Brain to Brain

Is it just a matter of time before brain-to-brain communication will replace the Internet? If we merge our brains with computers, is there a risk the Internet will become sentient and evolve into a life-form?

These are some futuristic questions discussed by scientists these days. There is no doubt humanity is quickly entering a new technological level, but what does it really mean? Not long ago, scientists from the Berkeley University successfully demonstrated it is possible video of your thoughts.

This is done by mapping brain wave response to 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos. Then, patients view a series of videos, and those brain waves are matched with the correlating visuals from the first test.

The result is this video of the clip watched and the matched brain wave activity. As you can see, it is remarkable how close some of them appear to the original, and it is equally amazing how some images become written words in our thoughts. The procedure may eventually help create visuals of our dreams.

Dr. Michio Kaku

So, if our thoughts can be filmed, does it mean that our brains can be plugged into computers and we can begin communicate without typing on the keyboard?

According to Dr. Michio Kaku, brain-to-brain communication would involve not just the exchange of information, but also the transmission of emotions and feelings, "because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts."

            "There's no doubt that the internet is creating what is called an intelligent planet, that is, the skin of the planet earth is becoming a network by which intelligent creatures communicate with each other. '

But that's just the first step. Some people think that the next step in the coming decades is not going to be the internet.

It's going to be Brain Net because we're at the point now where we can actually connect computers to the living mind.

In fact, I ( Dr. Kaku) was just at Berkeley a few weeks ago where I had a demonstration of this: we can actually create videos of your thoughts.

These videos are not perfectly accurate, but I saw a demonstration in a laboratory at Berkeley where you can actually see in a video screen what people are thinking," Dr. Kaku says.

"So with electrodes, perhaps, or EEG sensors in a helmet connected to our brain, perhaps one day we'll be able to have brain-to-brain communication, and that gives us the possibility of Brain Net. In fact, some of the leading neurologists doing these experiments have seriously proposed a brain net whereby you would exchange not just information like typing, but also emotions, feelings, because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts.

And then what comes beyond that? Well, of course, beyond that is science fiction, and science fiction gives us all sorts of horror stories of things like Sky Net: maybe one day the internet will become sentient; maybe one day the internet will think that humans are in the way and perhaps the internet will take over just like in the Terminator series. Well, I don't think so, "Dr. Kaku continues.

This is an image of an internet map. Will the Internet one day evolve into a life-form?

"The internet is simply a way in which minds can communicate with other minds. We see no self-awareness in the internet. Now some people say, "Well, what about some kind of collective consciousness that arises by an emergent phenomenon?" Well, that's a lot of gobbledygook. That's a lot of nice words. Maybe. Maybe not. But it's pure speculation at the present time. Even in the laboratory with our finest instruments and the latest developments in artificial intelligence, we cannot make a computer become self-aware.

I personally think that we don't have to worry that that internet is going to become sentient," Dr. Kaku says.

There are of course scientists who suggest that peoples' thoughts should be recorded and made public, but that would imply a total lack of privacy and it is unlikely it will happen.

messagetoeagle

Mankind’s Potential

 

Clay Shirky: Unlocking Mankind’s Untapped Potential

by Brian Hoffstein

Last year Americans spent 200 billion hours of their time watching TV. To put this into perspective, the entire database on Wikipedia is estimated to have taken just 100 million hours to complete. This means that that country spends a Wikipedia’s worth of time every weekend, just watching ads! It’s a massive amount of untapped potential, which Clay Shirky explains in his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, is a trend starting to take a turn for the better.

Thanks to the Internet, individuals all around the world have more productive ways to spend free time. Instead of sitting on the couch mindlessly watching sitcoms, individuals can engage with others in online communities, collaborate on open sourced projects, and contribute to knowledge platforms like Wikipedia and Quora. It’s sparked a renaissance of ideation and created opportunities not dreamed of just a few decades ago. The cognitive surplus formerly contained to passive consumption is now being utilized for projects and philanthropic good, and the result is an explosion of innovation and collaboration that’s driving the world forward.

During a recent lecture at Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program, Shirky talked about the emergence of  global interconnectedness and its effects on business, culture and human rights. Individuals are now able to transcend their immediate environment to work with people around the world based on shared interests and ideals. It’s led to platforms like, ushahidi which collects, aggregates, and mines data about inhumane and corrupt political events; and Linux, the operating system developed under the model of free and open source software distribution. Platforms that constrain themselves to people “in house’ are missing out, as Sun Microsystem co-counder Bill Joy famously remarked: “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Shirky explains that we need to start building our institutions with these dynamics in mind.  No longer should we be engineering for robustness, he says, as there is too much variance within the participants. Rather, we should engineer around resilience; vis-a-vis Wikipedia, where the number of malcontents is outnumbered by the number of people who truly care about the integrity of the movement. When systems are built as such, Shirky says we move from a culture of “failure is not an option” to a culture of “failure is not a problem.” In the open, transparent age of the Internet, the ability to adapt and feed off of the wisdom of the crowd is the winning strategy.

singularityhub

Unity

Zbigniew Brzezinski published an article for the New York Times in which he wrote: “For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.” This situation is made more precarious for elites as it takes place in a global transition in which the Atlantic powers – Western Europe and the United States – are experiencing a decline in their 500-year domination of the world. Brzezinski wrote that what is necessary to maintain control in this changing world is for the United States to spearhead “a collective effort for a more inclusive system of global management,” or in other words, more power for them. Brzezinski has suggested that, “the worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” In 2005, Brzezinski wrote:

    It is no overstatement to assert that now in the 21st century the population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest. It is a population acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree, and often resentful of its perceived lack of political dignity. The nearly universal access to radio, television and increasingly the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches…

    The youth of the Third World are particularly restless and resentful. The demographic revolution they embody is thus a political time-bomb, as well. With the exception of Europe, Japan and America, the rapidly expanding demographic bulge in the 25-year-old-and-under age bracket is creating a huge mass of impatient young people. Their minds have been stirred by sounds and images that emanate from afar and which intensify their disaffection with what is at hand. Their potential revolutionary spearhead is likely to emerge from among the scores of millions of students concentrated in the often intellectually dubious “tertiary level” educational institutions of developing countries… Typically originating from the socially insecure lower middle class and inflamed by a sense of social outrage, these millions of students are revolutionaries-in-waiting, already semi-mobilized in large congregations, connected by the Internet and pre-positioned for a replay on a larger scale of what transpired years earlier in Mexico City or in Tiananmen Square. Their physical energy and emotional frustration is just waiting to be triggered by a cause, or a faith, or a hatred.

Important to note is that Brzezinski has not simply been writing abstractly about this concept, but has been for years traveling to and speaking at various conferences and think tanks of national and international elites, who together form policy for the powerful nations of the world. Speaking to the elite American think tank, the Carnegie Council, Brzezinski warned of “the unprecedented global challenge arising out of the unique phenomenon of a truly massive global political awakening of mankind,” as we now live “in an age in which mankind writ large is becoming politically conscious and politically activated to an unprecedented degree, and it is this condition which is producing a great deal of international turmoil.” Brzezinski noted that much of the ‘awakening’ was being spurred on by America’s role in the world, and the reality of globalization (which America projects across the globe as the single global hegemon), and that this awakening “is beginning to create something altogether new: namely, some new ideological or doctrinal challenge which might fill the void created by the disappearance of communism.” He wrote that he sees “the beginnings, in writings and stirrings, of the making of a doctrine which combines anti-Americanism with anti-globalization, and the two could become a powerful force in a world that is very unequal and turbulent.”

 roarmag

Zeigeist

    

 What if someone from the future popped up in our timeline and started answering questions from people on internet message boards? That’s exactly what John Titor did in the late 1990s. Claiming he was sent from the future on a mission to retrieve an antique computer, he talked with thousands of people online and told stories of futuristic life in 2036. Many of his tales warned of imminent disaster for the world, but he said he couldn’t help.

    As abruptly as he appeared, Titor vanished in 2001. Did he finish his mission? Who – or what – is behind the legend of John Titor? …

    Posted by John Titor on 01-27-2001 12:45 PM.

 Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975. My “time” machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two, top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid. I will be happy to post pictures of the unit. …

    Life in 2036

Titor talks about his life as well, including living in Florida as a child, his service in the second American Civil War as a member of the Fighting Diamondbacks in 2013, and the communal/agricultural nature of life in 2036.

 Titor admits he lives in a parallel timeline, one that varies 1-2% from ours. Enough to be slightly different, but not diverge from the major societal events. Titor is on a mission to obtain an IBM 5100 in order to debug computers in 2036 due predicted problems with Unix in 2038. The IBM 5100 emulates APL and BASIC programming languages, an interesting feature. John also posts pictures of his time travel machine along with schematics and the logo used by his military unit.

    Titor’s story eventually falls apart, with answers inconsistent and terse, and the user quits posting in April of 2001. The Titor story contines to grow as the conversations are re-posted onto other sites and through e-mail lists, with Titor fever reaching a peak in 2003, culminating with the release of a book about Titor, John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale in late 2003 by the John Titor Foundation, Inc.

mindscape

Virtual Space

Henry David Thoreau once remarked that “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all”, and those words have become true in a way that not even he could have predicted. While we sit motionless, interacting with the world on the screen we enter into a sort of quasi-movement through a virtual world. And this is something that puzzles me immensely. I consider myself to have a firm understanding of exactly where I am until the moment I open my web browser, and then it all goes a bit fuzzy. Where am I when my experience has shifted from my physical surroundings into a virtual space? How do we define virtual space, and is it possible and preferable to create an accepted virtual topography?

The term telepresence has often been used to describe one of the largest benefits of instant media. In the earlier parts of the 20th century, long distance communication was remarkable enough, but the multi-medial character of the internet has brought about the ability to project ourselves instantly into other people’s lives in an even more remarkable way. We can broadcast our ideas with comparatively small amount of effort and cost, share in experiences of music, literature of video and even the most mundane online games enable us to commune with people all over the globe as we entertain ourselves, all while holding instantaneous access to immense archives of knowledge at our fingertips. And yet, there’s something strangely detached about our current experiences of virtual reality. The prefix “cyber”, one that so many of us overuse to explain complex socio-technological phenomena, takes its roots from the old Greek word describing the act of steering a ship. And while we can certainly agree that the analogy of holding a ships rudder may make sense in relation to a control device such as a keyboard, it takes much more imagination to picture ourselves in the middle of a vast ocean, navigating the internet as if it were a body of water. There has always been a tendency to predict future technological development as moving toward a system of full-body immersion, a system that will enable us to completely enter into a virtual environment and become fully mobile within the machine in a naturally intuitive way. However, although such technology may not be fully realized and available yet, it does not mean that we have not entered into an era of “virtual movement”.

Source: humanityplus