The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Saturday, January 09, 2016
In The Tech News (3)
Ray Kurzweil’s Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years
The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years
By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. ...... By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. ...... By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim. ...... By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. ..... Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and of exponential technologies. ..... Each of these technologies DEMATERIALIZED, DEMONETIZED, and DEMOCRATIZED access to services and products that used to be linear and non-scalable.
The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years
In 2025, in accordance with Moore's Law, we'll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. ....... A $1,000 Human Brain .... A Trillion-Sensor Economy .... the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value. ...... Perfect Knowledge ... you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights. ..... 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People .... Disruption of Healthcare .... this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system. ....... Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die. ........ Augmented and Virtual Reality .... The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans. ........ Early Days of JARVIS ... In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense. ..... BlockchainThe Internet Allowed Us to Learn Anything—VR Will Let Us Experience Everything
The Internet has liberated information from the constraints of the physical world and essentially made the sharing of information free and unlimited for everyone. From communicating with friends on free Skype calls to taking university-level classes on Coursera and Udacity, our current access and connectivity dwarfs anything we’ve seen before. ....... Massive open online courses have fantastic content, yet a very low percentage of students end up finishing them. It’s great to see my friend’s posts on Instagram and Snapchat, but nothing beats being together in person. And no matter how many times I’ve read about the Apollo 11 mission, I’ve never taken a step on the moon. ....... Just as the Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, virtual reality will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality...... And just as the democratization of information reshaped society, this is going to have a massive impact on the way we work, live, and play......... one word: presence. Presence is the phenomenon that occurs when your brain is convinced, on a fundamental and subconscious level, that the VR simulation you are experiencing is real. ...... Want to watch the Super Bowl from the fifty-yard line? Be on stage at your favorite concert? Or just visit and explore a faraway country? Well, that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be able to do on the Oculus Rift. ..... Using 360-degree video and light field technology, we can now capture real-life events and distribute them to anyone, anywhere. ...... Soon you’ll be able to explore every city, watch every sports game, and explore the universe in VR. Content plus presence is an extremely potent combination. ..... Part of the great sadness of the modern world is being able to text, call, and video chat with friends and family from all over the planet but never truly feel like you’re with them. Sometimes this ghost of a connection can paradoxically be worse than nothing, being just realistic enough to make you miss your loved ones without feeling the true warmth of their presence. ......... Multi-user virtual reality can enable a specific kind of phenomenon—social presence. ...... social presence can convince your brain to believe that the other people in the VR experience are really there with you. ...... An average Tuesday night in the VR future could include dropping into a professional conference with a coworker of yours, watching a football game with your father on the other side of the country, then hopping into a VR concert with your best friend from high school—all without leaving the house.......Six Technologies That Hit Their Tipping Points in 2015
The rise of the Internet was one of the most profound developments of the past century. The Internet famously allowed the futurist Ray Kurzweil to conclude that “A kid in Africa has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago.”
........ Can we finally create a digital university that surpasses the quality of our oldest and grandest learning institutions?
A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. ........ The Internet and knowledge ... As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity. India now has more Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many. ....... Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means that we will see another three billion people come on line.Stay Tuned for the Technological Transformation of Governance
Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way.
....... Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley. ...... Doctors in our pockets ... Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars. ..... With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors. Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies.
........ Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles ...... sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors. ......... Bitcoin and disintermediation ..The blockchain is not useful just for finance. It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted.
........ Engineering of life ..... CRISPR gene modification .. an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders. ..... to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water. ...... The drone age ... You can expect Amazon and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone. And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform building inspections, and provide emergency assistance in disasters. ...... These are an even bigger deal for the developing world. Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods. Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic. They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology. ......... Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy ...... Solar and wind capture are already advancing on exponential curves, installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling. .......By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.
....... We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage. Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.
Just as early waves of technological innovation in education and health care simply attempted to digitize old practices — putting an analog class into a MOOC or a patient’s file into the cloud — early forays into governmental technology involved bringing civil services online and enabling citizens to follow government protocols on websites instead of in buildings. .....Cosmology Is in Crisis — But Not for the Reason You May Think
new governance technologies preparing to reroute lines of authority and change what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.
....... Others are helping teams to build consensus and budget together, dynamically and elegantly. Still others are creating operating systems for political parties that are already winning seats in government. .....Whether we're facing climate apocalypse on Earth or colonizing Mars, the deciding factor between human civilization being extractive and oppressive, or cooperative and generative, will be how much we as a species have practiced the skills of equitable collaboration on a day-to-day basis — hearing diverse viewpoints and synthesizing them, consciously understanding the flows of power dynamics, and designing in the key factors of human wellness.
......... Human beings have been sitting in circles listening to one another for millennia, but software and the internet allow us to scale up these practices in a way we never have before. ....... Cobudget for funding and Loomio for decision-making. ........ Many of the worst aspects of command-and-control, mechanistic, hierarchical governance are consequences of limited communications technologies. If we can make distributed cooperation just as efficient, the need for those old governance forms — which cause a lot of human suffering in the name of efficiency — could be obviated. ..... The key difference is: are you privatizing everything, or are you building the commons? The real distinguishing factor isn't the governing practices, which may be similar to a point, but the governing purpose. Are we building in service of the people and the community, deeply rooted in social values and human rights, or are we in service of private interests, which only answer to their own internal logic of profit and power? ....... Already, in our network, Enspiral, where we run businesses in service of positive social outcomes, we constantly have to 'hack' company structures to make them reflect how we actually want to work. We're sticking to the law, of course, but there's some legal gymnastics involved and we're constantly having to blaze a trail. Are we a community? A company? A charity? None of the current forms actually quite fit, and the distinctions seem contrived. ........ One of the protections against government corruption in democracies is that the moment of the vote is hidden and blind. ......the very idea that our key moment of agency as a citizen is ticking a box every three or four years is the insane part
..... Our 'democratic' system is another example of something developed a couple hundred years ago because of very limited communications technology — election dates in the US are still determined by how long it took people to go on horseback between cities. ..... What's actually incredible is when you create a society where people not only feel safe being open about their political opinions, but they genuinely discuss them with different people, and their opinion can evolve through that interaction — they can change their minds.When citizen deliberation is possible, that's when truly amazing solutions can emerge, from synthesizing different views.
......... What can users of SMS-enabled mobile banking in Africa teach us about how our apps could work? People in warzones and disaster areas know a ton about decentralized networks, because centralised infrastructure fails them. Activists threatened by oppressive governments have heaps to teach us about privacy, identity, and leveraging online communications tools for effective action and resistance. ....... most people in this space are running completely analog processes using technologies like neighborhood meetings and science-fair like exhibitions of citizen-generated ideas. They are willing to pound the pavement.
a growing zoo of subatomic particles...... We still have no idea what the vast majority of the universe is made of. We struggle to understand how the Big Bang could suddenly arise from nothing or where the energy for “inflation,” a very short period of rapid growth in the early universe, came from. But despite these gaps in knowledge, it is actually human nature — our tendency to interpret data to fit our beliefs — that is the biggest threat to modern cosmology. ....... explanations for the nature of dark energy range from proposals to scrap Einstein’s theory of relativity, the addition of a new fundamental field of nature, or even thatOn the Origin of Truly Innovative Ideas
we may be seeing the effects of neighboring parallel universes
. ....... only those papers that agreed with the status-quo were being accepted by journals. ...... Blind analysis is the most straightforward and obvious thing to do ..... By using these three approaches — blinding, systems engineering and transparency — the next generation of cosmology experiments should be able to convince people that confirmation bias is not a factor in understanding the cosmos. Without them,by looking to the heavens, the most interesting thing we may find is ourselves.
The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea....... But few companies actually try crazy ideas — especially the most successful ones...... The same conditions that increase the rate of biological evolution also drive the greatest rate of idea generation. ...... "speciation" is very similar to "ideation," or the formation of new ideas. ..... High-pressure environments incentivize people to try crazy 'Hail Mary' ideas, and while most fail, if one works, it is usually a true innovation. ..... Place your "innovation team" outside the mother ship, far away from the hordes that will tell them how "crazy" their ideas are. True innovation is massively disruptive and the average employee hates disruptive change. Steve Jobs isolated his Macintosh team far away from the rest of Apple and proudly flew a pirate flag above the building.The Recipe for Generating Crazy, Innovative Ideas in Companies
it's important for "ideas to have sex." ..... This is how new ideas are made — I merge your idea and my idea and it becomes something new and valuable. ...... if new idea generation is a function of "idea interaction," then the rate of people interacting matters a lot. ...... In the 1950s, 7% of the population lived in cities..... Today, a little over 38% of people live in cities.....By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities........
doubling a city's population drives a 15% increase in income, wealth and innovation.
...... Jobs was very particular about where the bathrooms were placed in Pixar's office because he wanted "serendipitous personal encounters" to occur. ...... ask people to pick a spot and sign up to give a 10-minute talk on any subject, personal or professional. ..... Make sure you have a communication outlet that allows ideas to bubble up from anywhere, across disciplines and layers of the organization. ....... when you ask them to deliver 10x performance, with severely limited resources (i.e. 1/10th the budget and 1/10th the time), it drives invention and innovation. ...... Musk did this with Tesla, creating an epic car company with no legacy, no unions, no old factories and no old approaches. ....... Create hyper-constraints on your team. Set a difficult goal driven by a powerful massively transformative purpose and incentivize them to try new ways of attacking the problems you want solved ....... if you want true innovation, give the hardest, craziest challenges to the youth (or at least youthfully minded) in your company. ...... At what age do you think most Noble Laureates do their prize winning work? Not win their medal, but actually publish the research? .... Turns out, it's in their mid to late twenties...... "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible… and achieve it, generation after generation." ...... Where in your organization do you allow your teams to try crazy ideas?
Paul Graham's Social Essay
Paul Graham's Social Essay https://t.co/qXzTa402R2 @paulg @sacca @skg_accel @NavinChaddha @promodhaque @NeerajVC @mamoonha @RonConway
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 9, 2016The Refragmentation by Paul Graham
Though strictly speaking World War II lasted less than 4 years for the US, its effects lasted longer. Wars make central governments more powerful, and World War II was an extreme case of this. In the US, as in all the other Allied countries, the federal government was slow to give up the new powers it had acquired. Indeed, in some respects the war didn't end in 1945; the enemy just switched to the Soviet Union. In tax rates, federal power, defense spending, conscription, and nationalism the decades after the war looked more like wartime than prewar peacetime. [3] And the social effects lasted too. The kid pulled into the army from behind a mule team in West Virginia didn't simply go back to the farm afterward. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. ....... John D. Rockefeller said in 1880..... The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return..... He turned out to be mistaken, but he seemed right for the next hundred years............. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. ........ In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner. ......... the "red delicious" apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. .........
For most of the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. You can see it in old photos. Few adults aspired to look dangerous in 1950.
........ But the rise of national corporations didn't just compress us culturally. It compressed us economically too, and on both ends. ........ Along with giant national corporations, we got giant national labor unions. And in the mid 20th century the corporations cut deals with the unions where they paid over market price for labor. Partly because the unions were monopolies. ......... Much of the de facto pay of executives never showed up on their income tax returns, because it took the form of perks. ....... The ultimate way to get market price is to work for yourself, by starting your own company. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. But in the mid 20th century it was an alien concept. ........ in the mid 20th century. Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small. Which in those days of big companies often meant scurrying around trying to avoid being trampled by elephants. It was more prestigious to be one of the executive class riding the elephant. ......... in the 20th century there were more and more college graduates. They increased from about 2% of the population in 1900 to about 25% in 2000 ........ people in the 1950s and 60s had been even more conformist than us ...... What J. P. Morgan was to the horizontal axis, Henry Ford was to the vertical. He wanted to do everything himself. ....... if you want to solve a problem using a network of cooperating companies, you have to be able to coordinate their efforts, and you can do that much better with computers. Computers reduce the transaction costs that Coase argued are the raison d'etre of corporations. That is a fundamental change. .......... IBM itself ended up being supplanted by a supplier coming in from the side—from software, which didn't even seem to be the same business. .........
Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. That sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century. But it was going to happen increasingly often in the future.
......... This didn't seem as dubious to government officials at the time as it sounds to us. They felt a two-party system ensured sufficient competition in politics. It ought to work for business too. ...... The word used for this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. What was really happening was de-oligopolization. It happened to one industry after another. Two of the most visible to consumers were air travel and long-distance phone service, which both became dramatically cheaper after deregulation. ........
The companies in the S&P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years. By 2012 that number was 18 years.
......... the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way the industrial revolution was driven by steam engines. ........ The new fluidity of companies changed people's relationships with their employers. Why climb a corporate ladder that might be yanked out from under you? Ambitious people started to think of a career less as climbing a single ladder than as a series of jobs that might be at different companies. More movement (or even potential movement) between companies introduced more competition in salaries. Plus as companies became smaller it became easier to estimate how much an employee contributed to the company's revenue. Both changes drove salaries toward market price. And since people vary dramatically in productivity, paying market price meant salaries started to diverge. ........ Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. To someone in their twenties today, this wouldn't seem worth naming. Why wouldn't young professionals make lots of money? But until the 1980s being underpaid early in your career was part of what it meant to be a professional. ....... Almost four decades later, fragmentation is still increasing. ......... With the centripetal forces of total war and 20th century oligopoly mostly gone, what will happen next? ........The form of fragmentation people worry most about lately is economic inequality, and if you want to eliminate that you're up against a truly formidable headwind—one that has been in operation since the stone age: technology. Technology is a lever. It magnifies work. And the lever not only grows increasingly long, but the rate at which it grows is itself increasing.
......... The ambitious had little choice but to join large organizations that made them march in step with lots of other people—literally in the case of the armed forces, figuratively in the case of big corporations. ......... as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase. Even if you eliminate all the other ways to get rich. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity. ......... When Rockefeller said individualism was gone, he was right for a hundred years. It's back now, and that's likely to be true for longer....... The first big company CEOs were J. P. Morgan's hired hands ........ "Our founder" meant a photograph of a severe-looking man with a walrus mustache and a wing collar who had died decades ago. The thing to be when I was a kid was an executive. If you weren't around then it's hard to grasp the cachet that term had. The fancy version of everything was called the "executive" model. ....... it is certainly not impossible for a CEO to make 200x as much difference to a company's revenues as the average employee. Look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple when he came back as CEO. It would have been a good deal for the board to give him 95% of the company. Apple's market cap the day Steve came back in July 1997 was 1.73 billion. 5% of Apple now (January 2016) would be worth about 30 billion. And it would not be if Steve hadn't come back; Apple probably wouldn't even exist anymore. ......... Google will pay people millions of dollars a year to keep them from leaving to start or join startups.
If computers have brought about so much disruption, imagine what artificial intelligence will do, and at what speed! I just hope we get to the age of abundance fast and end up in an era of no poverty, no disease. As to the massive surpluses, I am less worried about the rich. But even there social and political innovation can happen. You can't get rich unless a lot of people can buy what you are selling. Political innovation is not happening as fast as technological innovation. And that is bad news. It does not have to be. Tech itself is partly to blame. There has not been enough direct technological innovation applied to the political sphere itself. Technology has the option to give us truly participatory democracy, but it has not done it. Technology has the option to give us rich, robust, grassroots discussions. It has not done it. The impending age of abundance means everyone can eat, there is no overpopulation, but it will not happen on its own. I think where Paul Graham falls short is in not being able to see that maybe political innovation will also happen. Unless the purchasing power of the masses goes up exponentially, we can not create the truly super rich, and we will not be a multi-planetary species. In the age of abundance, there should be a floor beneath which no human being falls. And that floor keeps rising because productivity keeps going up, and rather fast.
This essay is remarkable social and political (and economic) insight by a dude only known for tech startups.
I happen to think we have to start by creating a world government. For one, we have an existential reason to do so. There is no other way to coordinate the fight with Climate Change. And other good things follow. Only one person one vote taken to its logical, global conclusion will give us the kind of political innovation we need. Right now the political systems of the world simply do not create enough pressure. The only reason Google floats is because enough people click on its ads. Right now nobody is voting at the global level. A head of state is only one person.
Barack Obama: FDR, Lincoln And Washington
Maybe Paul Graham should put some of his Dropbox money into my Kickstarter campaign. It's only 60K. I intend to disrupt global group dynamics.
Paul Graham Asks For Disqus 2.0 Or A Disqus Disruptor
Paul Graham Is Not That Innocent
Paul Graham's Black Swans
Paul Graham: Disrupt
Paul Graham Now Has Disqus Integration At His Blog
TechStars' Geographical Advantage Over Y Combinator
Plenty Still Broken In The World
Fred Wilson And Mark Suster Missing Out On AirBnB And Uber
Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited
Dave McClure: Super Angel: Foulmouth
Me @ BBC
Robin Hood: My German Nickname
Y Combinator: Conveyor Belt StartUping?
Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC
Please fund my project https://t.co/QeYB3hBQuy #augmentedreality @RickKing16 @StasBorecky @fjbering @vonmelchior @Saga_Paul @Digarbeit— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 8, 2016
Paul Graham's Social Essay https://t.co/qXzTa402R2 @peterthiel @aneelb @venkyganesan @djparekh @satishd @chandna @salil @shervin @pmarca
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 9, 2016Stay Tuned for the Technological Transformation of Governance
Just as early waves of technological innovation in education and health care simply attempted to digitize old practices — putting an analog class into a MOOC or a patient’s file into the cloud — early forays into governmental technology involved bringing civil services online and enabling citizens to follow government protocols on websites instead of in buildings. .....new governance technologies preparing to reroute lines of authority and change what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.
....... Others are helping teams to build consensus and budget together, dynamically and elegantly. Still others are creating operating systems for political parties that are already winning seats in government. .....Whether we're facing climate apocalypse on Earth or colonizing Mars, the deciding factor between human civilization being extractive and oppressive, or cooperative and generative, will be how much we as a species have practiced the skills of equitable collaboration on a day-to-day basis — hearing diverse viewpoints and synthesizing them, consciously understanding the flows of power dynamics, and designing in the key factors of human wellness.
......... Human beings have been sitting in circles listening to one another for millennia, but software and the internet allow us to scale up these practices in a way we never have before. ....... Cobudget for funding and Loomio for decision-making. ........ Many of the worst aspects of command-and-control, mechanistic, hierarchical governance are consequences of limited communications technologies. If we can make distributed cooperation just as efficient, the need for those old governance forms — which cause a lot of human suffering in the name of efficiency — could be obviated. ..... The key difference is: are you privatizing everything, or are you building the commons? The real distinguishing factor isn't the governing practices, which may be similar to a point, but the governing purpose. Are we building in service of the people and the community, deeply rooted in social values and human rights, or are we in service of private interests, which only answer to their own internal logic of profit and power? ....... Already, in our network, Enspiral, where we run businesses in service of positive social outcomes, we constantly have to 'hack' company structures to make them reflect how we actually want to work. We're sticking to the law, of course, but there's some legal gymnastics involved and we're constantly having to blaze a trail. Are we a community? A company? A charity? None of the current forms actually quite fit, and the distinctions seem contrived. ........ One of the protections against government corruption in democracies is that the moment of the vote is hidden and blind. ......the very idea that our key moment of agency as a citizen is ticking a box every three or four years is the insane part
..... Our 'democratic' system is another example of something developed a couple hundred years ago because of very limited communications technology — election dates in the US are still determined by how long it took people to go on horseback between cities. ..... What's actually incredible is when you create a society where people not only feel safe being open about their political opinions, but they genuinely discuss them with different people, and their opinion can evolve through that interaction — they can change their minds.When citizen deliberation is possible, that's when truly amazing solutions can emerge, from synthesizing different views.
......... What can users of SMS-enabled mobile banking in Africa teach us about how our apps could work? People in warzones and disaster areas know a ton about decentralized networks, because centralised infrastructure fails them. Activists threatened by oppressive governments have heaps to teach us about privacy, identity, and leveraging online communications tools for effective action and resistance. ....... most people in this space are running completely analog processes using technologies like neighborhood meetings and science-fair like exhibitions of citizen-generated ideas. They are willing to pound the pavement.
In The Tech News (2)
Forget Rocket Fuel: This Spaceplane Will Use Microwave Beams to Reach Orbit
Scientists Connect Brain to a Basic Tablet—Paralyzed Patient Googles With Ease
We probably shouldn’t be shocked when a giant column of highly combustible material accelerates to thousands of miles an hour and explodes. ..... Escape Dynamics .. an “external propulsion” spaceplane that separates energy from propellant. Instead of volatile liquid or solid rocket fuel, the craft runs on pressurized hydrogen. A ground antenna array aims a beam of microwaves at a heat exchanger in the plane’s belly, superheats the hydrogen to 2,000 degrees kelvin, and forces it out of an exhaust nozzle to provide enough thrust to reach orbit. ......
Ultimately, they hope to build a reusable single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane that would slash launch costs for small satellite payloads and remove combustion from the equation entirely.
.... In tests, their lab-scale prototype thruster achieved efficiency higher than anything possible using chemical rockets. ..... The idea of external propulsion is by no means new. It was proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky nearly a century ago, and NASA and Caltech have since toyed with the concept. ..... there is growing demand for small payloads. With powerful, miniature sensors and chips, we’re now able to pack quite a bit more tech into much lighter satellites ...... Startups like Planet Labs (the company assembling a constellation of Earth observing satellites) or Google (building out global internet infrastructure) stand to benefit from the cost savings Escape Dynamics would offer if successful...... because a spaceplane glides back to Earth, instead of the hard-to-control freefall of a rocket stage, reusability may prove an easier nut to crack. .... a lot more affordable. .... launch costs are in the ballpark of $25,000 to $50,000 per kilogram. He’s a fan of the alternative approach: “Escape Dynamics is pursuing a radical technology—one I fundamentally think is a good idea—which could massively reduce the costs for small satellite payloads.” ....... Once they start regularly flying payloads, Tseliakhovich estimates costs could eventually fall by two orders of magnitude—perhaps reaching as low as around$150 per kilogram
. ..... Tseliakhovich hopes his company will begin flight tests of a small-scale thruster in 2017 and launch their first payload to orbit at the turn of the decade. ..... Tseliakhovich believes it will likely work alongside heavy-lifting chemical rockets and is a huge fan of current efforts to improve them by the likes of Elon Musk and SpaceX. ("One of the most remarkable efforts pursued by our civilization today.")
Scientists Connect Brain to a Basic Tablet—Paralyzed Patient Googles With Ease
eye- or head-tracking devices have allowed eye movement to act as an output system to control mouse cursors on computer screens. In some cases, the user could also perform the click function by staring intently at a single spot, known in the field as “dwell time.” .....Our Solar System’s 9 Extraterrestrial Oceans in One Surprising Infographic
In contrast to eye-trackers, neural prostheses directly interface the brain with computers, in essence cutting out the middleman — the sensory organs that we normally use to interact with our environment.
..... had a 100-channel electrode array implanted into the left side of her brain in regions responsible for movement. ...... “This is a first step towards developing a fully-capable brain-controlled communication and computer interface for restoring function for people with paralysis.”
Not too long ago, we only suspected one ocean of liquid water beyond Earth (on Europa). Now, thanks to robotic explorers, like NASA's Dawn and Cassini missions, we're finding evidence of oceans throughout the solar system. ...... water (especially liquid water) and life go hand in hand ..... life, at least the simplest forms, may survive in more environments than once believed. Indeed, even on Earth, life is ubiquitous, from scalding volcanic vents to frozen wastes. And we may not, as it turns out, need to travel light years to find extraterrestrial oceans or observe our first alien life forms ...... news of even a few nearby alien microbes would expand the number of nooks and crannies life might inhabit throughout the galaxy.
Friday, January 08, 2016
Facebook's Out On Free Internet Could Be A Mobile Browser
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| The second logo for AOL, used from 2006–2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
With its Aquila unmanned aircraft and laser technologies, Facebook has demonstrated the ability to deliver data at a rate of tens of gigabytes per second to a target the size of a coin — from 10 miles away. This is 10 times faster than existing land-based technologies. With interconnected drones, it will, within two or three years, most likely be able to provide Internet access to the most remote regions of the world....... And then there are low-orbit microsatellites, which Oneweb, SpaceX, and now Samsung are building. These beam Internet signals by laser to ground stations. In June, Oneweb announced that it had raised $500 million to develop and launch several hundred satellites that will provide global broadband coverage. ...... Google is launching Loons in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was also supposed to launch them in India, but India’s defense, aviation, and telecommunications ministries raised technical and security concerns and stopped the project. When the telecom providers figure out that with unlimited, inexpensive, Internet access, their cell and data businesses will be decimated, they too will place obstacles in the way of these technologies.Free Basics protects net neutrality
To connect a billion people, India must choose facts over fiction ..... We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good. ..... We have free basic healthcare. Public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives. ..... That’s why everyone also deserves access to free basic internet services. ..... We know that for every 10 people connected to the internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty. We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet. ...... in India and more than 30 other countries. We launched Free Basics, a set of basic internet services for things like education, healthcare, jobs and communication that people can use without paying for data. ...... More than 35 operators have launched Free Basics and 15 million people have come online. And half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full internet within 30 days. ....... Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality. .....
more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality
and good for consumers. ........Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.
..... Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim – falsely – the exact opposite. ...... This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics.
I am confused. What's free basics? What does it do? How? Is it restricted? Is it like AOL? AOL was not restricted. You could go all over the Internet through AOL. Most people didn't. They spent most of their time in AOL Messenger, but that's another story. Is Zuck's Free Basics like AOL? I don't get the impression he is using drones for the purpose.
I think the solution is two-fold. One, beam high speed internet from the sky straight to the smartphone. And have a Facebook browser on that phone that has code that communicates to the Facebook Internet beam from the Gods, and lets you go online, but the browser is customized for a Facebook experience. You still can go everywhere, but it looks and feels like Facebook. And Facebook serves ads.
That way Google could be competing to provide free internet from the high and above to the same smartphone. Next thing you know they are competing on speed. My broadband is faster than yours. The next logical step after that would be free smartphones. Sundar Pichai is so smart I think he could build $20 phones. Google could earn 20 bucks from ads in, like, 20 weeks flat.
Facebook should build a mobile browser.
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