Tag Archives: gnr

Singularity watch: New technologies as likely to to enslave as liberate

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We might not want to live forever (emphases, below, are mine). Libertarian author David Friedman appears to be arguing in a new book (which I will be reviewing in the coming weeks) that the future will be an adapt-or-die type thing:

David Friedman, author of such books as The Machinery of Freedom and Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, now looks at a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. “If it can be done, it will be done,” David Friedman has said. “So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt.” We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

via Cato Institute: Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World (Book Forum)

Robot "skin jobs" in the works

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<a href=Japanese scientists say they’ve developed a fully-flexible, and stretchable, conductive skin for robots with carbon nantubes.

U.S. scientists this week also announced they have made a flexible material that might make an excellent covering for artificial eyeballs.

Material bends, stretches and conducts electricity? | Technology | Reuters
They stretched the sheet of material to nearly double its original size and it snapped back into place, without disrupting the transistors or ruining the material’s conductive properties.

The elastic conductor would allow electronic circuits to be mounted in places that would have been impossible up to now, including “arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts, such as the joints of a robot’s arm,” Sekitani and colleagues wrote.

Live long and prosper? We might do neither

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Biotech body snatchers. A genetically “inferior” underclass. Increased terrorist attacks. Futurists will “make it so.“

(Marketing buzzword alert: “Futuring,” a verb, is the act of exploring of the future, according to those who do it. Photo: Futurist Thornton A. May flashes the three-finger “Sustainability Symbol.” More about this strange hand signal shortly. Credit: Dragonpreneur, under a Creative Commons license.)

from Mark:

A new book by a futurist and adviser to three U.S. presidents portrays a horrific near future scenario filled with body snatchers, a booming “neuromarket” for false memory implants, and a self-aware internet that rebels against humanity.

The author of “The Extreme Future,” James Canton, Ph.D. (below), was a student of Alvin Toffler, according to Publisher’s Weekly. He will be speaking at the U.S. Army War College this fall, at a conference aimed not at predicting, but shaping, the future.

“The goal of futuring (exploring the future) is not to predict the future but to improve it,” reads a quote from futurist Edward Cornish, on the U.S. Army War College’s website.

For more about how futurists plan our futures, see these blurbs and broadcasts by Alan Watt.

Bloggers from the military and intel communities are talking about the book. Here is an excerpt from one dot-mil blog:

(Dr.) Canton…includes “Top Ten” lists detailing everything from Energy Trends to Robo-Futures.

In THE EXTREME FUTURE, Dr. James Canton predicts that:

• The high cost of oil will force the West to invent new alternatives to oil and lead to depressed OPEC economies, leading to more terrorism against the West

• Radical life extension will create a two-class global society of those who live over 150 years and of those who cannot afford to

• The Internet will develop an awareness of itself and its own personality and rebel against human controls

• Human cloning will become the ultimate in identity theft

• A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is more likely then not

• Copy-cat products from Asia—from drugs to auto parts—will perform better then the original branded products they’re based on

• Radical life extension will reshape entire markets and society

• The new global Innovation Economy will deliver widespread prosperity and wealth

DNA scans and scams, backed by Google

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Your innermost “secrets,” stored to an online database? Genetic profiling firms promise insights, but deliver unfounded health scares.

For about US$1,000, Mountain View, Calif.-based 23andMe will tell you a thing or two about your genetic makeup.

Google, which collects as much intel as it possibly can about individuals, and has many close CIA ties, is one of the 23andMe’s backers.

23andMe analyzes saliva samples from its customers, to provide rudimentary information about your genetic predispositions to baldness, or developing prostate cancer.

More:

Google-funded firm launches DNA test in Europe | Technology | Reuters
The site does not currently make interpretations about a user’s risk for developing such diseases as cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, though users could in some cases get help from experts to make some basic assessments.

But the service may prove controversial in countries like Britain, where some experts say DNA tests are often of little value and can trigger unnecessary health worries.

– Mark Baard

DNA know the power of attraction

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Chemists discover “genetic telepathy” 


Stuck on you. DNA double helices with identical nucleotide sequences draw together, spontaneously.

Bits of identical DNA, separated by water only, will draw together–but only if they are the same, according to chemists at the Imperial College of London.

The ICL chemists do not know how the identical double helices recognize each other. They suggest that the curvature of the helices, being a match, might stress the medium between them in a way that brings them together.

Electrostatic charges might also be responsible for this DNA “telepathy.”

DNA Double Helices Recognize Mutual Sequence Homology in a Protein Free Environment
We have observed spontaneous segregation of the two kinds of DNA within each spherulite, which reveals that nucleotide sequence recognition occurs between double helices separated by water in the absence of proteins, consistent with our earlier theoretical hypothesis. We thus report experimental evidence and discuss possible mechanisms for the recognition of homologous DNAs from a distance.

– Mark Baard