SINGULARITY SUMMIT 2011 IN NEW YORK CITY 15-16 OCTOBER 2011
The Singularity Summit 2011 will be a TED-style two-day event at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City. The confirmed speakers include futurist Ray Kurzweil, neuroscientist Christof Koch, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIT polymath Alexander Wissner-Gross, DARPA challenge winner Riley Crane, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, economist Tyler Cowen, television personalities Jason Silva and Casey Pieretti, and robotics professors James McLurnkin and Robin Murphy.
To stay informed about the coming Summit, you can subscribe to the Singularity newsletter on their website.
We dolphins are not too thrilled about this idea. Humans have not evolved very far from their Neanderthal roots, and the idea of human hoards invading and polluting the seas is scary to those of us for whom sustainability and resilience comes naturally. Requires further study.
PayPal-founder Peter Thiel was so inspired by Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand's novel about free-market capitalism – that he's trying to make its title a reality.
The Silicon Valley billionaire has funnelled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, an organization that aspires to launch a floating colony into international waters, freeing them and like-minded thinkers to live by Libertarian ideals.
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Mr Thiel recently told Details magazine that: ‘The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn't do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?'
The floating sovereign nations that Thiel imagines would be built on oil-rig-like platforms anchored in areas free of regulation, laws, and moral conventions.
The Seasteading Institute says it will ‘give people the freedom to choose the government they want instead of being stuck with the government they get.'
Phi Beta Iota: The idea of seasteading in some form of idealic libertarian island of paradise is fairly distant from reality. Accepting that the libertarians will be armed and alert, this concept fails to account for a) the outlaw sea; and b) the dead sea. There is no solution for any group of humanity that is sustainable absent its embracing all humanity.
LOGAN — Imagine being able to put your fingers on the pulse of America's biosphere — keeping real-time track of weather, water/soil temperature, animal populations and much more. Armed with this information, scientists would be able to detect sudden shifts in climate, perhaps even predict them, allowing the nation to prepare for potential disasters.
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The National Science Foundation has given the financial go-ahead to begin construction of the nation's first coast-to-coast network of observatories, including one in Utah, to measure real-time climate changes.
The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is designed to gather vast amounts of data, every second, from around the country using satellites, observation towers, aircraft sensors, mobile motorized sensors and field work by scientists. From insect samples to weather data, the information will be fed into a central lab to build a picture of the nation's ecological health.
What scientists will keep an eye out for are “threshold events,” or sudden changes in climates, that can lead to droughts, floods, even the spread of diseases, said James MacMahon, dean of Utah State University's College of Science and chairman of NEON's board of directors.
Phi Beta Iota: The most righteous thing the White House has done in our view, starting under Clinton-Gore and continued by Bush-Cheney, has been the Earth Science information-sharing initiative. The above article neglects the importance of the same initiative being carried out across the oceans, 75% of the Earth's surface. This particular initiative would do well to adopt the four fundamental opens: Open Source Software, Open Data Access, Open Spectrum, and Open Source Intelligence.
As anticipated, we're on the brink of a global economic depression (again).
There's a strong possibility that a long running global depression will lead to a reshuffling of the global economic and political landscape. IF that happens, many of the fiat currencies we currently use will simply evaporate.
Given this backdrop, here's today's big question:
If the dollar and euro implode…
…will the next global currency be gold or networked virtual currencies (like bitcoin)?
Until the new currency platform emerges, the safest hedge for the future is building, buying, or trading for anything that can produce food, energy, water, and products locally.
Phi Beta Iota: George Soros has dumped gold and is largely off the stock market. John Robb is one of the best observers of chaos versus resilience–his advice above coincides with William Greider's finding in Come Home America, to wit, financial offerings are fraud, asset investments (at the local level) are real. What all of this leads up to is that we should all stop investing in old systems, and instead do the right thing: invest in bottom-up localized resilience that yields sustainable benefits for all–real assets for real people.
Here is a presentation by David Eaves (from three years ago), on the importance of collaboration, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills for successful free and open source software and content projects (as well as the need for better on-line tools to support all that):
His key point is that “facilitation” (enabling the community) is an essential part of open source software collaborations or open content collaborations, and that we have not prioritized for “facilitation” either in who runs such projects, the companies built around them, how people are trained, or what our online tools are actually good at supporting.
He makes a point that (in round numbers) written text over the web only conveys about 10% of human communication intent, with about another 40% being intonation and the last 50% being body language (so, 90%+ of communicated intent is lost by using text).
He says this is a reason a lot of web communications go wrong with various emotional-related misinterpretations of what people wrote, especially when people have no common face-to-face history together. He presents a model of negotiation where people build “relationship” and “communication”, and then iteratively explore “interests”, “options” to pursue those interests, and “legitimacy” (or likelihood an option will succeed) to find common ground they can work together on as a “commitment” instead of pursuing “alternatives” to the collaboration.
He contrasts that with a competitive up-front take-it-or-leave it style of advocacy for specific actions by others (a style which does not first explore broader common interests that are behind why the specific actions are desired, where common ground might be easier to find by taking a step back from the specific apparent conflict to see a bigger picture of common interests and creative ways to pursue those together).
He suggests that every conversation has four aspects (Inquire, Paraphrase, Acknowledge, and Advocate) and says people spend too much time on “Advocate” to the exclusion of these other important aspects and related skills. In general, he suggests these communications issues are why so many free and open source projects have problems and that we need better tools to support this sort of facilitation across all aspects of a project (coding, marketing, fundraising, tracking defects, providing support, etc.).
Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
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Chalmers Johnson
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire (Abridged)
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Phi Beta Iota: The second article is a stunning review of the intellectual life of Chalmers Johnson, who was among many things a net assessments analyst for Allen Dulles. He pioneered the study of “State Capitalism” and considered the US to be a greatly under-performing economy for its failure to move away from military unilateralism and toward sustainable development.
“Self-assembling dynamic networks” is one phrase we should all memorise to prepare ourselves and to understand 2011. This phrase encapsulates the defining aspect of both the year ahead and the years to come, as we embark on the second decade of the 21st century.
Whether we act as individuals, families, communities, businesses, government departments or organizations, there can be no question that we have to listen, learn and adapt according to the massive paradigm shift created by self-assembling dynamic networks and their by-product: boundary-less tribalism.
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All Silos Penetrated
Just like biological systems, self-assembling dynamic networks are increasingly manifest in every aspect of human thought, behaviour and endeavour in the 21st century enabled by mobile telephones and the Internet. It is no longer a question of when or where… societies, governments, businesses and non-governmental-organisations are all being buffeted by the consequences of this rising phenomenon. Geo-politics, foreign policy, domestic governance, tran-national business, financial markets and online platforms are all being subject to the vagaries of self-assembling dynamic networks in countless ways.
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Key Features
The key features of self-assembling dynamic networks are as follows:
1. Asymmetric power
2. Unintended consequences
3. No central control
4. No intelligent blueprint or formalised design
5. Rapid scaling
6. Unprecedented speed
7. Trans-national synchronicity
8. Total transparency
9. Creation of boundary-less tribalism
10. New order born out of chaos
