Kevin Kelly & Steven Johnson at New York Public Library...

Here is an interview with Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson at the New York Public Library. It was presented by ForaTV.

Copyright and The Creative Commons...

Are excessive copyrights slowing down progress and innovation?  Some think so.

7 Companies That Rule Our Perceptions...

These are the seven media companies that control most of what you see, hear and maybe think.

The Tyranny of Cable & Satellite Television....

For years we have paid Comcast, DirectTV and all the others...is that time coming to an end??

What is 30steps?

If you take 30 steps linearly you get to thirty but if you take 30 steps exponentially you arrive at 1 Billion. This is exponential growth and this is how all information technology grows.
Thanks to technology life expectancy and IQ have been globally rising while war and poverty are globally declining. As we approach the knee of the curve the exponential nature of technology is starting to really become evident. Some confused individuals refuse to accept the benefits of technology and cling to the "good ol' days" myth. They are fueling a dangerous neo-Luddite movement. We at 30 Steps believe in a transparent soft takeoff to the technological singularity; which will more likely be accomplishable by public understanding of technology, its benefits, and the dangers of its suppression.
Our logo captures the 3 overlapping technological revolutions Ray Kurzweil refers to as GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics).

Botnets and Zombie Computers?....

Does your computer rise up at night and obey orders from some one else like a Zombie??

Cyber Warfare or Cyber Espionage?...

How much do we depend on electricity?  What if it was lost for 5 weeks in most of the nation?  Can this happen?

Dr. Smartphone Will See You Now, Health & Technology...

Your phone can check your blood pressure, heartbeat, weight, and general health?

60 Minutes History of the Cell Phone...

Amazing video produced by 60 Minutes on the History of the Cell Phone.

We're Going To Need A Lot More Emoticons

We can't imagine 4-dimensional space, we can't see the color infrared, neither do we have the sense or sonar, but we will via technology, and with these gains in perceptions our emotions will change too...


To set the stage for what I'm going to propose I will first give 3 examples of perceptions humans currently can not experience.

1. Computers can think in 4-dimensional space, we can't. The image below is sequential 3D slices or shadows of a 4D cube, or hypercube. Since we can not perceive or display 4-dimensional space the best representation we can do is slice a 4-dimensional object into 3D plains, much like slicing a 3D potato into what appears to be 2D slivers. This is how a hypercube would appear if it were to slide through our 3-dimensional space.

hypercube

2. We only have 5 sensory imputs : touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. While a 6th sense or "3rd eye" is commonly fabled, we are generally limited to the basic five. Some animals however do have a 6th sense. Dolphins and bats have mastered the sense of sonar. Sharks have electroreception and can detect even the weakest electromagnetic fields given off by all living things. Humans are starting to gain sensory inputs via technology. Crude body modifications such as magnetic implants allow for detection of strong electromagnetic fields.

the 5 human senses

3. Our eyes can only see in color. We only can see into the visible light spectrum which goes from violet to dark red. While ultra violet and infrared are just out of our spectrum many insects see into these spectrums of light; ultraviolet flowers attract certain insects, while other bugs see infrared as a night vision. Our technology can detect the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared night goggles, radiographs, radio receivers, microwave radar, and radiation detectors are all rather old technologies. Some have peered beyond the visible light spectrum using just their biological eyes. During World War II the army conducted successful tests by altering soldiers' diets so they could see infrared, however this project was dumped because of technological advances. Seeing ultraviolet is just scratching the surface, see the chart below.

electromagnetic spectrum

As technology advances and we transcend biology our abilities to perceive the world directly will expand. New sensory inputs and intelligence levels will go far beyond that of biology. How will these changes shape us, as we are able to think in multiple dimensions and sense the universe in unimaginable ways? Just as reptiles are only capable of primitive emotions such as fear, humans are only capable of the emotions which we have evolved up to. New emotions will be discovered as we transcend biology. Some people today will fail to understand this possibility and say that the known emotions are all encompassing. Those critics should look at a color wheel and try to imagine the missing colors. We can't even imagine 4 spacial dimensions, the dimensions of emotions that are yet to be discovered are even more unimaginable. This is the essence of the singularity.

Mind "uploading" or Substrates for Independent Minds...

Is it possible to transfer a complete human brain into a computer?  Can a working model be made of the entire human brain?  Some respected scientists think so and are actively working towards this goal. 

Publishers Are Migrating Online...

The publishing industry, especially newspapers have been declining for several years.  Their advertising income is down and their world is changing.  They are migrating online, the "paper" newspaper to be an oddity within 5 years.

Does Facebook Want To Be WORLDbook...

500,000,000 members worldwide who have an average of 139 friends, who spend a combined 700,000,000,000 minutes a month on the site, of which 50% of them log into a site with over 1,000,000 other websites integrated into it, ** Does this company POSE A THREAT to the established order?? Coming to a blog near you!

Battle of the Tablets...

Comparison of all the released and soon to be released tablets along with all the known features.  Coming to a blog near you.

What We Still Don't Know - movie

How similar is our very existence to a simple game invented in 1970? Srik Narayanan's documentary What We Still Don't Know draws startling comparisons which will shake you to your core. Is the universe we live in a large genetic algorithm designed to create something of interest? What are the limits of human intelligence and how will we surpass those limits? How could our universe be so "fine tuned"? What We Still Don't Know asks such hard questions and some of the answers are very hard to digest. Full movies is posted at the bottom on this blog. Sit back, open your mind, your might want to roll a joint of Spice for this one...


Martin Rees
Cosmologist and Astrophysicist
Brilliantly hosts What We Still Don't Know. Outspoken on the future of humanity he is "a concerned member of the human race".







John Conway
Mathmatician
Invented the Game of Life in 1970, a cellular automata with simple rules based on; life, death, and reproduction. Conway suggests our in our own universe complexity may arise out of a rather simple set of rules.








Nick Bostrom
Philosopher and Transhumanist
Has stated planets, life, and entire galaxies may be simulated and that it is very likely we are existing in such a simulation.






Michael Hofman
Nueroscientist
In studying the brains of primates he has concluded that the human brain has reached biological limits of intelligence, and that a larger brain would actually decrease in processing power.



Leonard Susskind
Theoretical Physicist
widely considered a father of string theory






Max Tegmark
Cosmologist
In his Ultimate Ensemble Theory of Everything he states ...self-aware substructures will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world.

What We Still Don't Know

The Echelon Network Is Listening?...

Echelon is a network designed to collect and analyze information being operated by 5 different countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States .

Is the iPAD an iFad??...

Is the iPad a fad?  Will things go back to normal after people get tired of them?  This is what some are saying in the media.  We shall examine this fad here today.

PlayBook Will Die By iPad's Sword...

WHY THE RIM PLAYBOOK WILL DIE BY THE IPAD'S SWORD.  EXPLANATION NOW AT A BLOG NEAR YOU.

TechnoCalyps The Movie Part 3/3...

This will be the third and final post on the film TechnoCalpys titled, The Digital Messiah.  The director named the movie combining two ideas - apocalypse and technology.

TechnoCalyps The Movie Part 2/3...

This is part two of the series on TechnoCalyps.  Today we cover preparing for transhumanism.

Marine Census Leaves Us High and Dry

The 10 year marine census revealed thousands of new species, but no signs of advanced technology...
Is this an unfair expectation since critical steps in our technical evolution such as fire and electricity seem impossible underwater?

No one seriously expected to find advanced intelligence, but the study with all its odd discoveries makes me wonder if advanced technologies could ever crawl out of the sea. The 1989 James Cameron film The Abyss depicts a vastly more advanced civilization living under our oceans, but how would they ever develop that technology?

One things for sure; electricity and water do not mix. Now we made it pretty far ourselves without electricity, but it is the electric computer which has bridged us to the 3 overlapping revolutions; genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics with AI (GNR). Is it possible to skip the revolution of electricity? There could be ways to circumnavigate it.

Charles Babbage was the first to invent the computer, long before the invention of electricity. His early model the Difference Engine No. 2 was an interesting counting machine but whether it was a computer or not is debatable. He later envisioned and designed a more advanced computer called the Analytic Engine. While these Engines would be hard to create underwater I believe a determined enough inventor would create it. All the inventor would need is an opposable thumb of sorts.

The octopus has many opposable thumbs and an amazing way to communicate ideas by changing color, patterns and shape. In this film you can watch the octopus is capable of crude technology as it uses a coconut shell. So there is a surprisingly high level of intelligence in this animal. It has amazingly opposable limbs. We just need come back in a couple 100 thousand years and see if they are on the edge of a technological singularity.

But lets argue that Babbage’s engine could only advance so far. That a paradigm shift to electric computing would have to happen or that civilization would stagnate. As a singularitarian I think stagnation is not an option. I believe these beings would either leave their aquatic environment in suits of some sort, explore and conduct experiments on dry ground, or perhaps create experiments in bubbles or vacuums created under water. All life continues to evolve, and the animal kingdom called Technology is probably the most common kingdom throughout the galaxy.

What Happens When a Social Site Goes Down?...

They have all done it - crashed.  It seems to be part of the evolutionary stage we are in the development of the Internet.  But, what happens, if anything, psychologically to people when their favorite site crashes?  Do we know??

New Book: Where Good Ideas Come From....

This is a new wonderful book which will be available October 5, 2010.  It is tracing the origin of the greatest inventions of mankind.

TechnoCalyps The Movie Part 1/3...

This will be the first part of a three part series on the very frontiers of Technology.  You will have to keep an open mind and be willing to accept the hardest thing people can accept - CHANGE!  The movie is all the way at the end of the article.

Live Forever. Start Now.

Many of us singularitarians see radical life extension happening in our lifetimes. Life expectancy is increasing every year right now, but at the current rate its not enough to escape death... When we can add one year of life expectancy every year then we have arrived at the actuarial escape velocity. Some futurists including the World Future Society have predicted that we will arrive at the actuarial escape velocity by 2025.

Lets look to optimistic futurist Ray Kurzweil for inspiration. While there are currently no guarantees in health, he isn’t leaving anything to chance. At age 35 he was diagnosed with glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes. He immediately implemented an aggressive regimen of supplements along with a healthy diet, low impact exercises, plenty of sleep and reduction of stress. Today he claims these have contributed to his biological age being diagnosed 10 years younger than his current chronological age, and with no signs of diabetes.

Ray Kurzweil and Doctor Terry Grossman published the fantastic book last year Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever. After reading this book almost a year ago I was inspired to make a few changes in my own life. While not quite as extreme as Kurzweil who takes 150 pills a day I take 10 pills a day. My regime is based on recommendations out of Transcend along with my 23andMe DNA profile which has located some potential pitfalls in my genes. I recommend everyone take a two-a-day multivitamin and a fish oil, plus calcium for women. For further supplementation you should consult your doctor, but do some research of you own. I can tell you from personal experience that not all doctors understand the historical exponential nature of medical technology and are more likely to take a defeatist attitude towards aging.

Ray Kuzweil and Dr Grossman also have a supplement website; RayandTerry.com. I find them to have the best resveratrol and phospatidylcholine, plus some great health information is freely avalable there too. Swallowing a few pills everyday is the easy part. The exercise, avoidance of stress, and strict diet parts are a little harder to maintain consistently, especially when life throws us a curveball.

Centenarians are quite common today. My aunt just turned 99 a few days ago. She still walks unaided and is mentally alert. In the book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution Ronald Bailey explains how the first radical life extension revolution occurred; when humans first formed communities that cared for the elderly this allowed them to reach old age. Human beings and the animals we care for are the only life that experiences old age. The 2nd life extension revolution is dawning upon us now. Not just to age gracefully, but to stop and even reverse the aging process.

The top right image is available in poster or magnet form at Northern Sun

iOS4, Android 2.2 and Rim Faceoff....

There was a time when the iPhone had no real competition.  In some ways, that may be still be true.  But Google is trying to change that.  The battle of the mobile OSs starts here!