Op Ed

PBS NewsHour on Man vs. Machine: Will Human Workers Become Obsolete?

by Socrates
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Part of his series on Making Sen$e of financial news, Paul Solman has been showcasing the future of technology from a recent conference run by a California think tank — things such as 3-D printing of prosthetic legs and iPhone heart tests. But the conference also resurfaced an age-old question about the future of human workers. Transcript: JEFFREY BROWN: And now, more on the challenges of creating enough new jobs in an ever more automated and high-tech economy. NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman has the story. It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news. NARRATOR: American labor, management and capital. PAUL SOLMAN: Our favorite economics cartoon is a piece of free market propaganda from decades ago that envisioned a sort of cornucopia machine of the future, manned by the happy and lucky American worker, given the name King [...]

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Top 10 Reasons We Should Fear The Singularity

by Socrates
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Why do we fear the technological singularity? Well, let me give you what I believe are the top 10 most popular reasons: 1. Extinction Extinction is by far the most feared as well as the most commonly predicted consequence of the singularity. The global apocalypse for the human race comes in many flavors but some of the most popular ones are: the supersmart terminator AI’s – a robopocalypse; nanotechnology gone rogue – the so called grey goo scenario, home-made Smart Weapons of Mass Destruction – used by terrorists and nihilists; genetic modifications or mutations – turning us into living-dead zombies; science experiments gone wrong – the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that engulfs the planet… In short, the fear is that, as Bill Joy notoriously put it: The Future Doesn’t Need Us. 2. Slavery Perhaps the second most common reason for fearing the singularity is the potential slavery or subjugation of the entire human race. [...]

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An Atheist Who Wears a Cross and a Verb! What About You?!

by Socrates
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The issue of religion is one of the more common questions that I ask most of my guests on Singularity 1 on 1. But this is hardly the most important thing during any conversation. Still, if we are talking about the future of humanity, it may be relevant to know a little more about the person’s past and present religiosity. In this way when we move on to topics such as cosmology, metaphysics, ethics or epistemology, we are more mindful of our own implicit presumptions. The danger in the above approach is that one might embrace the label a bit too tightly and thereby ruin the potential for a genuine conversation and exchange of ideas. Thus we must also be aware of all the religious, intellectual, political or other such shortcuts we are using. While they can be useful in the short term, in the longer term they omit so [...]

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Douglas Rushkoff: Our On-Line Interactions Occur on Platforms Whose Function Is To Exploit Them

by Socrates
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Douglas Rushkoff is one of my favorite social ctitics on media, technology, culture and money. In this interview with Motherboard TV Rushkoff talks about technology, social media, the zombie apocalypse and the occupy movement. My favorite quote from Rushkoff’s interview: “Our interactions on line occur on platforms whose function, whose purpose is not to promote our social interaction, but to exploit our social interaction. So you have the average kid using Facebook believes that he is the customer of Facebook and that Facebook is there to help him make friends. And it’s not. The corporation is paying Facebook for Johny’s social graph. To reduce human interraction to that which is marketable to Facebook’s customers. Now, you are inhabiting a comercial environement that was constructed by people and companies in order to promote certain behaviors and attitudes from you. We have an entire way of life that is predicated on a faulty [...]

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When Vernor Vinge Coined the Technological Singularity

by Socrates
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When Vernor Vinge coined the term technological singularity few foresaw it becoming the conceptual watershed that it is now. Today, regardless of whether you are writing about sci fi, futurism, artificial intelligence, technology or the future of humanity, the moment you embrace the longer-term big picture framework of reference is the moment you are writing about the singularity. And if that is not the case, then, you must justify why not. So, in a way, you are still writing about the singularity. Thanks to Josh Calder, who made the effort to dig out and scan the original article, I can now show you a copy of the actual page where the term was used for the very first time in its contemporary technological context: the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine. Hope you enjoy this little digital piece of history as much as I do! Related articles 17 [...]

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Michio Kaku on the Collapse of Moore’s Law

by Socrates
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Moore’s Law has been around since 1965 when Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described it in a paper. Since that day, the law has been in full effect, and the number of transistors placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has roughly doubled every two years. It’s also a commonly held belief that chip performance doubles every 18 months. But Moore’s Law won’t be true forever, and in the video below theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains how it will collapse. And Kaku argues that the collapse isn’t going to happen in some distant future but within the next decade. The problem is one of finding a replacement for silicon coupled with the exponential nature of Moore’s Law. Quite simply, computing power cannot go on doubling every two years indefinitely. The other issue is we are about to reach the limits of [...]

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Reason.TV: Too Much Copyright!

by Socrates
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“This disconnect between the public’s view of copyright and fair use and what should and should not be prosecuted, versus the ‘copyright maximist’ view of the law, is our generation’s Prohibition,” says Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger and a loud voice in the recent backlash to SOPA and PIPA, two congressional bills aimed at curbing internet piracy. Copyright exists to “promote the useful arts” according to the Constitution. But is it still doing that? And should the government protect so-called “intellectual property” in the same way it protects other forms of property? Reason.tv posed these questions to Ben Huh, as well as a professor and a movie studio representative. Tom Bell, a law professor specializing in property law, has serious reservations about attempts by groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to equate property and copyright [...]

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17 Definitions of the Technological Singularity

by Socrates
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The term singularity has many meanings. The everyday English definition is a noun that designates the quality of being one of a kind, strange, unique, remarkable or unusual. If we want to be even more specific, we might take the Wiktionary definition of the term, which seems to be more contemporary and easily comprehensible, as opposed to those in classic dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster’s. So, the Wiktionary lists the following five meanings: Noun singularity (plural singularities) 1. the state of being singular, distinct, peculiar, uncommon or unusual 2. a point where all parallel lines meet 3. a point where a measured variable reaches unmeasurable or infinite value 4. (mathematics) the value or range of values of a function for which a derivative does not exist 5. (physics) a point or region in spacetime in which gravitational forces cause matter to have [...]

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