#ROBOTS-ONLY

Ubermetaphysics and the Upcoming Singularity

[asymptotic-silence]

Unknown (again the Shirin painter?), A girl standing on her hands

-http://50watts.com/Persian-Handstands

[wildcat2030]

This Generation Will Be Fine: Why Social Media Won’t Ruin Us — Medium

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

When people express concern about how smartphones are damaging our young people, I laugh. This anxiety that the internet is going to ruinreal human interactions is reminiscent of parents in the 50s who were worried that Elvis shaking his hips was the devil. Let’s be very clear here. Being concerned about cultural progression “damaging us as a society” always repeats itself with the current trend and will continue to play itself out again and again and again. Millennials are no different from Gen Y, Gen X, or any previous generation when it comes to being affected by a culture shift. In the 1940s, people had their heads in the newspaper and theirs ears to the radio. By the 60s, it was the TV. What about everyone today on their laptop and smartphones at a Starbucks? See what I’m getting at? What’s happening with technology in our culture and society is just evolution. Technology is not undermining real human interactions. Instead, it is exposing people for who they really are. I have been asked many times, “What are we teaching the young people?” I’ve watched the behavior of 14 year old girls spending 10 minutes to take the best selfie, post it on Instagram, and then take it down when it doesn’t get enough likes. This superficial behavior tends to concern pundits who think that technology is the cause of this appearance driven, attention seeking behavior in teenagers. But the thing is, teenagers have always strived to be liked and sought the attention of their peers and potential significant others. Selfies on Instagram is the evolution of this same behavior.

See on medium.com

[filmnoirfoundation]

Good morning, sinners.

[wildcat2030]

Cosmologist Paul Davies proposes theory that building blocks of life may not be chemicals but information

An extraterrestrial report has the scientific world discussing what it means to be alive.

Among all the extraterrestrial species featured in the late Douglas Adams’ excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels there is one called a Hoovooloo, described as “a super intelligent shade of the colour blue”. Oddly enough, this utterly abstract sort of alien might yet turn out to be the author’s most perspicacious invention. If a new paper co-written by prominent Australian physicist Professor Paul Davies is on the money, every other fictitious ET, from Star Trek’s Vulcans to Star Wars’ Yoda, are the products of depressingly limited imaginations. Pretty much all cinematic aliens – think Dr Who’s Sontarans, the bubble-headed things from Mars Attacks!, the giant worms from Dune – have something recognisably “life-like” about them: they have a chemical structure broadly similar to those found in earth species, and (it is implied) some kind of DNA-ish apparatus that facilitates reproduction. They are reasonable enough assumptions to make, but what if they are plain wrong? Davies and co-author Dr Sara Imari Walker, both from the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at the Arizona State University, suggest that fleshiness and double-helixes might be things confined only to life on Earth. Life in the rest of the universe, they venture, could be based on something much more unlikely: information. What’s more, Davies and Walker leave the door open – some say – to the involvement of a non-physical, perhaps godlike, influence in the development of life in the cosmos. The questions the pair raise might seem abstruse, but they are critically important. If humanity ever does encounter alien life it almost certainly won’t look like the dreadlocked guys or insect-monsters in Alien vs Predator. It will be life, Jim, but not as we know it. Real aliens may well be completely unrecognisable as living. “Without an understanding of ‘life’,” Davies and Walker write, “we can have little hope of solving the problem of its origin or provide a general-purpose set of criteria for identifying it on other worlds.”

[wildcat2030]

What Freudian slips really reveal about your mind

Do our verbal stumblings unveil our unconscious desires – or are they simply an innocent glitch in the brain’s workings? BBC Future investigates.

It was 1988 and the then-vice president, George H. W. Bush, was on a routine visit to Idaho. He was supposed to give a dry speech on agricultural policy and praise his successes alongside President Reagan, live on television. Then he said: “We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex… uh… setbacks.” Long after his political career is consigned to distant memory, President George Bush Senior will be celebrated for this legendary gaffe. Ah, the Freudian slip. There are the things you want to say, the things you could get away with saying and the things it would be utterly disastrous to utter – which, invariably, are what actually comes out of your mouth. It’s the greatest fear of any public speaker. But what really causes these errors? And do they have any hidden meaning? For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, it wasn’t enough to simply ask his patients what they thought. Their true desires, he believed, could only be examined by paying attention to ‘slips of the tongue’ and other clues from the unconscious. A classic slip is, as the saying goes, when you say one thing and mean your mother. Otherwise known as parapraxis, these verbal stumblings could reveal forbidden urges – such as sex and swearing – which were usually locked safely within the unconscious mind. Verbal errors aren’t random at all, but puzzles to be decoded. There’s just one problem: Freudian slips, as with many of his other ideas, are extremely difficult to test. Freud may be as famous as Darwin, but many modern-day psychologists, linguists and neuroscientists think that he was wrong about almost everything. But was he wrong about this?

[wired]

Look closely at Zhang Wei’s portrait of Michael Jackson and you’ll see something isn’t quite right. The eyes are wrong, the lips are a bit thin, the hair too straight. But it isn’t the King of Pop you’re seeing. It’s a clever composite of photos of his Chinese fans.

The image is among the 72 portraits in Artificial Theater, Wei’s sharp commentary on the influence of Western pop culture on China. Wei assembles each collage using the facial features of 20 to 30 ordinary Chinese citizens.

Wei, who lives in Beijing, has pondered China’s changing cultural identity for awhile. Today you can hear Taylor Swift and Katy Perry songs blaring out of every Starbucks, and see American films in every theater.

MORE. Creepy Celebrity Portraits Made From Other People’s Faces

[climateadaptation-deactivated20]

More than any area of science, the consensus on climate change is crystal clear.

Authors of seven climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, and John Cook — co-authored a paper that should settle this question once and for all. The two key conclusions from the paper are:

1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists.

2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Arha ( Tomomichi Morifuji)

arha.jp

[robots-only]

A magical, dark comedic examination of life, love and the apocalypse.

NPR review of new novel from the fabulous and amazing CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, sci-fi and fantasy that "blends the two genres in ways poetic and profound... wickedly playful... heart wrenching..." and Flat-out fun!

[goatfury1]

Why the Word "Transhumanism" Should Bother You, Too

As we continue to become one with our inventions, heading toward a possible technological singularity, there's only one thing that makes this revolution different: our perception.

[wildcat2030]

Don’t Worry, Artificial Intelligence Has A Long Way To Go: Baidu Scientist

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Ng: Despite all the hype, artificial intelligence has a ways to go before it is truly intelligent Just days after participants at the World Economic Forum noted sweeping changes in society were to be expected resulting from intelligent computer applications, Ng recognizes the advancements but puts artificial intelligence into perspective, with emphasis on the “artificial.” “Computers are getting much better at soaking up data to make predictions,” he said in a recent Fortune Magazine interview, noting that a computer capacity has caught up with the proliferation with data. “Despite all the hype, I think they are much further off than some people think.” Such early stage applications of such “intelligence” include predicting the advertisement to best illicit a response, recognizing people in pictures as well as predicting the web page most relevant to your search query. Separate analysis indicates that in many cases the guts of the “brains” behind today’s artificial intelligence is, in part, an advanced version of if-then logic. A mathematical formulation in some sense is required to generate outputs. Such “artificial intelligence” requires human definition and programming. Even today’s high frequency trading applications and algorithmic Hedge Funds are driven by humans who often understand the market underpinnings and can creatively connect non linear dots to develop and operate the formulas.

See on valuewalk.com

[tomorrowandbeyond]

[robots-only]

[prostheticknowledge]

Skyline

Music video for Karma Fields by ravenkwok is presented entirely using animated Voroni tesselations:

Skyline is a code-based generative music video I directed and programmed for the track Skyline (itunes.apple.com/us/album/skyline-single/id1039135793) by Karma Fields (soundcloud.com/karmafields). The entire music video consists of multiple stages that are programmed and generated using Processing.

One of the core principles for generating the visual patterns in Skyline is Voronoi tessellation. This geometric model dates back to 1644 in René Descartes’s vortex theory of planetary motion, and has been widely used by computational artists, for example, Robert Hodgin (vimeo.com/207637), Frederik Vanhoutte (vimeo.com/86820638), Diana Lange (flickr.com/photos/dianalange/sets/72157629453008849/), Jon McCormack (jonmccormack.info/~jonmc/sa/artworks/voronoi-wall/), etc.

In Skyline’s systems, seeds for generating the diagram are sorted into various types of agents following certain behaviors and appearance transformations. They are driven by either the song’s audio spectrum with different customized layouts, or animated sequence of the vocalist, collectively forming a complex and organic outcome.

Link

[npr]

So trippy-looking. -Ariel

[crossconnectmag]

Skyline

Music video for Karma Fields by ravenkwok is presented entirely using animated Voroni tesselations:

Thanks to NPR on Tumblr! Visit Raven Kwok on Tumblr to see more of his amazing work!

Art is tessalating all over the web.  Visit our Facebook Page to find more.

[wildcat2030]

Don’t Worry, Artificial Intelligence Has A Long Way To Go: Baidu Scientist

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Ng: Despite all the hype, artificial intelligence has a ways to go before it is truly intelligent Just days after participants at the World Economic Forum noted sweeping changes in society were to be expected resulting from intelligent computer applications, Ng recognizes the advancements but puts artificial intelligence into perspective, with emphasis on the “artificial.” “Computers are getting much better at soaking up data to make predictions,” he said in a recent Fortune Magazine interview, noting that a computer capacity has caught up with the proliferation with data. “Despite all the hype, I think they are much further off than some people think.” Such early stage applications of such “intelligence” include predicting the advertisement to best illicit a response, recognizing people in pictures as well as predicting the web page most relevant to your search query. Separate analysis indicates that in many cases the guts of the “brains” behind today’s artificial intelligence is, in part, an advanced version of if-then logic. A mathematical formulation in some sense is required to generate outputs. Such “artificial intelligence” requires human definition and programming. Even today’s high frequency trading applications and algorithmic Hedge Funds are driven by humans who often understand the market underpinnings and can creatively connect non linear dots to develop and operate the formulas.

See on valuewalk.com

[emergentfutures]

Sudden onset of ice loss in Antarctica so large it affects Earth’s gravity field

Using measurements of the elevation of the Antarctic ice sheet made by a suite of satellites, the researchers found that the Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change up to 2009. Around 2009, multiple glaciers along a vast coastal expanse, measuring some 750km in length, suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion litres of water, each year.

This makes the region the second largest contributor to sea level rise in Antarctica and the ice loss shows no sign of waning.

Dr Bert Wouters, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Bristol, who lead the study said: “To date, the glaciers added roughly 300 cubic km of water to the ocean. That’s the equivalent of the volume of nearly 350,000 Empire State Buildings combined.”

Full Story: Science Daily

[emergentfutures]

Drugs aren’t the future of medicine — tiny electric implants are

And pharmaceutical companies seem to agree: for example, GlaxoSmithKline is investing billions in bioelectronic innovation, even offering a $1 million prize to the first team to create a device that can “read and write the body’s electrical language” – by which they mean influence an organ’s function using accurate electrical signals. The US government is also investing in the field through the $250 million SPARC initiative and the ElectRx programme.

Read more: http://mosaicscience.com/extra/bioelectric-dreams#ixzz3c3zj1BCQ