http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/05...41994.html
Could machines that think someday pose an existential threat to humanity? Some big names in science and tech seem to think so--Stephen Hawking, for one--and they've issued grave warnings about the looming threat of artificial intelligence.
Other experts are less concerned, saying all we have to do to prevent a robot apocalypse is to unplug them.
And then there are those who take a middle position, calling for more research and development to ensure that we "reap the benefits" of A.I. while "avoiding potential pitfalls," as one group of scientists said recently in an open letter.
Interestin thouts from all them people but none of 'em seem to get it... an now for my corect opinion:::
Like it or not... AI is "here"... its queer... an it ant goin away.!!!
An thers nuthin to fear from AI unless humans goin extinct while evolvin into machines is scary to you.!!!
Anyhow... most of the people who fear this evolution will get to die a natural human death before AI gets 'em.!!!
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/20...k-for-you/
EXCERPT: Yes, depression feels bad. But below that is an important message you need to hear. When you feel depressed, all you want to do is get rid of the heavy feelings. You want to feel energetic and hopeful again. Of course, you do! Wanting that is entirely natural. But “symptom relief” alone does not always lead to renewed excitement and authentic happiness.
As a culture, we’re fixated on getting rid of depression and discomfort via simplified answers — take a pill, change your diet, eat more protein (or less protein), socialize more, exercise. Those steps are good and important things to try, but they only help get rid of bad feelings temporarily.
What if your depressive symptoms are a message from your inner self to your everyday self? What if that heavy unhappiness is telling you that something in your life actually needs facing (and maybe even changing)? Maybe your depression is a hard shell covering delicate inner yearnings that want to come alive. Depression is the hated messenger, but the message is to lean in and discover what’s truly going on before shooing away your unhappiness.
Here’s how to do exactly that...
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536...al-worlds/
EXCERPT: [...] The technology could also be used to create real-world simulations that reveal, for instance, the effect that closing a major railway station would have during a disease epidemic, or how a radical change in a government’s housing policy might affect a country’s infrastructure. Improbable has developed techniques that make it possible to share large amounts of information between multiple servers nearly instantaneously. This will allow many more players to experience a virtual world together than is currently possible. It will also allow more realistic physical interactions to take place within those worlds. Currently, in even the most elaborate virtual worlds, some characters and objects cannot interact because it would require more computational power than is available.....
https://plus.maths.org/content/sexual-statistics
EXCERPT: Straight men have had twice as many sexual partners, on average, as straight women. Sounds plausible, seeing that men supposedly think about sex every seven seconds. Except that it's mathematically impossible: in a closed population with as many men as women (which roughly there are) the averages should match up. Someone is being dishonest, but who? And why? These questions, along with many others, are explored in Sex by numbers, a new book by David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge....
http://worldofweirdthings.com/2013/09/13...revisited/
EXCERPT: A while ago, I wrote about some futurists’ ideas of robot brothels and conscious, self-aware sex bots capable of entering a relationship with a human, and why marriage to an android is unlikely to become legal. [...] I wouldn’t be surprised if there are sex bots for rent [...] but robot-human marriages are a legal dead end.
[...] First, a robot, no matter how self-aware or seemingly intelligent, is not a living things capable of giving consent. It could easily be programmed to do what its owner wants it to do [...] Second [...] is that anatomically correct robots are often used as surrogates for contact with humans and are being imparted human features by an owner who is either intimidated or easily hurt by the complexities of typical human interaction.
You don’t have to take my word on the latter. Just consider this interview with an iDollator — the term sometimes used by technosexuals to identify for themselves — in which he more or less just confirms everything I said word for word....
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...233711.htm
EXCERPT: A new study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Arlington demonstrates for the first time how elemental carbon became an important construction material of some forms of ocean life after one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of Earth more than 252 million years ago.
As the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era ended and the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic Era began, more than 90 percent of terrestrial and marine species became extinct. Various proposals have been suggested for this extinction event, including extensive volcanic activity, global heating, or even one or more extraterrestrial impacts.
[...] there was extensive volcanic activity in both the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres during the Permian-Triassic transition. "Much of the volcanic activity was connected with the extensive Siberian flood basalt known as the Siberian Traps that emerged through Permian aged coal deposits and, of course, the burning of coal created CO2," [Merlynd] Nestell said. He noted that there was also synchronous volcanic activity in what is now Australia and southern China that could have burned Permian vegetation. The carbon from ash accumulated in the atmosphere and marine environment and was used by some marine microorganisms in the construction of their shells, something they had not done before.
This new discovery documents elemental carbon as being a major construction component of the tiny shells of single-celled agglutinated foraminifers, ostracodes, and worm tubes that made up part of the very limited population of bottom-dwelling marine organisms surviving the extinction event....
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/should-w...hropocene/
EXCERPT: [...] from the earth sciences to English departments, there’s a veritable academic stampede to declare that we live in a new era, the Anthropocene – the age of humans. Coined [...] in the 1980s and brought to public attention in 2000 [...] the term remains officially under consideration [...] The lack of an official decision has set up the Anthropocene as a Rorschach blot for discerning what commentators think is the epochal change in the human/nature relationship. The rise of agriculture in China and the Middle East? The industrial revolution and worldwide spread of farming in the Age of Empire? The Atomic bomb?
[...] The most radical thought identified with the Anthropocene is this: the familiar contrast between people and the natural world no longer holds. There is no more nature that stands apart from human beings. There is no place or living thing that we haven’t changed. [...] The discovery that nature is henceforth partly a human creation makes the Anthropocene the latest of three great revolutions: three kinds of order once thought to be given and self-sustaining have proved instead to be fragile human creations.
The first to fall was politics. Long seen as part of divine design, with kings serving as the human equivalents of eagles in the sky and oaks in the forest, politics proved instead a dangerous but inescapable form of architecture – a blueprint for peaceful co‑existence, built with crooked materials.
Second came economics. Once presented as a gift of providence or an outgrowth of human nature, economic life, like politics, turned out to be a deliberate and artificial achievement. (We are still debating the range of shapes it can take, from Washington to Greece to China.)
Now, in the Anthropocene, nature itself has joined the list of those things that are not natural. The world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made.
[...] What work is this idea of the Anthropocene doing in culture and politics? As much as a scientific concept, the Anthropocene is a political and ethical gambit. Saying that we live in the Anthropocene is a way of saying that we cannot avoid responsibility for the world we are making. So far so good. The trouble starts when this charismatic, all-encompassing idea of the Anthropocene becomes an all-purpose projection screen and amplifier for one’s preferred version of ‘taking responsibility for the planet’.
Peter Kareiva, the controversial chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, uses the theme ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene’ to trash environmentalism as philosophically naïve and politically backward. Kareiva urges conservationists to give up on wilderness and embrace what the writer Emma Marris calls the ‘rambunctious garden’. Specifically, Kareiva wants to rank ecosystems by the quality of ‘ecosystem services’ they provide for human beings instead of ‘pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake’. He wants a pro‑development stance that assumes that ‘nature is resilient rather than fragile’. He insists that: ‘Instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures.’ In other words, the end of nature is the signal to carry on with green-branded business as usual, and the business of business is business, as the Nature Conservancy’s partnerships with Dow, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, J P Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the mining giant Rio Tinto remind us.
[...] If the Anthropocene is about the relationship between humanity and the planet, well, there is no ‘humanity’ that agrees on any particular meaning and imperative of climate change, extinction, toxification, etc. To think about the Anthropocene is to think about being able to do nothing about everything. No wonder the topic inspires compensatory fantasies that the solution lies in refining the bottom line or honing personal enlightenment – always, to be sure, in the name of some fictive ‘we’....
