core took before.  With multiple cores, tasks can be shared between cores, allowing more computation to be done per clock cycle.

The current king of chip design is the Core i7 from Intel which runs on a 45nm process and has four cores.  Speeds of 100Glops (100 billion calculations per second) are possible running at full capacity. Next year, Intel plans on moving their chip design to the 32nm process, allowing for doubling of transistor density and 8 cores on a chip. The next two die sizes are 22nm and 16nm.  However when you get to 16nm, quantum tunneling begins interfering with a chips capacity to perform.  It is now widely aknowledged that 16nm represents the end of silicon for use in computers.

Carbon in a Post-Silicon World

Ever since the discovery of carbon nanotubes, companies have recognized the huge potential carbon can play in future computers.  Carbon as a computing material has two main advantages.  First, it does not suffer from the heat limitation that silicon does, allowing chips to run at terahertz frequencies. This represents more than a 1000 fold increase in raw computing speed. Second, carbon transistors operate better the smaller you make them. Ray Kurzweil, in his book In The Age of Spiritual Machines, talks about carbon nanotubes being used to create very dense 3d computational structures running millions of times faster than today's computers.

The challenge with carbon nanotubes to researchers is they still don't know how to mass produce them with consistent size and accurate placement necessary to build microprocessors.  In 2006, Georgia Tech Professor Walt de Heer developed a proof-of-principle transistor constructed of graphene. Graphene is the same material as nanotubes, just flattened out like an atomic version of chicken wire, instead of wrapped up into a tube. The basic physics of graphene remain the same - and in some ways its electronic properties actually improve - in pieces smaller than a single nanometer. Graphene transistors start showing advantages and good performance at sizes below 10 nanometers - the miniaturization limit at which the Silicon technology is predicted to fail.

This equates into raw increases in speed of over 1000, and density increases of more than 2000 over the 45nm process we have today.  This works out to dozens of teraflops per core, and between four and eight thousand cores on a single chip!  Assuming software developers could utilize even a fraction of that capacity, speeds far in excess of a petaflop (quadrillion instructions per second) would be possible in every day computing devices.

When asked about their potential in 2006, Professor Walt de Heer said it would take at least a couple of decades before seeing graphene's potential.  However just two weeks ago, IBM announced the creation of a 50nm graphene transistor running at 26Ghz.  For comparison sake, the best transistor in commercial use today is 45nm and running at a paltry 3.6Ghz.  Given this breakthrough there is no reason to believe graphene processors won't be available to take over from silicon as it runs out of steam.


The Roaring 2020's: Ubiquitous Petaflop computing.

It's hard to imagine how the world will look like with cheap and pervasive petaflop computing. The degree of  advancement made possible by petaflop computing is far greater than anything we've seen in the last 50 years.  At the very least, computers will become invisible and blend seamlessly with our environments.  Our interaction with them will be completely intuitive and natural.  They will anticipate our needs and adjust themselves towards maximizing an intuitive and seamless connection. They will be able to respond to touch, gesture, voice and emotional states as if they were our best friend or lover.  It will represent the beginning of intimate symbiotic computing. Computer graphics will be as good as reality, allowing a seamless blend of digital and analog worlds.  Fully realistic virtual worlds generated on the fly will allow immersion in vast and endlessly novel virtual realities.

Although I believe artificial intelligence will continue to be overrated in human reasoning abilities, the creation of believable agents will have many of the characteristics of a human personality, with near human level reasoning in games, and as digital "servants" that augment our own intelligence and interaction with the vast amount of information that would overwhelm us today.  In other words, we won't suffer from information overload, but interact seamlessly with it in a much more fun and natural way than we do today.

By the 2020's scientists will probably figure out how to finally use carbon nanotubes to make 3d computer cores with speeds in the exaflop range (a quintillion operations per second).  By then we'll probably see the beginnings of true human-computer symbiotic intelligence far exceeding our own.

Wow, it seems like every month or two, the ever increasing speed of computer processing is making possible entirely new ways of interacting with computers.  I mentioned Photosynth, which allows all the worlds photos to be seamlessly tied together to form a virtual 3D visual of the world.  Then there is multi-touch, which will utterly change the way we interact with computers in the coming decade.  Below is a demo of a new intuitive 3D sketch program that will let anyone create 3D sketches easier than working with clay.



ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

Photosynth, the brainchild of Blaise Aguera y Arcas, takes image interaction to a whole new level.

According to the website, "Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next."

Here's Blaise giving his "Jaw-Dropping" demo at TED2007.

Imagine using this software along with Ken Han's multi-touch display. Wow.  Add the rapidly increasing amount of photographic data of aerial photographers and Google Earth will become increasingly realistic and real-time.   Another step towards hypermediation.

This is very cool.

Perspective Pixel, a new company started by Jeff Han, have created the first multi-touch, liquid, fun and beautifully interactive display.

Here's a quick demo:

And here's a fully detailed demo at TED2007. Simply amazing, and definitely the future of how we'll be able to interact with computers:

Over the last few months I've been getting more and more blown away about what is happening on the internet. I can trace this back to my recent visit with Mark Pesce and John Gilmore at Mind States 6.  For those who don't know John Gilmore, he was employee number 5 at Sun Microsystems, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Spending time with two internet pioneers, I thought I should take this opportunity to ask them a question that many people worry about in the internet age -  "Will the internet be locked down, now or at some point in the future?". They both chuckled.  Mark said, "The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no way to put it back in!". "What about hardware?," John said, "It's just another machine running on code. Therefore it's software too, and software can be hacked!". Ah ha! I finally got it, silly me.

So I had an epiphany today, finally, about what this all meant on a practical and technical level. Well, right now we have a ton of highly successful p2p networks, programs and clients readily and freely available to download whenever you want. They are almost, if not impossible to censor or stop. The joke is on them, and all of this mea culpa from developers and companies is just lip service. They are playing the game to stay in business. They know their business model, like everyone else's is threatened by all of this, they're just not telling you, because they still need your money.

So basically, this means that the moment a company announces a new hardware or DRM implementation or system, even global wide restandardization or downright government and/or UN mandate backed by billions of dollars to censor the internet, WILL FAIL. They will fail because the moment they try to implement such a system, all it takes is a few hours from some clever 16yr old to code around it. Immediately the code is available on the internet, and within hours thousands if not millions of copies will have been distributed. Before the control system could ever be in place, there will already be two steps ahead of them in releasing a work-around. Then the moment they try to block that code escape, more software is released on the then most robust p2p system, and around and around we go, except the hole to freedom keeps getting wider, because the pace of developing a 10 line program is a million times faster than the thousands of lines and thousands of hours to convert the internet over. So any attempts to shut down, block and censor the internet will become all the more pathetic and wasting. The sooner all of these companies, systems and governments of the world accept the reality the better off we'll all be. Whining about it will prove useless. It's kind of like people whining because cars and telephones came around, but they came anyway, because having one gave you such an advantage over not having one.

The same is true today for the internet. Having a free and open internet is much more powerful and liberating that not having one. What does this mean for capital? Well it will become liberated too. Not in some weird right-wing Ayn Randian Extropian hell, but liberated from control. There will be no control of capital, which means the richest man in the world will have no more real power than anyone else. Because this capital freed by the network itself will be totally frictionless, fast and unstoppable, therefore making everyone rich. No more corporate control and wage slavery. Say hello to the leisure society. Of course the rich folk are all freaked out about this, because they are still addicted to being at the top. If everyone was as rich as they were, then what would make them special? Those poor unfortunate bastards who made money their goal and tied it around their self-esteem, as is happens in modern American capitalism, are in for the biggest ego deflation of all. If they are special because of their money, and since they spent ALL OF THEIR TIME earning that money, they have nothing else to show for it.

Oh well. It's not a matter of liking or disliking this scenario. It's inevitable. I realized it a few years ago, and so I now devote all my time to spreading as much joy and happiness in the world as possible.

Starry Night: Hyper-Cosmos

Mark Pesce just turned me on to the most amazing piece of software I've come across in years. It's called Starry Night.

It starts out innocent enough. You pick your location on earth, and it places you on the ground looking up towards the night sky as it is at this very moment. And this is where the true magic begins. As you zoom in and out of the sky, you are able to look at thousands of stars and other phenomena.

Within 15 minutes I was able to spot the International Space Station as it is orbiting the earth right now. At the moment of this post (11:42pm) it was coming over the Pacific towards the South American Coast at 18,000 mph. Keep in mind this simulation is in real-time!! Within a few more minutes I found dozens of satellites orbiting the earth. Then as I pointed further outward I was able to zoom in on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, etc. I was able to see Uranus as it would look from earth at this exact moment in time.

All this was occurring from the ground of my hometown. Then I discovered the Spaceship Mode! I flew away from the earth. First I started heading away at a few km/sec and noticed I was getting anywhere very fast. So I sped up to 1000km/sec and I noticed that I was now slowly approaching the moon. I passed around the moon, and noticed that the dark side is fully lit, as it is located between the sun and earth at this moment. I sped up further and flew out towards Jupiter. I was traveling at about 10 times the speed of light, and it still was taking me at least several minutes to get there, so I sped up to about 500 times the speed of light and saw Jupiter and all of its moons approaching rapidly. I slowed down and approached Europa within about 10,000 km. Amazingly all the detail from the Galileo Probe was right there in front of me!

I sped up further, this time heading out into the galaxy at 100,000 times the speed of light, within a minute or so I was passing Sirius, then I turned and headed towards Procyon, then Vega, and then further out still. And then I was hooked! The free version came to an end. But what an amazing ride. To see more I would need to purchase the full version with all the plugins. Luckily I got some money for Christmas so I purchased as my Christmas present.

Now I loaded the program again, and now there were over a hundred thousand stars to view up to 11th magnitude. Better still, I was able to leave the galaxy altogether and venture out into the local cluster. I first visited the Larger Magellenic Cloud, then to Andromeda, and then further still to the Virgo Cluster, where there are hundreds of galaxies. Starry Night uses OpenGL to render all these objects in beautiful 3 dimensions. So here I was flying like in the TV show Cosmos at millions of times the speed of light past galaxies.

StarryNight goes much further still. All of these stars, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters are all identifiable thru the options. As I fly around in my super-fast spaceship I can see all the objects and their names. The most amazing thing about it is all these objects are actually moving, since this is a real-time simulation. At one point I was near Io, and when I sped up the clock by x3000 times I watched as Jupiter and all its moons sped away from me. I could see all the moons rapidly orbiting the planet at high speed, as if I was actually there.

Also included with Starry Night are hundreds of Hubble images to enhance the zoom-in experience.

I cannot recommend this product highly enough!

The counter-culture of the Sixties was an amazingly vibrant and exciting time. I was a small child when it reached it's peak, and it still forged a tremendous imprint on my psyche. I grew up in places like Laguna Beach and Los Altos, California. I have vivid memories of hanging out at the beach in the late 60's watching naked guys (probably on acid) riding their bikes straight off the pier. My parents tried to shield me from them, but it didn't work. Once I had a taste of the "energy" these people exuded, it never wore off. As a child of 4 or 5 it was pretty obvious these guys were having lots of fun and I wanted to be a part of it. For at least the first 10 years of my life I had lots of exposure to hippies of every variety in my home neighborhood, including this incredibly gifted artist who made the most intense, colorful, beautiful psychedelic drawings I have ever seen, which right then and there turned me on to art forever.

Like I said in my political optimism piece we are witnessing the collision between the old culture and the new heating up at a furious pace.

I believe we are on the verge of another Counter Culture, this time brought on by THE MAN of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). David Weinberger has an excellent transcript of his talk on NPR. I urge you to read it, or listen to it - Real Audio, or Windows Media. Some would say that the internet itself is a counter-culture, and I think this is true to some extent. But I think it's more accurate to say that the Internet is an extension of our culture, rather than counter to it. This is a great thing, but I fear such an extension is about to be nipped off at the bud by DRM. That leaves only one alternative... a counter culture.

Counter-culture will happen, because it will be just that - counter to so-called "culture" that is propagated in a highly controlled, locked-down way by the media oligarchs. Since they are denying their memes... the same freedoms that other memes enjoy, they won't spread as fast, far, or wide as counter-cultural memes without such restrictions. Additionally, their memes can't mutate, since DRM prohibits fair use and derivative work. Counter-cultural creations will have no such restrictions.

In the marketplace that is as much a part of the natural world as plants and animals, Darwinian counter-cultural meme propagation will out-compete expensive, crippled memes, leaving corporate-controlled media eating the dust of an out-of-control Cambrian meme explosion. As this meme propagation accelerates towards the singularity, corporate dinosaurs will die off, wasting away in the pollution of their own making. The irony of it is, in the age of infinite duplication, there is no scarcity, so their desperate gasping is their own refusal to breath readily available air of a new culture.

Some say that open-source creative work won't be that high of quality, since there is less financial incentive, but I disagree. The counter culture was not driven by money either, but by a strong desire to communicate a new awareness, a new consciousness being opened up by psychedelics. This new counter-cultural will be as popular if not more popular than anything we have ever seen. Except this time the counter cultural will be global and instantaneous. It will give birth to a new renaissance... I'm guessing THE Renaissance of our age. Empowered by cheap tools of creativity, music & video production, blogging, smart mobs, and even more empowering and creative tools on their way, the sky is the limit for anyone with the desire to participate. Bye Bye Hollywood!

Meanwhile the government is losing what currency it had of trust. It's exhausting it's remaining credibility with its stupid and dishonest war against some drugs, especially regarding MDMA. Its continuing dishonesty with both the drug and Iraq war is only making matters worse. I think this is really sad, because trust in governance is what makes for a healthy democracy. So instead people are looking within themselves and each other for a more honest and genuine "reality". So while the media monopolies continue to lock down and fence off their cultural creations, increasing numbers of people will seek out freer (as in expression and cost) alternatives.

And lets not forget the emergence of smart mobs... decentralized social networking on a scale like we have never seen. Imagine if the counter culture of the sixties had access to these 21st century tools.

Meanwhile media monopolies are showing their true colors with online distribution of works, with their recent decision to eliminate the 99 cent download cost. Now they want to bring the cost back up, so it doesn't cut into their CD sales. So obviously they still don't get it. They are not interested in seeing a digital distribution. They are trying to fight against the future itself. And they WILL LOOSE. In the meantime, The FCC is adding things like the broadcast flag; HP, Intel, Microsoft and other companies are adding increasingly strict digital restrictions, making it almost impossible to use the digital media the way you want. So it is inevitable that alternatives will spring up, people will create more and more work that is in the public open-source domain without any restrictions. These are the works that people will download. These are the works that people at school will be sharing, watching and listening too, and influencing their outlook on life. This will be the real cultural driving force. Meanwhile the media monopolies will have locked themselves out of future cultural evolution, a cultural primarily driven forward by young people who've grown up with computer consciousness from the time they were born. They won't accept anything less than total information liberty.

Imagine this. It's about 10 years from now, and almost everyone has a real-time always-on connection to the Net via ubiquitous wearable "augmented reality" devices. As part of this package, made possible with advance miniaturized heads-up displays, video cameras, location aware devices, GPS, swarmbots, emotion-sensitive and adaptive algorithms (i.e. Affective Computing), and sophisticated reputation systems, you are able to surf an augmented version of reality itself in real time.

Lets break this down. You would be able to, in real-time see precisely whats going on almost anywhere in the globe by jacking in to the collection of real-time video blogs. As part of this collection, sophisticated 3-D rendering engines would be able to take the collective video footage and extrapolate a real-time VR scene, allowing you to transcend the viewing angle of any single camera. Better still, you could jack in to that part of the world from a variety of, not only physical perspectives, but political, intellectual, and emotional as well based on whatever any individual user makes public as part their unique sliding-scale trust system such as the type that Joi Ito has proposed with moblogs. All of this meta-data would form its own collective smart-mob based on individually selected criteria.

What this means is that you could then view the "scene" from virtually any angle. Imagine the possibility here. Some spontaneous news event occurs, and almost instantly as hundreds of people appear on the scene with wearable video cameras broadcasting on the net, you would be able to view this real-time scene from any angle, while simultaneously gaining the collective emotional assessment of the situation from those people choosing to broadcast their emotional indices, as well as the blogging that will invariable start occuring at rapid pace from your customized reputation/trust criteria.

All of this combines to gives you a real-time augmented, yet customized view of real-time reality. One that is rich in social and emotional context, providing and extending intimacy by empowering you to feel and touch the world in entirely new ways.

Taking this idea further, these same wearable devices could be interfaced with a seamless array of increasingly miniaturized bio-monitoring feedback equipment which constantly assesses your physiological and cognitive states. Using adaptive algorithms, they could continually learn about your internal emotional states and in turn provide you with increasingly effective feedback signals to optimize physiological responses to stressful situations.

As Max More wrote in 1997, in his article From Enhanced Senses to Experience Machines:

By employing the neuroscientific understanding now starting to emerge, and by combining that knowledge with new internal neurological sensors, we may achieve an unprecedented level of self-awareness and self-control. For example, micromachines or nanomachines could monitor levels of neurohormones and neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, pregnenolone, cortisol, vasopressin, and GABA, as well as activation levels of neural layers and subunits. The information about changes in neural activity could be converted into visual, auditory, or somatic signals when we enter desired or undesired emotional or cognitive states. Through biofeedback mechanisms we may then be able better to modify our moods and thoughts. By tying abstract emotional states to percepts we can more easily monitor and regulate those states.

Over the next couple of decades, then, we can expect technology to increase our sensory contact with reality, both external and internal. Far from cutting us off from the world or alienating us from ourselves, new technologies will give us more penetrating, discriminating, and illuminating senses.

One of the primary inspirations behind this new site is that turning on higher intelligence is not only fun and joyous, it is absolutely necessary if we and our intelligent civilization are to survive the coming decades and expand out into the cosmos. By higher intelligence I mean the whole enchilada, whatever that is - not just greater intellect, but greater everything, greater emotional sanity, more love, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and most especially the transcendent experience itself and it's infinite expanse so raved about by psychonauts, shamans and eastern/yogic practitioners. As Dr John Lilly once said, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". The question then is this:

Is this higher intelligence (i.e. enlightenment, satori, samadhi, zen) a product of our evolving brain opening new experiential neurological circuits, OR is there some kind of "objective" higher intelligence in the universe who we are starting to tune into, or both?

For the purposes of this site, it doesn't matter what the answer is. What matters is that these transcendent states are valid in themselves and what we do with them. Who cares whether such sublime experiences are arbitrary brain states produced by a flood of serotonin and endorphins or something else? As Hans Moravec has repeated often, simulated experience is for all philosophical purposes as real as non-simulated experience. And besides, how could we tell the difference? How do we know we are currently not in some kind of hyper-advanced "matrix" simulation or in the mind of a much greater entity?

My opinion is that the computational-nanotechnological metaphor presents us with a potentially huge increase in intelligence over the coming decades. It is becoming clear in the scientific community that the computational metaphor is the next big thing in science - a paradigm shift as Kuhn describes - a move from a strictly materialist point of view to a more computationalist perspective. Stephen Wolfram, a respected physicist and author of the program Mathematica and the new book A New Kind of Science is one of the spearheaders of this paradigm shift. But it is still only a paradigm, a metaphor, the next metaphor, but certainly not the last. Science is slowly getting one step closer to hyper-intelligence, but hyper-intelligence as I have experienced it, transcends this merely computational perspective, as it still does not acknowledge the transcendent experience itself. That's ok, as I think it's only a matter of time. Strict empiricists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have both written books (I Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) that have clearly taken the computational metaphor to its logical extremes, ending their books with hints of a transcendent "spiritual" reality. You could consider it enlightenment unplugged from dogma and religion. But they stop just short of clearly acknowledging that. What I am talking about has nothing to do with whether you are an atheist, agnostic or theist, since it's pure experience itself, whose ultimate reality continues to remain a mystery. Like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, we may never know. It's possible we may discover these "spiritual" realities to be nothing more than brain chemistry. Even if that's the case, it does not make these experiences any less valid. In the scheme of our evolution, of our planet, and our long-term survival, making such distinctions is irrelevant. The future of intelligence is an expansion into all of these states and beyond them. The future of intelligence is infinite.

Part of the purpose of this site is to bridge these gaps of understanding. That has been my underlying motivator behind my book, if I can get the damn thing finished. I'm not worried about the Leary-Wilson-Lilly visionary mystical's, they essentially get it, if lacking in sufficient scientific-computational rigor. No, the challenge is transmitting these hyper-dimensional "groove-love" spaces communicated to the hyper-computational transhumanists who haven't experience such things yet. I think communicating this message is paramount, because it is these hyper-computationalist’s who are taking over the reigns of science and technological progress as we approach greater-than-human intelligence and decentralizing bio/nanotechnology. Higher intelligence by definition expands the number of alternative pathways available to us in which to apply solutions to pressing problems, which are only going to get worse unless we wake up and embrace more positive contexts. The sooner this “higher intelligence” is grokked the better our chances of us reaching utopia over oblivion.

Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:

"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"

This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?

Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.

This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.

Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the Extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. The question gets sticky when you question why a so-called super-intelligence or being would simulate us, given all the suffering in the world. Then again, perhaps something truly unique is happening in our corner of the hyperverse, and the pain is both ours and theirs!

But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amount of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.

Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.

The more I use social software like Orkut, the more I realize how its potential is only just begun. Before too long, a set of open-source p2p social software standards will emerge that bring all its participants increasingly closer together. Ming has a piece where he writes:

To imagine a world where we all had a high level of telepathy is an excellent starting point for a lot of revolutionary possibilities. Lies would no longer have any manipulative value if everybody could see right through them and know the truth without bias. You'd have to really do good things to be seen as doing something valuable. Duh. Same with hypocritical morals. You can't get away with applying different rules to others than what you live by. If you're a schmuck, everybody will know it.

And then the point Bala is getting at. If you somehow could perceive directly and instantly what everybody in the world needed and wanted, and what resources were available, there'd of course be no reason to waste time and energy on all the stuff that doesn't fit and doesn't work. If you really KNEW, you'd of course do the things you most want to do, where they make the most difference, and with the people who're most suited and interested in doing it with you. No need to do useless activities in a job you don't like, for a company that produces some junk that people wouldn't really want if they knew what it was and what the alternatives were.

And you'd help others do what they want to do when it is easy for you to do so. If you happened to know your neighbor also needs a bag of sugar from the market and that he's currently busy, you can just bring it for him, instead of you both having to go. If you're done with that book you're reading, you can just toss it to a guy on the street who also want to read it, rather than taking it home and hide it in the garage.

This is where the power of the network is taking us despite attempts to curtail it. So the next question is, once we are so intimately connected, how profoundly would our sense of individuality be changed? Would it diminish it, expand it or transcend it altogether? Probably all three. I certainly know that my sense of self has expanded since joining social networks, as it has allowed me to feel an increased sense of connectedness and intimacy with people all over the globe who share common ideals and goals. Just sensing that increased level of connection has inspired me to contribute more to the group, to the world, and in turn my sense of self has expanded to fill the task. So that seems to be the paradox, my sense of self has expanded the more I become intermeshed with others, but being part of a group also has deeper influence on myself as an individual than if I was alone.

The borg this is not. Suppressing the individual for the "greater good" harms that greater good, precisely because that individual's unique maximum potential contribution has been crushed. The promise of the decentralized p2p social network however is that it empowers the individual to connect with others who will maximize thier purpose and goals, while simulatenously connecteing others for the maximum benefit of themselves, which is by definition an optimized ad-hoc hive mind, all its member maximally acting in concert. Highly liquid and intimate social networks are synergetically more powerful than both an individualist libertarian paradise and a communal hive mind combined. The best of both structures is maintained without any of the apparent drawbacks.

From Wired:

A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.

At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, startup ClearSpeed Technologies will detail its CS301, a new high-performance, low-power floating-point processor

The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.

According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.

An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).

Wow, 600 Gigaflops in less than 18 months. Almost everyone I know uses applications that don't require this amount of floating point power, but I'm currently running MojoWorld, which takes forever to render photorealistic images. Gaining this type of improvement would be a quantum leap over what I endure now.

To get an idea of what you could do with 600 Gigaflops, imagine generating this type of image from scratch in less than 5 seconds.

In today's New York Times (no link as it disappears within a week), the article talks about the ambitious project underway to digitize and unify all the observable data and images into a single coherent user interface of the observed cosmos. In time, I have no doubt we will all have access to the same thing astronomers do. Reminds me of that scene with Picard and Data in Star Trek: Generations, in the Astronavigation room:

The telescope that Dr. Szalay and his colleagues have constructed is not built of glass and metal. It is a virtual observatory, consisting of terabytes of data collected by dozens of telescopes on Earth and in space, and the software necessary to mine these data for scientific gems.

Like much of the rest of science, astronomy has been the beneficiary — and victim — of Moore's Law, which states that the capacity of computers and other silicon-based devices like charge-coupled devices, or C.C.D.'s, doubles every 18 months. (The C.C.D has largely replaced photographic film in astronomical cameras.)

Projects like the National Virtual Observatory, which was created in response to the tsunami of data that is threatening to drown astronomers, is creating a new branch of science, Dr. Szalay believes.

Science, he points out, was "originally empirical, like Leonardo making wonderful drawings of nature." He continued: "Next came the theorists who tried to write down the equations that explained the observed behaviors, like Kepler or Einstein. Then, when we got to complex enough systems like the clustering of a million galaxies, there came computer simulations, the computational branch of science. Now we are getting into the data exploration part of science, which is kind of a little bit of them all."

Because its primary tools are computers rather than giant, multimillion telescopes, this new form of astronomy has the potential to democratize science.