A way to browse the web using pattern recognition and abstraction as opposed to links.  Is this how understanding and self reflection emerge in the first place??  Why not speed that up too! (via DataMining) TED Feb 2010 – Live Labs Pivot demo and the world beyond facebook: One way to put it, is to...

Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68. Kevin Kelly View more presentations from...

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary...

In Juan Enriquez’ TED talk earlier this year, he made the point that humans have entered a new phase of evolution, one that has not been seen on before modern humans and their technology.  This, of course, is one of the main theses of Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, and the main...

If, like Aubrey de Grey, you believe that immortality is achievable, or you are just intrigued by the possibility, you should check out this news story on The Methuselah Foundation. ...

Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of the melding of the computational speed of computers with the awesome software of the human brain is one step closer. The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the brain with the goal of “creating a physiological simulation for biomedical...

This is a precursor to Singularity sort of...

I happened to come across two interesting posts with Singularity implications that I thought you might be interested in.  First, the Singularity Hub reports that Osiris has a promising phase II trial underway for a treatment that uses foreign stem cells to repair the muscle damage from heart attacks.  If...

Continuation of: Focusing on “Autonomy” I’ve been trying to reconcile Rafe’s an my views on this topic.  I actually think we agree on the broad themes related to our argument over “autonomy”.  From my perspective, it seems like the only real disagreement is on the...

Continuation of: Superfoo Rafe and I had a great chat on the phone today about Superfoos.  I think we agreed that there will be multiple instances of agents emerging in the level immediately above humans but there is always a single top-level network in local space.  I think we also agreed that the...

Response to Superorganism as Terminology. I was actually about to post something about terminology, so I’m glad this came up. It’s just so difficult to choose words to describe concepts that have little precedent, without going to the extreme of overloading on the one end (e.g....

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post. Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular...

Response to: Superorganism and Singularity Rafe’s post covers a rather speculative topic. I think it’s worth stress testing so I am going to play skeptic without revealing my actual position.  But you can be assured that it’s at least somewhat nuanced. Rafe knows more about this topic than...

There is an aspect to The Singularity which is not discussed much, an orthogonal dimension that is already taking shape, and which is perhaps more significant than what is implied by the “standard definition”: The Singularity represents an “event horizon” in the predictability of...

The above is a self-replicating dynamic structure from a class of systems called cellular automata (click here to run the simulation).  Below is a self-replicating dynamic structure from a class of systems called “life”: ...

Now that I’ve had a week to digest what I saw at the summit, I have some thoughts on the most likely path we’ll take to the singularity. From an absolute perspective, this path isn’t very likely because there are a lot of different ways to get there (or not get there). But given what...

As most of you know, one of the commonly proposed paths to The Singularity is the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As you can read in my rundown of the Singularity Summit, speakers showcased a lot of progress in hardware substrate and software infrastructure, but no significant...

I attended the Singularity Summit today. Overall, it was worth the time spent.  I did not attend the workshop on Friday because it didn’t look substantive when I reviewed the program.  Today, I spoke to several people who were there and they confirmed my prediction. I took 7 pages of notes at the...

[ This is an edited version of a blog comment on Brandon Kein's Wired Science post here ] The question of whether we will “break through” to a superorganism or collapse through any number of spiraling cascades or catastrophic events is the subject of Ervin Laszlo’s book, The Chaos Point,...

David Basanta’s blog has an interesting thread (quite a few of them actually).  Here’s the setup but you should read the original post, including the Wired article: Apparently, some people are seeing some potential in cloud computing not just as an aid to science but as a completely new approach...

Rafe’s post on complex systems defending themselves randomly collided in my mind with this post and paper by Robin Hanson on the Singularity to spur a stray thought. What if the Singularity were catalyzed by changes in organizations rather than intelligence or manufacturing? ...