Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game. Singularity Q&A. Originally published in 2005 with the launch of The Singularity Is Near. Questions and Answers So what is the Singularity? Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.
And that’s the Singularity? No, that’s just the precursor. When will that occur? I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. Why is this called the Singularity? The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Okay, let’s break this down. Indeed. So how are we going to achieve that? We can break this down further into hardware and software requirements. And how will we recreate the algorithms of human intelligence? You mentioned the AI tool kit. Absolutely. But how can that be? Dawn of Midi. Better Than Human | Gadget Lab. Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force.
But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.
First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. And it has already begun. Click to Open Overlay Gallery Click to Open Overlay Gallery 1. Self-Tracking Apps To Help You 'Quantify' Yourself : All Tech Considered. Hide captionNoah Zandan shows off his Zeo sleep-tracking headband.
His other self-tracking devices are on his wrists. Noah and his father, Peter, are both part of the growing "Quantified Self" movement. Elise Hu/NPR Noah Zandan shows off his Zeo sleep-tracking headband. His other self-tracking devices are on his wrists. Technology has made it easier than ever to track your activity levels, your sleep cycles, how you spend your time, and more.
Interested in giving self-tracking a try? If you're just getting started, the most "mainstream" self-tracking devices are the Fitbit, Jawbone UP, and Nike Fuelband. For heart rate monitoring devices, Garmin and Polar both make options that self-trackers like. Food monitoring apps include MyFitnessPal and MyPlate. If you want to dig a little deeper, these self-tracking devices, apps and systems might teach you something that you don't know about yourself.
Robots on the rise in the workplace. Technology has always been one of the great drivers of the U.S. economy, constantly creating jobs and eliminating some in the process. But recently, MIT professors tell Steve Kroft, technology has been eliminating more jobs than it creates -- a net loss that poses a danger to the delicate economic recovery. Kroft's report on this technological revolution, often characterized by advanced robotics, will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. "Technology is always creating jobs. Fewer Americans on a percentage basis are holding jobs now than 20 years ago. The irony is that the economy is growing. One reason for this was automated warehouses, which surprised McAfee. Kroft visits a huge warehouse in Devens, Mass., where about 100 employees work with 69 suitcase-size robots that navigate the massive facility, moving product from shelf to shipping point faster and better than humanly possible. No Mercy For Robots: Experiment Tests How Humans Relate To Machines : Shots - Health News.
Hide captionCould you say "no" to this face? Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand recently tested whether humans could end the life of a robot as it pleaded for survival. Christoph Bartneck Could you say "no" to this face? Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand recently tested whether humans could end the life of a robot as it pleaded for survival. In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study. In Milgram's study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer "learner" in another room.
As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the "learners" began to clearly suffer. Treating Machines Like Social Beings Consider the work of Stanford professor Clifford Nass. YouTube The Implications. Morgan Harris - Introducing Muse: Changing The Way The World Thinks. Matt Mills: Image recognition that triggers augmented reality. Morgan Harris - Seeing Beyond the Human Eye | Off Book | PBS. Translation Software For Music Makers : The Record. Hide captionJace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ Rupture. Xabi Tudela/Courtesy of the artist Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ Rupture. When you hear a song on the radio today, there's a good chance that song was made using a computer. There's also a good chance that it was made using Western music software like, say, Ableton Live. That makes sense, of course, for Western musicians, who are used to things like a 4/4 time signature and a 12-tone scale.
A plug-in is a little program that adds abilities to a larger software application, like a video player or a synthesizer. Sufi Plug Ins were created by Jace Clayton, also known as DJ Rupture. "Spain has a really active community of Moroccan musicians, and I was making music with a violinist named Abdelhak Rahal," Clayton says. In addition to rhythm, his software was not compatible with Eastern melodies. "It is a scale insofar as it's a group of notes with a specific tuning, but in a way its more than a scale.
One maqam, for example, is used for love songs. Crazy Smart: When A Rocker Designs A Mars Lander. NASA engineer Adam Steltzner led the team that designed a crazy new approach to landing on Mars. Rachael Porter for NPR hide caption toggle caption Rachael Porter for NPR NASA engineer Adam Steltzner led the team that designed a crazy new approach to landing on Mars. It's called the seven minutes of terror. In just seven minutes, NASA's latest mission to Mars, a new six-wheeled rover called Curiosity, must go from 13,000 mph as it enters the Martian atmosphere to a dead stop on the surface. During those seven minutes, the rover is on its own. The team that invented the EDL system has spent nearly 10 years together, designing, building, testing, tweaking, retesting and retweaking.
Because the new Mars rover is five times heavier than its predecessors, NASA had to come up with a totally new landing system. The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will approach Mars at 13,000 mph. I don't know about you, but I tend to think of engineers as serious buttoned-down types. This is it! Elon Musk's Mission to Mars | Wired Science. Maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk Photo: Art Streiber When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world.
All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than Elon Musk. And he is leading the private space race with SpaceX, which is poised to replace the space shuttle and usher us into an interplanetary age. It’s no wonder the character of Tony Stark in Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., was modeled on Musk: This is superhero-grade stuff.
The Cure For Internet Addiction? Mindfulness. Designed by Dmitry Baranovskiy for the Noun Project The creative routines of famous creatives has been popular internet fodder this year. The Pacific Standard thinks this obsession and trend of emulating famous artist’s habits is problematic, to say the least. The larger picture, says Casey N. Cep, is that most artists did not always followed these routines they’re known for anyways. In the end they would have still produced genius work regardless of the kind of breakfast they ate, hours they worked, or whatever office supplies they used. The idea that any one of these habits can be isolated from the entirety of the writer’s life and made into a template for the rest of us is nonsense. We often talk about process at 99U, so we think this is a great debate. Read the rest of the article here. Remee - The REM enhancing Lucid Dreaming Mask by Bitbanger Labs.
Like Bitbanger Labs on Facebook Remee has been selected as a finalist for the William McShane Fund, by Buckyballs & Brookstone! If you think Remee deserves to be available at Brookstone, vote here! Yes, really! For nearly as long as recorded human history, the idea of consciously recognizing and controlling our dreams has been around.
From the Hindu Upanishads to Aristotle's On Dreams, people have been puzzling out the mysteries of lucid dreaming for centuries. To us, this is kind of a shame, sort of like being unaware of the existence of books or music. This is an easy one. There's a lot more to Lucid Dreaming than simply acknowledging that it's real and crossing your fingers. Boom. Here's some great info for people new to the concept: WNYC's Radiolab - We've been listening to Radiolab for ages, so we thought it was great when they recently released a short about someone using lucid dreaming to overcome a recurring nightmare. You bet. . $100 Reward: Remee SPACE EXPLORATION Limited Edition!
The Turing Problem. 100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn't kind to Alan Turing. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted under a British law that prohibited "acts of gross indecency between men, in public or private. " In 1936, a young Alan Turing devised a machine that would ultimately change the world. You: So? Us: So this was back when the only "computers" were people doing math by hand. Turing lived his whole life with machines. The idea that machines would become our equals was unsettling for many of Turing's peers.
Alan Turing was arrested and convicted in 1952 for activities that are no longer illegal in England. Read more: Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. IBM's Quantum Computers Could Change The World (Mostly In Very Good Ways) 101010: That's the number 42 represented in binary, which is the mathematical way today's binary computers see every single piece of information flowing through them, whether it's a stock price, the latest Adele track, or a calculation to generate an MRI of a tumor.
But now IBM believes it's made progress in developing quantum computers, which don't use binary coding. It is not overstating the matter to say this really may be the ultimate answer in computing machines. Quick, mop your brow and don't worry: The science isn't too hard to grasp and the revolution, when it comes, could rock the world. In a very good way. First, a little background: Computers today, everything from the chip controlling your washing machine cycle to the screen you're reading this on, rely on binary math to work. Now, what if instead of simply being able to do math with ones and zeros, a computer chip could work with bits that included other numbers?
That's quantum computing. Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit. When Gaming Is Good for You. Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life. Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world. After Conquering Consoles, Hard-Core Gaming Shifts To Mobile : All Tech Considered. Hide captionGears of War: Judgment hit stores on Tuesday. Courtesy Microsoft Studios This generation of video game consoles will be remembered for over-the-top, knock-you-out-of-your-seat extravaganza games like Halo, Call of Duty — and Gears of War, a juggernaut of a game.
The first three Gears of War sold 19 million units, making it a $1 billion franchise. And the latest, Gears of War: Judgment, has just hit stores at a crucial time in the video game industry — sales are down, new Xbox and PlayStation consoles are due out, and mobile gaming is growing. In a lot of ways, what's happening with Gears of War is emblematic of what the industry as a whole is going through.
"Gears of War specifically, to me, is a game that defined the HD generation of gaming," says Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios, which publishes and develops games for the Xbox. "It is one of a kind," he says. Ahead Of The Curve Big changes are coming to the game industry. Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers : All Tech Considered. Hide captionSarah Allen, CEO of Blazing Cloud, works with user experience designer Anton Zadorozhnyy in the company's offices in San Francisco.
Ramin Rahimian for NPR Sarah Allen, CEO of Blazing Cloud, works with user experience designer Anton Zadorozhnyy in the company's offices in San Francisco. This story is part of our series, The Changing Lives of Women. Sarah Allen has been the only woman on a team of computer programmers a few times in the more than two decades she has worked in the field. Most notably, she led the team — as the lone female programmer — that created Flash video, the dominant technology for streaming video on the Web. Since only about 20 percent of all programmers are women, her experience isn't uncommon, and now she's trying to bring more women into the field. hide captionSarah Allen works with interns Lori Hsu (left) and Fito von Zastrow at the Blazing Cloud offices in San Francisco.
Recently they met with Estee Solomon Gray, the founder of a company called Mmindd. Cloud Computing: Cloud University. The recession created new demand for higher education, demand that can be met more economically, thanks to improved broadband access and decreased costs in delivering Internet services. Remarkably, the pricing of higher education has remained flat despite these advances -- presumably reacting more to the increased demand than the decreased production costs. Webinar: The New PCI 3.0 Standard Learn the steps to take to get your company ready for PCI DSS 3.0 changes coming January 2015. We cover all of the details you need to know as we head to the deadline to complete and pass your PCI DSS 3.0 audit.
View the PCI Webinar Series Now. How do you e-pledge a sorority? We may soon find out. Four factors will contribute to this move: Increased broadband access: The number of broadband users in the U.S. rose from 48 million in 2000 to 232 million in 2012, with 1.7 billion broadband users estimated globally. Ripe for the Taking How will the market evolve? Fortunes to Be Made. What Will The Ed Tech Revolution Look Like? The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level. In Cyberwar, Software Flaws Are A Hot Commodity. Syrian Cyber-Rebel Wages War, One Hack At A Time. Firms Brace For Possible Retaliatory Cyberattacks From Syria : All Tech Considered. RIP, Aaron Swartz. Program or Be Programmed: Douglas Rushkoff, Leland Purvis: Amazon.com. Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code. Morgan Harris - The Culture Of Reddit | Off Book | PBS.
Facebook's Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search | Wired Business. Bump On The Road For Driverless Cars Isn't Technology, It's You : All Tech Considered. If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who's Liable? : Planet Money. With Smarter Cars, The Doors Are Open To Hacking Dangers : All Tech Considered. In Kenya, Using Tech To Put An 'Invisible' Slum On The Map : Parallels. The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever | Wired Magazine. Genome Sequencing For Babies Brings Knowledge And Conflicts : Shots - Health News.
A Rare Mix Created Silicon Valley's Startup Culture. Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing | Wired Business. Rio Goes High-Tech, With An Eye Toward Olympics, World Cup : Parallels. Taking The Battle Against Patent Trolls To The Public : All Tech Considered.