Category Archives: Singularity

Nanohands

Posted on by
Reply

 

EU-funded NanoHand project uses mobile microrobots equipped with delicate handling tools. NanoHand builds on the work of ROBOSEM, an earlier EU project that developed the basic technologies that are now being put into effect. The robots, about two centimetres in size, work inside a scanning electron microscope where their activities can be followed by an observer. Each robot has a ‘microgripper’ that can make precise and delicate movements. It works on an electrothermal principle to open and close the jaws, much like a pair of tweezers.

The jaws open to about 2 micrometres and can pick up objects less than 100 nanometres in size. “[It is] really able to grip micro or even nano objects,” Eichhorn says. “We have handled objects down to tens of nanometres.”

The Distinction of Past and Future

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to my subscription to Twine.com, i found this great website of Humansfuture.

future_human_evolution

It brings together subjects like Artificial Intelligence, Nano, Genetic Engineering, Transhumanism, etc, etc,… exactly all the subject matter for our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

From there i went on a surf “trip”, and discover The Next Big Thing, an initiative from BBC2 Open University.

They find their stuff at the Vega Science Trust.

Which led me discover the Classic Feynman Lectures that were put on line recently by Bill Gates on Microsoft Research under Project Tuva.

Btw, i wonder what became of Bill Gates new company, a sort of Think Tank.

White1

Microsoft Research Project Tuva presents Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman’s Messenger Series lectures within a new video player. This enhanced video player features searchable video, linked transcripts, user notes, and interactive extras.

Have a look at the 1964 lecture on “The distinction of past & future”. Dont forget this is 50 years old !

You can of course also google/bing Feynman. Here is a cool video: he starts by saying “I want to investigate everything”.

So, while the title of this post relates to future that is still 30-50 years away, it brings us back 50 years ago !

Holographic Week-End

Posted on by
Reply

Looks like i have a holographic week-end 🙂

At our Sep 2009 Innotribe, we’ll also have something holographic.

Michael Warner (CEO Quantum4D) and Ed Sesek (InfiniteZ), will show Holographic Analytics and Banking:

Holographic Analytics goes beyond pages and files to open a new universe of interconnected insights.  

Mike and Ed will show dynamic 3D holographic models of SWIFT’s global banking networks on a national scale. They will then fly into regional views and on down into a individual bank and its internal network topology.  The tour will include – among a number of potential tour stops – models of banking markets that ‘mash-up’ demographic and industry data with SWIFT traffic. 

 Holographic_Banking_Display

They also aim to show a visual model of the bank enterprise itself from several dimensions (staff activities, IT networks, etc…)  and how that those domains interact with each other and the larger banking ecosystem we help illuminate.

This includes the addition of a display platform which will allow the audience to cue up to view the same views displayed on the big screen in an experimental holographic 3D display. Users wearing polarized sun-glasses will be able to  see the above described animated network graphics ‘floating in space’ in the air between them and two screens.

Users will also be able to wear a head tracking hat and use a pen device to literally look around and manipulate the network visualizations.

The InfiniteZ Website has a fantastic tagline:

“Transforming human-computer interaction”

image

They will speak during our R&D Insights on the Innovation Floor on 16th Sep 2009 from 15:30 – 16:30, and the audience will be able to wear special glasses and play around with holographic pointers.

Singularity Summit 2009

Posted on by
Reply

If you happen to be in New-York begin October 2009, and you can spend the week-end there, something different would be to attend the Saturday-Sunday 3-4 Oct 2009 Singularity Summit.

banner_color

Very interesting line-up of speakers and not that expensive: 399$ for the 2 days if your are an early bird.

The conference is devoted to the better understanding of increasing intelligence and accelerating change.

Participants will hear talks from cutting-edge researchers and network with strategic business leaders.

The world’s most eminent experts on forecasting, venture capital, emerging technologies, consciousness and life extension will present their unique perspectives on the future and how to get there.

Select Speakers this year:

* Ray Kurzweil really does not need an introduction, but anyway: he is the author of The Singularity is Near (2005) and co-founder of Singularity University, which is backed by Google and NASA. At the Singularity Summit, he will present his theories on accelerating technological change and the future of humanity.

* Dr. David Chalmers, director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University and one of the world’s foremost philosophers, will discuss mind uploading, the possibility of transferring human consciousness onto a computer network.

* Dr. Ed Boyden is a joint professor of Biological Engineering and of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Discover Magazine named him one of the 20 best brains under 40.

* Peter Thiel is the president of Clarium, seed investor in Facebook, managing partner of Founders Fund, and co-founder of PayPal.

* Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biogerontologist and Director of Research at the SENS Foundation, which seeks to extend the human lifespan. He will present on the ethics of this proposition.

* Dr. Philip Tetlock is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It?

* Dr. Jurgen Schmidhuber is co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano, Switzerland. He will discuss the mathematical essence of beauty and creativity.

* Dr. Gary Marcus is director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and professor of psychology at New York University and author of the book Kludge.

You can subscribe to the event via the banner below.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, i strongly recommend to subscribe to the weekly KurzweilAI.net newsletter, where this week, i found the following interesting article on the first Touchable Hologram becoming reality.

3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands have been developed by researchers from the University of Tokyo. Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the hologram projector uses an ultrasound phenomenon called acoustic radiation pressure to create a pressure sensation on a user’s hands, which are tracked with two Nintendo Wiimotes….

Watch the white mouse at the very end. I can think of a couple of applications that are touch-based 😉

Virtual Worlds

Posted on by
1

Thanks to my job, i get in contact with interesting people. As preparation for the Innovation track at Sibos (called www.innotribe.com), our team is focusing on 3 themes:

  1. Cloud
  2. Crowd
  3. Mash-ups

In total we’ll have more than 40 speakers during one week, combined with speedlabs, debates, and R&D pitches. And during the last day, Guy Kawasaki will be part of our VC debate and Buyers Panel.

Detailed agenda available here.

As you have probably noticed, in my private life and endeavors (such as the Think Tank for Long Term Future), i am blurring the lines between real and virtual, between flesh & bone human and robots.

As a matter of fact, i am also blurring the lines between job and private here, and i  don’t see anything wrong with it.

What about virtual reality in a business context ?

Welcome to project Wonderland from Sun Microsystems. They will do during Innotribe @ Sibos a demo on the Virtual Bank Branch Office. In the meantime , have a look at below 2 videos, that once again proof how fast our real and virtual worlds are merging.

First listen to the project manager, Nicole Yankelovich. What’s really interesting is that the sort of people that work on this are true hybrids: a mix of nerds, psychologists, anthropological and ethnographic R&D…

This video is a hidden job advertisement, so you’re warned 🙂

But this sort of stuff and skills is really were we as a society should put stimuli and scholarships for our net.generation to be ready for 2030. Those who are 20 today will be 40 by then and our next leaders.

Then enjoy to this wonderful Wonderland scenario tour based on the preview of version 0.5 in their labs:

First time i see things like federation of worlds. I already heard about federated identities, federated clouds, federated services, but this ? No, not yet.

Oh yes, you can also restore a world in his previous state.

However, i still find that the user is forced into the developers mind of properties, cells, etc. No way i can explain this to my dad. It’s like the first time you see Windows: only if you get used to it, you start making sense out of it. You adapt to the programmer’s mind.

Think.

Tank.

Thanks to Amir for providing me the links.

Retaining our identities

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to xstof (again ;-), I discovered daily galaxy site.

Two really interesting blog entries related to our Long Term Think Tank ambitions:

The first about robots developing at warp speed.

Hans Moravec,  pioneer in mobile robot research and founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Yes, again that Carnegie Mellon University.

robota_3_3_2

Whilst today, these robots are barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, they could catch up with us within a half century."

  1. 2010: A first generation of broadly-capable "universal robots".
  2. 2015: Utility robots host programs for several tasks.
  3. 2020: Universal robots host programs for most simple chores.
  4. 2030: Robot competence will become comparable to larger mammals.

In the decades following the first universal robots, a second generation with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability will emerge. They will have a conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience, gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike, generation will abstract and reason from the world model.

Others believe that it is humans who will evolve into advanced “robots”. Their belief is that with futuristic technologies being developed in multiple fields, human intelligence may eventually be able to “escape its ensnarement in biological tissue” and be able to move freely across boundaries that can’t support flesh and blood—while still retaining our identities

Many more video material from Carnegie here.

One is about identities, privacy and social security numbers. I am sure my friends from the Belgian eID project will have a sort of déja-vu when watching the following video:

But in essence, it’s all about the changing nature our own real and perceived identity in a digital world. I should drop the word “digital”, as young people see this as “old-mans-wording”. They not talk about a “digital” camera. It’s just a camera. It’s our “world”.

The other article is about Project Blue Brain.

6a00d8341bf7f753ef011572290e9c970b-500wi

A bit scary is the statement: ""We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," That is Mr. Markram during this month’s TED Global Conference at Oxford, England.

… a simulation that recreates the activity of a human brain may produce ethical concerns.  Technically a computer that recreates a rat brain would raise similar issues but, as you’re about to see, these guys don’t have any sympathy for rats.

And not that innocent at all:

With the ability to simulate the effects of rewiring, drugs or external electric fields at an individual neuron level we can investigate enhancements (such as new senses, new cognitive modes or neuroelectric interfaces) without all the inconvenient "human rights violations" and "Crimes against humanity" such research normally entails.  We could improve our own minds – and since we’ll have just invented a silicon model operating at computer speeds in a bulletproof shell, we’ll have to.

Again, this is one of the key purposes of our Think Tank: what if all this (technological evolutionary exponential explosion) happens, what are the consequences for our value kit for the future ? For our personal and corporate values, for our ethical context, for the way we want to be human ?

And also, how do we prepare the future generation of leaders for this radically different world ?

By coincidence, one of the links on the home page of Carnegie Mellon University’s Next-Generation Computing faculty points to project Alice 3.0

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

(btw, also note that the classrooms are packed with Mac’s not PC’s)

Again, it’s again about “doing things that matter”

Why can we from Europe not set-up this sort of stimulating initiatives for our Net Generation (or Generation Y or Generation M) to prepare the next generation of leaders to be ready for 2030 ?

Augmented Reality in iPhone 3GS

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to my twine.com subscription to “Technology Trends”, i found this.

You can read the related article here.

In case you doubted that man-machine are blurring more and more everyday.

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by
Reply

Something is going on at Carnegie Mellon University. Just a couple of days ago, my friend xstof twittered about claytronics research at Carnergie.

It’s about programmable matter. Not really sure what to image ? Have a look at the following video.

image

This model car is made of programmable matter !

Today the New York Times (this is not what you call the average newspaper, i can tell you) had an article about the February 2009 private Asilomar Conference. The title says: “Association’s Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures”

On reflecting about the long term, panelists will review expectations and uncertainties about the development of increasingly competent machine intelligences, including the prospect that computational systems will achieve “human-level” abilities along a variety of dimensions, or surpass human intelligence in a variety of ways. The panel will appraise societal and technical issues that would likely come to the fore with the rise of competent machine intelligence. For example, how might AI successes in multiple realms and venues lead to significant or perhaps even disruptive societal changes?

The focus groups are on:

  • Pace, Concerns, Control, Guidelines
  • Potentially Disruptive Advances: Nature and timing

  • Ethical and Legal Challenges

    • The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

    Also in this context, the AI lab of the Carnegie Mellon University was mentioned.

    Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

    From killing to empathy is only a small step in the NYT article. Here is a robot showing empathy when you have diarrhea.

    image

    If you want some more serious stuff on this subject, i can really recommend the book “Beyond AI – Creating the conscience of the machine” by J.Storrs Hall, PhD.

    xhuman

    He talks about different “Kind of Minds”: Hypohumans, Diahumans, Epihumans, Hyperhumans.

    See also Ray Kurzweil.Net

    Think Tank – Inspiration

    Posted on by
    Reply

     

    Some interesting sources of inspiration, with thanks to xstof.

    1) Fantastic on-line magazine H+ (Human +), and transhumanistic inpired: http://hplusmagazine.com/magazine

    ad-omg-read-hplus

    In the intro by the editor of the Summer 2009 issue of the H+ Magazine, there is a wonderful setting-the-scene statement that we can also apply to our Think Tank on Long Term Future:

    Watching the news as we do, we witness incredible breakthroughs nearly every week. These are stories that would have been the “story of the year” if they had happened just a decade ago. But these days, they are quickly swept aside by the next breaking science story. They seem to come at ever increasing speeds. In this sense, we are becoming ever more aware of the implications of moore’s Law being played out in the “NBIC” (Nano, Bio, Info & Cogno) “Information science” fields.

    We hope that (among other things) we can inspire young people to study and get involved in the emerging “NBIC” sciences and technologies so as to help us transcend our genetic/biological limitations. We’re hoping that future generations will be able to live incredibly long and healthy life spans without disease, enjoy higher intelligences (perhaps augmented by computers through braincomputer interfaces), and generally be more productive and happy.

    In the Spring 2009 Issue, there was also a really cool article about the state of Nanotechnology.

    Excerpt from that article:

    If nanotechnology follows Moore’s law (transistors on a chip double every 18 months), this level of nanotechnology could occur in the next 15 years or less. The vision includes:

    • Precisely targeted agents for cancer therapy
    • Efficient solar photovoltaic cells
    • Efficient, high-power-density fuel cells
    • Single molecule and single electron sensors
    • Biomedical sensors (in vitro and in vivo)
    • High-density computer memory
    • Molecular-scale computer circuits
    • Selectively permeable membranes
    • Highly selective catalysts
    • Display and lighting systems
    • Responsive (“smart”) materials
    • Ultra-high-performance materials
    • Nanosystems for APM.

    It also includes numerous links to the coolest sites on that subject, including a link to Eric Drexler’s Nanotechnology Roadmap, dated 2007, and translated in Russian June 2009 (Elie, how is your scientific Russian ? 🙂

    2) A Web² PDF Whitepaper that is published at the occasion of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit scheduled for 20-22 October 2009 in San-Francisco.

    The whitepaper can be found here.

    Some salient extracts, that really inspire me and the folks at our Think Tank:

    Collective intelligence applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. The "subsystems" of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage: Data is the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

    Today, we realize that these insights were not only directionally right, but are being applied in areas we only imagined in 2004. The smartphone revolution has moved the Web from our desks to our pockets. Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors. Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

    With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems. As a result, the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared. 1990-2004 was the match being struck; 2005-2009 was the fuse; and 2010 will be the explosion.

    Ever since we first introduced the term "Web 2.0," people have been asking, "What’s next?" Assuming that Web 2.0 was meant to be a kind of software version number (rather than a statement about the second coming of the Web after the dotcom bust), we’re constantly asked about "Web 3.0." Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality?

    It is all of those, and more.

    The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow," an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.

    The whitepaper tackles Web² from following angles:

    – Redefining Collective Intelligence: New Sensory Input

    – Cooperating Data Subsystems

    – How the Web Learns: Explicit vs. Implicit Meaning

    – Web Meets World: The "Information Shadow" and the Internet of Things

    – Photosynth, Gigapixel Photography, and Infinite Images (example)

    – The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind

    Thrilling is the thinking on identity and information shadows of objects:

    For instance, a book has information shadows on Amazon, on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs.

    A song has information shadows on iTunes, on Amazon, on Rhapsody, on MySpace, or Facebook.

    A person has information shadows in a host of emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings, photographs, videos, and government documents.

    A product on the supermarket shelf, a car on a dealer’s lot, a pallet of newly mined boron sitting on a loading dock, a storefront on a small town’s main street — all have information shadows now.

    In many cases, these information shadows are linked with their real world analogues by unique identifiers: an ISBN or ASIN, a part number, or getting more individual, a social security number, a vehicle identification number, or a serial number. Other identifiers are looser, but identity can be triangulated: a name plus an address or phone number, a name plus a photograph, a phone call from a particular location undermining what once would have been a rock-solid alibi.

    This puts a completely different perspective on the thinking about for example the Belgian Electronic Identity Card (eID) which is based on information in the government central database and referred to by the Belgian Social Security Number.

    Why do we still need numbers ? See also my earlier post on “Do we still need identity numbers?”.

    There is also a fantastic reference to Jeff Jonas work on Identity.

    Jonas’ work included building a database of known US persons from various sources. His database grew to about 630 million "identities" before the system had enough information to identify all the variations. But at a certain point, his database began to learn, and then to shrink. Each new load of data made the database smaller, not bigger. 630 million plus 30 million became 600 million, as the subtle calculus of recognition by "context accumulation" worked its magic.

    The last paragraphs are even more stimulating:

    But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world.

    And the world needs our help.

    If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work – its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.

    It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World – that’s Web Squared.

    3) A recent interview with Ray Kurzweil at the occasion of the real start of his Singularity University.

    It little less exciting – at least of you have read his book “The Singularity is Near” – but always inspiring.

    http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-26-Inventing-the-Future.cfm

    Let the future emerge !