From the May 15, 2011 meeting of The Fulfillment group in Second Life

Serendipity Seraph:
To get to our dreams we need a clean vision and a lot of dedication to making it fully realized. I don't buy that we will just be gently slid *cough* into some utopia or some place we want to go. It is time for the species to grow up. It is time for each one of us to grow up. Not by letting go of dreams but by refining them and dedicating ourselves to fulfilling them. It is time to literally become the change we seek. It can happen no other way. Yes, we will get bits and pieces of the tech. But to what end? Do we expect singularity to be something that just happens to us or is it something we bring into being and help shape?

Khannea Suntzu:
"Singularity is not defined as 'singular thing' but rather 'the point at which X becomes opaque to our understanding'." Well let me say it simpler. In the future things happen. Then more things happen. Then all these things have sex and have babies and so many things happen we won't know what hit us. And then we have no idea what comes next. It'll be weird. We can't see. Not being able to see means it's intransparent. Intransparant means opaque. That is saying the future is 'opaque'. You can't model it anymore. That also means that bad things can happen, and good things. While some transhumanists think the future is this undifferentiated glob of potential, I say, it is being formed RIGHT NOW by choices WE RIGHT NOW make or are too lazy to make.

Toward A Collective Mind

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2006/01/lets_build_the_.html

The concept of an emerging collective intelligence has the right "feel" to me. I'm not sure how it will develop, or whether we will recognize it when it does, but I would like to help it along. The idea is still nebulous enough that I don't know which skills would most benefit the effort. At least I can be counted on as an enthusiastic participant, and perhaps the emerging intelligence will eventually know each of us well enough to know just which of our strengths would be most useful.

Can You Read My Math?

In the film "Colussus: The Forbin Project", there comes a time when the two computers (Colussus and Guardian) decide to abandon "our" math and invent their own more efficient symbolic communication language.

In the Star Trek Next Generation episode "11001001", the Binars communicate much more efficiently with their own binary language than humans.

This article from BusinessWeek http://businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm?chan=gl reports one attempt to begin encoding all information mathematically. From the article:

"How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.

By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves."

How will we know when the computers processing all this information begin to self organize into intelligences with their own language, one which is far superior to English or any other existing language?

We're spending a lot of time and effort to get computers to understand our language. Perhaps it is we who should be learning theirs.

The Birth Of A New Intelligence

"There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment."

This quote from Kevin Kelly's Wired article, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html is very perceptive. I wonder how we will recognize this new intelligence? And perhaps more importantly, how it will recognize us.

The End Of The AI Winter?

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,99691,00.html

"brains are not computers; they are memory systems that make a model of the world."

I believe Jeff Hawkins may be on to something here. Perhaps this new way of looking at the brain will finally lead to true AI.

Redesigning Yourself

http://www.betterhumans.com/Features/Reports/report.aspx?articleID=2003-05-19-1

If you were able to "redesign" yourself, what would you change first?

And what would you change *last*?

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Digital

These Miss Digital World entries point to a wave of the future--when digital agents appear as real as your next door neighbor. So who would you vote for and what do think about simulations in general?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/virtual.html?tw=wn_tophead_4