Free and Open Data as a Worldwide Economic Engine | The Great Debate UK. –Cameron Neylon is Advocacy Director at PLOS. Previously, he was a Senior Scientist at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and a faculty member at the University of Southampton. The opinions expressed are those of PLOS.– California’s governor, referring as much to the state’s financial issues as its lead in technology, has signed into law a new fund to create 50 open-source undergraduate textbooks, as well as a digital library to host them.
By being digital, the textbooks will be able to evolve rapidly as the needs of students and the state of knowledge change, but more importantly they will be made available under a Creative Commons license, allowing any individual or organization, anywhere in the world, to read, use, and remix the content. It’s not always easy for us researchers to stomach the idea of others making money off of our work, but at PLOS, when we say “open access”, we have always meant more than just making the literature of research readable. 3 | Create UIs Out of Anything, With This Kit From MIT. Mainstream computer interfaces are tough to get right, because they have to be everything to everyone--which is impossible.
Even something as "no duh" as a touch screen is going to make someone, somewhere, gripe that it’s not quite right for them. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum of the MIT Media Lab have come up with a solution to this problem that’s so weird it just might be perfect: MaKey MaKey, a kit that lets you turn any object--food, toys, clothes, whatever--into an ultra-personalized UI. MaKey MaKey works with "any material that can conduct at least a tiny bit of electricity. " For some reason, many of the suggested uses of MaKey MaKey on its website involve food: Use an apple as a computer mouse! But that’s the point of this kit: A banana piano or apple-mouse may make no sense to everyone else on Earth, but it might be perfect for me.
"Our number one goal is to open up possibility space in people’s minds and guts," Silver says. [MaKey MaKey is available for pre-order here.] Future Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events. H+ Magazine | Covering technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing--and will change--human beings in fundamental ways.
Humanity+» Blog Archive » Volunteers for H+ Magazine. The Venus Project. The Foresight Institute » More on the AI takeover. There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names: Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as Roomba or industrial robots or automated call-center systems or dictation programs.Robo habilis: Rosie the housemaid robot level intelligence, able to handle service level jobs in the real world but not a rocket scientist.Robo sapiens: up to and including rocket scientists, AI researchers, corporate executives, any human capability.Robo googolis: a collection of top R. sapiens wired together in a box running at accelerated speed, equivalent to, say, Google (the company and the search engine together).
First point: One R. googolis can’t take over the world, any more than Google could. You’d have to get to the next stage (R. unclesammus).