Yksityisetsiva

Muistilinkkejä

2011-06-22T10:28:00.002+03:00

"Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept"
Bostrom: We have to distinguish between positional and non-positional goods. In economics, a positional good benefits you only because others lack it. Height may be an advantage in men, but if everybody were three inches taller, nobody would be better off. Attractiveness may be another example of a positional good. A gain for one person implies a relative loss for others. I would contrast that with a trait like health. Your life is better when you are healthy, even if others are also healthy. Cognitive enhancements are a complex topic, but they have aspects that are intrinsically valuable. It is good if we can understand the world better. Arguments against positional goods are no arguments against enhancements as such.

Memory Implant Gives Rats Sharper Recollection
“Turn the switch on, the animal has the memory; turn it off and they don’t: that’s exactly how it worked,”

Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight
Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Lab-grown meat would 'cut emissions and save energy'
‘What our study found was that the environmental impacts of cultured meat could be substantially lower than those of meat produced in the conventional way,’ said Hanna Tuomisto of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who led the research. ‘Cultured meat could potentially be produced with up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 45% less energy, 99% lower land use, and 96% lower water use than conventional meat.’

How To Live Forever

2011-05-13T20:53:00.000+03:00

2011-04-18T20:22:00.002+03:00

Äänestä Piraattia

2011-04-06T20:29:00.001+03:00

Mieluummin ääni hukkaan Piraateille kuin löysä taktikointiääni kakkosvaihtoehdolle galluphypetyksen perusteella.

2011.piraattivaalit.fi
Uskonnonvapaus.fi vaalikone
Älä äänestä homofobiaa eduskuntaan

Odota heilahduksia

2011-02-11T10:33:00.001+02:00

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

Transcending the Human, DIY Style - Jos lääkärit eivät suostu asentamaan magneetteja ihon alle, hätäilijät tekevät sen itse ja päätyvät lääkäriin.

Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

2010-12-22T12:03:00.003+02:00

Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Holiday Challenge
Jaan Tallinn, a founder of Skype and Ambient Sound Investments, and Edwin Evans, CEO of the mobile applications startup Quinly, every contribution to the Singularity Institute up until January 20, 2010 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-12-09T16:30:00.000+02:00

David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically about drugs'
Government proposes to scrap need for scientific advice on drugs policy

How Was the Billionaire’s Singularity Dinner?

Lonkerokäsiproteesi

WikiLeaked

live.piraattipuolue.fi

Muistilinkkejä

2010-11-12T13:04:00.001+02:00

Nokia Supports Singularity University as Fifth Corporate Founder

Sähkövirta aivoihin parantaa matemaattisia taitoja
Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important

Gene discovery suggests way to engineer fast-growing plants

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology

One of the goals of this whitepaper is to prepare the 3D printing community, and the public at large, before incumbents try to cripple 3D printing with restrictive intellectual property laws. By understanding how intellectual property law relates to 3D printing, and how changes might impact 3D printing’s future, this time we will be ready when incumbents come calling to Congress.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-11-03T13:02:00.001+02:00

Cryonics: Understanding Why It Failed - TransVision 2010 Presentation by Eugen Leitl

Lakatos proposed a model of scientific advance wherein there is a “hard core” of scientific or mathematical theory which is surrounded by a “protective belt” of gentle inquiry. It is work going on within this protective belt that incrementally advances or erodes the hard core of the paradigm. Virtually all of routine scientific research (institutional science) operates in the zone of this protective belt while revolutionary, or paradigm changing ideas, penetrate it, smash the hard core, and thus demolish the whole structure. Cryonics, like Natural Selection, or the theories of General and Special Relativity, is core-smashing in character, and in the case of cryonics, the idea is so antithetical to the existing order of civilization that it can it only be advanced by insurgent means. This is so because cryonics overturns the Vitalistic view of life, challenges the conventional definition of death, invalidates the core tenets of contemporary medicine, erodes the need for a mystical afterlife, radically redistributes capital (disrupts inheritance, bequests, and mortuary customs), mandates a complete change in reproductive behavior, perturbs generational succession, requires space colonization, requires (and supports) profoundly disruptive technologies such as cloning, regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and finally, ends the species and enables, if not requires Transhumanism.

The real cost of free

As I've written here before, copying isn't going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won't magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more. Networks won't be harder to use. PCs won't be slower. People won't stop learning to type "Toy Story 3 bittorrent" into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.

Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs

On the low end of the spectrum, we have physical jobs that we can’t automate yet (yard work, for example). On the high end of the spectrum, we have creative and cognitive jobs that we can’t automate yet (law and management, for example). But as technology advances, and it certainly will, more people are going to be elbowed out of the workforce. We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle.
-- If the skills and talents that are truly financially rewarding become harder and harder to acquire, people who would never consider themselves students of Marx might start questioning whether, given the circumstances, it still makes sense to pay people based solely on the demand for their skills in a marketplace that would be demanding very few skills.

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

Parempien tapojen lisäksi

2010-10-06T11:50:00.003+03:00

Kuulumisia Saksan seminaarista - Kryoniikkaseuran matkaraporttia Goslarista ja uusi organisaatio EUCRIO pyrkii tarjoamaan kryoniikkapalveluita Euroopassa.

Toisten ihmisten ongelmat - Hyvin pärjäävä ei käsitä miksi joku pärjää niin huonosti asioissa, joissa itse pärjää hyvin. Jos neuvot masentunutta, että luuserin pitäisi vain ottaa itseään niskasta kiinni, se on kuin neuvoisi jalatonta, että luuserin pitäisi vain lähteä lenkille.

Miltei vihrein keksintö - Geenimuuntelu on hyväksi ympäristölle. Viisi vastausta vasta-argumentteihin.

This is a news website article about a scientific paper - Tämä on lyhyt kommentti linkin takana olevan artikkelin sisällöstä.

Cyborgs Needed for Escape from Earth

"If our objective is to become space-faring people, it's probably going to force you to reconsider how to reengineer humans."

Patients to be frozen into state of suspended animation for surgery

Muistilinkkejä

2010-09-14T15:31:00.001+03:00

50 Posts About Cyborgs

Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us. - Domesticated Cyborgs

Emotiv EPOC EEG Headset Hacked

Another company can come along and replace Emotiv pretty easily. They are missing out on a huge opportunity here, and time and again we see companies locking stuff down instead of harnessing developers.

Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable. Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

Zeros to heroes: 10 unlikely ideas that changed the world

10 impossibilities conquered by science

Immortal Kids

2010-08-22T17:45:00.000+03:00

Muistilinkkejä

2010-08-18T19:02:00.000+03:00

Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s

“It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

The Power Trip

"It's an incredibly consistent effect," Mr. Keltner says. "When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive." Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive

Mr Yurista feels by digitising his life, he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions. And he says his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance.

5 Stupid, Unfair and Sexist Things Expected of Men

The laws and expectations of our civilized society are designed to keep physical violence to a minimum. And for good reason: physical violence is, you know, destructive. So men are expected -- indeed required -- to avoid and deflect confrontation, and to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence. And when they do, they get called pussies. Nice.

Huonoja uutisia, hyviä faktoja

2010-07-28T15:31:00.002+03:00

The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

How facts backfire

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-06-29T00:08:00.001+03:00

Muistilinkkejä

2010-06-20T17:33:00.000+03:00

Whole Brain Emulation

2010-06-06T20:53:00.002+03:00

Huippukokouksia

2010-06-02T14:03:00.002+03:00

Humanity+ Summit 2010 - Harvardin yliopistossa 12-13. kesäkuuta. Puhujina mm. Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram ja Aubrey de Grey.

Singularity Summit 2010 - San Franciscossa 14-15. elokuuta. Puhujina mm. Ray Kurzweil, James Randi ja Steve Mann.

Ray Kurzweil, That Singularity Guy

People say, “Gee, I don’t want to be a machine.” They’re thinking of the machines they know today, and that’s not the kind of machine I’m talking about. I’m talking about a machine—and we’ll probably need a different word by then—that’s just as subtle and supple and emotional as humans are today, and even more so.

Futuristic mega-projects by Shimizu

The surprising truth about what motivates us

2010-05-28T15:06:00.001+03:00

"Best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table."

Muotia ja robotteja

2010-05-27T18:56:00.000+03:00

Intellectual Property in the Fashion Industry - "Apparel design is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection."

Willow Garage - Avoimia robotteja kaikille.

Stem Cell Patent Halts Hospital's Collection - Patenttitrollit estävät lääketieteellistä tutkimusta.

First human 'infected with computer virus' - Mark Gasson laittoi kokeilun vuoksi viruksen implanttiinsa.

Synteettisiä huumesoluja

2010-05-23T13:34:00.000+03:00

Biology, or the Drugs Win the Drug War - Synteettiset design-solut avaavat tietysti ovia kotitekoisiin design-huumeisiin. Lainaat kaverilta samplen, remiksaat komerossa ja jaat kopioita eteenpäin.

You know what’s a lot easier than all the high minded business about environment, or life extension, or even the scary doomsday 12 Monkeys scenarios? Growing simpler molecule drugs. I don’t mean like aspirin, I mean like heroin and cocaine, THC and hallucinogens. They already grow in plants thoroughly studied, and people are motivated and not at all risk averse about getting those sequences somewhere they can use them. Cooking meth is hard and dangerous science compared to the ability to get a starter of a minimal cell that poops heroin and feeding it growth medium in your closet. We may have lost the drug war, but not as badly as the drug lords have.

Today we lost the drug war - Anders Sandberg samalla linjalla.

In a scenario building exercise on the future of drugs I participated in a while ago we investigated a future scenario not too unlike the one above: new technologies makes the threshold of entry to the drug market low and people are fairly accepting of drugs. The result was a "drugs-com boom" where startups invented ever more innovative drugs (starting with enhancers, moving on towards recreational drugs and continuing towards strange pharma-bio-nano-info hybrid drugs), leaving drug lords and pharmaceutical companies in the dust.
--
While there might be Microsoft and Apple biologies there will also be open Linux biologies - we are in a sense already living in one. And as the user interface of biology improves more people will poke at it. Just like we will never win the drug war, we will not be able to win a war against biology - synthetic or natural. Just like we have to accept that people will use drugs, we have to accept that people will try to use available tools to get what they want.

Ensimmäinen synteettinen solu rakennettu

2010-05-20T20:32:00.000+03:00

First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell - Craig Venterin ryhmä kertoo onnistuneensa synteettisen elämän luomisessa.

While this first construct—dubbed M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, is a proof of concept, the tools and technologies developed to create this cell hold great promise for application in so many critical areas. Throughout the course of this work, the team contemplated, discussed, and engaged in outside review of the ethical and societal implications of their work. The ability to routinely write the software of life will usher in a new era in science, and with it, new products and applications such as advanced biofuels, clean water technology, and new vaccines and medicines.

*golfclap*

Muistilinkkejä

2010-05-14T20:57:00.000+03:00

Prosthetic Culture - Amber Case, kyborgiantropologi.

A proximity-based programmable DNA nanoscale assembly line - Ensimmäinen ohjelmoitavien nanokoneiden liukuhihna valmistettu.

Richard Dawkins: If Science Worked Like Religion

2010-05-10T13:27:00.001+03:00

Auttaako tiededokumentti?

2010-05-04T18:44:00.000+03:00

Tiededokumentti: Auttaako tiede? - BBC:n kolmiosainen dokumenttisarja, jossa Michael Mosley tarkastelee älykkyyttä, elämänpidennystä ja nukkumattomuutta. Ensimmäinen jakso Areenassa, seuraavat YLE Teemalla 6.5. ja 13.5. Älykkyysjaksossa mukana Christopher Langan, joka on korkeasta älykkyydestään huolimatta hieman kreationisti - hyvä esimerkki siitä, ettei korkea ÄO aina tarkoita korkeaa rationaalisuutta ja päinvastoin.

The Art of Human Enhancement - Transhumanistinen online-taidenäyttely, mukana mm. Eduardo Kacin biotaidetta.

The Weird World of Zentai - Koska Star Trekin univormut eivät menneet ihonmyötäisyydessä tarpeeksi pitkälle ja koska huntukielto menee liian pitkälle.

Mittasuhteiden merkitys

2010-04-29T19:54:00.000+03:00

Videoita Humanity+ UK2010 -konferenssista YouTubessa.

A sense of proportion - Anders Sandberg konferenssin annista.

When thinking about existential risks it is important to have a sense of what the stakes are, and not just think "that is bad" - some things can be many orders of magnitude worse than others. At the same time, as Nick Bostrom pointed out, we have rather minimal research on how to prevent human extinction, about the same size as the literature on dung beetle reproduction. Toby Ord has pointed out that some charities can be up to 10,000 times more efficient in providing health than others (in terms of years of life per dollar donated), just because they focus on particular very effective means. Aubrey de Grey showed a pretty minor advance in biogerontology that was hailed in the media as "the secret of ageing", while rattling of a series of papers with far more profound implications that nobody outside the field has heard of. A graph of cost and size of carbon abatement methods clearly shows that some fix a vastly bigger chunk than others.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-04-25T18:39:00.000+03:00

Maxed out: Testing humans to destruction - Kuinka pitkään perusmallia oleva ihmiskeho selviää ilman ruokaa, juomaa ja unta? Kuinka paljon lihakeho kestää kylmyyttä, säteilyä ja tyhjiötä?

The science that stops us looking older - 'cosmeceuticals’, which alter the DNA in your hair and skin.

Private Moon Bases a Hot Idea for Space Pioneer
3D printer could build moon bases
An Archaeological Approach to SETI

Humanity+ UK2010

2010-04-24T11:33:00.000+03:00

Humanity+ UK2010 - Päivän konferenssi Lontoossa tänään. Livestream.

Jarrut päällä vastatuuleen

2010-04-16T14:27:00.000+03:00

Professori: Tekijänoikeuslaki on kehityksen jarru Suomessa

Why Content Is a Public Good

What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong?

Muistilinkkejä

2010-04-11T18:22:00.001+03:00

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI - Saakohan tämä paavin perumaan vierailunsa Britteihin?

Eroa kirkosta -sivua voisi mainostaa jälleen tässä välissä.

Your Life In 2020 - Vuonna 2020 robotit elävät puolestasi.

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s - Minun nuoruudessani Facebookissa oli vain nuoria.

Synthesia - Pelaa peliä, opi soittamaan pianoa.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-04-08T18:13:00.000+03:00

The Collapse of Complex Business Models - Clay Shirky muutosvastarinnasta ja vanhaan monimutkaisuuteen takertumisesta.

When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. -- Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

On space travel - Warren Ellis avaruusmatkailusta.

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

Planning our next steps in space - David Brin valmisaterioiden lähettämisestä Marsiin etukäteen.

The mud creature that lives without oxygen - Sanoiko joku jotain hankalasta elinympäristöstä?

The beasts live in conditions that would kill every other known animal. As well as lacking oxygen, the sediments are choked with salt and swamped with hydrogen sulphide gas.

Cars that drive better than you

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowskyn fanifiktiota.

The NewOrgan Prize

2010-04-02T11:07:00.003+03:00

Methuselah Foundation on luonut MPrizen kylkeen uuden palkinnon sille, joka rakentaa toimivan elimen potilaan omista soluista seuraavan kymmenen vuoden aikana.

The NewOrgan Prize will be given for successfully constructing a whole new organ – heart, kidney, lung, pancreas or liver - from a patient's own cells. The organ must be transplanted and have functioned properly for two years in order for the award to be granted. The dollar amount of the prize will grow with donations from the general public.

Näkevätkö androidit painajaisia tekohampaiden putoamisesta?

2010-03-26T19:31:00.001+02:00

Uusin xkcd muistutti minua siitä, että olen nähnyt unta sekä hampaiden että hiusten putoamisesta. Mutta en ajatellut niitä painajaisina. Hampaiden putoamisesta uneksiessani tutkin suutani peilin kautta ja mietin, että nyt täytyy hankkia proteesit. Hiusten pudotessa mietin, että voisin ehkä kiinnittää kalloon jotain kuituputkia. Jälkeenpäin ajattelin, että alitajunta yritti näyttää minulle painajaisia, mutta epäonnistui. Tiesin, että ongelma on korjattavissa, joten keskityin vain pohtimaan ratkaisuvaihtoehtoja. Painajaisten pitäisi päivittää pelottelukuvastoaan, muuten ne jäävät kehityksen jalkoihin.

Olen kokenut pari kertaa myös unihalvauksen. Suhteellisen mielenkiintoinen tunne. Jotkut onnettomuuteen joutuneet haluavat kuulemma mieluummin kuolla kuin elää halvaantuneena, mikä on minusta kummallista. Halvaantuminen on vain väliaikainen hidaste, ei mikään loputon painajainen. Jonakin päivänä se selkäydinvamma voidaan korjata tai kiertää. Ei aivojaan kannata heittää roskakoriin siksi, että kroppa on väliaikaisesti remontissa.

World of Warcraft predicts the future - William Sims Bainbridge kertoo tiedekonferenssista WoWissa.

There were a few casualties - poor Wayne Lutters, a colleague of mine, was eaten by a pack of hyenas when he wandered too far from the group during the conference, and another colleague drowned. But there were no real technical problems, and that's what counts to a scientist, right? -- In the drowning case, for example, even while she was dead she could still get the text. She was just floating in the water right next to where we were. She just couldn't get out of it. It happened to be during a session I was running and I just couldn't break away to solve the problem.

Jokapiraatinoikeus

2010-03-22T14:00:00.001+02:00

Ahto Apajalahden ja Kaj Sotalan Jokapiraatinoikeus (WSOY) ilmestyi tänään. Osta kirjakaupasta, lue netistä, kopioi kaverilta tai lainaa kirjastosta.

ISBN: 978-951-0-36468-0
275 sivua
Hinta alle 15€ eli sopiva

Pysäytetty eloisuus

2010-03-17T16:40:00.001+02:00

Mark Roth puhuu rikkivedystä, hapenpuutteesta, keinotekoisesta hibernaatiosta ja kylmässä säilymisestä.

Scott and Scurvy - Kuinka keripukin syy löydettiin, kadotettiin ja löydettiin uudelleen.

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

We feel your pain: Extreme empaths

Those with echopraxia, for example, compulsively mimic the actions of everyone they come across, and with a speed and abruptness that suggests it's a reflex rather than premeditated. -- The team struck gold when they targeted the left frontal region of the brain, an area known to be involved in motor function. "When we disrupted this area, people started to show an increase in imitative behavior," Bien says

Briton is recognised as world's first officially genderless person

Keinotekoista jäätä

2010-03-06T13:00:00.000+02:00

Ben Best on the feasibility of cryonics at SENS3 - Munuaiset tuottavat virtsaa, aivot tuottavat tietoisuutta. Jäniksen munuainen on vitrifioitu, uudelleenlämmitetty ja siirretty toimivana takaisin jänikseen. Arvelen, että jäniksellä... *laittaa aurinkolasit* nousi kusi päähän. YEEEAAAHH

Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future - Korporaatiofuturismia.

I don't know how to predict the future, and I never will. But I do know how not to predict it: don't stick to your boss's comfort zone by predicting that doing exactly what you're doing now is exactly the right thing to do forever.

The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations - Lector, Elevator Operator, Copy Boy, Pinsetter, River Driver, Iceman, Lamplighter, Milkman, Switchboard Operator, Typist In A Typist Pool, Typesetter, Telegraph Operator.

After 1900, when so-called artificial ice became generally accepted as safe...

A machine that prints organs is coming to market - Organovon 3D-bioprintteri, hinta noin $200,000.

Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface - Sormiperkussionisteille.

Is your life just one big RPG?

2010-02-25T11:35:00.000+02:00

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer - Säveltäjä Emily Howell on tietokoneohjelma. Kun koneet tekevät musiikin, ihmiset voivat keskittyä oleelliseen eli näyttämään hyvältä lavalla.

At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

That sentiment — present in many recent articles, blog posts and comments about Emily Howell — frustrates Cope. “Most of what I’ve heard [and read] is the same old crap,” he complains. “It’s all about machines versus humans, and ‘aren’t you taking away the last little thing we have left that we can call unique to human beings — creativity?’ I just find this so laborious and uncreative.”
--
Already, at least one prominent pop group — he’s signed a confidentiality agreement, so he can’t say which one — asked him to use software to help them write new songs. He also points to services like Pandora, which uses algorithms to suggest new music to listeners.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-02-23T12:45:00.001+02:00

Singularity FAQ - Vastauksia kysymyksiin.

Piraattikirjallisuuden luvut 1-7 - Piraattikirjan luonnosversio.

Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds) - Dresden Codak.

The Future of Money - Rahaa kuin roskapostia.

The night I met Einstein - Jos et pidä musiikista, opettele kuuntelemaan.

Aivodoping - Anders Sandberg City-lehdessä.

Lisää vain todellisuus

2010-02-14T20:34:00.000+02:00

A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Yhtään kunnollista teknistä artikkelia kryoniikkaa vastaan ei näytä löytyvän. Saman huomasi Ralph Merkle jo 16 vuotta sitten. Kenties kyse on siitä, että ne jotka viitsivät tutkia kryoniikkaa syvällisemmin päätyvät lopulta kryoniikan kannattajiksi.

I mailed Michael Shermer, Steve Jones, Quackwatch, and Professor David Pegg. I told them (quite truthfully) that I had recently started talking to some people who were cryonics advocates, that they seemed persuasive but I wasn't an expert and didn't want to fall for a scam, and asked if there was anything they'd recommend I'd read on the subject to see the other side.

The only one of these to reply was Michael Shermer. He recommended I read David Brin, Steve Harris and Gregory Benford. This is a pretty surprising reply. The latter two are cryonics advocates, and while Brin talks about a lot of possible problems, he agrees with cryonics advocates that it is technically feasable.

Ben Goldacre: The placebo effect - Plaseboefekti hyötykäyttöön ilman valehtelua potilaille.

DNA 2.0: A new operating system for life is created

Vääriä ihmisiä väärässä ympäristössä

2010-01-31T23:27:00.000+02:00

Teema: Bioniikka - kone ihmisessä - National Geographic 1/2010 ihmisen varaosista.

Ephemerisle - Kokeellinen vesifestivaali Seasteading Institutelta.

Drug could turn soldiers into super-survivors - Verenhukan haittoja kuriin valproaatilla.

SoundBite - Kuulokoje hampaaseen.

Videot Aubrey de Greyn puheesta

2010-01-27T15:25:00.001+02:00

Aubrey de Grey Helsinki 2010 - Videotiedostot de Greyn puheesta viime lauantaina. Ladatkaa, jakakaa, leikatkaa, konvertoikaa ja siirtäkää kätevämpiin videopalveluihin. Edit: YouTubessa

Mars-mönkijä on juuttunut hiekkaan, mutta ei anna periksi vaan jatkaa tutkimuksia.

In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits

The 10:23 Event - Homeopatia on huijausta, joten 'lääkettä' voi niellä pullollisen kerralla.

Sceptics and consumer rights activists will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic 'pillules' to demonstrate that these 'remedies', prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills.

Muistilinkkejä

2010-01-16T15:52:00.000+02:00

Aubrey de Grey esitelmöi ikääntymisen pysäyttämisestä lauantaina 23.1. Lääkäriliiton talon auditoriossa Helsingissä.

Self-control is contagious, study finds - Kannattaa hengailla robottien seurassa.

Derailing for Dummies - Kuinka suistaa keskustelu syrjinnästä raiteiltaan.

The Final Prejudice - David Deutsch Star Trekistä ja pienten ihmisten kuuntelemisesta.

Roxxxy - Ei kovin seksikäs seksirobotti.

‘Strongest Man,’ 104, dies after he's hit by car - Onnettomuus vei nuorekkaan satavuotiaan.

Why It's So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers

Pidempiä juttuja odotellessa

2010-01-07T19:37:00.001+02:00

Useampikin henkilö on toivonut, että kirjoittaisin lisää pitkiä juttuja suomeksi pelkkien linkkien ja englanninkielisten lainausten sijaan. Ymmärrän hyvin, sillä minulla on odottamassa lista aiheista, joista haluaisin kirjoittaa hieman enemmän tai joihin haluaisin palata uudelleen, mutta aiheet eivät tunnu tällä hetkellä niin pakottavan tärkeiltä ja innostavilta, että siirtäisin ne ajankäytössä kärkipäähän. Runsaampia aikoja odotellessa joudutte siis tyytymään linkkeihin ja lyhyisiin kommentteihin - siihen raakamateriaaliin, josta pidemmät kirjoitukset kenties aikanaan syntyvät.

Jos odotellessa käy aika pitkäksi, suosittelen Less Wrongin sekvenssien lukemista.

Ne

2010-01-06T18:09:00.003+02:00

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up - Leuka rintaan ja kohti uusia epäonnistumisia.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.

Hacklabs Finland - Yhteisötyöpajat.
TakeOnIt - Vertaile asiantuntijoiden mielipiteitä.

Build An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire - Jürgen Schmidhuberin haastattelu.

It's a bit like asking an ant of 10 million years ago: If humans were created tomorrow, what sort of implications do you think that would have for all the ant colonies?

Scientists create world's first molecular transistor
Scientists 'photograph' nano-particle self-assembly

-- The third-person singular and plural are, respectively, se and ne, which according to the written language specifications refer to an inanimate object or an animal. Thus, at a time when English is moving towards gender-neutrality, Finnish is moving to species-neutrality.
- Gender-neutral pronoun#Uralic_languages

2010

2009-12-30T12:22:00.000+02:00

2010 Singularity Research Challenge - Singularity Instituten keräyskampanja ensi vuodelle. Voit valita millaiseen toimintaan lahjoituksesi käytetään.

If you make a donation to the Singularity Institute, you can choose which grant proposal your donation should help to fill. Any time a grant proposal is fully funded, it goes into our “active projects” file: it becomes a project that we have money enough to fund, and that we are publicly committed to funding. (Some of the projects will go forward even without earmarked donations, with money from the general fund — but many won’t, and since our work is limited by how much money we have available to support skilled staff and Visiting Fellows, more money allows more total projects to go forward.)

Any remaining money allocated to partially funded grants on Feb 28 (at the close of the Challenge Campaign) will be returned to the general fund.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-12-20T01:00:00.000+02:00

H+ Magazine #5

2009-12-10T01:00:00.000+02:00

H+ Magazinen talvinumero julkaistu.

Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers 2009

Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory

Net piracy: The people vs the entertainment industry

Burt Rutan: Behind the scenes at SpaceShipTwo roll-out

ProDigits: The world's first bionic finger

F F F F F F F

2009-11-29T15:11:00.000+02:00

Race is on to use embryonic stem cells in humans

Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020

Addicted To Being Good? The Psychopathology of Heroism - Extreme-altruistit. Aiemmin: Sankarit ja psykopaatit

The myth of the starship

Such an interstellar capability isn't going to look much like a "ship". It's going to look more like a DVD balanced on a microwave beam, or a can of beans hanging below a light sail energized by lasers powered by huge orbiting solar power stations. There won't be any biological agencies aboard: just AGIs or something equivalent ported out of a fleshbody's cranium. No hands, only nanotech assemblers. And after a voyage of decades or centuries it's going to have to stop — somehow braking at the other end — then spend more decades farming rocks, slush and sunlight to build ever-bigger physical structures until it can build the equipment with which to phone home.

Lisää videoita ja puheita

2009-11-20T14:23:00.000+02:00

YleX Mielipidevanki: Transhumanisti uskoo 1000 vuoden elinikään - Jani Moliis radiohaastattelussa.

Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction - Julian Savulescun puhe Sydneyn oopperatalossa.

A Universe From Nothing - Lawrence Kraussin puhe universumin synnystä ja yksinäisestä galaksista kaukana, kaukana kaikesta.

Medibots: The world's smallest surgeons

Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder General" with power to appoint militias, create laws

Esitelmiä ja videoita

2009-11-18T15:19:00.000+02:00

Tulevaisuuden teknologiat - teknologian tulevaisuus - Jose Cordeiro esitelmöi Helsingissä 23.11. Tilaisuuden järjestävät yhteistyössä Tieteen ja teknologian vihreät ja Suomen transhumanistiliitto.

Singularity Universityn luentoja:
Andrew Hessel - Introduction to Synthetic Biology
Ralph Merkle - An introduction to Molecular Nanotechnology

Bloggingheads.tv Robert Greene & Eliezer Yudkowsky

Top 10 Cyborg Videos

Gizmodo - This Cyborg Life
Normal Was Never Cool: Inception of Perception
Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be?

Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an "unfair advantage" in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years—and were still comfortably categorized as "disabled"—were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society's regard of a disabled athlete as an "inspiration" (cue the patronizing "awwwww") to a legitimate threat to other athletes ("Uh, what the hell do we do now?").

Tele Scouter - Silmälasikääntäjä.

The amazing man who drives car with thought-powered arms after losing limbs in accident

Don't pack your parachute: Totally free fall

Muistilinkkejä

2009-11-08T17:53:00.000+02:00

I am unable to feel most emotion: I have alexithymia. AMA
I am unable to feel pain, hot, or cold. (I have CIPA) AMA

The Dad's Army of British cryonics

"In America, we didn't do it until we started regular animal experiments. You need to establish a teaching and training environment. Read the book The Knife Man, about John Hunter, one of the greatest men in your country. The greatest surgeon in London, and they wouldn't even let him lecture in the official facilities. He had to build his own building in his home to teach his students." Darwin feels he has much in common with Hunter, a prophet without honour. "He created disciples, students who went all over the world and took what he taught them. That's what we were trying to do; establish an environment to create a self-perpetuating professionalism."

Philips food probe - Diagnostic kitchen, home farming, food printing.

Changing the World Panel

2009-11-03T18:12:00.000+02:00

Changing the World Panel -- Singularity Summit 2009 -- Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

Jätän nämä tähän

2009-10-31T16:42:00.001+02:00

Korporaation haastattelussa syväjäädytysmiehet - Kryoniikasta Radio Rockissa.

Seuraava renessanssi - Jyrki Kasvi tekijänoikeuksista.

Perinteisillä tekijänoikeuksilla rahaa tekevä sisältöteollisuus on valitettavasti keskittynyt vastustamaan teknologian kehitystä sen sijaan että se olisi etsinyt uusia toimintatapoja. Mieleen tulee Tanskan muinainen kuningas Knuut II Suuri, joka antoi kantaa valtaistuimensa meren rantaan ja käski nousevaa vuorovettä pysähtymään sen sijaan että olisi opetellut uimaan.

Are Good Deeds a License to Misbehave?

"I helped my parents with chores, so I don't have to help my friends." We have a baseline sense of what society considers appropriate, moral behavior, and we have a sense of where we fit in that. If we do something that is better than our norm, we balance it out with something a bit devious: it's a zero-sum game.

How habitable is the Earth?

The point is this: we are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history. And while survival outside that niche is possible with the assistance of a horrendously complex toolkit we call "civilization", we've yet to try it somewhere where we can't count on the basics (free oxygen and triple point water).

Sacked adviser criticises Brown

Prof Nutt said drug laws should not be influenced "petty party politics" -- "There's no point in having drug laws that are meaningless and arbitrary just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down hard on drugs. That's undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws."

My husband has a virtual girlfriend - Love Plus, koska todellisuus ei riitä.

Ovelat kortit

2009-10-25T18:11:00.003+02:00

The Sneaky Card

Can Drugs Make You Love Someone You Don't? - Jos rakkaus ei nouse itsekseen, ota rakkausviagraa.

They do know, for example, why you suddenly become as excited as a schoolgirl, get butterflies in your stomach and can’t eat or sleep when you first fall in love. "Natural amphetamines are triggered in the brain and do what any natural or synthetic amphetamine does," explains Francoeur. "They give you that hyped-up feeling." So basically, you’re on speed. If you’re lucky when your brain eventually comes down, endorphins kick in. "These are the natural opiates, like serotonin" says Francoeur, "these give us the feelings of relaxation and security that come with long-term love." Combine endorphins with oxytocin, otherwise known as the "bonding" or "cuddling" hormone, and, tah-dah, you’ve got a long-term relationship.

New research shows clean smells promote moral behavior, aikaisemmin Graffiti and litter lead to more street crime - Tulevaisuuden kukille tuoksuvat ihmiset pukeutuvat kirkkaisiin kimonoihin ja asuvat puhtaissa, pastellinsävyisissä huoneissa.

Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science, or New Technology?

“It’s technology that gives rise to both modern science and the economy, and we tend to think of it in reverse — that science gives rise to technology and the economy gives rise to technology. But technology is more fundamental than either one.”

Muistilinkkejä

2009-10-22T17:03:00.000+03:00

The First Augmented Human International Conference - Megève, France, April 2-4 2010.
The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence - Lugano, Switzerland, March 5-8 2010.

One Ultrarunning Problem, Solved for Good - Ultramaratoonarit poistattavat häiritsevät varpaankynnet.

“A lot of them look at their toenails as useless appendages, remnants of claws from evolutionary times long ago. I’ve heard them say, ‘Toenails are dead weight.’ ”

Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension

Take the peculiar case of an individual known as BW. As BW drove his car one day, the trees and buildings by the road began to speed by, as if he were driving at 300 kilometres per hour. BW eased up on the accelerator, but the cityscape continued to whizz by. Unable to cope with the speed of the world around him, BW stopped his car by the roadside. While BW perceived the world as having accelerated, in reality what had happened was that BW had slowed down. He walked and talked in slow motion: when his doctor asked him to count 60 seconds in his head, he took 280 seconds to do it. It turned out that he had a tumour in his brain's frontal cortex.
--
In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. -- But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Erythropoietin boosts brainpower

Muistilinkkejä

2009-10-20T17:14:00.000+03:00

Virus Is Found in Many With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - Krooninen väsymys paljastui virustartunnaksi. Mikä muu voisi olla tuntematon virus? Ujous, tiukkapipoisuus, hajamielisyys, kömpelyys?
Generation reveal: there's nothing they won't post online
Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn
PredictionBook - Kuinka varma olet?
How Safe is the HPV vaccine?, Drugs World - Infografiikkaa.
Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
Kids dope up to get 'high' - Humatrope, a designer drug for preteens that some experts call "Miracle-Gro for kids." -- Shortness now is seen as a treatable condition, and parents, without accounting for genetic predisposition, are taking their kids' height into their own hands.

Sensaatiota asian sijaan

2009-10-17T16:17:00.001+03:00

Alcor vastaa Larry Johnsonin sensaatiohakuisen Frozen-kirjan älyvapaisiin väitteisiin.

Mr. Johnson was caught in his own web of deceit when one of his claimed errors in the Ted Williams case was exposed as false. He was also forced to admit that he tried to profit from the death of baseball great, Ted Williams by charging visitors to his website $20 to view alleged photos of Mr. Williams' cryopreserved head.
--
The sensationalized reference to the use of a "hammer and chisel" in a cryopreservation demonstrates either Mr. Johnson's ignorance or an effort to hoodwink the public. In a surgical context, those instruments are called a "mallet and osteotome" commonly used by orthopedists for surgical procedures involving bone.
--
Johnson's statements about tissue debris, tuna, and cats are fictionalized accounts crafted for maximum tabloid shock value, as is nearly the entirety of his book.
--
As Nightline asked in the lead-in to the segment, "is this self-styled whistleblower just out to make money?" The answer is a resounding yes.

Samankaltaisia väitteitä esitti myös Sports Illustrated vuonna 2003.

Virtues Portrayed as Vices
Perhaps the most unfair aspect of the allegations against Alcor is that conscientious and well-justified procedures were perceived as wrongdoing.

* Why does Alcor remove heads? Because, according to Alcor, that allows the best possible preservation of the brain. The brain is the primary target of preservation in cryonics.
* Why doesn't Alcor just remove the brain? Because the brain would be injured in the process.
* Why does Alcor make two small holes in the skull? To properly monitor the brain.
* Why does Alcor get "cracks"? All large organs treated with chemicals to suppress ice formation develop invisible fractures during deep cooling. Alcor was the first institution anywhere to discover and monitor fracturing with a unique acoustic (sound detection) technology. Nobody would even know about this problem were it not for Alcor's extraordinary efforts to measure and document it during cryonics cases.
--
Consider if a journalist did this expose of the funeral industry: "Funeral Home Scandal: Bodies injected with poison, organs mutilated, remains stuffed into wood boxes and covered with dirt!" It's all true, right? Of course, if a disgruntled apprentice embalmer went to a sports magazine describing in graphic detail the use of a trocar during embalming of a sports celebrity, or the physical effects of cremation, he would be escorted out of the building by security.

MTV3:n uutisen sisältämiin asiavirheisiin löytyy korjauksia kryoniikkaseuran blogista.

Hyviä kuplia ja hopealuoteja

2009-10-07T17:11:00.001+03:00

Muistilinkkejä

2009-10-03T12:00:00.001+03:00

The Singularity Summit 2009 - Tapahtumaa voi seurata mediasivulla.

Mini-FAQ on Artificial Intelligence - Michael Wilsonin vastauksia.
Cryoethics: Seeking Life After Death - Bioethics-lehdestä.
The oldest living things in the world - Valokuvia maailman vanhimmista elävistä.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-10-02T01:00:00.000+03:00

Smart drugs 'should be allowed’ - “If socioeconomic inequalities in education are readily tolerated by society, then it would be hypocritical to apply this criterion selectively to nootropics and not to other performance enhancing strategies.”
Increase in 'academic doping' could spark routine urine tests for exam students - "It is apparent that the failures and inconsistencies inherent in anti doping policy in sport will be mirrored in academia unless a reasonable and realistic approach to the issue of nootropics is adopted."
Scientists develop nasal spray that improves memory
NYC Man Survives After Heart Stops For 45 Minutes
Craters Show 1970s Viking Lander Missed Martian Ice by Inches
By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain

"The form of opposition from fundamentalist humanists, and fundamentalist naturalists – that we should make no change to nature [or] to human beings – is directly contrary to the nature of human beings, because we are the species that goes beyond our limitations," counters Kurzweil. "And I think that's quite a destructive school of thought – you can show that hundreds of thousands of kids went blind in Africa due to the opposition to [genetically engineered] golden rice. The opposition to genetically modified organisms is just a blanket, reflexive opposition to the idea of changing nature. Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it."

Muistilinkkejä

2009-09-25T13:46:00.000+03:00

Tiede-lehti 10/2009 on erikoisnumero ihmisen tulevaisuudesta.
The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future
Bionic Eye for the iPhone
Miruko: Wearable eyeball robot interface
Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics - "This is not cheap labor, and it's not occupational therapy," he says. "We simply do a better job."

Muistilinkkejä

2009-09-21T17:41:00.002+03:00

Color-Blind Monkeys Get Full Color Vision - Värisokeat orava-apinat saavat ihmisen värinäön geenisiirrolla.

Scientists make paralyzed rats walk again after spinal-cord injury - a combination of drugs, electrical stimulation and regular exercise

Project ‘Gaydar’ - Kaveripiirisi kertoo oletko kaapissa.

If You Love Your Gadgets, Tear Them Apart

A clear observation from teardowns is they keep getting more difficult, as gadgets progressively become smaller, more complex and more tightly packed with components.

Is the Internet melting our brains? No!

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

The Referendum

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret. -- The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control.

An Operating System for the Mind

Today - surely we've seen enough evidence of this! - if you simply follow the rules, do what you're told, do your job and stay out of trouble, you will be led to ruin. It's like sitting on a log floating in a river: it works for a while, and seems like the safest place to me, but all the while, you're approaching a waterfall.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-09-17T16:28:00.000+03:00

What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist's University
The Future of Human Enhancement
Blueprint for a better world
100kGarages
The 2009 SENS Conference

H+ Magazine #4

2009-09-09T13:00:00.003+03:00

H+ Magazine Fall Issue - Syksynumero ilmestynyt ja piakkoin saatavilla myös rajoitettuna paperiversiona. Toivottavasti tulevaisuudessa myös kivikaiverruksina ja käsin kopioituina papyrusversioina - koska kunnon tulevaisuus tarkoittaa enemmän vaihtoehtoja, ei vähemmän.

It's like this: a few have commented that it's weird that a futurist magazine should choose an archaic format. -- While I have no love for Victorianism, this is the kind of future that attracts me – a future where new technology expands our options, including our options to work and play within forms and worlds that may have been long since rendered archaic (or disintermediated). A future (and a present) where we drive the technoculture more and the technoculture drives us less.

The age of enhancement

Evolution, he thinks, has so optimised the brain that its capacities operate in a fragile equilibrium. His team has engineered ordinary mice to learn quicker and better, but these bionic creatures are less able to apply their knowledge flexibly. However, as Giese acknowledges, some of us may be willing to make these kind of trade-offs. -- One day, in theory, science may crack the trade-off problem. It may be feasible to strengthen one capacity with minimal or no cost to another. Even so, enhancement will never automatically equate to improvement.

The curious case of the game show neuroscientists, or how NOT to research an online community - SurveyFail

Kehittyvä ihmiskunta

2009-09-06T13:15:00.000+03:00

Kaj Sotala: Kehittyvä ihmiskunta - uuden teknologian uhkaavat mahdollisuudet (Finn Lectura 2009)
ISBN: 978-951-792-433-7
212 sivua
Kustantajahinta: 37 euroa
Tilaa kirja

Uunituore suomenkielinen starter pack kehittyvien teknologioiden mahdollistamista riskeistä ja hyödyistä - ihmisen tehostamisesta, persoonallisuuden muokkauksesta, elämän pidentämisestä, supertekoälystä - sekä niihin liittyvistä eettisistä ongelmista ja ehdotetuista ratkaisumalleista.

Puhuvat silmät

2009-09-04T01:00:00.001+03:00

Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers - US National Science Foundationin rahoittama raportti ihmisen parantelusta.

The Woodstock Film Festival - Teemana tänä vuonna transhumanismi.

Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You - Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Digital Synesthesia

While the first people to reprogram their senses are likely to be people with a sense that has failed them, the technology will likely trickle down. Eventually, the hard lines between our five senses may be blurred. And in a world where everything is programmable, five may be a choice, not a limit.

Top science body calls for geoengineering 'plan B'

If humanity wants to avoid the worst effects of climate change, it must be ready to safely deploy geoengineering methods as and when necessary, the report says.

Ten things you should know about nanotechnology

Jotain todellista

2009-09-03T01:00:00.002+03:00

Käytä enemmän kuin aivojasi

2009-09-02T01:00:00.001+03:00

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine - Näyttääkö tämä blogi siltä, että välitän täydellisyydestä?

We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality." -- To some, it looks like the crapification of everything. But it's really an improvement

Forget Shorter Showers - Pikkunäpertely kotipiirissä ei auta, jos planeetan korjaaminen kaipaa terraforming-luokan työkaluja.

We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Common Sense Is Worthless in Science - Muistutus siitä, että ihmismäisillä aivoilla ajattelu on epätäydellinen työkalu maailman ymmärtämiseen. Sinun täytyy käyttää enemmän kuin pelkästään aivojasi.

Atheism vs Theism may seem like a battle of wits - Ja tämän vuoksi uskontoa ei pitäisi syöttää lapsille.

Peukalosääntöjä valinnoista ja vapaudesta

2009-09-01T21:41:00.000+03:00

Kysymyksiä mailitse: Miten suhtaudut valinnanvapautta rajoittaviin asioihin? Ei kai toisten vapautta pidä kunnioittaa niin paljon, että heidän antaisi tehdä vahingollisia valintoja? Vaikka optimistina luottaisit siihen, että jokainen käyttää vapauttaan vastuullisesti, eivät kaikki niin tee. Miten paljon sekä tänään että positiivisessa tulevaisuudessa tarvitaan yhteiskunnallista valtaa ja valvontaa?

Yleisluonteisia kysymyksiä, joihin minulla ei ole näppäriä yhden lauseen vastauksia valmiina, joten pohdin yleisluonteisesti millaisia peukalosääntöjä käytän miettiessäni näitä asioita.

Periaatteessa haluan tietysti mahdollisimman paljon valinnanvapautta, mahdollisimman paljon hyviä vaihtoehtoja ja mahdollisimman paljon kykyä valita parhaista vaihtoehdoista parhaat. En ole välttämättä optimisti nykyihmisyyden suhteen, mutta olen optimisti ihmisyyden potentiaalin suhteen. Parhaassa tapauksessa kaikki voisivat muuttaa itsensä (sopivalla teknologialla) järkeviksi ja hallita omia impulssejaan niin, ettei mitään erityistä ulkoista valvontaa tarvita, mutta tällainen best case scenario on aika kaukana toteutumisesta. Se on kuitenkin kätevä virtuaalinen päämäärä.

Ensimmäinen peukalosääntö on yksinkertaisesti se, että jokainen tehköön mitä haluaa kunhan ei vahingoita tekemisillään muita. Itselleen vahingollisia asioita saa valita, mutta tarjottimelle pitäisi kasata myös sellaisia vaihtoehtoja, että itsensä vahingoittaminen tuntuu tyhmältä vaihtoehdolta niiden rinnalla.

Toinen peukalosääntö on siis se, että hyvistä valinnoista pitäisi tehdä mahdollisimman helppoja ja kannattavia, vahingollisista valinnoista taas mahdollisimman hankalia ja kannattamattomia.

Kolmas peukalosääntö on, että valintoja tehdessä haittoja ja hyötyjä on punnittava järkevästi. Järkevästi ajatteleva pohtii tupakoinnin ominaisuuksia etukäteen (onko riippuvuus kalliiseen ja terveydelle haitalliseen aineeseen sopiva hinta hetkellisistä hyvänolontunteista?) ja päättää, ettei aloita polttamista.

Neljäs peukalosääntö on, että teknologian ja yhteiskunnan kehittyessä kaikkia valintoja on punnittava yhä uudelleen ja muokattava uuden tiedon valossa. Absoluuttisen hyviä tai huonoja valintoja ei ole, poikkeustilanteessa huono vaihtoehto voi yllättäen muuttua parhaaksi.

Viides peukalosääntö on, että vapauksien väliaikaiseen polkemiseen täytyy olla aina painava syy (esim. vaarallinen tartuntatauti) ja poikkeustilan aikana päämääränä tulisi olla vapauksien palauttaminen mahdollisimman pian, ei vallitsevan poikkeustilan ylläpito.

Jos vahingoitat teoillasi muita, muut voivat eristää sinut jonnekin missä et aiheuta vahinkoa. Esimerkiksi tupakoitsijat eristetään väliaikaisesti tupakkakoppiin, jotta he eivät aiheuta vahinkoa kanssaihmisille. Samaan aikaan tupakoitsijoille täytyy kehittää myrkyttömiä, ei-addiktoivia vaihtoehtoja ja riippuvuutta poistavaa lääkitystä, jotta he voivat muuttaa valintaansa (moni haluaa lopettaa, mutta riippuvuus tappelee vastaan). Täysi kieltolaki on huono ratkaisu, mieluummin tönäisyjä oikeaan suuntaan.

Sisäisten rajoitusjärjestelmien puuttuessa on pakko käyttää ulkoisia rajoitusjärjestelmiä. Jos rikolliset vahingoittavat muita, heidän vapauttaan rajoitetaan väliaikaisella eristyksellä, kunnes heidät voidaan parantaa vahingollisista taipumuksistaan tai yhteiskunta muuttuu sellaiseksi, etteivät heidän rikolliset taipumuksensa enää merkitse mitään (rattijuopumusta on hankala harrastaa, jos autot ohjaavat itse itseään, tai ääriesimerkkinä surrogaattien yhteiskunta, jossa fyysinen vahingoittaminen on hankalaa, koska kaikki toimivat turvallisten bunkkereidensa ulkopuolella kauko-ohjattavilla androideilla).

Ehkä nykyistä yhteiskuntaa voisi ajatella suurena vankilana, jonka muurit olemme itse rakentaneet siitä yksinkertaisesta syystä, että olemme ihmisiä eli arvaamattomia ja irrationaalisia olentoja. Jotkut ovat mallivankeja ja saavat erityisvapauksia, kun taas toiset viedään suoraan eristykseen. Kehityksen myötä ihmisiä voi päästää yhä pidemmille lomille ja lopulta ehkä vapauttaa kokonaan, jos vahingollisista ihmistaipumuksista on päässyt eroon. Nyky-yhteiskunnan säännöt ovat väliaikainen hätäratkaisu ennen parempien olentojen yhteiskuntaa, jossa ulkoista kontrollia ei tarvita - tai jokaisella on vapaus valita pysyykö muurien sisällä ihmisenä vai lähteekö ulos paremman itsekontrollin omaavana olentona.

Rakennat valvonnan itsesi sisään tai muut rakentavat valvonnan ympärillesi. Valitse siitä. Jos haluat ihmistä vahvemman androidikehon, kaupan päälle on otettava ihmistä tehokkaampi impulssikontrolli tai pysyttävä tiukasti testialueella. Tai kuvaannollisesti poltettava sitä virtuaalitupakkaa virtuaalisessa tupakkakopissa.

Luistele sinne mihin kiekko on menossa

2009-08-23T18:00:00.001+03:00

Kauneusihanne

2009-08-20T19:45:00.000+03:00

Tasapainon vuoksi

2009-08-16T15:00:00.002+03:00

An Open Letter to John C. Wright - Hal Duncanin vastaus John C. Wrightin homofobiseen kiihkoiluun. Wright oli ennen vuotta 2003 suhteellisen järkevä tyyppi, mutta sitten hän sai sairaskohtauksen, näki näkyjä ja kääntyi ateistista uskovaiseksi eli tapahtui Luukanen-Kildet tai Phineas Gaget. Ihmismieli on heikkoa tekoa, yksi pieni sairaskohtaus voi muuttaa typeräksi. Wrightin kaltaiset herättävät lähinnä sääliä, ei harhaisuus kepillä hakkaamalla parane.

Empire Off The Grid - Dean Kamenin saaresta.

Scientists Make Oxygen Out of Moon Rock

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. - Ihmiset jahtaavat pieniä päivityksiä uudelleen ja uudelleen kuin kissat laserpistettä, jahtaaminen muuttuu tärkeämmäksi kuin saalis.

Panksepp says a way to drive animals into a frenzy is to give them only tiny bits of food: This simultaneously stimulating and unsatisfying tease sends the seeking system into hyperactivity. -- If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly.

Neljä singulariteettileffaa

2009-08-14T20:00:00.001+03:00

Four Singularity Movies - Neljä dokumenttielokuvaa teknologisesta singulariteetista tämän vuoden aikana. Todennäköisesti vähintään yksi on huono.

Transcendent Man debuted earlier this year, The Singularity Film and The Singularity is Near will both premier before year’s end, and We Are The Singularity is still in production. All four movies have the same general topic and largely similar casts of characters, but each views the future through a different lens.

Where tech and philosophy collide

Tumors feel the deadly sting of nanobees

About six millionths of an inch in diameter, the nanoparticles are large enough to carry thousands of active compounds, yet small enough to pass readily through the bloodstream and to attach to cell membranes.

Leijona ja perhonen

2009-08-11T18:26:00.000+03:00

The Lion And The Butterfly - Paul D. Fernhoutin tarina.
Robots to get their own operating system
How to read 300% faster in 20 minutes
High-tech hearing aid the ultimate iPod accessory
Professor sequences his entire genome at low cost, with small team - a Stanford University professor reports sequencing his entire genome for less than $50,000 and with a team of just two other people.

Joka neljäs haluaisi

2009-08-09T14:37:00.001+03:00

Päivän Hesarissa on sivun juttu Ray Kurzweilista otsikolla Ihmiskunnan suuri loikka. Ei sisällä mitään erityisen uutta asiaa, mutta jutussa esitetään kysymys: haluaisiko ihminen todella yhdistyä koneen kanssa?

The Way We'll Be: Cyborg Status vastaa kysymykseen sopivasti, että 41,175 ihmisen kyselyssä yksi neljästä olisi valmis laittamaan parantavan sirun päähänsä.

--Would you agree to have a computer chip implanted in your brain if it would make you immune to disease?
Yes: 25%
No: 54%
Not sure: 21%

Avustettu itsemurha ja turha murha

2009-08-07T19:49:00.001+03:00

I'll die before the endgame, says Terry Pratchett in call for law to allow assisted suicides in UK - Jos mieli alkaa näyttää katoamisen merkkejä, on parasta toimia ajoissa ja tehdä etukäteen selväksi, että aikoo itse päättää kuolemansa ajankohdasta sen sijaan, että odottelisi passiivisesti 'luonnollista' lähtöä.

I have met Alzheimer's sufferers who are hoping that another illness takes them away first. Little old ladies confide in me, saying: 'I've been saving up my pills for the end, dear.' What they are doing, in fact, is buying themselves a feeling of control. I have met retired nurses who have made their own provisions for the future with rather more knowledgeable deliberation.

Santeria priest in Euless can resume goat sacrifices - Eläimiä saa uhrata vetoamalla uskontoon, mutta rastafarit eivät saa polttaa kannabista vetoamalla uskontoon. Reilua meininkiä Teksasissa. Oikean eläimen tappaminen mielikuvitusolennon verenjanon tyydyttämiseksi ansaitsee Vuosituhannen Turhake -palkinnon.

Robottivideoita

2009-08-05T19:00:00.000+03:00

Cyborg-walkers stride toward Japan's robotics future - Kolme japanilaista patikoi robotiikkakonferenssiin robottijaloilla. Lisäjalat ovat tulevaisuuden kulkuneuvo.

Juokseva robotti yhtyy mielipiteeseen.

What's Behind Japan's Love Affair with Robots?

"Robots have a long and friendly history in Japan, and humanoid robots are considered to be living things and even desirable members of families," says Robertson. While popular culture in the west often casts robots as forces of evil that pose a threat to world peace — or worse, job security — Japan "tends to see robots as a force for good," says Damien Thong

Vilkaisuja kulissien takana ahkeroiviin robotteihin: Nagoyan robottikokit työssään.

FlexPicker lajittelee muffinsseja kuin hyperaktiivinen hämähäkki.

KIVA-robotit tekevät varastotyöstä vähemmän vaivalloista.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-08-04T15:18:00.000+03:00

Government watchdog considers ban on IQ booster drugs - Pohditaan samalla kahvinjuonnin kieltämistä työpaikalla, etteivät kahvinjuojat saa epäreilua etumatkaa kivennäisvedenjuojiin verrattuna tai ettei "luonnollinen" satunnaistarkkaavaisuus menetä historiallista asemaansa keinotekoisten boostereiden vuoksi.

The medical scientists pointed to the growing use of drugs designed to maintain attention or keep people awake. They cited the use of drugs, such as modafinil and methylphenidate, in the workplace to aid professional performance and by the military to increase problem-solving skills and reduce impulsive behaviour.

Blue Rats Move Again After Food-Dye Injection

Lista Singulariteettiyliopiston ensimmäisistä 40 opiskelijasta.

Master Life Faster - Paul Lemin kirja ja wiki. Tutkimuksista napattuja neuvoja elämän eri osa-alueille tiiviisti ja nopeasti.

'Guerrilla' stem cell clinic raided by police - Huijarit rahastavat Unkarissa ruiskuttamalla asiakkailleen kantasoluja melko sattumanvaraisesti.

Uusia remiksejä vanhoista blogikirjoituksista

2009-07-29T20:16:00.001+03:00

Vanhojen kirjoitustensa lukeminen tuntuu tunnetusti siltä kuin lukisi jonkun toisen ihmisen tekstiä. Sanavalinnat ovat kömpeliä, vitsit vanhoja ja kuluneita. Nuoremman minänsä kirjoituksiin palaaminen tuntuu omituiselta, joten olen tietysti mennyt takaisin päivittämään niitä ja tehnyt yhdistelmäremiksejä vanhoista blogikirjoituksista. Koska muuttuminen ja muokkaaminen on niin kuin jutun pointti. Uutta tuuheutta jaetun eksokorteksin pölyisille peruukeille.

Lisäksi pieniä päivityksiä ainakin Kuolemattomuus FAQiin ja Kryoniikka FAQiin.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-07-29T17:00:00.000+03:00

Teaching Robots the Rules of War - Robotti ei menetä malttiaan, ei pelkää uhrautua, ei ammuskele siviilejä puolinukuksissa eikä kiduta sotavankeja huvikseen.

“My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can,” says Dr. Arkin. “That’s the case I make.”

Education and Learning: Still in the Middle Ages - Niin, miksi esimerkiksi (pääsy)kokeissa käytetään edelleen lyijykynää ja pyyhekumia? Keskiaikaista touhua, modernit ihmiset käyttäisivät näppäimistöä ja tekstinkäsittelyohjelmaa.

This suggests that science has yet to be applied, or at least successfully applied, to learning. Everywhere we have applied the scientific method, the last few centuries have brought radical changes… And learning stays comparatively still.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-07-26T18:08:00.000+03:00

Awesome wearable computer setup is powered by Sony VAIO UX UMPC

Monkey's Brain Can "Plug and Play" to Control Computer With Thought

Robot Trash Collectors Are Roaming the Streets of Italy

Jos siinä ei ole kosketusnäyttöä, se on viallinen

Love in 2-D

“Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.” Honda insists that he’s advocating not prurience but a whole new kind of romance. If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those signals while looking at an inanimate character?

Kasvissyöjät ja lihansyöjät

2009-07-21T21:18:00.001+03:00

Televisiosarjassa True Blood vampyyrien ei tarvitse enää juoda ihmisverta, koska he voivat juoda synteettistä verta. He voivat elää rauhassa ei-verenjuojien kanssa, koska synteettinen veri on tarpeeksi hyvää ja ravitsevaa.

Kuvitellaan maailma, jossa lihansyöjät ovat kuin vampyyreja. Lihansyöjillä on halu tappaa viattomia eläimiä ravinnokseen. Kasvissyöjät elävät päivällä ja lihansyöjät ovat yöllisiä saalistajia, joille kasvissyöjät iskevät vaajan sydämeen. Eräänä päivänä keksitään synteettinen liha, joka kelpaa lihansyöjille. Lihansyöjien ei tarvitse enää metsästää eläimiä, koska synteettinen liha on tarpeeksi hyvää ja ravitsevaa. He tulevat ulos arkuistaan ja elävät tasavertaisina kasvissyöjien keskuudessa.

Hyväksyvätkö kasvissyöjät keinolihansyöjät yhteisöönsä? Lihansyöjillä on edelleen primitiiviset metsästysvaistot, joten kasvissyöjät ehkä miettivät kaksi kertaa päästävätkö lihansyöjää eläintarhan vartijaksi tai jättävätkö yksin kotiin lemmikkieläimen kanssa. Mutta suurin osa luultavasti hyväksyy keinolihansyöjät.

Jää tietysti pieni kasvissyöjien ääriliike, joka ajattelee keinolihan vain ylläpitävän metsästysvaistoja ja haluaa tappaa kaikki lihansyöjät, jotta maailma olisi varmasti turvallinen paikka eläimille.

Ja pieni joukko äärimmäisiä lihansyöjiä haluaa palata entisaikojen metsästystapoihin, koska kasvissyöjien maailma tuntuu liian kesyltä ja keinolihasta puuttuu jahtiromantiikka.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-07-15T17:30:00.000+03:00

Singularity Summit 2009 - New Yorkissa 3-4. lokakuuta.

Toxic Substance Allows Birds to "See" Magnetic Field

Cryptochrome is also present in the human eye, but our amount of superoxides is even lower. That's because superoxides reduce longevity, so human evolution has put a premium on longer life spans instead of on better steering. In birds, however, evolution has favored a bit of cellular damage in return for the navigational benefits of magnetic vision, the researchers conclude.

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

In some cases, patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.

Plantagon - Vertikaalifarmi kasvihuonepallon sisällä.

Not Only Dogs, but Deer, Monkeys and Birds Bark to Deal with Conflict
Holy f*@!: Swearing alleviates pain - Onko näillä jotain yhteistä?

Muistilinkkejä

2009-07-10T01:00:00.000+03:00

New clues in search for elixir of youth

Mice on rapamycin, which was first discovered in soil fungus from Easter Island, lived about 10 per cent longer than other mice. Kaeberlein says that the drug's ability to extend lifespan when taken late in life is "exactly what you'd want from an 'anti-ageing drug'". -- "It's set a high bar for the field," agrees David Sinclair, a molecular biologist at Harvard University Medical School in Boston. "It's also the first time that a drug has worked so late in life"

Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence

-- But then they changed the rules. Instead of giving P. polycephalum a fourth blast of cold air, they did nothing. The slime mould's reaction was remarkable: it slowed down again, in anticipation of a blast that never came. -- It's worth taking a moment to think about what this means. Somehow, this single-celled organism had memorised the pattern of events it was faced with and changed its behaviour to anticipate a future event. -- The Japanese paper rang a bell with Max Di Ventra, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. He was one of the few who had followed Chua's work, and recognised that the slime mould was behaving like a memristive circuit.

My top 10 Frightening Scientific Papers

Positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience

Posthumaaneja roolipelejä ja parkouria

2009-07-09T01:00:00.001+03:00

Eclipse Phase - Sääntökirja tulossa tänä kesänä ja filmioptio varattu.

FreeMarket - Yhteistyöpeliä avaruusasemalla.

The Runner -Exploit yourself- from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

Apple iPhone to Replace Your Hearing Aids?
Additionally, the application continuously keeps a recorded buffer of what it hears, allowing you to quickly replay the last five to thirty seconds of a misheard conversation.

Why Music Moves Us

And of course people self-medicate with music all the time. Broad surveys have found that nearly everybody reports listening to music by themselves for the purpose of enhancing or altering their emotional state. -- even amid uncertainty about music’s origins, we can still use songs to pump ourselves up or calm ourselves down, ease pain and anxiety, bond with others or simply move people to tears. “Music is the most direct and mysterious way of conveying and evoking feeling,” Sacks professes. “It is a way of connecting one consciousness to another. I think the nearest thing to telepathy is making music together.”

Skippaa suoraan avainlinkkeihin

2009-07-08T01:00:00.002+03:00

One step closer to an artificial nerve cell -- possible to program the unit such that the release of neurotransmitters takes place as often or as seldom as required
What’s on your mind – microelectrodes offer poke free brain control -- new micro electrocorticography (ECoG) technology -- placed under the skull, but over brain areas where it would be risky to place penetrating electrodes
Coating technique helps bionic implants fit right in -- coat the implants with a material called synthetic hydroxyapatite -- plasma-spraying is traditionally used -- into a bath of electrolyte solution and applying an electric current -- virtually indistinguishable from the body's own material
Coming Soon: Photographic Memory in a Pill? -- a protein that can extend the life of visual memory significantly-- boosted in mice, the rodents' visual memory retention increased, from about an hour to almost 2 months
50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine
List of open source healthcare software
Robot brain jumps bodies to do human bidding
Blind man sees wife for first time after having a tooth implanted into his eye
Nike Hindsight - Pyöräilylasit lisäävät sivunäköä.

The Surrogates -traileri

2009-07-04T18:29:00.001+03:00

Muistilinkkejä

2009-07-01T12:00:00.000+03:00

Highlights From Day One At Singularity University

I hesitate even to call the 40 attendees of the University “students”, for this term brings to mind images of youths in high school or undergraduate studies that are still at the very beginning of their learning curves. Nearly all of the 40 attendees of Singularity University are at the Ph.D level or beyond in their professional and academic careers. Visiting scholar or simply professional might be a more appropriate term.

World's First Controllable Molecular Gear At Nanoscale Created

Real-time Control Of Wheelchair With Brain Waves

Water should be a human right

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-26T16:00:00.001+03:00

Tekoälyä, laserpulsseja ja pöytätehtaita

2009-06-23T17:00:00.000+03:00

The AI Report - Vassar, Bostrom, Norvig, Goertzel ym. Forbesin spesiaalissa.

Living Safely with Robots, Beyond Asimov's Laws

-- should robots be programmed with safety rules, or should they be created with the ability for safety-oriented reasoning? Should robot ethics be based on human-centered value systems, or a combination of human-centered value systems with the robot’s own value system? Or, legally, when a robot accident does occur, how should the responsibility be divided (for example, among the designer, manufacturer, user, or even the robot itself)?

Laser Research Grant - Lahjoita rahaa Nason Schoolerin SENS-tutkimukseen lipofuskiinin poistamiseksi laserilla.

How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, or Hurt, Homeland Security - Älä kuvittele uusia ja erikoisia terrorismiriskejä, kuvittele uusia ja erikoisia ehkäisykeinoja todellisiin riskeihin.

RepRap-video.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-17T12:00:00.000+03:00

Asevelvollisuus lakkautetaan Ruotsissa 2014 - Suomi laahaa tässäkin asiassa jälkijunassa.

Things I Won't Work With - Aineita, joiden kanssa ei välttämättä halua leikkiä.

Archeological Inventory at Tranquility Base - Tavaroita, jotka astronautit jättivät kuuhun.

12 ways to check if your news sources are lying to you

Get Smarter - Miksi avoimuus, muokattavuus, päivitettävyys ja modulaarisuus ovat tärkeitä.

In a world of ongoing technological acceleration, today’s cutting-edge brain implant would be tomorrow’s obsolete junk—and good luck if the protocols change or you’re on the wrong side of a “format war” (anyone want a Betamax implant?).

Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-14T01:00:00.000+03:00

Maapallon maankaltaistamista

2009-06-13T17:25:00.000+03:00

What is Geoengineering? from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Catastrophe or Radical Action? from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Yksi piraatti voi vallata koko aluksen

2009-06-09T01:00:00.000+03:00

Amelia Andersdotter: "Piratismi ei ole yhden asian liike vaan ideologia ja maailmankuva"

"- Lääkepatentit tekevät lääkkeistä kalliimpia ja vaikeammin saatavia. AIDS-lääkkeet pelastaisivat miljoonia ihmisiä kehitysmaissa, mutta niitä tarvitsevat ihmiset eivät saa niitä käyttöönsä, koska halvat korvaavat lääkkeet ovat patenttilainsäädännöllä kiellettyjä. Jos nämä köyhät maat rikkovat lääketeollisuuden patentteja vastaan pelastaakseen kansalaisiaan, niitä rangaistaan estämällä niiden pääsy unionin sisämarkkinoille, eikä niillä ole varaa siihen."

How Pirates Shook European Politics

One pirate can hijack a whole ship.

Rickard Falkvingen haastattelu puolueen perustamisvuodelta 2006.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-08T00:45:00.000+03:00

Easily grossed out? You're more likely a conservative - Yök-reaktio on matelija-aivoisuuden merkki.

Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something -- gay sex between consenting adults, for example -- is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm.

Robots at War: The New Battlefield - Ihmissotilaat eivät lisää itseensä robottiosia, robottisotilaat korvaavat ihmisarmeijat olemalla parempia. Ja koska ihmisuhreja tulee yhä vähemmän, sota muuttuu showksi ja show on helpompi aloittaa kuin sota.

Targeting the Brain with Sound Waves - Ultraääniä päähän vaihtoehtona invasiivisille implanteille.

The Right Stuff - NASA:n kehittämä urheilujuoma astronauteille tulee kauppoihin.

231

2009-06-07T02:31:00.001+03:00

h+ Magazine kesänumero

2009-06-04T19:30:00.003+03:00

h+ Magazinen kesänumero ilmestynyt.

Search (and Destroy) Engines - Ren rou sou suo. Lihallinen hakukone, närkästyneenä sohvalta noussut lazyweb.

A billion-year ultra-dense memory chip

Sight for sore eyes - Näkökyky takaisin kantasoluilla.

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-03T20:30:00.000+03:00

Inmamusys - Intelligent Multiagent Music System. Endless original, copyright-free music.

A person with no musical knowledge whatsoever can use this artificial musical composer, because the user need do nothing more than decide on the type of music.

Project Natal - Microsoft panostaa keho-ohjattavuuteen, mutta aivo-ohjattavuus nousee vauhdilla rinnalle.

Robot brain jumps bodies to do human bidding - Siirretään vanhan koirarobotin persoonallisuus uuteen ihmisrobottiin, kyllä se siihen tottuu.

Instant sex change served up by video software

Is this the future of food? Japanese 'plant factory' churn out immaculate vegetables

Muistilinkkejä

2009-06-01T13:30:00.000+03:00

Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run! - Osuvaa satiiria.

Is Star Trek A Religion? - Onko tällainen vertailu verrattavissa ajan tuhlaukseen?

Piraattipuolueen kannattajakortit koossa.

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired - Ilman nettiä ei ole elämää.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

Legalize it? Medical evidence on marijuana blows both ways

"Although we like to say we separate politics from science, with medical marijuana, that's really difficult," Abrams says. "It depends on who does the study, where it's published and what their agenda is." -- "But at this point, I'd be in favor of legalization. I wouldn't encourage anybody to smoke any substances, because of the potential for harm. But I don't think it should be stigmatized as an illegal substance. Tobacco smoking causes far more harm. And in terms of an intoxicant, alcohol causes far more harm."

Vapaus, runsaus, vertaisverkko

2009-05-29T01:44:00.004+03:00

Lars Gustafsson äänestää piraatteja

Tämän jälkeen kirjailija toteaa, kuinka merkillisen paljon tilanne vuonna 2009 kansalaisoikeuksien osalta muistuttaa tilannetta, joka vallitsi Ranskassa viimeisinä vuosikymmeninä ennen vuoden 1789 vallankumousta. Maassa käytiin tuolloin rajua taistelua lehdistön vapaudesta. Kokonainen uusi ideoiden maailma oli nousemassa esiin uuden kehittyvän painoteknologian ansiosta. Ratsiat salaisiin kirjapainoihin, pamflettikirjoitusten takavarikoinnit ja itse painovälineiden takavarikoinnit olivat arkipäivää. Pidätysmääräyksiä jaeltiin päivittäin samalla kun yöaikaan salakuljetettujen painotuotteiden virta - joka sisälsi kaikkea pornosta poliittiseen propagandaan - jatkui vuolaana Preussin puolelta Pariisiin. Vuosien 1730 ja 1780 välillä Ranskan valtion sensoreiden määrä nelinkertaistui, ja samassa suhteessa lisääntyivät ratsiat laittomia painotaloja vastaan. Jälkikäteen me tiedämme, että koko tuo taistelu oli täysin turhaa. Yritys pysäyttää uudet aatteet ja ideat sensuurin ja ratsioiden avulla pikemminkin kiihdyttivät näiden aatteiden leviämistä.