A fascinating video (8:29) on the “technological disobedience” of Cubans, who repurposed technology in creative ways during the crisis of scarcity known euphemistically as the “Special Period in Time of Peace”.
Potential inspiration for postapocalyptic and dystopian authors here.
Via Charlie Loyd’s newsletter: a study that suggests the key thing about conspiracy theories is the belief that a conspiracy exists – not the content. The more people believe that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they also believe she was murdered. The more people believe that bin Laden was already dead when Seal Team Six arrived at his compound, the more they believe he’s still alive.
http://www.academia.edu/1207098/Dead_and_alive_Beliefs_in_contradictory_conspiracy_theories
Some good pointers here on things you can tighten up about your story before submitting it, from a Writers of the Future judge.
The first point is one of the most important. I figured out a while ago that it’s very difficult to get a professional sale if you’re telling the kind of story that often works very well as a midlist novel: generic plot, generic characters, generic setting (the Federation of Space Opera, or West Sword-and-Sorceria). It can be done, but you usually have to be famous first.
Writers of the Future is a competition, not a magazine or anthology, so he doesn’t mention one important reason that editors may reject your piece: it may be good, but not fit what they’re looking for in that specific market. Research your market carefully before submitting.
Originally shared by David Farland
https://mystorydoctor.com/why-editors-reject-your-story/
These devices, which physically change their shape and provide a two-way interface between the virtual and physical worlds, are the first clumsy steps towards something like I describe in my novella Gu (http://csidemedia.com/gu).
Duration: 9:22.
An introduction to “transhumanism”, the idea that the next step in human evolution could be taken deliberately, by changing ourselves.
Philosopher Anders Sandberg summarizes the state of research and thinking, without overhyping it. He mentions exercise, education, meditation, drugs, brain training, genetic engineering, neurological interfaces, collaborative technologies, cybernetic human enhancements and body modification.
Few of these have had widespread real-world trials, and there are various ethical and philosophical questions; the more fundamental something is to our sense of self, the more hesitant we are to change it.
From about the 1-hour (halfway) mark, another philosopher (whose name I didn’t catch) responds, questioning some of the underlying ideas of transhumanism. What is humanity, what is the self, and if we change it, is it still humanity? If we delegate too much to technology, do we diminish our own capacity?
All of these questions were mentioned in the first part of the lecture, in fact, and the responding philosopher keeps everything at a high theoretical level, rather than sticking with practicalities as Dr Sandberg did. They’re important questions, but I don’t know that the way they were raised was particularly useful.
The moderator then raises the question of enhancement of ourselves in order to be better than our instincts and save the world, versus enhancing ourselves to enjoy our current type of life more (moral enhancement versus enhancement of abilities). Sandberg’s response is that transhumanism is about tools, but you can use those tools in the service of various different value systems.
The respondent questions whether human enhancement is the solution to the world’s problems at all; collective organization, and taking collective responsibility – not enhancement – is where the solutions lie.
Sandberg: Government is also a technology. Meditation is a technology. New forms of government are enabled by new technologies for producing and disseminating information. We are getting better at organizing ourselves in positive ways. (This isn’t necessarily “transhumanism” as such.)
Moderator: Where does humanity leave off? What about posthumanism?
Sandberg: Over the years he has become more interested in near-term, practical technologies than the big picture about where we might go. There’s not much we can say about the posthuman condition, by its nature.
Respondent: Can we actually assume that humans consist primarily of information, so an uploaded person is human? Or is technological uploading the death of humanity?
Sandberg: Would it be a failure if humanity evolved into something else, rather than remaining the same?
Respondent: But how do we actually decide on our direction as a species?
Sandberg: We don’t know yet, so we should try to become smarter, so we can figure out these questions.
Audience question period ensues.
Q: Is transhumanism inevitable? Will we eventually merge with our technology as it becomes more powerful?
Sandberg: Not inevitable, but highly likely. There’s a ratchet effect in the development of technology, and once some people adopt something there’s a strong pressure for others to do so in order to keep up. However, some people may remain human as others become transhuman. Parallel of the Amish; a kind of backup in case the advanced technology fails.
Q: Is there only one direction of enhancement, or will posthumanism be widely divergent, with people choosing which enhancements they accept? Will that lead to conflict among different groups?
Sandberg: This may be like Mac/Windows/Linux. Transhumanists do often talk as if there’s one true way forward, but he doesn’t. The key is to have some cooperative framework so we can live together. This may lead to complementary groups rather than competing ones, though if people are too radically different it may lead to issues. However, liberal democracy is quite good at handling diversity; we might just need liberal democracy 2.0.
Respondent: Is there not something to be said for lessening our technology and dependency upon it?
Sandberg: We can give up some things in part because we have a safety net and can get them back.
Moderator: But if there’s a cognitively enhanced group and a group of have-nots, it will inevitably lead to a class separation.
Sandberg: Discrimination is bad when it’s about something that doesn’t matter, but we don’t want a society that takes no notice of ability when it does matter. Enhanced people will have great responsibility to go with their great power. But most people’s life projects would be helped by enhanced intelligence, so most people will probably go for it.
Q: Would it be possible to allow people to experience both human and transhuman life?
Sandberg: We can already have “monkey experiences” through alcohol, for example. But there are some experiences that only make sense while enhanced. Each level of brain development builds on the one before, and gives us a new level of meaning. The lower levels of enjoyment are not lost as we reach the higher.
Respondent: There’s often an assumption that enhancements will be irreversible – you won’t be able to put them on the nightstand when you go to bed.
Sandberg: It’s like the irreversibility of learning – learning changes you, you’re a different person afterwards.
Q: Enhancements are accepted when compensating for disabilities, but not so much when we are going from human to superhuman. To what extent would people accept some decrements in order to gain enhancements, like a shorter life in exchange for a better robot arm?
Sandberg: This would depend on your life goals and value system, and on how well we can predict the drawbacks. Unknown, long-term side effects are a big part of what people worry about with things like cognitive enhancement pills. There are problems with getting ethics approval to study this kind of thing.
Moderator: In conclusion, while predictions are notoriously unreliable, making them does have utility. We don’t know what will happen in 10 years, but we do know that things are going to change and confront us with ethical, social and political choices, so considering the issues imaginatively is something that helps to prepare us for the future – even if we don’t know what it will be.
Classic magazines.
Originally shared by Boing Boing
All of If magazine is now available at the Internet Archive.
$11.60.
What a time to be alive.
Originally shared by Kat Richardson
Soon to be standard equipment for every plumber, house inspector, and contractor EVER!
Something this article doesn’t mention: it’s pretty well established by research that having diverse teams increases creativity and innovation, something that you’d think Silicon Valley tech companies would be all over.
But the big tech companies are mostly hiring very few people who aren’t young straight white men, and those who are hired don’t feel welcome.
(The article also doesn’t discuss numbers of Indian and Asian hires – typically large in tech in my experience, but since I’m far from Silicon Valley and don’t have figures to hand, I’m not sure about this one way or the other.)
Originally shared by Tosca Johnson
#diversity
Manufacturing is now following publishing into a democratised model.
It’s become literally child’s play to make things on your desktop, on gear with a low four-figure cost. Also, it’s now possible to download a free design app to your phone, design a physical thing… and have a robot factory in China manufacture it in bulk and send it to you. Some of them take PayPal.
We can print not only in metal, wood and plastic, but in biology and electronics.
Chris Anderson’s story is that, as editor of Wired, he was given two things to review: a Lego Mindstorms robot and a model plane. When he took them home at the weekend, his kids weren’t impressed with either one separately, so they and he mashed them together and made a drone with a robot autopilot in an afternoon. That gave him a “What just happened?” moment.
He started a hobbyist website called DIYDrones, and ended up starting a business when people asked for kits. He hired a new high school graduate in Tijuana, who he’d met on the Internet, to assemble his kits when his kids wouldn’t do it any more, and discovered (when his 19-year-old employee did it and then told him about it) that you can buy factory equipment on eBay, out of cash flow, if your product’s something people want.
Now he does it a bit more professionally, and his company makes more drones than the whole of the US aerospace industry (because they’re cheap, consumer-level gear). They’re more advanced than military drones – because the users are less advanced. They’re kids and untrained hobbyists. The innovation has shifted to the low end of the market, where people want to get magic at the press of a button without worrying about the technology.
He follows an “open innovation” model, on the Bill Joy principle of “the smartest people are not working for you” – wanting to get the smartest people working for him, just not necessarily employed by him. His software, and a lot of his hardware design, is open sourced. Customers become support for each other. The community finds new use cases, which contributes to the spread of the technology.
By recognising contributions to the project, he builds a funnel of contributors, many of whom end up working for him full-time. The platform for innovation attracts talent to it.
Production, he says, has moved from an industrial act to a technological act to a social act.
What will be the impact of AI on jobs?
John Markoff is optimistic. He believes that they will transform, rather than destroy, jobs, and help compensate for the demographic shifts in the world’s population. We will need to retrain a lot, though (so liberal arts degrees are good preparation).
That said, data science and the intersection of biology and information technology are current hot areas for employment.
To the title: there are two streams of development in computer science, AI and human-computer interaction, which don’t have a lot of crossover. They are two different philosophical approaches to the relationship between humans and computers.
Although there’s no real evidence that machines will be self-aware in the near future, they will be autonomous, and we need to design human values into their systems.
45 minutes.