22 DEC 2023 by ideonexus
The AI Business Model is Wrong
AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool’s ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI’s guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs’ tendency to “hallucinate†and confabulate, there’s an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a “human in the loop†to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist...Folksonomies: futurism technology
Folksonomies: futurism technology
07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
Space Colonists as Selfish Fools
Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too. No. No. It was not...Told from the perspective of the AI running the ship.
10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Estimating Technical Progress
Overestimating the potential upside of every new sign of tech progress is as common as downplaying the downsides. It's easy to let our imaginations run wild with how any new development is going to change everything practically overnight. The unforeseen technical roadblocks that inevitably spring up are only one reason for this consistent miscalculation. Human nature is simply out of sync with the nature of technological development. We see progress as linear, a straight line of improvement. ...Folksonomies: futurism technical progress
Folksonomies: futurism technical progress
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
The Myth of the Solitary Villain
The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a team of scientists whose job it was to develop a species-extinguishing bio weapon, or to take down the internet to zero, you probably still couldn’t do it. That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-year...20 MAR 2018 by ideonexus
Star Wars Nostalgia VS Star Trek Futurism
Also, Star Wars is set in a fantasy past that can look like anything, while Trek is supposed to be a projection of what we imagine our own future to look like. And Star Wars has always been an exercise in nostalgia from the start — nostalgia for ’30s movie serials and comic strips, for ’40s war movies, for ’50s hot rods and samurai movies, etc. It’s always, always been based on the past and set in the past. Star Trek looks to the future, and our idea of the future is always changing.Folksonomies: futurism science fiction
Folksonomies: futurism science fiction
12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Two Kinds of Science-Fiction Innovations
Most common are the fictions that begin with Jules Verne, and concern the single artifact—a submarine, flying machine, or death ray—and its consquence for all of humanity. These extraordinary voyages—to use Verne's term—play along the fault line between what we think we are and what we can do. Nemo is no accident, or a tragic figure, but the natural consequence of the intersection between present-day humanity and extraordinary technology. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey plays on the same t...Folksonomies: futurism science fiction
Folksonomies: futurism science fiction
12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Credit is Trust in the Future
We’ve already seen that money is an astounding thing because it can represent myriad di22 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
The Role of the Educator In Regards to the Future
The world is changing -- it is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time. Our world shrinks as technologies now allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with peers around the world. Conversely, the explosion of information now available to us expands our view of the world. As a result of the ability to communicate globally and the information explosion, education must change. Most educators might not want to change, but the change is coming -- it is a matter of whe...10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Argonauts: Magna Cortica
THE MAGNA CORTICA ORIGINAL TENETS (DATE UNKNOWN BUT BEFORE BF 80) I. Self knowledge. Sapient beings have the right to know whether they’ve been mentally modified. II. Self-modification. Sapient beings have the right to pursue self-modification. III. Refusing modification. They also have the right to refuse it. IV. Modification (or not) of progeny. Sapient beings have the right to modify—or not—their own progeny. V. Knowledge of who has been modified or selfupgraded. Polities and ...10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Creative and Social Intelligence are Computational Bottle...
Our model predicts that the second wave of computerisation will mainly depend on overcoming the engineering bottlenecks related to creative and social intelligence. As reported in Table III, the “fine arts”, “originality”, “negotiation”, “persuasion”, “social perceptiveness”, and “assisting and caring for others”, variables, all exhibit relatively high values in the low risk category. By contrast, we note that the “manual dexterity”, “finger dexterity” and “c...Generalist skills, like management, are hard to automate. Could everyone therefore become a manager of an automatized field?