Why hasn't the Singularity gone mainstream (yet?) (advance, smartphone, laptop)
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Even more news on stem cells. As time goes on news like this will happen faster and faster as we reach the singularity.
From Science Daily:
Dec. 1, 2013 — For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells. The advance, reported by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, has significant potential for modeling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation. The study was published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
One of the things I have noticed is every time we have a new paradigm the impact it has on society going up by a factor of thousands. What I mean is computers that fit in rooms impacted society thousands of times more then the computers before that were more expensive and fit in buildings. This has continued and today smart phones has impacted society thousands of times more then lap tops did in the 1990's. Well the next paradigm, wearable computers, will impact society thousands of times more then the smart phone has. By the time we reach the singularity computers inside us will have thousands of times more impact on society then wearable computers do today and that is one reason its called the singularity as it will be the tipping point.
Why do I bring this up now? Because there is a new advancement in wearable computers that illustrate why they will impact society thousands of times more then the smart phone era did.
This is from Science Daily:
Dec. 4, 2013 — It is likely that at your next visit to the doctor, a medical practitioner will start by taking your temperature. This has been part of medical practice for so long that we may see it as antiquated, with little value. However, the routine nature of the ritual belies the critical importance of obtaining accurate body temperature to assess the health of a patient. In fact, subtle variations in temperature can indicate potentially harmful underlying conditions such as constriction or dilation of blood vessels, or dehydration. Even changes in mental activity, such as increased concentration while solving a mathematical equation, are accompanied by measurable changes in body temperature.
Accordingly, a number of technologies have been developed to detect skin temperature changes that can serve as early indicators of disease development and progression. For example, sophisticated infrared digital cameras can detect, in high resolution, temperature changes across large areas of the body. At the other end of the technology spectrum, paste-on temperature sensors provide simple, single-point measurements. Although both technologies are accurate, infrared cameras are expensive and require the patient to remain completely still, and while paste-on sensors allow free movement, they provide limited information. Now, an international multidisciplinary team including researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has developed an entirely new approach: a sophisticated "electronic skin" that adheres non-invasively to human skin, conforms well to contours, and provides a detailed temperature map of any surface of the body.
A team of engineers today announced a discovery that could change the world of electronics forever. Called an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), it's basically an electronic circuit mounted on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements of your body.
EES is a leap forward for wearable technologies, and has potential applications ranging from medical diagnostics to video game control and accelerated wound-healing. Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman, who worked on the discovery, tell io9 it's a huge step towards erasing the divide that separates machine and human.
Coleman and Rogers say they developed EES to forego the hard and rigid electronic "wafer" format of traditional electronics in favor of a softer, more dynamic platform.
More news about how wearable technology is going to change our lives.
This is from MIT Technology Review:
There have been remarkable mechanical advances in prosthetic limbs in recent years, including rewiring nerve fibers to control sophisticated mechanical arms (see “A Lifelike Prosthetic Arm”), and brain interfaces that allow for complicated thought control (see “Brain Helps Quadriplegics Move Robotic Arms with Their Thoughts”). But for all this progress, prosthetic limbs cannot send back sensory information to the wearer, making it harder for them to do tasks like pick up objects without crushing them or losing their grip.
Now researchers at the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University have developed a new kind of interface that can convey a sense of touch from 20 spots on a prosthetic hand. It does this by directly stimulating nerve bundles—known as peripheral nerves—in the arms of patients; two people have so far been fitted with the interface. What’s more, the implants continue to work after 18 months, a noteworthy milestone given that electrical interfaces to nerve tissue can gradually degrade in performance.
One of the things I talk about is how the 2020's will be the pre-singularity. Well CNN has a interview with Ray Kurzweil and it goes in depth as to what will happen by the 2020's and is exactly why I call it the pre-singularity.
This is 7 years away. What is 7 years? It will be here before we know it. That is why I call 40 the new 20 because by the time I turn 50 I will have 2 ages my chronological age and my biological age. By 2023 my chronological age will be 50 but my biological age will be in the lower 20's and will hold. This is why this is by far the best time to be alive.
This is from CNN:
Editor's note: Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." Ray has written five national best-selling books. He is Director of Engineering at Google. Below are five ways he predicts our lives will change.
(CNN) -- By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.
Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.
All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s. We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to. We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers. RNA interference, for example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune system, have the ability to add new genes. Stem cell therapies, including the recently developed method to create "induced pluripotent cells" (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch. There are now hundreds of drugs and processes in the pipeline using these methods to modify the course of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and aging processes. Company fights to keep monopoly on gene As one of many examples, we can now fix a broken heart -- not (yet) from romance -- but from a heart attack, by rejuvenating the heart with reprogrammed stem cells.
World’s Smallest Pacemaker Can Be Implanted without Surgery
One of the hallmarks of the singularity will be computers the size of blood cells that fit in our bodies. We are not there yet but on our way and this is another example of how computers are becoming so small they can fit inside out bodies.
This is from MIT Technology Review:
Pacemaker surgery typically requires a doctor to make an incision above a patient’s heart, dig a cavity into which they can implant the heartbeat-regulating device, and then connect the pulse generator to wires delivered through a vein near the collarbone. Such surgery could soon be completely unnecessary. Instead, doctors could employ miniaturized wireless pacemakers that can be delivered into the heart through a major vein in the thigh.
On Monday, doctors in Austria implanted one such device into a patient—the first participant in a human trial of what device-manufacturer Medtronic says is the smallest pacemaker in the world. The device is 24 millimeters long and 0.75 cubic centimeters in volume—a tenth the size of a conventional pacemaker. Earlier this year, another device manufacturer, St. Jude Medical, bought a startup called Nanostim that makes another tiny pacemaker, and St. Jude is offering it to patients in Europe. This device is 41 millimeters long and one cubic centimeter in volume.
Doctors can implant such pacemakers into the heart through blood vessels, via an incision in the thigh. They use steerable, flexible tubes called catheters to push the pacemakers through a large vein.
I read the article while some of it was over my head I did grasp the basic understanding that he argues computers will not advance exponentially much longer and he is wrong. While technically More's law will come to a end around 2020 computers will continue to advance exponentially and will do so with new technologies like 3 D transistors and transistors that are coming out that are the size of atoms. It has done this since 1890 and will continue to do that for foreseeable future. More then likely they will still call it More's law as well as they will just expand the definition to include computers advancing exponentially not just the current computer chips as was the original deflation.
So you have better data than the article that shows it is wrong?
Or..let me guess..you are making bare assertions that you can't cite a source for apart from Kurzweil.
So you have better data than the article that shows it is wrong?
Or..let me guess..you are making bare assertions that you can't cite a source for apart from Kurzweil.
I already posted about the new 3D molecular circuits that will be the next paradigm. So you dont have to look back here is a link to that article:
March 16, 2010 -- The features on computer chips are getting so small that soon the process used to make them, which has hardly changed in the last 50 years, won’t work anymore. One of the alternatives that academic researchers have been exploring is to create tiny circuits using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns. In a paper that appeared Monday in Nature Nanotechnology, MIT researchers have taken an important step toward making that approach practical.
Here is another example that proves computers will continue to advance exponentially even after the current paradigm, the integrated circuit, is over.
Notice this is from MIT Technology review and has nothing to do with Ray Kurzweil.
A new breed of computer chips that operate more like the brain may be about to narrow the gulf between artificial and natural computation—between circuits that crunch through logical operations at blistering speed and a mechanism honed by evolution to process and act on sensory input from the real world. Advances in neuroscience and chip technology have made it practical to build devices that, on a small scale at least, process data the way a mammalian brain does. These “neuromorphic” chips may be the missing piece of many promising but unfinished projects in artificial intelligence, such as cars that drive themselves reliably in all conditions, and smartphones that act as competent conversational assistants.
“Modern computers are inherited from calculators, good for crunching numbers,” says Dharmendra Modha, a senior researcher at IBM Research in Almaden, California. “Brains evolved in the real world.” Modha leads one of two groups that have built computer chips with a basic architecture copied from the mammalian brain under a $100 million project called Synapse, funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The prototypes have already shown early sparks of intelligence, processing images very efficiently and gaining new skills in a way that resembles biological learning. IBM has created tools to let software engineers program these brain-inspired chips; the other prototype, at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, will soon be installed inside a tiny robotic aircraft, from which it will learn to recognize its surroundings.
The first smartring has an LED screen, tells time, and accepts calls
Two of the things I always post about the singularity will bring us is computers advancing exponentially and that rate will, also, increase so that to keep up with the technology advancing we will have to merge with it. Well this is only 2013 and technology is already advancing so fast its hard to keep with it. The latest example is the smartwatches, or should I say forget it because it looks like we will be skipping them all together. If this kind of advancement in technology is happening now imagine what it will be like by 2030?!?!?!?!
This is from ARS technica:
Forget smartwatches—smartrings are the new thing now. An Indiegogo campaign for a product called the "Smarty Ring" has hit its funding goal. Smarty Ring is a 13mm-wide stainless steel ring with an LED screen, Bluetooth 4.0, and an accompanying smartphone app. The ring pairs with a smartphone and acts as a remote control and notification receiver.
The ring can display the time, accept or reject calls, control music, trigger the smartphone's camera, and initiate speed-dial calls. It will also alert the wearer with light-up icons for texts, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, and Skype. It supports dual time zones and comes with a countdown timer, a stopwatch, and an alarm. It can work as a tracker for your phone, too—if your smartphone is more than 30 feet away from the ring, Smarty Ring will trigger an alarm.
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