“Cognitive computing chips aim to reduce the cost of extracting information from ever changing spatial-temporal environments around us by an order of 100,000. Imagine the impact,” humans.

Bruce Sterling on “the pre-distressed antique futurity,” etc. He explains that William Gibson was saying that, “if you have a genuinely avante garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read 20 years from now. In other words, in order to do it, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antiqued, before it hits the page or the screen. Approach it from that perspective. No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty; just refuse to go there. Accept that it’s already passe, and create it from that point of view; try to make it news that stays news. Refuse the awe of the future, refuse reverence to the past. If they’re really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.”

Bruce Sterling explains “atemporality for artists” Boing Boing - Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod. More Exceprts “Becoming multi-temporal rather than multi-cultural. I think we’re approaching a situation where the outlooks and perspectives of our own age make very little sense; they just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t really have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we’re closer to a potentially objective history than anybody’s ever been.” “A personal museum economy. Why not designer fiction as life? Just invent the whole thing. Why not just go ahead and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Ghandian dedication and see what happens?” We’ve been trying this last part for about twenty years, now. We’ll keep trying, Bruce. Thanks for the encouragement! ;-)

Ultimately, there will be diverse UX alternatives for substrate independence. The robotic substrate is certainly a fascinating option to consider and we not only can, but must immediately begin preparatory thinking, training, behavioral, and psychological exercises to prepare for increasingly high resolution software and hardware mediated experiences. Certainly within ten years and likely within five, we will see the convergence of the dexterity of R2 Robonaut, the mobility of AIST and Kawada’s HRP-4, the quotidian autonomy of Anybots, the brain machine interface typical of today’s prosthetic arms and legs, in addition to thin-sheet Displays as I/O Devices and internal Attention Management System HUD’s — vastly improved versions of software like Feedly and My6Sense which are designed to help surface the most salient and actionable information streaming throughout the vastness of the Internet of Things and the ever expanding Global Cognition Grid, all integrated into our 2020 Tesla built MacAvatars, powered by Google, and designed by Apple in California. ;-) We will not need “mind uploads” for this phase of self-guided, participatory, migratory evolution. Within ten years, we will see vastly improved and multi-functioned brain-machine interfaces to these device and the utterly immersive first person UX will become increasingly difficult to discern from “real life.” So don’t hold on too tight, Dorothy, or a hole the size of Kansas might get inadvertently ripped through your cute little bioconservative extremist hands. Or, in the words of the sub-legendary 38 Special, “hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna’ lose control.”

Some of our post-protoplasmic tenements may be meat, some may be metal, some may be silicon, some may even attempt the vastly more inconceivable leap to pure software, or even into the pure light of quantum computational fields. Regardless of one’s intolerance for hype or inclination for reading too much into the posthuman tea leaves, one thing is for certain: this  experimental era of mashups and multi-substrate hybrids over the next few decades will be both exciting and at times troubling to behold. We’re participating in our own evolution, for better or worse.

Pandora’s box is open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Pick a favorite cheesy B-movie metaphor if you like, the progress manifest in seemingly innocuous projects like the “advanced telepresence robot created by Silicon Valley robotics start-up “Anybots” is already analogous to prototype bicycles with wings found in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s earliest garage. Are video-phone sticks on wheels absurdly crude, compared to remote embodiments we’ll consider humdrum by the 2020's? Of course. At the same time, we err to dismiss them as inconsequential. No, the human drive toward applied, adaptive futuretechture is made of this very ho-hum stuff. In any and all cases, the impulse toward richer, more integrated remote presence and extra-corporeal embodiment experiences continues accelerating.

“Just as Copernicus’s heliocentric notion of universe is now bedrock truth, the Neuro Revolution will bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity’s role and place the universe. A quiet transformation has begun, albeit one that may take centuries to play out fully” (Lynch, 152. The Neuro Revolution.).

May 18, 2010 MIT/Stanford VLAB: Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) promises a quantum leap in human interaction with technology — enabling our thoughts and emotions to control devices and enabling devices to know what we’re “really thinking” and feeling. Currently, there are more than 300 million brain toting people in the United States alone, making the opportunities for BCI products far-reaching. BCI is bringing fresh and often unexpected perspectives to established industries, from entertainment and transportation to medicine and information systems. In this emergent phase of consumer-related BCI, innovators are redefining sleep management, gaming, user interfacing, courtroom evidence, and national security—and this is only the beginning. For the first time, neuroscientists and savvy entrepreneurs, from a number of traditionally unrelated industries, are teaming up to move BCI technology out of research and medical labs and into our everyday lives. The Business of the Brain event will address the challenges and opportunities of this exciting revolution, including limitations of “wet” sensors, “noise” interference, government regulation, novel user interfaces, designing industry-specific BCI applications and the cost engineering of current applications. Meet the minds behind this wave and find out how entrepreneurs are using the way we think to drive the future of technology. Topics to Be Explored:

Developing new industries vs. enhancing current industries Hardware, software and service opportunities Barriers of entry (how to build them up or tear them down) What VC’s are looking for in BCI Data interpretation and context Cutting edge vs. currently available

“Who knows? Maybe, in another ten years, we’ll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant.” — Pattie Maes

Wired: The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas. Embedded in Contact Lenses with Built-In Virtual Graphics might minimize power requirements: One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit. One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

Imagining an unequalable, universally contiguous, extended human cognition substrate; a phenomenologically consistent and sustainable epi-neocortical architecture, intrinsically obviating corporation and nation; diverse, progressive, transparent, authentic, open, extensible. Observe, interpret, forecast, design, build, uplift. What is it?

On Thursday, November 12, 2009, sponsored by The Rock Center for Corporate Governance and Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics: Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.

Stanford CodeX: “Human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” File under Augmented, Extended, Emergent Cognition Grid.

PhysOrg, (via KAIN): Stanford engineers are developing the first autonomous racing car to climb Pikes Peak, a challenging 12.4-mile ascent in the Rocky Mountains, at 130 mph, as a way to create and test safety systems they hope one day will be used in all vehicles. “If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep,” said Kirstin Talvala, one of the students.

More extraordinarily high-signal outputs from the seemingly inexhaustible cognition engine behind Sentient Developments: Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will … Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain mind-types … Forced cognitive modification is an issue that’s affecting real people today.

The eponymous io9 poses the question.

I propose, in short, no.

Perhaps our new job is non-stop education, outreach, and distributed peer-to-peer augmented psychotherapies to help other humans adjust and adapt to The Hybrid Century, as well. If the recent townhall tantrum trend is any indication, it will take many generations to even begin to bring humanity up to speed on the obvious and dramatic differences in scale and function between gray goo and swarming microbots.

So wait, let me rephrase that, the answer isn't so much "no" as it is, "not in the sense you once thought." In other words, there's a diminishing return on racking our brains to INVENT communication satellites, Star Trek replicators, and matrixy singularities; especially if all existence as we know it is actually a simulation, right?

The fact of the matter is, none of us truly has a grip on where the hell all of these developments are leading, but we certainly can see that the ever exploding explosions of everyday advances are taking us to wherever the hell "there" is at an accelerating; not flat or decelerating rate. Argue about the shape of the curve, it doesn't matter. What matters is the trajectory and how we bring our allegedly enlightened Human Values to bear upon this journey set so plainly before us.

Bickering over whether or not specific scenario high resolution realization of occurs -- will "THE" singularity happen or not -- also simply does not matter. All such are, and always have been, highly evolved and Focused Instructional and Motivational Tools, boys and girls; so let us rather write science fiction scenarios within the seemingly known universe of unpredictable outcomes of seemingly all-known unknowns; let us rather help one another to get over ourselves, accept ourselves, find ourselves in the Shared Fate of each and every one another, regardless of whether or not Gort, Hal, Neo, or Colossus actually awaits us on the other side.

Isn't that more than Good Enough for a fictional future palette? What more do you want, oh forlorn and self-pitying writer-blocked human? Put your Once and Ever Might Imagination to work envisioning and describing futures wherein every human has More Than Enough, without suppression or oppression of any other. If that doesn't provide our allegedly superior SciFi minds an infinite palette of possibilities, then perhaps we have only our own stunted, un-augmented, un-transhuman imaginations to blame.

After all the dreaming, it's the DOING that matters. And perhaps in between dreaming, only DOING can open us all up to the next imaginable unimaginable final frontier.

"This is the real news of our century. It is highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever experienced or dreamt of. To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another so that everybody can enjoy the whole earth. And it can all be done by 1985." – R. Buckminster Fuller, The World Game, 1971

Therefore, the highest probability for $ES_F 600 is shifted to either September or November. In any event, if you're not comfortable with futures hedges, one best find some kind of insurance policy. Maybe iPath S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures ETN or similar, are worth a look.

Remember, save the link so you can come back and make me eat my hat ... or ... bring your hat so we can get you on video. ;-)

@cascio Brilliant! Congratulations on the July / August The Atlantic: Get Smarter article http://tr.im/g3tsmart3r and Thank You! Fun bit of timeline interleaving discovering this http://u.nu/747m not long after the previous post.

However, this may not be the case for very much longer; hence the imperative to make some key policy and personal decisions, right now. What manner of individuals and society are we to become? As @cascio writes, in The Atlantic Monthly: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves. The Nöocene awaits.

And many other leading edge topics in this Summer Edition of H+ Magazine, now on news stands like this one everywhere. I must have lost half of my potential contracts because the company wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar.

It was around 1999, about four of five years before I finally started this blog, and many of the topics covered herein were considered so fringe as to threaten my real employment, social credibility, and even mental health assessment. I had been discriminatorily profiled in the past as manifesting mental illness in the form of various overachieving cognition crimes, such as being comparatively well informed about relatively fringe science and technology progress, understanding which technologies are likely coming next, and for concisely (and in retrospect, fairly accurately) forecasting a number of likely uses and implications for those emerging capabilities. However, I do not consider myself a “futurist” in the science fiction sense; I tend rather to gravitate toward the interface between the potential and the actual; I naturally find myself studying, advocating for, participating in, or at the very least desiring to act as a catalyzing agent that helps in some small way to transmute the potential into the next new actual. In some of those earlier cases, I’d helped to found companies that went on to build some everyday technologies that we now take for granted. At one point, I was literally told by investors and other well respected authoritative normals that I was not mentally well for pronouncing intentions that I went on to fulfill in every way. That particular technology’s trajectory is well documented and part of it even went on to include new IEEE standards. What I learned from such experiences is that it is empirically dangerous to share some of my understandings and insights with humans that populate the center of the bell curve. That’s a lot of humans, friend. Some of them, in fact many of them, would have locked me up and medicated me rather permit me to go on and build technologies that you yourself are very likely using today, if you use the internet every single day. So, I was forced to realize how the normals treat people who see things a little “too differently” from them; and from my perspective, such people became a very clear and present danger. I realized that I had to find ways to protect myself. Unsurprisingly, again in retrospect, that protection came in the form of surrounding myself with similar beings to the greatest degree possible; first by modem, then by academic association and increasing education, then by physical relocation to a part of the country where cognitive diversity was held a little less suspect. In some cases, even that didn’t feel like enough. When I began understanding that brain computer interfaces and other posthuman eventualities were not just possible, but both inevitable and desirable, I was utterly closed-lipped about it in public. I knew that if I began talking about these things as if they were obvious, the normals would bound me, medicate me, and I would never be heard from again. Yet, I simply had to have an outlet for these ideas and other emerging trends that I perceived as directly or tangentially interdependent in the construction of our posthuman future. At that time, I hadn’t yet heard of the word posthuman; but I fully understood and expected positive permutations of posthumanity to emerge within the subsequent 20, 50, and 100 years. We’re now 10 years into that first 20 year time frame. I also wanted to publish and broadcast such “fringe” thoughts in a way that might help others who viewed the world similarly to the way I perceived it, to feel emboldened, allied, encouraged, and motivated. Thus emerged the precursor to this site, A Webcam Darkly and later, as I began understanding this little experiment in accountable anonymity and technoprogressive futurtechture: Metavalent Stigmergy. While the past decade has seen some gains in cognitive tolerance, we have a long, long way to go toward building a world that is safe and supportive of both physical and mental morphological diversity. In today’s world, it’s fine if you have the cash and established social standing of a Ray Kurzweil or James Hughes to defend yourself; but there are thousands of us who share lesser or less developed and varied permutations of such forward-leaning cognitive styles, who do not yet possess such robust defense systems or even sufficiently fully architected personnas. Consequently, we are numbered among those who are expected to keep working at 7-11 or Kmart, or maybe manage a few other writers, or herd cats for some pointy-haired boss’s project or program; even as we see the world accelerating all around us in ways that create a more than full time autodidact vocation of simply keeping up, in hopes of preparing for, and adapting to whatever comes next. We live in a world where the normals won’t let us have money or eat or have a house if we don’t spend the majority of our already far-too-brief lives engaged in these relatively meaningless and mundane tasks that society understands as perpetuating its own safe status quo; yet, the overwhelming time and attention demands of that perceived safety effectively shackles our own intellectual, id est, existential puissance. So this issue of H+ Magazine coincides with a bit of a personal watershed. The topics being discussed are now sufficiently well understood and have been experienced by a large enough constituency, that it is tempting to call the all clear and to feel safe coming out from both the real and perceived social safety of this dual purpose identity bunker and experiment in accountable anonymity. I’ve experimented over the past five years or so in creating an identity that is both relatively anonymous and yet fully accountable to the community in every way. I say relatively because it’s also relatively easy to put together the pieces and find my biological identity if you care; I just don’t flat out give people the easy answer, outside of a very close circle of friends. Second Life has helped tremendously to advance the cause of accountable anonymity, but the ultimate achievement would be to coexist in a world where we are all safe amongst the normals; where cognitive diversity is not just tolerated, but celebrated. Now I’m really dreaming, huh? Toward that apparitional aspiration, perhaps we could create a magazine and sell the normals harmless pills with polysyllabic names that persuade them to believe that they too are exceptional, or at least that they too might have the potential to become exceptional. Or perhaps we could create television programs like The 4400 or Heroes that help to portray those deviant technoprogressive thinkers and positivistic posthuman dreamers as potential super allies. Nah, that’d never work. Humans aren’t that gullible. Right.