Futurisms: Critiquing the project to reengineer humanity

Monday, October 5, 2009

The Revolution Will Be PowerPointed














  1. I quite agree with your comments on the conference . For something presumably focused on a singularity , it was rather diffuse . And cramped coffee and lunch breaks don't replace a more relaxed time for social interaction -- that's really the only added value to making the trip there .

    I think there are lots of singularities going on all the time and show up as Ray Kurzweil's paradigm-shift-bumps on his double exponential . The collapse of time and distance , the very topology , of the world's knowledge by the Web is a definitionally accurate biggie . The ubiquity of PowerPoint a far lesser one .

    As I mentioned when we chatted briefly the second day , the singularity I spent the `70s working to understand is that of consciousness . Now , 3 decades later , the physical basis of consciousness is being openly explored . I attended the Singularity Summit to get a taste of the status of the study these days , and because I can I can crash in NYC and see old friends and nbds . It's a nice place to visit about 1%50 of the year .

    I appreciated Kurzweil's summary that all that consciousness and quantum theory have in common is that both are mysterious . Certainly the papers were short of the boundary of what was understood 30 years ago . For instance , Gary Marcus's discussion of "cue memory" seemed oblivious to the substantial understanding of the mathematics of associative memory , and therefore human memory , greatly accelerated back in the '70s by the reification of holograms .

    I guess I shouldn't have expected more from a non-mathematical , general audience targeted meeting . In contrast , see my http://www.cosy.com/views/mind.htm . The most important concept comes from someone who may well be known by Ray , Huseyin Yilmaz . Yilmaz pointed out years ago that within an information system ( network ) , the maximum velocity of information transmission holds many of the roles that c plays in reality . Most crucially , within the brain , the maximal axonal speed of around 200 m%s , induces a volume of simultaneity , a singularity , on the scale of the brain .

    As I think about it , there were some useful talks with some of the current rather incredible imaging , and seeing how planar the dendritic branching in , as I understood it , cerebellar tissue , and one with an estimate of less than 1e8 byte of info in the genome . But , in the future I'll be drawn by more focused conferences .

  2. Thanks for your comments, Bob. Nice to meet you at the conference and hear from you again.

