latest book, Novacene – a treatise on the future impact of Artificial Intelligence – was published last July. In it, he argues the world is moving into a new era which will be dominated by the emergence of superintelligent co... which will slowly but surely seize control of Earth from their human creators, and fuse with us into cyborgs. Far from viewing this as a sinister development which threatens a Terminator-style war between humans and machines, Lovelock offers a refreshingly upbeat view: that robots who will rule the world with our blessing and support, because they will need us just as much as we need them.
He decries our tendency to see technology as a threat, rather than a new stage in our evolutionary development – partly down to “the endless stream of stuff coming from Hollywood. It’s always ‘the cyber monsters are out to get you’. And I just think it’s time we changed that negative way of looking at things.” The rise of superintelligent computers has anyway already begun, he says, and will accelerate. “Supercomputers exist,” he smiles. “An iPhone is a supercomputer. It fits in your pocket and has wires just a few atoms thick. It could never be made by a human.”
“It’s just a short hop from where we are already to a world of cyborgs”, he says tapping his chest. “Slowly, imperceptibly we are all being dragged into a kind of mixed animal,” he says. “I’ve got a triple wire pacemaker in my heart and I’ve got hearing aids, so electronics is coming into my existence on quite a scale already.” He adds: “It’s nothing but advantage. It won’t be that there are monsters who are controlling us.”
Superintelligent machines, he adds, will help humans solve some of their most intractable problems – tackling a warming climate, providing sufficient food and resources and helping us to administer the increasingly complex urban civilisations in which we live.
They will need us to regulate the rest of the planet and perform many of the menial tasks required to keep Earth – or Gaia – in balance. Super intelligence will come to view us much like we ourselves view plants, he says.
“Plants are about a million times slower than we are, but the farmer doesn’t go out and get rid of them. We need them and it’s a good relationship. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be true with cyborgs.”
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Added by Michael Grove at 10:35 on February 20, 2020
But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them.
Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.
Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is 60 times the length of the Berlin Wall.
Why are some walls so loud and others mute?Eduardo Galeano
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he extraordinary TED conference. To create this mood I used sophisticated camera techniques including a camera mounted on a wire, a 30 foot jib arm, and a miniature Dolly to float through this space and give just a taste of what it contains. Thank you for the opportunity, Jay Walker. To see more of my work, visit www.theHoffmancollection.com
THE ART of the POSSIBLE in FILM • in[DEED]
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algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used to regulate data traffic on the internet.
Both ant and human networks use positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager.
This research led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years!
( WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet” in its Jargon Watch column last year.)
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ne meant logging onto an electronic bulletin board.
Now imagine being able to smell it all coming—not the details but
the impact of a networked world on culture, business, politics, daily
life. These were the preconditions that spawned Wired. In 1988, Louis Rossetto, a 39-year-old adventurer, onetime novelist,
and avid libertarian, sensed that the encoding of information in 1s
and 0s was going to change everything. Living in Amsterdam at the
time, he and Jane Metcalfe, his partner in business and life, had
parlayed his job at an obscure language-translation service into a
magazine, Electric Word. Produced on an Apple Mac, it evoked a
digital universe that was not about gadgetry but a force for global transformation.
Over the following year, the couple hammered out a business plan
for a new magazine, tentatively called Millennium, that would take
this revolution to the US mainstream. Technology, Rossetto predicted,
would be the rock and roll of the ’90s, and the pair aimed to make
Millennium its standard-bearer.
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Added by Michael Grove at 18:22 on November 23, 2013
algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used to regulate data traffic on the internet.
Both ant and human networks use positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager.
This research led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems familiar to us: WOW, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years!
( WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet” in its Jargon Watch column last year.)
…
lgorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic
Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used to regulate
data traffic on the internet. Both ant and human networks use
positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the
transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning
foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager. This research
led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems
familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years!
( WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet” in its Jargon Watch column last year.)
…