Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise

What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere. It isn’t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks — playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list — that you can already do on your phone.

But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add Popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too.  Read more.

My Perfect Country: Estonia

Fi Glover and digital guru Martha Lane Fox look at the digital revolution pioneered by the government in Estonia – where people vote, get their medical prescriptions even pay for their parking, online. With the help of Professor Henrietta Moore from the Institute for Global Prosperity and Taavet Hinrikus from Transferwise they ask – could it work where you are?

Advanced Scale Computing – Probably Not In Our Lifetime

Unless we embrace Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE)

In the ideal, Advanced Scale Computing (ASC) would be holistic – integrating all information across all disciplines, languages, domains, and modes of cyber space-time. ASC today does not integrate all measurements such as true cost economics (e.g. natural capital as well as moral and physical hazard) across all supply chains as well as policy and behavioral domains. If ASC is to be achieved it must be rooted in Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE), the only approach that is affordable, inter-operable, and scalable to the five billion poor whose human brainpower is biological computing at exascale. OSEE embraces rather than ignores the opportunity costs of doing business; the urgency of achieving access to all information at all levels; and the vital contributions of the five billion poor as both sources and consumers of information and intelligence (decision-support).

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Advanced Scale Computing — Probably Not in Our Lifetime…”

First woman space traveller to take internet to rural India through TV

Anousheh Ansari, who had in September 2006 grabbed headlines for becoming the first woman space traveller, is now dreaming of connecting rural India with the internet via television screens. The Iranian-American entrepreneur, who is working with Tata Trust to help the rural areas in three districts of Rajasthan get access to select content on the internet using their TV sets through an innovative technology developed by her company Prodea Systems, is now planning to expand it across the state before taking it pan-India.

Chris Eliasmith on Reverse Engineering the Brain, Dangerous AI, and Universal Basic Income

My interview with Chris Eliasmith, Director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and head of the Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG) at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of one of the world's most realistic brain simulations (SPAUN), winner of the prestigious 2015 NSERC Polanyi Award, and cofounder of Applied Brain Research.

Interview