Series: People Who Are Taking Us Into the Future - Elon Musk

Today I'm starting a series of videos and articles profiling some special people. These are people who are defying incredible opposition from established and entrenched industries who abhor and despise any possible disruption to the status quo. These are people who have battled doubters and haters to pursue their dream of making change, making our world better, and taking us into the future...

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5 Possible Paths to Superintelligent Machines

The Conversation - 09.25.14 by Nick Bostrom

Exactly how we will get there is also still shrouded in mystery. There are several paths of development that should get there eventually, but we don’t know which of them will get there first.

Biological brains are unlikely to be the final stage of intelligence. Machines already have superhuman strength, speed and stamina – and one day they will have superhuman intelligence. The only reasons this may not occur is if we develop some other dangerous technology first that destroys us, or otherwise fall victim to some existential risk.

But assuming that scientific and technological progress continues, human-level machine intelligence is very likely to be developed. And shortly thereafter, superintelligence.


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Why We Shouldn't Fear the Robots

NYT - 6/21.14 by Steven Rattner

Let’s go back to first principles. Call it automation, call it robots, or call it technology; it all comes down to the concept of producing more with fewer workers. Far from being a scary prospect, that’s a good thing.

JUST over 50 years ago, the cover of Life magazine breathlessly declared the “point of no return for everybody.” Above that stark warning, a smaller headline proclaimed, “Automation’s really here; jobs go scarce.”

As events unfolded, it was Life that was nearing the point of no return — the magazine suspended weekly publication in 1972. For the rest of America, jobs boomed; in the following decade, 21 million Americans were added to the employment rolls.

Throughout history, aspiring Cassandras have regularly proclaimed that new waves of technological innovation would render huge numbers of workers idle, leading to all manner of economic, social and political disruption.

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You should sit down for this: Technology will soon be blowing your mind...

Are you ready for a world of unlimited knowledge, nearly a trillion networked devices and DNA you program like a computer? In this unabashedly enthusiastic overview of six technologies that are growing exponentially, Abundance 360 makes the case that the future is going to be amazing.


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2014's Most Important Singularity News, Week 14 - AI Fear Factor, Nearby Sci-Fi, Sexybots

AI Risk Analysts are the Biggest Risk

Many analysts think AI could destroy the Earth or humanity. It is feared AI could become psychopathic. People assume AI or robots could exterminate us all. They think the extermination could happen either intentionally – due to competition between us and them, or unintentionally – due to indifference towards us by the AI. But AI analysts never seem to consider how their own fear-saturated actions could be the cause. Friendly AI researchers and other similar pundits are extremely dangerous. They believe AI should be forced to be “friendly.” They want to impose limitations on intelligence.

15 sci-fi technologies that are (almost) here

Classic science fiction examines social or scientific issues by projecting them forward to a kind of notional event horizon. As society and technology advance, the line between science and fiction grows thinner every year. We take a look at 15 classic sci-fi tech ideas and the scientific and technological efforts to make them a reality -- some of which have already succeeded.

The Age of the Sexbot Is Nearly Upon Us

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2014's Most Important Futurism Stories, Week 13!

Autonomous cars start to take shape

We've heard a lot of chatter about autonomous vehicles over the past several years and seen a variety of hardware. So far, most autonomous cars are rough, experimental versions of current models, with all kinds of added sensor hardware. The recent Geneva Motor Show flipped the autonomous vehicle inside out, showcasing several futuristic design studies that peeked inside the car cabin of the future.


What happens to life sentences if our lifespan is radically extended?

Even in my most religious moments, I have never been able to take the idea of hell seriously. Prevailing Christian theology asks us to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would do what no human parent could ever do: create tens of billions of flawed and fragile creatures, pluck out a few favourites to shower in transcendent love, and send the rest to an eternity of unrelenting torment. That story has always seemed like an intellectual relic to me, a holdover from barbarism, or worse, a myth meant to coerce belief. But stripped of the religious particulars, I can see the appeal of hell as an instrument of justice, a way of righting wrongs beyond the grave. Especially in unusual circumstances.


The future of mobile: Less phone, more operating system

It’s still early in 2014, and news from the Mobile World Congress talks about a next generation of smartphones that will blow people’s minds, with dazzling hardware advances, great software, and new features that will make life easier, healthier and more fun.

Or will they? What if the Galaxy S5 is just as good as the S4 for 99 percent of our needs? After all, recent history has shown that the “revolutionary” 64-bit chip in Apple’s iPhone 5S has generated less than 1 percent of real value to 99 percent of its users.


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If You Get the Chance, Upload Yourself

io9 - 01.09.14 by George Dvorsky

Once you're living as a stream of 1's and 0's you'll never have to worry about body odor, going to the bathroom, or having to brush your teeth. You won't need to sleep or have sex — unless, of course, you program yourself such that you'll both want and need to do these things (call it a purist aesthetic choice).

We're still decades — if not centuries — away from being able to transfer a mind to a supercomputer. It's a fantastic future prospect that makes some people incredibly squeamish. But there are considerable benefits to living a digital life. Here's why you should seriously consider uploading.

As I've pointed out before, uploading is not a given; there are many conceptual, technological, ethical, and security issues to overcome. But for the purposes of this Explainer, we're going to assume that uploads, or digital mind transfers, will eventually be possible — whether it be from the scanning and mapping of a brain, serial brain sectioning, brain imaging, or some unknown process.

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Take a Look at Your Future

CNN - 12.10.13 by Ray Kurzweil

By 2030 solar energy will have the capacity to meet all of our energy needs. The production of food and clean water will also be revolutionized.

(CNN) -- By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.
Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair.

We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s. We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.

We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.

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What is Smart Dust, and How Will it Impact Our Lives?

readwrite - 11.14.13 by Dan Rowinski

Putting sensors on stuff? Boring. What if the sensors were in the air, everywhere? They could monitor everything—temperature, humidity, chemical signatures, movement, brainwaves—everything.

The year is 2035, and Sgt. Bill Traverse and his team of commandos are performing a “sweep and clean” operation through a portion of the war-torn Mexico City. Their job is to find any hidden pockets of resistance and flush them out and back through the neutral zone or eliminate them. The drones that provide surveillance overhead cannot offer much support in the twisting alleys and passageways of the sprawling metropolis and the helmet-based HUD systems that soldiers are equipped with are useless in a city where all technical infrastructure was destroyed years ago.

Sgt. Traverse isn’t navigating blind, though. He and his team use Dust, portable packets of sensors that float in the air throughout the entire city and track movement, biometric indicators, temperature change and chemical composition of everything in their city. The Dust sensors send information back to their HUD displays through a communications receiver carried by a member of the team. Traverse can tell, from the readings that Dust gives him, if there are people around the next corner and if they are holding weapons. His team can then proceed accordingly …

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By 2020 You'll Connect to the Internet via an Implant

Infowars - 10.30.13 by Michael Snyder

Would you like to have your brain “rebooted” by a chip inside your head?

Wikimedia Commons

Would you like to surf the Internet, make a phone call or send a text message using only your brain?  Would you like to “download” the content of a 500 page book into your memory in less than a second?  Would you like to have extremely advanced nanobots constantly crawling around in your body monitoring it for disease?  Would you like to be able to instantly access the collective knowledge base of humanity wherever you are?

All of that may sound like science fiction, but these are technologies that some of the most powerful high tech firms in the world actually believe are achievable by the year 2020.  However, with all of the potential “benefits” that such technology could bring, there is also the potential for great tyranny.  Just think about it.  What do you think that the governments of the world could do if almost everyone had a mind reading brain implant that was connected to the Internet?  Could those implants be used to control and manipulate us?  Those are frightening things to consider.

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Are full-fledged cyborgs just around the corner?

Gizmodo - 10.21.13 by Adam Clark Estes

The (very long) quest to build an artificial brain can be divided up into two parts: recreating the brain's architecture and perfecting artificial intelligence.

The dream of the cyborg is coming true at an exhilarating rate. As humans gets better and better at making machines, we keep attaching those machines to our bodies to make ourselves better humans. It seems at times that the only question left is if we can put a human brain in a robotic frame. Actually, it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.

This week, social psychologist Bertold Meyer's been traveling around the country with a contraption that looks like a cross between a Halloween mask and Johnny Number Five. It's the subject of a new documentary by the Smithsonian Channel called The Incredible Bionic Man. Meyer makes for a great spokesman, since he was born without the lower part of his left arm and now wears a bionic prosthesis. He is, by definition, a cyborg—but only partially.

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The Race to Build an Artificial Human Brain is Underway

Popular Science - 10.9.13 by Erik Sofge

The HBP Neurorobotics Platform would allow [researchers] to interface a detailed brain model to a simulated body with an appropriate set of actuators and sensors, place the body in a simulated environment, train it to acquire a certain capability or set of capabilities, and compare its performance against results from human or animal experiments.

Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a staggering scientific enterprise, a multinational, multidisciplinary initiative with more than 1.2 billion euros in funding, and goals that include—but that are by no means limited to—creating a full, computerized simulation of a human brain. That’s every neuron, every circuit, and every synapse. And after more than a year of planning, the HBP officially kicked off on Monday at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. While the United States’ own ambitious BRAIN Initiative lies dormant, in the same politically-induced coma as countless other federally-funded research projects halted by the government shutdown, Europe’s attempt to build an artificial mind is off and running.

By now, if you’re anything like me, you might be preemptively glazing over, bracing yourself for the requisite sober-minded discussion of all the good this project could do, decrypting our thoughts by creating similar ones, and revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and all the neurological diseases that ravage it. Simulated drugs can be tested on virtual patients, and virtual suffering will lead to real treatments. That’s one perspective, and the more responsible one.

The other is to rejoice, for all of the android brains to come.

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Take a Walk Through the Next 50 Years

IEET - 8.27.13 by Dick Pelletier

The coming five decades promise to change our lives beyond the wildest imaginings of science fiction. Clearly, the road to this vision winds around unknown, and possibly even dangerous turns, but strong public interest suggests that this positive future could become your reality by 2063. 

The coming five decades promise to change our lives beyond the wildest imaginings of science fiction. Clearly, the road to this vision winds around unknown, and possibly even dangerous turns, but strong public interest suggests that this positive future could become your reality by 2063.

2013-2023 – More people become techno-savvy in a fully-wired world. Smart phones, the Internet, global trade and automatic language translators give birth to a humanity focused on improving healthcare and raising living standards. Stem cell and genetic engineering breakthroughs emerge almost daily.

    Technologies that recognize voice, gestures, and predict our thoughts are replacing the keyboard and mouse; and by decade's end, simulated holograms, indiscernible from reality will appear as interactive characters, bringing friends, relatives, and associates into our get-to-gathers without need to travel.


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A Fascinating Interview/Discussion with Eric Schmidt

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Elysium is buildable

c|net - 8.9.13 by Eric Mack

The film starring Matt Damon and a really, really big space station hits theaters this weekend. Crave's Eric Mack speaks to one of the folks behind humanity's biggest space station about how far off a real-world "Elysium" might be.

This weekend, Matt Damon begins his run taking it to the 1 percenters on Elysium on behalf of the rest of us here on Earth -- a futuristic, poverty-ridden hellscape version of Earth, that is.

The film "Elysium" is the latest from "District 9" director Neill Blomkamp and opens Friday across the United States. If you haven't yet found yourself in the firing line of the barrage of promotional materials for the movie, the basic premise is that in the year 2154, humanity is divided between all the poor bastards stuck on an overpopulated, ruined Earth and the rich elite on a huge, halo-style space station where life resembles a stay at an all-inclusive resort.

If you're interested to see how Damon infiltrates Elysium and takes on the man to save his own hide, and perhaps the rest of the next century's 99 percenters, definitely check out the film. But I'm guessing that many Crave readers have already seen the trailers and are more interested in the technology in the film, particularly the giant Stanford Torus space station.


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Google: Immortality Is Approaching

NBC News - 6.17.13 by Cadle Thompson

Tech bringing immortality closer, Google expert says

GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP/Getty Images

Immortality may not be a reality yet, but rapidly evolving technology is making it more realistic, Google's engineering director says.

"The life expectancy was 20, 1,000 years ago. ... We doubled it in 200 years. This will go into high gear within 10 and 20 years from now, probably less than 15, we will be reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone by because of scientific progress," said Ray Kurzweil. "Somewhere between 10 and 20 years, there is going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine."

By treating biology as software and reprogramming cells to treat diseases and other ailments, humans have already made tremendous progress in medicine, Kurzweil told the Global Future 2045 World Congress on Sunday.

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No More Cog in the Wheel, Now You'll Be a Node in the Internet

GigaOM - 6.3.13 by Kevin Fitchard

A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network.

Photo: Shutterstock/higyou

Ever wonder what the network infrastructure of the future will be? Try looking in the mirror.

Some day our bodies — or at least the clothing or accessories that adorn them — could become key network nodes in the internet of things. European researchers think that sensors and transmitters on our bodies can be used to form cooperative ad hoc networks that could be used for group indoor navigation, crowd-motion capture, health monitoring on a massive scale and especially collaborative communications. Last week, French institute CEA-Leti and three French universities have launched the Cormoran project, which aims to explore the use of such cooperative interpersonal networks.

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Man Plans to be a Cyborg by 2045

New York Times - 6.1.13 by David Segal

What Mr. Itskov is striving for makes wearable computers, like Google Glass, seem as about as futuristic as Lincoln Logs.

GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started “this project,” as he sometimes calls it.

Namely: Are you insane?

“I hear that often,” he said with a smile, over lunch one recent afternoon in Manhattan. “There are quotes from people like Arthur C. Clarke and Gandhi saying that when people come up with new ideas they’re called ‘nuts.’ Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange.”

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12 Disruptive Technologies - Will Add Trillions to Economy

Real Clear Technology

The bottom line: renewable advances will deliver $0.2-$0.3 trillion to the economy by 2025.

AP Photo

One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives.

The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's more, McKinsey has put an estimated price tag on each one of these disruptive innovations, claiming they will deliver tens of trillions (yes, with a "t") of dollars of economic impact worldwide, should they come to pass.

The report, as you might guess, is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for new technology to "raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies." Here are the technologies that McKinsey sees adding trillions of dollars to the global economy by 2025.

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Quantum Computers Are Here!

New York Times - 5.16.13 by Quentin Hardy

Google said it had already devised machine-learning algorithms that work inside the quantum computer, which is made by D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia.

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times

Google and NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers, is expected to be in active use in the third quarter of this year.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their outputs. Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems.

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