What Is The Present State of Robotics? PREVIEW

How are advanced are we with robots?  How close are they in some areas to taking over the jobs of humans or at least to being able assistants?

Facebook Drops The Ball Again...

In a previous post, we spoke about Facebook's ineptitude, especially recently.  They have done it again.

Amazon Kindle Now Ahead of All Other eReaders...

In September, we had reviewed the different eReaders in the market and concluded that the Nook from Barnes & Noble had the slight lead in features.  This is NO longer true.  The Kindle is now ahead.

Do You Need A Smart Home?... PREVIEW

Homes have not basically changed in hundreds of years.  They have electricity and indoor plumbing but in many ways, they would be very familiar to our ancient ancestors.  It's time for a change!

Do We Need A Smart Grid For Our Electricity?...

How much do we depend on electricity?  Could we lose our electrical grid for 6 months??

Nanotechnology Part 3 World Transformation...

More on the most important and decisive technology of the 21st Century. Will it create economic world upheaval due to pricing of objects plummeting, while at the same time transforming our world completely?

How A Microchip Is Made....

AMD's amazing video on how a microchip is made A-Z.

Nanotechnology Part 2...

What products are being made using Nanotechnology right now? What is right around the corner?  What is still far in the future?

Why Apple Will Buy Facebook (If Facebook Says YES!)...

If Apple buys Facebook it would solve it's biggest problem - Apple's weakness in the Social Media Market.

Can We Multitask?...

Can humans really multitask?  Some say it is not possible.  Others talk of the new study on distraction. Others say that we can only multitask simple motor skills.  Find out.

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 .