Edison, Jobs, Kurzweil!

Folks,

Some folks refer to Apple's Steve Jobs as the Edison of our age, building useful playthings and workplace tools that disrupt incumbent industries and transform popular culture. For Edison, it was the phonograph and motion picture camera that put the kibosh on the player piano and got folks off the front porch and into movie theaters on Saturday afternoons. With Jobs it was first the Macintosh, then the iPhone and iPad.


With both of those guys, what they essentially did was take a pile of already existing inventions and materials off the lab bench, bee's wax, a lathe, digital circuit boards and aluminum, and configure them in ways that provided a superior way to be entertained or to do work. Their inventions are not novel in an essential sense. But, there is a guy named Ray Kurzweil who actually has invented machines that do things that machines could previously not do, that extend Human capacities beyond what is possible, or at least too tedious to undertake with our own senses and limbs.


If you've ever used an optical character recognition program to convert printed text to digital information, you can thank Kurzweil. When you listen to Stevie Wonder play, you are hearing electronic instruments controlled by Kurweil's voice pattern recognition engines and sonic wave forms created by the circuits that he designed.


But there's more. Kurzweil has a remarkable record of predicting the future of Humanity and tech. Starting with his book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and then in his more recent "The Age of Spiritual Machines", he forecasts a day coming soon, when our inventions will embody characteristics that more than mimic our own capacities in dexterous thought. They will appear to us to be conscious.


Given the solid batting average that he's thus far demonstrated both in prediction and commercializing the fruits of his ruminations, despite his seemingly nutty ideas on human life extension, this fellow demands being paid attention to. We have already seen, this year, a machine named Watson, that appears to understand subtle jokes and puns. Computers are emerging from University and industry labs that can "calculate" from human facial expressions and postures the state of their user's emotions. "Androids" are being created that closely mimic the human form, right down to appearing to breathe and perspire.


Yes, do stay tuned to what this old whack job is forecasting. When the iPod is as distant a memory to civilization as rotating cylinders that seem to sing, the proceeds of Kurzweil's work may still be evolving.


S

Ray Kurzweil

Agony…

Folks,

An immortal image. Folks alive and aware today will remember the time and place of the present and ongoing tragedy in Japan, an awesome and terrible confluence of Nature's fury and Human muddling. A thousand years in the future, if our species has one, Humans will simply see themselves and their kin in this photo and likely still know too well that desolate wailing frozen for eternity in pixels.



Yes, our species may yet undo itself, or perhaps the Earth and the Universe will simply shrug us off in natural catastrophe. Still, we must keep our eye on the ball, on those things that we can control and shed our stupidity, hatreds and greed, as best we can. There is no situation that Love and Hope will not benefit.


Right now, on the other side of my Home World, brave folks are hurling themselves against a nuclear inferno to protect their own and even Humans they have never met, some a world away. Only Love and Hope permits such courage. We are capable of doing our best against all odds.

If all you can do today is say a prayer for this mother and the departed Spirit and Ghost, the Reikin (霊魂), and Yūrei (幽霊), of her lost child, do so. That can't hurt anything. Spending a moment dwelling in compassion might do us all some good.

S

The Bear is Dead

Folks,


We've lost another great and weird hero, Augustus Owsley Stanley III. The bodies pile up. The bills come due. Life marches on in History's slow parade.


Thanks, Bear. The vistas that your handiwork revealed to me and my chosen family will remain forever as indescribable as they were profound in forming my outlook and curiosity, even long after a last adventure into the realm of the Ineffable and Loving Beautiful.


Sleep in the stars, my friend and benefactor,


S

S

The Dawn of the Replicants?

Folks,


Geminoid|DK is a crude android that is passably human in appearance and action (including breathing). At present he exists only as a torso with a neck and head. But, if you added the dexterous arms and hands of NASA's Robonaut R2B and a further refined version of Honda's ASIMO P3 bipedal abilities, we would have a fair simulacrum of a mechanical humanoid body in motion. Then, add advanced versions of currently available tech for medical and commercial electronics sensors and pattern recognition (language, speech, vision, audio), the next-gen of "self aware" computers" (two or many more computers watching each others' "perceptions" and outputs)… the gizmo seems to come alive.

Today, Geminoid|DK's actions are entirely controlled by the user's actions. In this, he is merely an advanced platform for investigating Human/Machine interaction as it may exist in the near future. But, "he" also embodies the promise of an advanced form of telepresence. Imagine tying the coming iterations of mind controlled computing networked between your thoughts and a full-body prosthetic of your own proportions, your own gate and physical manner, and an approximation of your own sensorium. Care to take a stroll sans space suit on the icy shores of Titan? Want to walk past the rim of a volcanic caldera? Let's go…


S

This World Has Lost a Hero…

Folks,

This world has lost a hero. His name was Craig Lorraine, but he was known on the streets that I now inhabit as Bongo. He actually played the marimba on those streets and sidewalks incessantly, but such a lexical particular was of little matter to his colleagues in The Life. The moniker Bongo seemed to fit this great bear of a man with a voice that rumbled like jungle drums, just fine.

Many a stranger walked by this fellow and took him to be mad and utterly dissipated with booze, and in so doing never earned a little bit of the abundant, unconquerable heart that Bongo possessed and unfailingly strove to share. I can truly say, in my life full of somehow acquiring beautiful friends and even meeting the likes of the Dali Lama, none quite paralleled Bongo's sloppy poise in executing love in smile, a wink, or a single beat on those wooden keys with a mallet that was tiny in his big hands. He also was handy in offering useful advice on how break into an abandoned house to find a place to lay your head on a cold night.

We can't sugar coat the fact that it was, at the foundation of his demise, the terrible disease of addiction that snuffed out Craig's gentle fire. Stupid drunk, he fell down and hit his head. Lights out. Neither can we discount the fact that the world and the streets of my hometown has lost a living treasure, a family a loving son, and that the Universe is a little less complete with him gone.

S

Bongo

Photo: Greg Saulman

Murdering a Machine?

Folks,

What do you do when you've got a machine in front of you, or under the desk, or manifest in the cloud… and it can truly understand your natural speech, not just keystrokes? It can parse the quirks of English, its spongy melange of words and syntax from all over the Western World. It gets jokes and puns and limericks. It knows the answer to almost any factual question you put to it, and will even make good guesses at the more philosophical sort of query.

And, it can also tell how you are feeling, what your moment to moment emotional state happens to be. It responds accordingly. It feels eerily sentient, and it is aware of you. Is there a ghost in this machine?


Suppose that you get the feeling that it is conscious. What are the ethics of turning it off? What about replacing it with a "smarter" gizmo that apparently thinks and feels, but "better" than the old gadget and is cheaper and easier. You send your old friend, or is it a slave, off to be rendered into parts and precious metals, or evaporate its bits into the digital aether where all its information will be gone forever. Is this murder?

S

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. ~  HAL 9000

Very Soft Noodles…

Folks,

This link takes you to an excellent summary on the rise of fact free science posted to slashdot.org today. The anti-science agenda is based on a movement by cranks with soft heads to demote science to the status of superstition and elevate any religious, business, political or just plain loony concept (frequently all of the above) to the level of  plausibility, "just 'cuz I said so." With the summary are links for those further interested in this pox abroad in education, media, and legislation in the USA, today. Ben Franklin would be nauseous at what our will public tolerate as scientific thought and theory.

S