WiseGEEK

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of short articles for WiseGEEK.com, whose unostentacious tagline promises “clear answers for common questions”. The site is fairly popular in the Great Wide World of Intarnet, boasting an Alexa rating that hovers between 5,000 and 10,000 on a weekly basis. Following are some articles of mine that have been published fairly recently. Some questions are common, some are self-selected and quite eclectic:

What is a Space Pier? What is the process of winemaking? What is a folksonomy? What is a hypertelescope? How much radiation can the human body safely receive? What is a polymerase chain reaction Why is carbon fiber so useful? How do glaciers move? What is an EMP? What is sonoluminescence? What is an electrolaser?

Here are some others, a bit older, but of classic transhumanist interest:

What are some common objections to life extension? What is the technological Singularity? What is the …

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Human Upgrades – Our Obligation?

My gf just pointed my attention to this:

Human Upgrades

The site is fictional but interesting. The tagline, “the possibility is our obligation”, should be taken with a grain of salt. Statements like this, of course, are what gets transhumanists in trouble with the mainstream all the time, and it seems like some people in the mainstream actually want transhumanists to say things like this, because it gives them more ammo in arguments.

Is it our obligation to take a child to the hospital when they are sick? Yes… although members of the First Church of Christ, Scientist seem to disagree in certain respects.

Is it our obligation to ensure that our child has a genetic disposition to be healthy and free of birth defects, if the technology to do so exists and is cheap and noninvasive? Most transhumanists and many normal people seem to think so, although some members of the President’s Council on Bioethics seem to disagree. Many would convincingly argue that they are wrong.

Is it our obligation to ensure that our minds are …

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Necessary Conditions for Artificial General Intelligence?

On Digg today:

Five Reasons Google Will Invent Real AI

Turns out that it’s from the gossip blog Valleywag. Its author recently attended the Singularity Summit. Looks like the topic is staying in his mind a bit! Of course the recent George Dyson article (“Turing’s Cathedral”) likely contributed as well.

Is the idea plausible? For Google to have a chance at reaching real AI, they would have to make it a priority. As in, would they need to create a project specifically devoted to it, and nothing else. They would need to put a dozen or more supergeniuses to work full-time for years on end, at a likely cost of tens of millions of dollars with no substantial return in the forseeable future. Do any Singularity-watchers think this could happen? Not before some other group has made substantial progress already, is my guess.

What are the necessary conditions for any group having even a chance at AGI (artificial general intelligence) in the next couple decades, or before nanocomputing, whichever comes first? Here’s what I’m throwing out there:

…

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Digg Likes X-Seed 4000

My X-Seed 4000 post reached the front page of Digg’s technology section today… the page has received about 5000 hits in the past seven hours, pretty cool. (Update: the final traffic count was about 25,000 unique visitors in the single day that the post was linked from digg’s front page.) In honor of this, let’s brainstorm structures significantly bigger and more exciting than X-Seed:

1. Space Pier 2. Space beanstalk 3. 100km-aperture hypertelescope 4. Death Star 5. Borg Cube 6. some structures from Halo 7. Ringworld 8. A Dyson sphere 9. Deep Space Nine 10. Many proposed space colonies 11. Globus Cassus 12. Omega Point

Add your own in the comments.

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CNN Focuses on the Future

I ran across this CNN event/feature just now – an ongoing thing called the CNN Future Summit. It opened with a television event and continues with a series of stories every week. There is also a tangentially-related site called CNN Future Summit Challenge, where people can submit their hopes and fears about the future and “build your own robot” using a sketchy-looking flash interface. Seems like the submissions ended on June 15th. What I like about the overall tone of the stories is that they aren’t overoptimistic, as one might worry, but actually discuss a variety of existential risks that could stem from these technologies.

The thing that’s interesting about both sites is that they’re blatantly transhumanistic, and Ray Kurzweil is featured right on the front page of the first. A poll question asks if people are interested in using technology to enhance their bodies:

Tens of thousands of people must have participated in this poll. Of course it’s probably biased in favor of people who watched the show and were interested enough to visit …

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