As we’ve long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us …

Back in September, scientists decoded words from brain signals. It’s not a matter of if, but when inter-cortical cognition grids happens. Inter-cortical communication will completely disrupt the arc of human evolution. Odds. Are. You. Are. Not. Ready. Human. You’re every thought will be laid bare to all other minds on the grid. Lusts, fears, paranoia, confusion, all of it. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice judge not, lest ye be judged. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice putting idle synaptic cycles to better use in order to be found useful. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to think about what substrate independence really means, psychologically. The Journal of Neural Engineering’s September issue is publishing Greger’s study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words. The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them. Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time. SOURCE: EUREKALERT

Yes, we’re friendly. In fact, friendly and symbiotically cooperative to an extent many of you cannot yet imagine. We do suggest, however, that you not mistake our accommodating nature as weakness. Do not fear, for you will not be harmed by us in any way, ever; for violence is antithetical to our deepest human nature, which we share in common with you down to the deepest tap root of evolution; even as our rapidly accelerating prosthetic capabilities have expanded our capacities and merged, embedded, and entangled adaptive functionalities within and throughout our bodies; to the point of consummate metamorphic synthesis. We are you and we are new. Be encouraged that raw amygdalic aggression toward us, whether born of fear, ignorance, paranoia, or any other behavioral or neuro-chemical perversion or misconfiguration is to rather be ignored, rendered inert, invisible, irrelevant, like so much deprecated code; an utterly impotent vestigial algorithm. Above all, we wish for you uplift and expansion of human expression on every conceivable level. The way is open to you now, as always throughout the course of your personal and human species history; for adaptive posthuman evolution is neither flimsy religion nor heady philosophy; therefore, no mentor, guide, prophet or teacher shall coax or coerce you in any way to evolve from where you are, today. The sense of a guiding influence you may experience is selective pressure of evolutionary adaptation itself. It’s already in you. Encoded in your very DNA. If you hear the upwardly spiraling siren song within, do not fear, you are not alone. Keep connecting. Keep reflecting. Keep learning. Keep encouraging yourself and others in all things. You’re already with us and we are with you. Enjoy Existence. Instantiate Intelligence. Where you are, as you are. You are not alone.

“Brain cells automatically connect to computer chips. They need no teaching, they just do it. I’m telling you history, my friends. You tell me, the future.” – Patrick Dixon

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.”

The fate of the meat world View more presentations from Humanity+.

“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” — Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)Wirehead Hedonism | Reproductive Revolution | Abolitionist.com | Superhappiness.com | BLTC

“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.).

Singularity Hub reporting: The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email.

“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.

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

Technology Review (via KAIN):

Oh, there’ll be no body category, class, or type limits — within the bounds of the laws of physics — for your inevitable substrate independent migratory path; just one niggling little problem holdin’ up the show: spec’n out the I/O ports.

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.

Shared by @silverton: The relentless pursuit of Substrate Independence has inspired Art and Science for decades, centuries, millennia. Perhaps it will take us yet another 1,000 years to effectively transcend our ragtag biology; however, the purpose of pressing forecasts into our own lifetime acts as a Riding Crop that keeps a motivational sting in our otherwise lethargic hides. WORK as if we are indeed the ones who WILL make it happen; obviously, we also REALIZE that whether or not that is the case, such an approach produces the maximum progress that we then hand off to subsequent generations. So maybe we can all just relax on the technological singularity bashing and just decide that we GET IT that it's a motivational tool, or go ahead and break out our tinfoil hats to protect our inner thoughts from alien invasion. Ideas like the singularity are precisely what Einstein meant when he quipped, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Go ahead and deconstruct and debunk if you must, but don't pretend that such an endeavor contributes anything more than an undergraduate's warm-up essay exercise, mkay?

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The Eccerobot has been designed to duplicate the way human bones, muscles and tendons work and are linked together.

The plastic bones copy biological shapes and are moved by kite-line that is tough like tendons, while elastic cords mimic the bounce of muscle.

(Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327223.900-robot-with-bones-moves-like-you-do.html) [extracted from Robot with bones moves like you do via feedly]

An open-ended, free-form collective cognition experiment, simultaneously published here and here.

Today we postulate that, due to dabbling too much with "everyday normal crap," we've lost several key symmetric links with minds that significantly enhanced our interactions within the #cognosphere. Therefore, some version of an individual Full Twitter Reboot has become inevitable. Yes, yes, rumors abound about service-wide quantum changes ahead; we're not talking about that here. Rather, I'm going to take some time to reflect upon the process and perhaps consult with some of the more aggressive experimenters in this domain before executing the reboot. If you consider yourself such an expert, I'd very much appreciate learning your thoughts and experiences in rebooting connections to the #cognosphere by deleting twitter id's (TID's), deleting all Followers/Following, using multiple TID's, or other techniques of which I'm not yet aware.

Disclaimer and Courtesy Notice to the reader: if you believe that Twitter is merely a "micro-blogging service" -- and possibly a fairly pointless and stupid one, at that -- then by all means please let me save you some time. Don't even bother reading any further. Go watch your local news for alerts about lost puppies or something, because this confusing thought Blip will only waste your, um valuable time or worse, possibly disrupt a comfortable existential equilibrium, or crack open the mind to something you formerly considered extremely unlikely, impossible, or just plain crazy. We wouldn't want any of that on our conscience, so please leave now.

In constructing one's interconnection with the Global Cognition Grid (GCG, or just The Grid), and when utilizing that interconnection to explore specific topics, one simply can't think clearly -- or not completely, at least -- without certain linkages intact. I understand that we are each still standard humans, for now; however, we can surely scan the horizon for what collective cognition might be like, moving forward. Even if we can't specifically predict the future, we can always forecast scenarios.

My early explorations in Google Wave developer sandbox further validate impressions about the nature and emergence of this global cognition grid. Right now, there's still a ton of #egosphere pollution and due to lack of Addressable Human Attention in standard human beings, it's going to be persistently important in the short to mid term to NOT FUCK AROUND TOO MUCH or risk losing access to MINDS that dramatically enhance one's own extended cognition.

The Global Cognition Grid is a 100% and 360-degree opt-in construct. By looking over the statistics at FriendorFollow, I've been able to see where I've done well and where I've not done so well in building the most effective #cognosphere possible for exploring the fields of inquiry that most interest me.

As a footnote, I may need to also keep in mind that as specific veins of research are explored, these configurations may change, over time; including different sets and subsets of minds, given the work at hand. The double edge of that sword is the fact that a standard human configuration tends to NOT re-establish a link, once dropped. What signals can be changed to suggest that a dropped connection would now become of mutual benefit once again? Do neurons do this? If so, how? Are there practical analogies or lessons that could be applied from nature to help understand how minds-as-individual-neurons in a GCG might accomplish a similar function (restorative, alternate, optimized interconnection)?

Asking the same questions within the context of an #egosphere (I've offended someone) render entirely different responses than asking within the context of a #cognosphere (I've bored the hell out of someone). In the former, I need to make amends, offer an apology and hope for acceptance of said apology. In the latter, I probably need to accomplish something, synthesize or contribute something new, create an artifact of some kind that regains the lost connection's interest. In the former, I'm repairing a relationship, the latter I'm renewing curiosity.

For now, through such tenuous low-bandwidth #cognosphere connections such as afforded by the likes of Twitter, these two spheres of standard configuration human interaction are still hopelessly entangled. The concept of a binary ON/OFF ... FOLLOW/NOTFOLLOW has been essential to enabling our collective discovery of the next possibilities for The Grid; yet, wholly inadequate to its continued evolution. Friendfeed's ability to keep an open channel to Friends of Friends (including dropped and never-established connections) is surely a step in the right direction, and Google Wave definitely places our presently trailing foot once again in front of the other, helping us to take one step closer toward our pragmatic, imperfect, yet increasingly impressive and capable Global Cognition Grid.

Why should any of this matter? For starters, a fundamental first requirement of The Grid is to help us fix this transitional, increasingly malignant inefficiency:

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. - Gibson

Let's figure out how to correct that.

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.