AIIB Aims to Build a Green Future People watched closely when China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) last year. The new multilateral development bank boasted an initial capital of $100 billion, a founding membership of 57 countries (with 24 more waiting to join end of this year), and a mandate to be “lean, clean and green.” After its first annual general meeting and seminars this week, it appears that the AIIB is starting to move in a positive direction. I attended the recent meetings, where I listened to senior bank officials talking about the new bank’s ambition for infrastructure investment. It was clear that AIIB has a huge opportunity to foster green infrastructure and usher in sustainable development in countries around the world. A Need for Green Infrastructure It is well documented that infrastructure is fundamental for socio-economic development, and that infrastructure bottlenecks hinder economic growth. So how is the bank faring so far in living up to expectations and its own goals?
Michel Bauwens on the pitfalls of start-up culture Our second extract from the transcript of the C-Realm Podcast Bauwens/Kleiner/Trialogue, Michel Bauwens talks about the disconnect between young idealistic developers and the business models many of them default to, unaware that there’s better options. I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right? The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things.
Putting A Computer In Your Brain Is No Longer Science Fiction Like many in Silicon Valley, technology entrepreneur Bryan Johnson sees a future in which intelligent machines can do things like drive cars on their own and anticipate our needs before we ask. What’s uncommon is how Johnson wants to respond: find a way to supercharge the human brain so that we can keep up with the machines. From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, his science-fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer’s or concussions. The medical device is years in the making, Johnson acknowledges, but he can afford the time. “Human intelligence is landlocked in relationship to artificial intelligence — and the landlock is the degeneration of the body and the brain,” he said in an interview about the company, which he had not discussed publicly before. [Tech titans' lastest project: Creating the fountain of youth] [Building an artificial brain]
Amazon Wants To Include Peer-to-Peer Payments In Its “Real World” PayPal Competitor Earlier today, the WSJ published a report on how Amazon is building a Kindle-based point-of-sale payments service for local merchants using technology it picked up via its Gopago acquisition –something we actually reported on back in December. In fact, this looks like just part of what Amazon has in mind. The e-commerce giant is also developing a solution for person-to-person payments — bypassing banks and other payment networks — putting it in even closer competition with P2P payment giant PayPal. The P2P payment system, as it’s being conceived, would have a mobile component to it, and it would be cloud-based, so presumably usable over desktop, too. Those Amazon phones we and others keep talking about could be coming soon — the latest that we’ve heard, by the way, is that they may get announced in the next 60 days and ship this summer. Our team is charged with extending Amazon’s value proposition (price, selection, and convenience) from e-commerce to commerce in general. Photo: Flickr
The Future Of Quantum Computing, AI & More Andy Rubin is not only the co-founder of Android, but also the man who ignited Google's robotics efforts. He did leave Google in 2014, but that does not make him less of a presence in the field of cutting-edge technology. Rubin recently gave a talk at Bloomberg's Tech Conference in San Francisco, where he pointed out the possibilities stemming from merging AI advancements and quantum computing. The biggest promise of such a marriage would be conscious intelligence capable of powering up every piece of technology. "If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one," Rubin says. He goes on to say that the entity "just has to be conscious." Rubin controls the Playground Global investment fund, which bets on companies that put every effort into transforming this idea into a reality. The AI expert notes that there are quantum computing firms that are almost ready to build consumer-ready quantum devices. © 2016 Tech Times, All rights reserved.
We want to replace YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs, and more with decentralized apps based on proof of bandwidth. We need developers. Welcome to Bitcloud. Status Quo + Robots Will Create A 'Permanent Underclass' (Pew) Robots are taking all the jobs. But are we, the average, moderately skilled humans, screwed, or aren't we? Let me just get it out of the way now: We are, unless there are drastic, immediate changes to education and economic systems around the world. The dominant narrative going around today about Pew Research's new report on artificial intelligence and the future of jobs is that experts can't really decide whether automation is going to make working obsolete, that it's really a toss up whether robots will simply create new jobs in other sectors as they destroy ones in other. That's true, in one sense: The 1,896 futurists, CEOs, journalists, and university professors questioned for the report were split in half over robots will "displace significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers," with 52 percent of respondents agreeing that "human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."
Peer Property "the outcome of the process (of Peer Production) is a collective good. In the industrial era, cooperation, typically in a corporate setting, resulted in a proprietary product owned by the company. But, in the network age, cooperation becomes what Benkler calls “commons-based peer production," and it is the production of this commons, i.e. what is held in common, that erodes the foundations of old-fashioned property." By Paul Hartzog at Peer Property is a concept coined by Michel Bauwens to indicate the innovative nature of legal forms such as the General Public License, the Creative Commons, etc... Peer Property create universal common-access property regimes. The major legal forms of such peer property is the General Public License. What is the key difference between the GPL and CC approaches Michel Bauwens: It helps to distinguish between different forms of sharing and purpose. Commonism and Ownerism 1. 2. 3. Bifo
UK Copyright Extension Challenges 3D Printing A recent extension of UK copyright for industrially manufactured artistic works represents "a direct assault on the 3D printing revolution," says Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge. The UK government last month extended copyright for designs from 25 years to the life of the designer plus 70 years. In practice, this is likely to mean a copyright term of over 100 years for furniture and other designed objects. As Ars reported last year, a consultation was held by the UK government on how long the transitional period for the new rules should be. Writing on the Private Internet Access site, Falkvinge says that the copyright extension will have important consequences for makers in the UK and EU: "This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century." In an e-mail to Ars, the legal expert Andrew Katz, partner at Moorcrofts LLP, agreed with Falkvinge's view.