TrendBlog � Trend: Sense and Simplicity: "Trend: Sense and Simplicity"

Minding the Planet: Collective Intelligence 2.0: "This will in turn enable the human species to function increasingly as an intelligent superorganism, for example, like a beehive, or an ant colony -- but perhaps even more intelligent. But the key to bringing this process about is self-awareness. In short, the planetary supermind cannot become truly intelligent until it evolves a form of collective self-awareness. Self-awareness is the most critical component of human intelligence -- the sophistication of human self-awareness is what makes humans different from dumb machines, and from less intelligent species. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "In exploring these subjects, one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active -- aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented 'subliminally,' which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "But the lack of violence within small groups can come at a heavy price. Small homogenous groups with shared values can be a nightmare of conformity. They can also be dangerous for outsiders. Unconsciously emulating the murderous border patrols of closely related male chimps, militaries throughout history have sought to form small, stable units; inculcate them with rituals of pseudokinship; and thereby produce efficient, cooperative killing machines."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Game theorists have shown that a small, cohesive group is the perfect setting for the emergence of cooperation: the identities of the other participants are known, there are opportunities for multiple iterations of games (and thus the ability to punish cheaters), and there is open-book play (players can acquire reputations). And so, those hunter-gatherer bands were highly egalitarian. Empirical and experimental data have also shown the cooperative advantages of small groups at the opposite human extreme, namely in the corporate world."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Any biological anthropologist opining about human behavior is required by long-established tradition to note that for 99 percent of human history, humans lived in small, stable bands of related hunter-gatherers."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, 'culture' consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. "

News & Broadcast - Press Reviews: "Adding piquancy to the proceedings was Chinese government data earlier in the day that suggested China may have leapfrogged several European powers to become the world's fourth-largest economy, after the United States, Japan and Germany. Speakers at the debate noted that by embracing market principles, China and India have added hundreds of millions of inexpensive workers to the global labor market at precisely the moment when technology has rendered geographical location less important.

Where Google may be headed: Google is God - Jan. 25, 2006: "In 2005, historian George Dyson was told by an engineer in the Googleplex, 'We are not scanning all these books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.'2 Dyson said at the time, 'We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.'"

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "To some extent, the age-old 'nature versus nurture' debate is silly. The action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment Y. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "So primate species with some of the most aggressive and stratified social systems have been seen to cooperate and resolve conflicts -- but not consistently, not necessarily for benign purposes, and not in a cumulative way that could lead to some fundamentally non-Hobbesian social outcomes. The lesson appears to be not that violent primates can transcend their natures, but merely that the natures of these species are subtler and more multifaceted than previously thought. At least that was the lesson until quite recently."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Tension-reducing reconciliation, in other words, is most likely to occur among animals who already are in the habit of cooperating and have an incentive to keep doing so."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "And so the crude picture of combat as the sole path to evolutionary success is wrong. The average male baboon does opt for the combative route, but there are important phases of his life when aggression is less important than social intelligence and restraint, and there are evolutionarily fruitful alternative courses of action."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "These nice-guy males seem to pass on at least as many copies of their genes as their more aggressive peers, not least because they can go like this for years, without the life-shortening burnout and injuries of the gladiators."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "According to the standard logic, males compete with one another aggressively in order to achieve and maintain a high rank, which will in turn enable them to dominate reproduction and thus maximize the number of copies of their genes that are passed on to the next generation. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "More important, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick themselves."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, 'All species are unique, but humans are uniquest.' Humans have long taken pride in their specialness. But the study of other primates is rendering the concept of such human exceptionalism increasingly suspect."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Summary: Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not 'killer apes' destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history."

Amazon.com: Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower: Books: "Regardless, most of this book contains extremely useful and relevant information on US chicanery and violence around the world. Despite the constant predictable sloganeering about freedom and democracy, the US has always been more concerned about preserving corporate interests and a hegemonic domination of power, with an ideology that is unyielding and destructive. Entire peoples and nations around the world have been ruined and exploited. "

KurzweilAI.net: "I would say technology has done more good than harm. You know, 99.9 percent of humanity lived terrible lives 200 or 300 years ago, and life was well-described by Thomas Hobbes as 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Human life expectancy was only 37 in 1800, and if someone got a simple bacterial infection it would plunge that person's whole family into desperation, because there were no social safety nets. Life was extremely difficult, and labor-filled. For example, it took six hours to prepare the evening meal. So we have liberated ourselves to a great extent from these kinds of miseries. Though we still have a lot of suffering in the world, only technology has the scale to solve problems like environmental degradation and poverty. "

KurzweilAI.net: "I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It's something that transcends the semblance of parts you've put together. That is the nature of technology, and it's the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the right combination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern."

KurzweilAI.net: "Yes, that's a typically human observation, and is how we think: we see patterns. A better coach or sports strategist will be able to have greater insights into those patterns, and be able to anticipate the patterns of the opposition, and then think of some way of superseding that. And historians see patterns in events in the world. Pattern recognition is the essence of what intelligence is."

KurzweilAI.net: "However, machines are getting better, and ultimately machines will be better than humans in all areas of pattern recognition. Of course, at that point, computers will have achieved human levels of intelligence, in the late 2020s. But human pattern recognition, though, is basically hardwired for certain types of patterns. For example, there's actually a region of the brain that recognizes faces, and we're very good at that, because we have a built-in capability. We're very good at recognizing language sounds, and language skill is essentially a pattern recognition capability. Computers can apply pattern recognition principles to other types of patterns that humans are good at, and they're also learning how to do the kinds of pattern recognition that humans are not good at. And ultimately, we'll be able to exceed human intelligence."

KurzweilAI.net: "Pattern recognition is the heart of human intelligence. We're in fact not very good at logical thinking, analytical thinking. Computers are already much better at that than we are�as is clear if you consider a math program like 'Mathematica' that's very hard even for professionals and mathematicians to keep up with. And yet people are still better than machines at recognizing patterns."

KurzweilAI.net: "The 'singularity' is a metaphor borrowed from physics, really referring to the event horizon. We can't easily see beyond the event horizon around the black hole in physics. And here with regard to this historical singularity, we can't easily see beyond that event horizon, because it's so profoundly transformative. We will literally multiple the intelligence of our civilization by merging with, and supplementing our biological intelligence, with this profoundly more capable nonbiological intelligence by a factor of billions, ultimately trillions. And that will dramatically change the nature of human civilization. That in a nutshell is what the singularity is all about."

KurzweilAI.net: "My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence�biological intelligence�is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that's not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization's intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation."

KurzweilAI.net: "One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. Machines can think more quickly than we can. They're much better at logical thinking and much better at remembering things: a $1000 notebook computer can remember billions of things accurately whereas we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. And most importantly, machines can share their knowledge, their skills, and their insights at electronic speed, which is a million times faster than human language."

KurzweilAI.net: "There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity�the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we're gathering about the brain every year. We're showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations. There's also two dozen regions of the brain, that we have modeled and simulated, including the cerebellum�which is where we do our skill formation and which compromises more than half the neurons in the brain. There's an effective simulation of that."

People's Daily Online -- 'Iran is not Iraq': Comment: "Militarily, Iran is another strong country second only to Israel in the Middle East region. It has modernized missiles and air strike technology and capable to block the Strait of Hormuz and destroy all the oil wells and pipelines in the region. Iran is the fourth oil producer in the world, producing 4 million barrels of crude oil every day. Iraq didn't have these conditions then. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning."

KurzweilAI.net: "There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment."

KurzweilAI.net: "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows�about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves�as if they'd had a lobotomy."

KurzweilAI.net: "The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it."

KurzweilAI.net: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

KurzweilAI.net: "Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me,' has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine."

KurzweilAI.net: "Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed 'chip' spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC."

KurzweilAI.net: "As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds."

KurzweilAI.net: "No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination."

KurzweilAI.net: "A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked a few hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month on the information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting, and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted. According to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in order): playing games, 'just surfing,' shopping the list ends with responsible activities like politics and banking. (Some even admitted to porn.) "

KurzweilAI.net: "I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations�text, music, film, software, tools, and services�all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers."

KurzweilAI.net: "Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible."

KurzweilAI.net: "The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers�all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works."

KurzweilAI.net: "How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan."

KurzweilAI.net: "The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive"

KurzweilAI.net: "The planet-sized 'Web' computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?"

KurzweilAI.net: "It's actually a complicated premise, but there are several key ideas. First of all, there's the idea that technology in general is accelerating rapidly, and information technology in particular is doubling its power, as measured in price performance and bandwidth capacity, every year. We will see the power of information technology multiplied by a factor of a billion in 25 years. If you imagine increasing the power of computers for the same price, computation, communication, as well as our knowledge of biology, and knowledge of intelligence processes in the brain, by a factor of a billion in 25 years, it's quite a formidable result."

KurzweilAI.net: "'If it were up to the Luddites, human life expectancy would still be 37, and we'd still be dying from bacterial infections,' says Ray Kurzweil in this wide-ranging interview. The anti-technology movement 'is fundamentally misguided, because it fails to appreciate the profound benefits technology has brought.'"

BBC - BBC THREE - Exposed: Episode Guide: "Heartbreak
We�ve all been there. It can cut like a knife, tear our lives apart, even make us kill�

In this episode, Exposed investigates the devastating effect that social and romantic rejection can have on our brains, our bodies and our behaviour.

Using the latest neuro-imaging technology, we explore the links between social rejection and physical pain.

Why does rejection lead to crimes of passion and revenge? How do early childhood experiences of rejection affect our ability to form secure relationships as adults? And do men and women respond differently to a broken heart?"

BBC - Science & Nature - Space - Life from a Comet?: "One theory of how life on Earth began is that it didn't start here at all. Life may have arrived from outer space on a comet. This is called the 'panspermia theory'.
During the early period of the Earth's history, collisions with comets were commonplace. Comets have been found which contain amino acids, the building blocks of life. So they could have brought life to Earth."