Hive Mind

Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?

2006-07-20T10:58:00.000-04:00

The World Community Grid has recently added another weapon to its arsenal: fighting cancer. The Help Defeat Cancer project will analyze scans of cancerous tissue, looking for patterns and markers that will help differentiate the various types of cancer and their signatures. This new project comes only a few weeks after the introduction of the second iteration of the Human Proteome Folding project, which calculates the precise interactions of atoms during protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that fold in precise physical structures. Analysis of these interactions can help cure myriads of diseases, as all biological processes involve protein synthesis and folding for their operations. The FightAids@Home project has already run an astonishing 22,272 years of computing thanks to the participation of its 200,000 members.

"According to the World Health Organization, cancer causes 7 million deaths each year, or 12.5% of deaths worldwide. More than 11 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year, and it is estimated that there will be 16 million new cases every year by 2020" [Help Defeat Cancer | World Community Grid] while "UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus." [FightAIDS@Home | World Community Grid]. The threats of terrorism are a mere shadow when stood against the miniature killers that target us all indiscriminately.

You can personally contribute to helping cure cancer, AIDS and a host of other genetic diseases by contributing your wasted computer resources to calculate the causes of those diseases, a different approach from the traditional pharmaceutical method of trial and error on symptoms. Even your most ambitious personal use of your computer's resources waste the vast majority of its potential. If you were to look at the resources you are using (i.e. your cpu and memory usage), you would find that about 95% of the time your cpu is idle, working at a fraction of its gigahertz capacity.

Downloading and running the World Community Grid agent on every computer on which you can (i.e. yours, your parents', neighbours', at work) can have a much greater impact in saving lives than any other significant effort you, or even the world's governments, will ever undertake. If the WCG's efforts in calculating the causes of diseases would yield a cure for cancer, millions of people would escape death every year. Unlike the billions spent on the "war on terror", this minimal effort on your part will yield genuine impact on the world and, litteraly, save millions of lives.

[Cross-published: Newsvine - Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?]

Perpetual war

2006-07-18T22:07:00.000-04:00

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein and the war on terrorism has little to do with terrorists. There have been dozens of individuals as murderous and unstable as Saddam was in every century of human history. The idea that a few barely organized lunatics are more dangerous than an army that possesses thousands of nuclear warheads is ridiculous. Things should be kept in perspective and skills should not be superhumanly exaggerated.

Both wars have everything to do with national politics. With those never-ending conflicts, both parties do not need to actually work when they are in power. They can both maintain vague policies about security-related probabilities and not be held accountable for actual policy-making. With a constant culture war, dividing the population on emotional issues, policy-making can be easily deflected with rhetorical speech.

As long as we're here, small parentheses should be opened about emboldening and giving aid and comfort to the enemy: it's ridiculous. Any adult who thinks that some actual terrorist out there in, say Yemen, Pakistan or Iraq, is listening to what some people are writing or saying in editorials or speeches is either drunk or delusional. Add to that the fact that all the emboldening and comfort for exercising the fundamental act of criticism and peer-review in political decision-making is not going to do much difference in front of a guided missile or hand weapon, and much of this debate adds up to a content level between kindergarten and 3rd grade.

Since the information media has neither mandate nor incentive to provide understanding of political affairs, it is simple matter to provide incentives to the opposite and maintain sufficient secrecy to minimize accountability. With power should come proportional accountability, which is simply not possible with secrecy. Between secrecy, and its hypothetical efficiency boost, and accountability, which when correctly applied prevents corruption, incompetence, nepotism, war and propaganda, the benefit of the doubt is a foolish gift to grant to politicians.

Harpers published an excellent essay on American right-wing policies and their abuse of executive privilege, at a cost of several trillion and millions of lives: Stabbed in the Back! - The past and future of a right-wing myth, posted on July 14, 2006.

Shorter Bush Administration: $296 billion deficit is good news

2006-07-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

In a graphic display of lunacy, the Bush administration has cheered recent news that budget estimates put the federal deficit for 2006 at $296 billion, rather than the previously projected $423 billion.

Sir, you do not have generalized cancer, but rejoice, you have flesh-eating bacteria and we will only need to remove your left leg.

As always, the NY Times provides mandatory cheering for the lunatic fantasies of the Bush Administration: Bush Cheers High Tax Revenues.

Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: ‘The President Is Always Right’

2006-07-12T13:53:00.000-04:00

The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel. When questioned by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on whether the President’s interpretation of the Hamdan case was right or wrong, Bradbury replied, “The President is always right.”

From ThinkProgress: Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: ‘The President Is Always Right’

Biological evolution as the foundation of morality and ethics

2006-07-04T19:23:00.000-04:00

A very frequent argument presented by religious folks is that there needs to be a basis for morality and ethical behavior, which religion claims to be. Most humans have very negative views of human nature and believe that most humans cannot act in a moral fashion without a specific set or rules. Religion provides such rules through terror, fear from eternal damnation, and egoistical desires, which the ideas of heaven and God's love provide with convincing images. Fundamentalists are especially hard on individuals who do not follow their respective set of laws, believing they are immoral and therefore justified for forced conversion or murder.

But there is a strong biological basis for morality and ethical behavior, which stands as the foundation of the survival of a species. Any species or group of animals that would conduct themselves without an ethical political behavior would extinguish itself, as inter-species competition is too strong to allow any group weakened by internal violence to survive in the natural environment.

Evolution has woven morality in the genetic code of the surviving species and societies, as all groups that allowed internecine violence to dominate have vanished through self-destruction. For further arguments on this thesis, follow this post at Hell's Handmaiden: Atheists are bad, bad people: The Conclusion!, as well as the earlier portions of this well-written essay: part I and part II.

Shorter Donald Rumsfeld: I have no idea what I'm doing

2006-06-29T23:39:00.000-04:00

In a spectacular display of incompetence, United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate, regarding the largest defence lease in the Pentagon's history, that he had no knowledge whatsoever about large procurements, which amount in billions of dollars, and is not capable of keeping track of activities in the largest operational organization in the world.

Despite trillions, yes trillions, lost in the enormous military budget, a deficient strategy and poor planning for the war in Iraq, an incapacity to anticipate obvious consequences, such as home-grown terrorism from Iraqis who view Americans as occupiers, bizarre displays of lunacy and public non sequiturs, there does not seem to be any mechanism in the American political system to hold the Secretary of Defence, the holder of the largest discretionary budget in the world, accountable.

Any individual with a mere fraction of that power and responsibility cannot say "We know for a fact where they are" about any subject and simply never be held accountable. Any organization incapable of enforcing responsibility in such matters is dysfunctional and political institutions are not exceptions. The undertaking of such a serious matter as war should obviously hold conditions, such as severe consequences in the case of errors. Any accountability regarding the people who have the power to wage war should take serious any allegation that supports and impose consequences if they turned out to be wrong. The lives of a few people, not matter how powerful politically, are insignificant to history. Most systems are currently configured in a way that can more effectively work to secure its leaders' reputation over their actual work. Expecting anything else than pork barrel politics is at best delusional, hypocritically criminal.

This is a case study of the failure of checks and balances short-sighted by secrecy in policy-making. While the benefits of executive privilege remain anecdotal at best, its damages are countless in human history and repeated only because no significant commitment exists to evolve politics into a generator of human evolution, rather than being its most primitive institution. Staying the course in such conditions is criminally insane, yet continues undebated by the single most useless political institution in the world, the United States Senate, now a mere shadow of its history. It is very hard to take seriously a group of rich old white males who are supposed to represent the American population debating steroid use in baseball, in a committee on government reform no less, gay marriage, the life of a woman in a vegetative state, flag burning, video games and other insane and utterly pointless matters. If all other problems had been solved, these matters may deserve a few passing lines in political debate. But with so many problems plaguing our societies, it is unwise to continue without significant changes in the way our political institutions work.

Washington Post: Tanker Inquiry Finds Rumsfeld's Attention Was Elsewhere

Evil is in human nature

2006-06-28T20:21:00.000-04:00

The idea that there are evil or equivalently negative sentiments deep in the very nature of humankind is very peculiar in light of a very single fact: we are thriving, becoming wiser and wealthier. While billions of humans still live in terrible conditions, the condition is improving for most humans, unequivocally thanks to the immense progress of science in the past decades. Any species that fundamentally inhabits evil sentiments would be very unlikely to achieve even a fraction of that greatness, as its very nature would prohibit it from cooperating and develop its understanding.

Despite strong media hype, terrorism is but a shadow of the evils that threatened humankind with total destruction. The notion that a group of improvised soldiers are more threatening than the military forces that destroyed and enslaved so many societies is ridiculous. Comparing Islamic terrorists with fascists, the term islamofacist being a favourite of American right-wingers, is shameful and offensive in many more ways than Howard Stern may ever achieve.

Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and so many others who enslaved entire nations had armies, air forces, naval forces and highly trained killing machines. That the forces of large-scale destructions, from the Roman Empire, European kingdoms and the many military dictatorships of the 20th century be compared with psychopathic, untrained fools is unacceptable. The dedication of these soldiers of god is often cited as their unshakable resolve, and hence the terrible danger they represent. Yet most police officers, medical workers and other first responders would show the very same resolve if they were faced with the power to intervene. Terrorists remain delusional brainwashed youth, no matter how much damage they can create. They are mere dust compared to the millions of deaths from the many avoidable causes that still lack proper funding, from pollution, cancer, AIDS to illegal arms trade and the $1 trillion criminal market created by drug prohibition.

Dark sentiments cross the mind of almost every human being throughout his life. But the vast majority of our consciousness is dedicated to constructive sentiments. Those sentiments have resulted in the kind devotion of parenthood, social skills that encourage sharing and severely punish those so-called evil sentiments. Greed, bad temper and physical abuse, among many negative individual treats, are suppressed by our much more powerful empathetic, one might say "good", sentiments, which are almost universal among all cultures that exist to this day. Cultures that promoted violent or otherwise psychopathic behaviour have collapsed.

Empathy is the moral guiding force on which all imagined systems of beliefs rely on. It is our ability to understand how others think and feel that allows us to understand that it is equally important to preserve in ourselves as it is in every other being we can apply those principles on. The petty excuses of our violent history are mere passages in textbooks read only by a few interested in their meaning. It is cowardice that pushes people to reject the responsibility of freedom and fuels excuses that do not stand to scrutiny. War and peace are only differentiated by the ability of those in power to understand the driving force of the human species. Those who went against this force, the dictators of our authoritarian institutions, are only remembered by a few, despised by most.

All the great political and religious conquerors of history, those who shared egomaniacal personalities, barely have any impact on our modern civilization, much less than any of the great inventors that created the modern economy, without which justice and morality are but an eyesight away from total impunity. By modern standards, most of the "great" individuals of history would be considered psychopaths and would be socially rejected. There are still many people behaving similarly to history's egomaniacal leaders. But we now more often see them in padded rooms or shouting on the sidewalk than in a position of authority. That is because modern science has allowed us to create an economic order that rejects such egomaniacal behaviours from most of its institutions.

There is one policy that can forever solve the problem of terrorism. It is decades long but absolutely flawless: improving the life of all humankind. This feat can, and will, only be achieved by science and as such our technological progress needs a much steadier course. There is no call to jihad, or any delusional sacrifice, that can compete with freedom and a high quality of life. The beauty of science is that with the proper governing body and funding, it will mostly be taken care of by itself. All that is needed is political commitment, funding and a strict separation from politics. A contribution based on a flat percentage of the GDP would be simple to manage and fair.

Science is by far the professional body most dedicated to improving human life, as it has no meaning with such results. Science has so far saved far more lives in the few decades of its modern age than all the demagogues of the past. It is the single most lucrative investment from an economic perspective and the single most effective policy towards freedom, justice and democracy.

Why They Fight

2006-06-25T22:54:00.000-04:00

If North America was invaded, Americans would resist - just like the insurgents in Iraq.

http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1862

A serious proposal for a solution to the Iraq situation

2006-06-06T23:37:00.000-04:00

There is one solution to the Iraq war that would satisfy all obstacles and dead-ends. It would cost as much as staying the course with full American military presence, but actually provide positive results that would have the support of the international community and the Iraqi population.

The solution would be for American forces to be gradually replaced with a greater number of foreign troops working under a specially formed political authority and military command paid for by the American treasury. American citizens simply have to sustain the operation's costs in exchange for the return of their soldiers. Disorder from an otherwise unilateral pullout would be avoided by replacing American forces with soldiers from democracies with the favorable opinion of the Iraqi people.

It will be a politically shameful policy to put into action, essentially a full recognition of failure, but much better for the people of the United States. The reputation of one of the most unpopular American presidents is irrelevant in the context of the nation's history. It is the solution that hurts the American population the least, saving more American lives that any other possible option in the full course of the war.

For the Iraqi people this would mean a competently managed, accountable military presence that would break away the guilt and danger they are exposed to in participating with US forces. Iraqis know enough history to know the US government supported Saddam during his war with Iran. Things like that are not forgiven easily. It is very unlikely that any European presence would be welcomed as well, their presence having had much to do with the country's history of tyrannical leadership.

I would favor a leadership board made of influential leaders from around the world. There are many deserving ambassadors to humanity who would provide a beneficial support to an Iraqi democracy. I am not talking about the typical leaders known only to insiders but rather political figures that have provided recognizable benefits to their nations. Perhaps a large-scale election could select enough leaders to form a beneficial and accountable oversight.

Leaving foreign policy to the elected Iraqi government, the political body would have neither use nor benefit from secrecy and therefore represents a great opportunity to create an open political authority, fully accountable before the elected representatives of Iraq.

The only negative consequence is merely political and only concerns certain groups of individuals who were responsible for the war's development. The majority of the American people was tricked into this war and had every reason given the poor media coverage and lack of oversight. Paying for something you broke while someone else repairs it is the least someone can do. Shame hurts much less than death, especially if further misery can be lessened by its quickly forgotten sting.

Political science: coming soon to a political system near you

2006-05-22T16:21:00.000-04:00

A biologist who has never seen a cell, live or at least a detailed reproduction, is no biologist. Neither is a physicist unable to describe the physical properties of an atom of silver really a physicist. Professionals are experts in their line of work because they know the inner workings of a particular system. An engineer who doesn't the precise working of each gear and electric gate in an automaton has neither understanding nor control over the machine's functioning.

No sane individual would trust, or even take seriously, a doctor who does not know where the liver is, because his understanding of the inner working of the body are limited to overall characteristics, much as medieval medical science understood so little about the body that they aggravated the situation more than they did help.

I consider professionalism in any line of work to be related to a significant body of knowledge that must be learned in order to properly exercise a career. I also consider it to be related to a certification of some sort, most preferably a democratic consensus over what knowledge and proficiency must be demonstrated to hold a recognized title. There have to be respected judges but the overall policies must be conceived out of democratic decision-making.

I will stop right here and ask you to reflect whether or not you agree on each and every statement I have made above, at least generally. I can wait... I'm sure some people will reply that an elite-based system is a wrong idea, period. However I do not think any sane individual would ever be diagnosed, let alone operated on, by an unregistered medical doctor. Neither would a sane individual consider for a moment letting an amateur handle their life savings or car.

I chose very similar and obvious examples where we generally agree that there needs to be a proof of competence where our lives are deeply concerned. They were selected to reflect a fundamental system that contradicts all rational knowledge humans have gained. For certain unexplained reasons, in the most basic system of each and every society, one which affects all other aspects of life, there is neither understanding of the inner mechanisms, training related to the inner workings of the system nor certification of any sort.

Let us consider politicians and political scientists and their respective qualifications. Political scientists are exactly like medieval medical doctors, looking at the arms movement and hypothesizing that it may mean such or such disease for which he, obviously, has a cure. The mere mention of the word heart evokes images of all the emotions processed in its center, along with myriad other myths. Each and every scientific endeavor has provided proof that until any idea is firmly proved, it is much more likely that the truth is closer to the exact opposite of the popular paradigm.

Political scientists look at the overall idea of a government, but never peek at the inner workings. Just as the obvious object of study of medical science is the human body, the obvious object of study of political science is the system of government and its inner workings. So as long as the real dynamics of political decision-making, as opposed to the supposed dynamics, will remain unstudied by political scientists, we will never see any solid understanding of government and political systems.

Never in my years of study in political science, in any academic paper or object of interest have I seen the inner working of a government. Political scientists are spectators to a smoke-screen projection. Neither during his training or his career will a political scientist see, let alone understand, anymore than the descriptions of the mechanisms involved. The dynamics are completely hidden from sight through executive priviledge and other arbitrary traditions. It is accepted and unchallenged that what really goes on inside a government can not be understood.

What is ignored is that governments are a human creation and operation and can be fully understood if there is will to that end. The reason is that there are much fewer processes in a political system than there are in the human body and while they will not be fully understood for quite a while, it is perfectly possible to fully know them. Political science has an important advantage over all other sciences, but has failed to make use of it and as a reason lags behind all other sciences as the one with the fewest achievements.

Politicians are practicians who have mostly never even looked inside the government. Despite statements to the contrary, our political systems are under the rule of amateur politicians, who have never demonstrated proof of their competence or even basic understanding of their body of work. There is no formal training for a professional politician and there is no accreditation either. Politics is mostly a marketing-based market, with little substance and no understanding of the most basic inner dynamics.

Accreditation is a sensitive matter but education is not. There are clear proficiencies that a politician must master and it would be easy to develop an academic program that would reflect the matters a politician works on. It would not even be necessary to make such schooling to be mandatory, as it would be much more likely to reflect the true needs of a political system if the voters can judge of the usefulness it provides to candidates.

While the issue of accreditation is sensitive, the issue of banishment is not. There are clear violations for which full banishment of the political system are as clear as those for a medical doctor: corruption, incompetence (often very obvious with the right knowledge), profiteering and others that still plague our political systems. The reason those crimes are lightly, if ever, punished is that they are hard to demonstrate. This is however only a matter of will, as the laws that prevent full knowledge of each and every dynamic of a political system are consciously enacted to protect those crimes.

The field of political science will begin when political scientists will devote most of their efforts to the study of the actual workings of governments, with the full knowledge of the details involved. Only then will the adequate checks and balances work correctly to protect the system from corruption and incompetence. Only then will political scientists understand their field of study and develop political science as a professional academic field.

A workable energy policy: what would $1 trillion do to help the problem?

2006-05-17T22:13:00.000-04:00

One factor that is usually missing from pollution-control policies is the matter of investment in research. It is not taken seriously enough, despite being the single most important factor in this issue, the only capable of resolving it. We will not take care of energy problems any other way than through new technologies capable of sustaining a high quality of life.

Think for a moment what $1 trillion would bring to energy research. Spread out over 10 years, this represents $100 billion in annual budget (only 0.002% of the current world GDP). Significant improvements in several forms of alternative energies would combine to save much larger costs within a few years. More advanced forms of production, such as nuclear fusion, anti-matter and dark energy would also be much closer. We could create enormous wealth while helping to achieve energy independance.

The most efficient format would be a prize factor. Let's say there was a $100 billion prize on the development of a significantly higher efficiency and sustainability energy technology. The assurance of such a large payment would fuel scientific entrepreneurship, creating jobs and heliping science. I think it only makes sense that if someone were to develop something as significant as controlled nuclear fusion, solving all our energy problems, $100 billion would be a very small price compared to the wealth it would create. Smaller prizes could be granted for significant but lower improvements, encouraging a flourishing market of research securities.

It would be simple to build a system of private investment through stock options. Besides the large sums of the prizes, such discoveries are obviously lucrative patents that will generate significant royalties. So investments could be sold in the form of stock options on registered projects. After discovery, the stocks would be bonds of ownership on the royalties generated by the patents, shared equally with the creators of the patent.

Such high economic incentives would undoubtly be the most important builders of our energy efficiency. Small companies with the talent and know-how to achieve the objectives would be prime targets for very lucrative investments. Thousands of teams will compete to achieve the most lucrative goals. The X-Prizes and the Grand Challenge have proved that achievement prizes work as an incentive. If they covered all the possible discoveries that would benefit humankind, we would be in a win-all situation: public grants would only finance successfull attempts, private investment would be driven by a $100 billion a year industry, which would then be much larger thanks to those investments. There will be significant risks to investing in few research teams, but the prizes would be significant.

I have come to the conclusion that through the coming decades, all of wealth will concentrate in the form of intellectual property stocks, invested in patents that pay royalties. Knowledge will be a tradable commodity, the most lucrative of all. This energy research investment market would merely the beginning, as there are much more goals in the fields of technology and engineering. The assurance of a couple billions upon success is undoubtdly the single most powerful incentive to achieve any possible objective.

Wal-Martonomics

2006-05-17T20:27:00.000-04:00

Wal-Mart became rich by paying less for everything. Now it wants to get richer by wasting less. In a policy that makes sense on a long-term planning, Wal-Mart decided to:

be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy.
create zero waste.
sell products that sustain our resources and environment.

TreeHugger - It's Getting Harder to Hate Wal-Mart

On a long-enough time scale, industries will face the cost of borrowed growth. The single most important property of an economic system is to be sustainable. Any economic system that is not sustainable will eventually collapse and is therefore temporary. Any company that exists in a system must surely not see economic shocks in the future as a result of current practices as good long-term planning.

Such a policy is only rational and economically sane if the owners wish the company to remain in business on a long time scale. It has been established that very costly impact will result from the heavy pollution we created. Looking beyond such a possibly grim future, it makes sense that anyone capable of improving sustainability will have strong economic incentives to do so. For most individuals, stocks and other financial assets are retirement funds. While it is exciting to watch them rise fast, it is the overall result that counts. It seems Wal-Mart has decided to stay in business for a long time.

Arbitrary demographics: lessons learned from markets

2006-03-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Geography is a completely arbitrary demographic filter. It represents nothing concrete and dilutes cultural characters found in large urban populations. Marketing has understood this perfectly, going as far as tending to the large-scale psychological personalities. Politics remain in complete incomprehension of this sociological knowledge other than for marketing purposes. This use is a waste of the most efficient decision-making process allowed to complex adaptive systems: distributed intelligence.

Economic markets have well adapted to these realities and are well on their way to satisfy all the primary needs of humankind. The secondary needs, important but not mandatory, can partially be met by those markets. Tertiary needs are much beyond what markets can adapt to. With these needs, competitive access is always detrimental to the overall efficiency of the socioeconomic system, especially decision-making.

Science works largely based on critical debate and multiple decision-making mechanisms. Politics usually works along such practices, but lacks the check science with which science evolves: peer review. But there must be caution about peer review, as human intelligences easily make the mistake of confounding what is true and what is believed to be true. It is completely impossible to make an intelligent decision, especially the best possible decision, without understanding all the relevant facts. Citizens, whose most fundamental responsibility is to carry out or have the most qualified individuals exercise their political power, are asked to do just that. They inevitably fail as it is a physical improbability for the best decisions to be majority if information improbabilities are too high. In other words, when critical facts are misunderstood, there are simply too many possible options and decision-making becomes gamble. While it may be amusing to some individuals, it is far from useful to anybody that political decisions are not the best possible given the resources available.

This is an obvious argument for proportional democracy. However the systems created at the Institute go much beyond electoral proportional democracy. They are capable of truly representing not only the proportional interests of a society but also its distributed intelligence. Social networks, especially those used for political decision-making, do not arise out of arbitrary demographic filters like geography, any more than race, language and sex. These filters were abundantly used by the marketing and public relations industries for several decades. After they failed miserably, they were accordingly replaced with the much more efficient dynamic of understanding its beneficiaries. There is little reason why it would make any more sense in politics.

The Sunni-Shiite split

2006-03-09T22:27:00.000-05:00

However politically incorrect it may be, it is a chilling thought that human beings are willing to kill each other over such a simple issue. There is no rational way to justify violent action for opinions. A very abrupt understanding modern science has given us is that all opinions, every single one of them, is at best a weak and abstract representation that does not come close to understanding reality. We merely see the world through electromagnetic and chemical communications, imprinted in chemical concentrations that allow electrical signals to pass at various levels.

Whatever opinion each of us holds is only barely correct, although often very truthful. But none is truly indisputable or transcendent in any way. Ideology, this time in the form of a mass religion, is capable of exaggerating minor issues to completely hide the larger picture of reality. Religion is a powerful meme but it will inevitably go away, or at least evolve to an unrecognizable level. There will always be purely speculative explanations about the world. But the future ones will not involve magical interventions in our individual lives.

Islamic extremists were actually close to becoming insignificant and drew very negative responses from Muslim populations. This branch of Wahhabism considers that Muslims who are not rejecting the infidels are infidels themselves and are therefore legitimate targets for attacks. The small group that surrounded Bin Laden was chased from every Muslim nation, whose populations did not appreciate the holy wariors' piousness, and only found solace in war-wrecked Afghanistan, where extremists overthrew the government during a power vacuum. That the world did not respond in the first place, despite knowledge of every salient information to prove the situation was a violation of human rights, is a testament to a broken and corrupt political order.

Governments everywhere are packed full of very intelligent people who, despite intellectual skills, can do very little because the vastness of their responsibilities exceed what even them can handle. History is as plagued by political corruption as it is by political incompetence. Public administrations have become very efficient, but decision-making institutions have not evolved from their 17th century origins.

Only with fully accountable decision-making can democracy function. A vital dynamic of the decision-making process of a democracy is the understanding and power to express opinions of the citizens. Otherwise politics is dysfunctional and dangerous. Its activities become redundant and recursive. They justify their existence and daily activities. For citizens to understand what the government is doing, it must know everything the government does. There is simply no other way to make sure that every decision is subject to accountability.

While traditionally justified on efficiency, secrecy actually hinders political efficiency in many ways. It requires to create bureaucratic institutions to make sure decisions are broadcasted to the designated checks and balances. If citizens knew everything the government knows and does, decision-making could be very decisive when there is truly approval from over half the population. These kinds of decisions would be carried very efficiently as administrative barriers can be replaced by a single, all-knowing and free accountability mechanism. No wrong step could go unnoticed, so decision-makers would largely be given blank checks for political power. They would have much wider powers in exchange for unlimited accountability.

There is no point in finding solace elsewhere than in this reality, where we have a limited lifespan, both individually and collectively. Rationality has prevailed over a long enough period of time. Humans do not have a history of war because they are naturally driven to dark instincts. Biology has clearly shown that everything in a living organism drives it to bring the best to itself and its society. All human behavior, unless interrupted by threatening forces, works to eliminate harmful sources. Humans never try to carry negative growth ideas on large scale unless violence is imposed.

Past decision-makers, politicians and theologians, are largely to blame for that behavior. Humans respond extremely well to positive environments. Any human being can be trained to behave a specific way. By censoring the emotions of individuals, their personality can be molded. But given the best conditions, all conscious actors unite to improve the collective decision-making.

The future of computing

2006-02-24T20:51:00.000-05:00

Being able to simulate events with a high precision will give access to a limited capacity to view in the future and predict certain phenomena. Most of them will be natural, but statistically distributed social simulations will also give many clues about human evolution. In a few decades, we will be able to simulate every reaction between sub-atomic particles of a physical system. It will allow much better management of primary and secondary economic functions as agronomy and molecular engineering knowledge will allow precise and energy-efficient farming and manufacturing.

At one point we will be able to capture every detail relevant to a realistic simulation from every improbability wave and simulate concurrent outcomes that will answer questions involving chaotic communication functions. The faster we are capable of resolving improbability waves, the more precise our capacity to understand the consequences and benefits of a decision. When humans will form a computer that is capable of solving every improbability, genetic algorithm simulations explaining statistical outcomes of the best decisions will reduce the margin of error in every field of human influence and will enable scientific political decision-making.

One after another, every obstacle we face will evolve enough developments to work flawlessly. Starting with the simplest, the most complex will all be within the reach of the distributed intelligent system that will succeed the Internet. Human politics will evolve into a science when the basic aspects of an economy will be automatically regulated. At this point, permanent communications will be universal and computation will be capable of solving larger improbability functions, such as those involved in social interactions. Chaotic functions will be computable and achieve the creation of the mathematical functions of communications.

Computer-assisted decision-making is a crucial part of the semiconductor industry roadmap, whose performance is an achievement that should be followed. "Increasingly, new materials need to be introduced in technology development due to physical limits that otherwise would prevent further scaling. This is required especially for gate stacks and interconnect structures. Modeling related to reliability and process variations is needed. In consequence, equipment, process, device, and circuit models must be extended to include these new materials. Furthermore, computational material science needs to be developed and applied to contribute to the assessment and selection of new materials in order to reduce experiment effort." (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, executive summary, p. 30). Multi-core systems, with over 100 processors per chip in aproximately 10 years, will scale the grid enormously. The combined computing resources of billions of processors will provide such power in a few years, provided required investments are made in key telecommunications technologies.

News in America

2006-02-24T19:31:00.000-05:00

News media exert a powerful influence on political matters as they are the source of all popular political knowledge. Without a functioning news media a democracy is harmful, tolerating high levels of incompetence. An essential criterion of a complex adaptive system is a judgment mechanism that prohibits harmful behavior. Due to their power, incompetent politicians are harmful and can create strong negative consequences.

An essential responsibility of news media is to enforce accountability, as without extensive coverage a legislature would be useless. It is the citizens who provide the final judgment of accountability. It is however impossible to make an intelligent decision without a clear understanding of the salient elements. Politics is basically a very simple system as only a few people are involved in final decision-making. As long as there is a way for citizens to understand everything the government does, which is fairly easy, a democracy will self-improve. But without a mechanism to discard incompetent decision-makers, regression becomes much more likely.

Influential news media, despite their large budgets and resources, are unable to provide the duty they are responsible to deliver. Fox News leads the way (All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing) as satire to what news media is supposed to deliver. Access to information relies too heavily on subjective sources. Instead of having access to valuable information in clear and systematic processes, journalists have to hunt for their information. While it may provide a poetic legacy to the profession of journalist, the information bandwidth is simply too small for important information to receive the attention it deserves.

The evolving Internet is most likely to become the source and medium of transmission, a complex adaptive system provided with the tools to generate sufficient computation and communications capacity to access intelligent decision-making networks.

Artificial intelligence engineering

2006-02-24T12:54:00.000-05:00

Scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center have engineered antennas using an artificial intelligence system through genetic algorithms. The simulation ran on 80 personal computers for 10 hours and provided a design that would never have been found without computation assistance.

The program is designed to evolve solutions from a set of desired parameters and can work on any technology which can be defined in terms of desired behaviors. "Scientists also can use the evolutionary AI software to invent and create new structures, computer chips and even machines, according to Lohn. "We are now using the software to design tiny microscopic machines, including gyroscopes, for spaceflight navigation," he ventured."

This is a first step in what will define manufacturing and engineering in the coming decades, when all production and development processes will be handled through intelligent software. Starting with simple electronic devices, intelligent systems will be able to engineer larger and more complex devices, including large-scale logistical processes for mass manufacturing.

To provide an overview of coming uses for such technological developments, read our text on the world in 2055 or browse through Singularity articles at KurzweilAI.

Global supercomputer basics in advanced test phase

2006-02-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

The research team for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in construction at the CERN complex on the French-Swiss border to be operational in 2007, has completed an initial test phase for distributed grid computing that presents concrete capacity for global supercomputing.

The LHC will produce an estimated 15 million gigabytes in its first year, approximately 41,000 gigs per day, that must be analyzed and stored.

A graphical overview of the current grid's layout:

This distributed system provides a proof of concept for large-scale high-throughput grid systems that will extend to the global computing grid in the coming years.

Original article: 'Maiden Flight' for LHC Computing Grid Breaks Gigabyte-per-Second Barrier

As a reminder of what a distributed computing grid can accomplish, sub-atomic precise simulation of physical environments will be achievable. Above 10²⁵ cps of computing power and equivalent fast-access memory and bandwidth, a distributed computing system will be capable of calculating genetic algorithms to build engineering solutions as well as provide a much deeper understanding of the universe's forces. While a largely overlooked knowledge to gain, significant understanding of universal forces will create more economic wealth than all human work through history. Full capacity for nanoengineering, assisted by genetic algorithms simulated in full reality environments, will allow to build the most complex object at insignificant costs compared to industrial processes. The mere capacity of full molecular nanotechnology engineering (MNE) will increase the speed of evolution in information technology hardware, by making obsolete the currently required need to build multi-billion dollar factories. This increase will accelerate even further the efficiency of MNE, which will allow faster computation, storage and bandwidth.

Economic cycles will accelerate with the evolution of scientific discovery, evening out most current economic problems. Intelligent monetary and financial policies will remain a requirement for any economic policy, but an economy inevitably responds to the law of accelerating returns as soon as knowledge becomes the major constituant of its economic throuput. As we have shown in a previous post, Estimating future human economic growth, humankind will reach the knee of the exponential curve around 2010. This growth will largely be driven by limited nanotechnology and more intelligent software systems that will improve the efficiency of all work and processes.

Artificial intelligences will be capable of predicting social behavior from statistically distributed personalities among the simulated minds. It will make achievable an understanding of the deep mechanics of economics and most social behaviors. It would not even need to identify a single live citizen by using artificial simulated environments.

American political accountability: flashback

2006-02-20T21:43:00.001-05:00

On December 2, 2001, the following exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and Tim Russert took place on Meet the press.

Russert: The Times of London did a graphic, which I want to put on the screen for you and our viewers. This is it. This is a fortress. This is a very much a complex, multi-tiered, bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see, secret exits on the side and on the bottom, cut deep to avoid thermal detection so when our planes fly to try to determine if any human beings are in there, it's built so deeply down and embedded in the mountain and the rock it's hard to detect. And over here, valleys guarded, as you can see, by some Taliban soldiers. A ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. An arms and ammunition depot. And you can see here the exits leading into it and the entrances large enough to drive trucks and cars and even tanks. And it's own hydroelectric power to help keep lights on, even computer systems and telephone systems. It's a very sophisticated operation.

Rumsfeld: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of those. And they have been used very effectively. And I might add, Afghanistan is not the only country that has gone underground. Any number of countries have gone underground. The tunneling equipment that exists today is very powerful. It's dual use. It's available across the globe. And people have recognized the advantages of using underground protection for themselves.

Rendering printed by the Times of London:

Of course the rendering was fantasy. Most people require more accountability from their children than is asked from politicians. I fail to see how it is possible for democracy to function if a leader, unelected that is, can make such obviously false statements without any consequences, among many others. We can also remember "We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat", on March 30, 2003.

That a journal would be as incompetent as to print this is one thing. But one of the fundamental characteristics we should absolutely require of political leaders is their integrity and judgment. It is impossible for decision-making to emerge when such mistakes are not followed by, at the least, complete radiation from political life.

People in office are only in power because specific rules were laid out to allow them. The outcome was the direct result of a specific system. Clearly, with the quality of our modern political systems, there is a heavy justification for improvement in terms of accountability and competence of political functions.

Putting terrorism in perspective

2006-02-20T19:08:00.000-05:00

One overlooked fact with the current threat of international terrorism is the incredible evolution humankind has gone through in the last decades. Little over 60 years ago, Europe was in flames and so was nearly half the world. For decades following the last major war, the world stood on the brink of nuclear armageddon on a daily basis. Today, these ideas have lost so much meaning that the handfew who hold ideological beliefs have to shout or hit to even be heard. The fantastic beliefs of such individuals resonate only to the poor few who have lost hope for themselves or who think they have something to benefit. It was as true with poor russian and chinese peasants and german workers as it is to anyone today living in poverty. There have been plenty of both miserable and exploiters in human history.

Today, there is little immediate threat to fear from any nation and the interdependance of world economics has generated a prosperity that has shown the obvious economic advantages of peace and democracy. There is no current threat capable of sending ICBMs, heavy mechanical forces, fighter jets or highly equiped troops outside of the United States.

Luckily, the shaky remnants of democracy still infused in the American system is many times more likely to improve than even the most moderate of abusive regimes. It remains nonetheless that world justice and democracy is highly unlikely without the G7 becoming truly democratic nations, the United States being the most critically important. If western governments were at least capable of finalizing the last few reforms that will make then achieve a truly democratic form, humankind would be better prepared for its long-term evolution.

It takes a nation to lead a war. Groups can only wage battles and are no match against an organized army. However even the most powerful army in the world is not immuned from political stupidity. There is little to fear from all the most fearsome terrorists combined compared to some of the most unlikely armed forces. Even the small, heavily trained, Canadian forces would have been sufficiant to handle all terrorist groups if they had been handed intelligent political decisions. This strategy only works when actual decision-making drives politics, which is impossible without full accountability for every political decision.

Unilateralism would not work any better against the United States than it does in its favor. That American politicians fail to understand this speaks greatly of their utter incompetence in doing anything remotely related to political decision-making. There is no reason to believe that what is completely impossible in each and every aspect of society, that individiduals can be unaccountable for their decisions without undesirable consequences, could work in politics, where everything is in fact less likely to happen than in any other human affair.

Bin Laden's group is hated throughout the Middle East and the large majority of muslims support democratic reforms. All over human history groups of disaffected egomaniacal males believed they had a divine quest to liberate their fellow. Uses of organized violence against the established order can be counted in the hundreds of thousands, probably even millions. What islamic terrorists do is not unlike what hundreds of thousands of violent groups did in human history.

Islam itself is irrelevant to the question of islamic terrorism. It is merely ideology that, once again, causes great loss and suffering. A crime of passion's motive has no effect on the nature of the crime. A religious motive does not change that fact and is one of many types of such crimes. There have been people ready to die for their beliefs throughout human history and there are still today in every culture. In the middle ages and before, those who acted as the islamic terrorists today became kings and emperors. The seizure of power always begins with a conviction that surpasses the fear of death.

It is far from new in human society to use violence to gain desirable objectives. History only legitimizes winners, regardless of prior motives. It is the way criminals operate and it is the way tyrants operate. There have been millions of the first and thousands of the latter. There have been catholic terrorists, buddhist terrorists, pagan terrorists, protestant terrorists, atheist terrorists just as there were smart and dumb terrorists who acted for numerous reasons. Religion is neither new nor unexpected as a source of oppressive and aggressive violence, it was the history of christian europe, taoist, shintoist and buddhist asia, greek and mayan societies as well as practiced by regimes of all types.

Humankind needs to look ahead and work to reform its political institutions. We are capable for the first time in human history of using collective intelligence to work on complicated questions. The deep transformations of the coming eras of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology will render all current political issues meaningless. It is time we face today the questions that will matter in the long term. Our governments' habit of satisfaction with short-sighted solutions must be parted with. We must complete the final improvemements that will finally accomplish truly democratic societies. Many people still wonder how to define democracy, when in fact it is not something that can be idealized but achieved. I fail to see how we can achieve anything, let alone democracy itself, without an actual coherent effort in political decision-making.

Estimating future human economic growth

2006-02-13T22:17:00.000-05:00

A fundamental characteristic of information patterns is that they are exponential in nature. Each salient discovery promotes higher levels of effiency, not merely cummulative input, and allows more complex technologies to evolve.

Looking at past numbers and calculating an exponential trend, the reason for which becomes apparent by looking at past growth, we can estimate the GDP value with an interesting precision. Numbers were taken from a paper published by J. Bradford Delong, from U.C. Berkeley, about past economic growth.

We start from 1000 to 1850, where we see GDP grows by a factor of 5-6 times in the first 800 years:

Growth from 1900 to 2000 shows a sharp exponential increase and grows by a factor of 18 to 37 times:

Graphs reveal the exponential trend, slowly at first but sharp closer to 2000:

The exponential trend is more observable on the complete millenium scale:

What is most interesting, however, is if we calculate the exponential trend. Incidentally, it is pointless to calculate the trend prior to 1900, as growth is too slow. The knee of the curve sits from 2000 to 2010:

If past trends keep the pace, we should expect a GDP of:

2020: $80 trillion
2040: $150 trillion
2060: $280 trillion
2080: $510 trillion
2100: $935 trillion

As economic capital further relies on information, it is natural for its processes to grow along information functions rather than work functions.

Links to high-resolution images: 1000 to 2100 and 1900 to 2100.

Direct representative democracy basics: The communications engine

2006-02-10T18:53:00.000-05:00

At the closest level of direct representation lies the relationship between a citizen and his representative. It is important for citizens to have knowledge of those who offer solutions to political problems. This begins with allowing everyone offering solutions to political problems to reach all other citizens who are interested in such ideas and justify their capacity to accomplish them.

A communications engine is the most basic element of a direct representative democracy, as it is through communication that politics function. The capacity to reach individuals is the most accurate measurement of political power. It should be accessible not through a single channel but rather needs to be able to reach all those who want to be reached. Will alone should be sufficient to generate political dynamic. The engine should therefore provide the capacity to filter out elaborate criteria to help understand the broadcasted communications. Artificial intelligence will be able to provide that in about a decade. By reaching all citizens, political power would be accessible to everyone and function as a dynamic social system, rather than a passive and enclosed institution.

At its first iteration, the communications engine should take the form of a Web site. Driven by Web application dynamics, the Web can now provide powerful communications tools. A most fundamental aspect would be to provide the capacity for citizens who offer ideas to be heard in an intelligent environment. The application needs to reference knowledge whenever applicable, known information otherwise.

At its basics are 2 types of citizens: executive and legislative. Executive take direct action and pursue decision-making. They would be either representatives or work in a networked decision-making system. Legislative citizens would give ascent or rebuttal to policies. Legislative citizens would judge and comment on formulated policies. Executive citizens would actively develop policies and present ideas and projects. Legislative citizens could choose to have their will represented, unless they veto their voice, by an executive citizen. Most legislative citizens would therefore select a representative to thrust on most votes.

Candidates would start by providing basic facts about their ideas, their intentions and the justifications for their capacity to accomplish the projects they propose. A simple array of texts, videos and presentations would already provide a toolkit several orders of magnitude better than the conventional political campaign dynamic of rhetoric and filtered communication. A minimum number of standard characteristics need to be provided in order to allow intelligent matching between the will of citizens and the candidates' proposed ideas. This way citizens will be able to search and watch for specific issues and ideas, compare and make informed decisions.

Communication between representatives and the citizens they represent would be another major part of the engine. Representatives would be first and foremost accountable before the people who support them. Citizens would have a direct channel to question and hold accountable their representatives. It is merely a matter of synthesizing the noise to make sense of the opinions and ideas of the collectivity. Representatives would be much more useful working with citizens who inspire them. It is absurd to think a few people will be capable of solving society's problems. A much larger intelligence is required for such a task, a collective intelligence.

In a later evolution, the communications engine should be able to provide an intelligent selection system to allow a precise measurement of public opinion, broadcast ideas from those who do not want to wield political power and filter the noise for those listening in. The collective intelligence of humankind is the most powerful force known in the universe. It is strongest in a permanent communications and will provide the capacity to evolve further, a necessity in a chaotic world.

Ideological pathology

2006-02-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

A sad but obvious caracteristic of ideology is its pathological nature. All humans with a normally functionning biochemical system are capable of being entirely rational on all but a few issues. Those issues are among the most demanding in terms of emotional perturbation, love being an obvious candidate for inviting irrational behavior. Although we have not published an official paper on the subject, a venue we are studying at the Institute is the relation between intelligence and emotions. A few posts below reflect on that matter but we have not explained it yet.

Human intelligence was the result of a complex evolution that needed a set of careful objectives. Those objectives were provided by emotions, in the form of biochemical rewards to the biological substrate. What was good for the biological body, in terms of emotional satisfaction, was good for the organism. One of the most fundamental caracteristics of our intelligence is that we are capable of adapting to all new knowledge we can understand. Context is a very important factor in the rationality of this mental exercise. Emotional balance influences information received by the brain and changes the pattern of learned information. Emotion can therefore influence what we understand and therefore the computed solution to a particular input. When emotions reward an individual for a specific information, it is a biological constraint for the individual to reject information that contradicts and embrace information that strenghtens the emotional satisfaction. There was an evolutionary bias to seek information that pleases our emotions. It should thus come at little surprise that these biases affect political leanings.

A recent study by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen, briefly explained in this Washington Post article - Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases - identified through brainscans that emotional reward centers gratified discarding true information that did not fit emotional bias. Partisans of either the Democratic or the Republican party were as prompt to notice hypocrisy from a politician of different political leaning as they were to excuse similar hypocrisy from an individual who relates to their emotional biases.

While the implications of this can be overlooked, it calls for an important debate on the contexts in which political power should relate to the citizens it represents in a democracy. Politicians have largely taken advantage of emotional imbalance in citizens to gain support. While this is a largely accepted fact of political life, there are few justifications to reason that it is the best way to function. The governments' own incompetence and unaccountability are diseases that prevent them from exercising power in the first place. Fully accountable politicians would have much more freedom of action as abuse would be too easily detected.

Politics being the nervous center of a society, it is obvious that all should be done to achieve the best political system possible. Excuses abound about how much the task is difficult. Political philosophers and politicians have professed this for almost three millenas and achieved little while scientists have gone exactly the opposite way and have already achieved more influence than politicians. While the two groups may seem opposed, they both seek answers to society's problems and formulate answers to improve them. Technology has a much larger role in peace, justice, equality, wealth and health than governments do in every society. Politics are usually derided as deranged theatre and most citizens of modern democracies care little for political affairs. They do not affect them nearly as much as the technologies that grant them access to a material wealth that satisfies their most basic needs.

A marvelous epiphany most political science teachers like to reveal to their students is that politics is still working on the same problems as 2000 years ago. Such a fact is shameful in every science. Again, excuses abound to explain how hard the problems politics try to solve are complex. It's an obvious statement that changes little to the debate and neglects that it took over 2000 years to understand a clear enough picture of nature, which we mostly do not see. Politics at least has the advantage of being in position to know everything about itself. Decisions always tend the opposite way despite the absence of arguments.

Ideology is a pathology of the mind, a memetic virus that shields the mind from rational political debate. Politics, if it is to become a science, must provide itself with tools. Even economics has managed this well by using mathematical tools. The tools of politics are based on communications. At the Institute, we have formulated the systems of executive citizens, intelligent selection, the supercomputer-run encyclopedia and direct representation. We have also formulated a general theory of political science, which deals with a rational procedure that could be followed to achieve useful solutions. The idea of the tools society is fundamental to our research and could eliminate the pathology of ideology to produce a much more efficient, effective and legitimate political system. Most political debate, however interesting, is largely pointless as it rarely evolves from its original statements. If politics are to become a useful part of society, it must improve itself and equip with useful tools.

Site redesign

2006-02-04T01:49:00.000-05:00

The Institute Web site has been upgraded to a much more editable version. Changes are mostly minor on the public side but the administrative mechanisms have improved enormously. This will improve the overall usge of the site thanks to much faster editing, through a custom AJAX-based CMS.

What this implies is that we simply need to log on the site and edit changes directly to on the site, with live modifications. This upgrade is one of a series of tools we will build to satisfy the evolving processes of our editing. We will incorporate decision-making tools, archiving that will track the evolution of our texts and more contextual content.

Linear work vs. exponential knowledge

2006-02-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

New research subject here at the Institute: Linear work vs. exponential knowledge.

Summary:
Knowledge is additive and therefore has a linear function. Additional workers only add roughly equally valuable output to any process. Knowledge can provide a boost of several thousand percents to any economic process with much less effort and resources than equivalent work-based value output. It benefits from an exponential function and explains how over 95% of all economic wealth of modern societies is backed by knowledge.

Computation enables full physical simulation

2006-01-30T22:20:00.000-05:00

With sufficient computation power and emotional drive, through artificial intelligence, we will be able to calculate full physical simulations of precise environments. In less than 30 years, humankind will be able to fully simulate an environment, from its most fundamental physical forces to the most complex biochemical processes. Such a simulation will form the basis of most economic, academic and social activities. It will simulate engineering platforms and use genetic algorithms to form the most efficient designs.

This project is most often considered a research subject. However, it has reached maturity except for political commitment. It would take barely a few million dollars in investments and international cooperation to create a vast computational network capable of such processing powers. The hundreds of millions of computers that are connected to the Internet can provide an exponentially increasing pool of computing power. This approach has already been used several times, notably by the SETI@Home and the World Community Grid. The economic benefit of fully realistic simulations are valued several trillions in a decade's time as they would greatly improve all manufacturing, transportation and telecommunications processes.

All mathematical and algorithmical functions, which comprise the vast majority of the mechanisms in an economy, can be automated with enough computing power. The tools capable of achieving nuclear fusion and other advanced sources of energy are worth more than all the wealth created by humankind in its history. Significantly higher levels of energy would provide access for humanity to the basic forces of life. Bending the nuclear forces is possible with sufficient energy and is an upcoming step of evolution in regards to picotechnology. Such a level of technology means interstellar travel that would provide access to planetary resources. Computation and genetic algorithms are indispensable to create such technology and will help achieve them much faster.

Microsoft (strangely) leading the next economic paradigm

2006-01-30T20:01:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has lately expanded its plans to license their IP property. The only logical outcome of such a practice is that the technology Microsoft has developped will be improved without cost to them or Microsoft consumers. It is very likely that salient developments will be made, especially if academic institutions can benefit from educational access. In effect the overall field of software will expand in value and along will Microsoft's value.

One of the developments we have made at the Economics, Science and Communications Institute is a new model of intellectual property which emphasizes economic reward but opens the intellectual content of patents. As a whole, science is synergical and benefits from greater numbers of thinkers. Economic markets that were created in the last fifty years account for well over half of all economic throughput and are responsible for more than 95% of all economic wealth. Information is already the most valued economic resource and will progress increasingly faster with scientific research and advanced education. Education remains the most powerful economic investment any society can spend. Rewards only come after 15 to 20 years but they create much more wealth in their lifetime than any other economic activity.

Microsoft's move is a heavy push towards such a system. A rework of intellectual property is self-evident in the force that open-source pushes against commercial software. In a short lapse of time such development can be ignored but as it becomes as solid as commercial software it poses a rethinking of business practices. On a long-enough period of time, any piece of software that can generate a loyal core of developpers and users will provide more usefulness and value than a comparable piece of commercial software.

Intellectual property will represent a large portion of economic wealth in a few decades and will need to make use of all emotional computation capacity it can handle, the primary source of which is human intelligence. As artificial intelligence begins to handle most, and then all, economic processes, computation and information technologies will run the entire manufacturing, transportation and communication mechanisms while human intervention will be devoted to designing and developping concepts and theories. The future economic development of industrialized societies is directly tied to the development of information technologies, computation, specially nano-based computation, and telecommunications.

News.com — Microsoft expands IP licensing program

St Lawrence of Google

2006-01-17T23:09:00.000-05:00

The Economist — St Lawrence of Google

Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

Collaboration as economic efficiency

2006-01-17T22:22:00.000-05:00

Collaboration has surpassed competition in the new industries. While production needs the pressure of self-improvement, collaboration is far more efficient in knowledge industries. Engineering partnerships in the automobile industry are self-evident with the numerous cross-ownerships of the majors. The computer chip industries also strongly collaborate (Toward the Chips of Tomorrow, BusinessWeek) in order to achieve an industry-wide roadmap that would otherwise be out of financial reach.

The purpose of work turns into a logical decision-making process rather than a strategic one. Science is a self-correcting process that works best with a maximum number of criticism of the solutions evaluated. Research has a much higher return over a long period than production. Since competition drags down research by limiting creativity and evolutionary mechanisms, a reworking of intellectual property laws is clearly needed. Research benefits from the law of accelerating returns and therefore constitutes the only sustainable economic policy.

Research information tool: intelligent text mining

2006-01-17T22:18:00.000-05:00

Embryonic development of a distributed supercompter serving public research.

The Guardian — Digging for data that can change our world

The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain.

Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example). In many ways, it's more precise and sophisticated than a search engine: it not only tracks down information against specified criteria but can also draw out relationships between hitherto unlinked bits of research (see below).

2006 expected technological developments

2006-01-17T22:14:00.000-05:00

Driver-Monitoring System
Body Area Network (BAN)
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)
Metadata
NAND Flash Memory
Nanoparticle Batteries
SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony)
Micro Fuel Cells
Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
Coal Gasification
Perpendicular Storage

Worldwide nanobiotechnology survey

2006-01-17T22:12:00.000-05:00

A worldwide expert survey on 20 future developments in Nanobiotechnology (NBT) has been successfully completed. The survey was conducted as part of the Foresight activity within the EU network of excellence "Nano-to-Life" (N2L). 139 experts from 30 countries participated in the survey. For each development the experts assessed the likely year of realization, impact on science and technology, environment, quality of life and the labor market, and commercialization prospects in medicine, security, environment, agro-food and consumer products....

The Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis &
Forecasting at Tel-Aviv University — N2L Expert Survey