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Category: Singularity Signposts

  • The Remarkable Noam Chomsky

    George Rebane In a private communication an RR reader brought up Noam Chomsky and his views on the Singularity.  It appears that the world famous linguist does not believe that the Singularity is possible.  I was not aware of that, since in his 60 years at MIT he has been credited with making contributions to…

  • Time to Live Forever?

    George Rebane A number of emails, articles, and recent announcements came together that made me again revisit the notion of man’s dream of physical immortality.  What if there were developed a pill that would genomically and/or proteomically rejuvenate a person, and taking such a pill every so many years would keep him going indefinitely?  It…

  • Rise of the New Upper Class

    George Rebane [This is the appended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 30 August 2013.] In these commentaries we have examined major trends like systemic unemployment, income inequality, and the notion of a Great Divide that may rend America across one of its ideological faults.  In this installment I’ll briefly summarize a schism…

  • Machines and Minders and Systemic Unemployment

    George Rebane Automation and advanced digital technologies are eliminating the need for people in a growing number of jobs.  We’ve survived severe technological change before but this time it might be different: are we facing a future of dismal job opportunities, stagnant income, and worsening inequality?  Are we headed for chronic unemployment?  So asks ‘How…

  • … in the Eye of the Beholder

    "That's because we haven't yet played Cowboys and Muslims, but it's a'comin'."  (punchline to a joke about a conversation between an American Indian, a Muslim exchange student, and an old cowboy waiting at a small town airport in Montana.) George Rebane Readers should be clear by now that I don’t record these thoughts to endear…

  • Singularity Signposts – Just ask Watson

    George Rebane IBM’s Watson will now take your calls.  The progeny of Watson of Jeopardy fame is being introduced into all kinds of new decision support applications from medicine to finance.  One of the new areas for Watson technology is to ‘man’ call centers – you know, those telephone sweat shops where the speaker at…

  • Ruminations – 9feb13 (updated)

    George Rebane The prestigious national newspaper Investor’s Business Daily has now picked up the alarm about the feds’ enormous ammo and gun buys.  (RR readers were made aware of these developments months ago.)  All of the weaponry is designated for in-country use in the US, and amounts involved are enough to support the Iraq war…

  • 3D Printing – Bigger and sooner than you think (updated 28jan13)

    George Rebane Additive manufacturing, now ‘3D printing’, has been around and evolving for years.  But with the introduction of the precision and automated control of lasers and CAD (computer aided design) encoding the design of the manufactured (‘printed’) part, the field has taken off.  Imagine having a device approximately the size of a refrigerator in…

  • Singularity Signposts – IBM’s TrueNorth advances cognitive computing

    George Rebane A few days ago IBM published a very short paper titled simply 1014.  It summarized the first successful testing of TrueNorth, IBM’s cognitive computing testbed funded under DARPA’s SyNAPSE.  That program “calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 1010 neurons (10…

  • edX meets the workforce (updated 21oct12)

    George Rebane [This continues the RR series on jobs and the economy, and illustrates the relationship between workforce skill levels and available jobs across a spectrum of productivity levels.  The objective is to give the reader a firm understanding of why and how America’s systemic unemployment has come into place, and its future in terms…

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