new illuminati: future shock

Showing posts with label future shock. Show all posts

Monday, 23 May 2011

To be Human is to be more human than human

By: Mike Thurau

There is a popular sentiment circulating through our living rooms and universities that humankind has reached “the end of history”. This is to say that every Big Idea which can be thought of has been thought of already and that the global society of the distant future will be fundamentally the same as the present. Eventually, the rest of the world will jump on the liberal-capitalist-democracy bandwagon and “progress” as we know it will end with pats on the back and high fives all around. Suffice to say, the time for revolutions and paradigm shifts is over.

The self-congratulatory proclamation that capitalism facilitated by representative democracy is the last stage of human social evolution is a pretty bold stance to take, but it is the official stance of the controversial academic Francis Fukuyama. Of course, there are plenty of people who disagree with Fukuyama about what tomorrow will look like.

Environmentalist warn of a devastating collapse of our planetary ecosystem, academics prophesy of a new dark age brought about by disenfranchised fundamentalists who are appalled at how quickly the world is changing, and there are even still a few old fashioned Marxists left in the world who expect capitalism and representative democracy to eventually wear themselves out and be replaced with a workers paradise.

Regardless, capitalism as an institution is stronger than ever, and while the democracies of the world might sometimes be unpleasant to gaze upon, the idea of democracy still enjoys tremendous popularity. Marxism is pretty much discredited, Theocracy is no longer an option for countries outside of the Middle East, and pretty much every other form of authoritarian command economy seems to be on the way out. However, there is still one more Big Idea that has yet to be consigned to the garbage pail of history, and that Big Idea is the brainchild of a man called Ray Kurtzweil. If Kurtzweil is even half-way correct about the kind of future he expects, then we are on the threshold of the weirdest and most exciting phase of human history yet.

This man believes he has a shot at living forever

What does Ray Kurtzweil believe the next 100 years will bring? Well for starters, by 2019 he expects a $1,000 personal computer to have as much raw computing power as the human brain, pinhead-sized cameras will become incredibly common and privacy will be all but dead, exoskeletons will give people with spinal injuries new freedom, translator machines that will be as good or better than human interpreters, and cars controlled remotely by robots to alleviate congestion.

By 2029 he expects a computer will be designed which will be fully equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of having opinions and a desire to be recognized as a conscious being. Furthermore, agriculture and industry will become so efficient that the basic needs of even the most impoverished will finally be regularly met. His vision of humankind’s final destiny thousands of years from now is “Intelligent beings consider the fate of the Universe.” Which is to say, Godhood.

Kurtzweil not only expects technological progress to upgrade the human experience, he expects it to change the very nature of human experience its self. We are unable to appreciate the magnificence of this new state of being in the same way that a mosquito is unable to appreciate the magnificence of a masterpiece concerto.

By now you’re probably smirking or perhaps you are moving your cursor to the “Back” button at the top of this page. Kurtzweil’s technological utopia may seem like the musings of a crazy person, and Ray Kurtzweil may very well be crazy. However, he is without a doubt a genius. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. A few years later he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. The capabilities of this invention were so impressive that, in 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I’ve Got A Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he had also built. He is a millionaire several times over thanks to his numerous inventions and contributions to artificial intelligence.

At this point, we can still write him off as a brilliant yet eccentric entrepreneur who may have read one to many Isaac Asimov novels. But what is really unsettling is how frequently Ray Kurzweil has been right. Kurzweil predicted the advent of search engines, cell phones, military drones, cybernetic limbs, and numerous other world changing innovations that have already come to pass.

So far, Kurzweil’s track record for accurately predicting the future stands at 102 out of 108 correct predictions, so it’s safe to say this man is not simply just a fortune telling shyster. But the source of controversy surrounding Kurzweil isn’t if he has been correct so far (he has), it’s a matter of whether or not he will continue to be right in the future.

So why should we take Kurzweil’s more outlandish predictions seriously? It’s because he uses the same methodology to estimate when we will enter the age of intelligent machines as he used to predict all of the things he was right about. Kurzweil is a firm believer in the law of accelerating returns and so far, it has served him well.

The law of accelerating returns is based on Moore’s law, which is belief (which has been demonstrated to be true for decades) that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The result of this is essentially an exponential increase in the power and affordability of computers. To anyone who has ever bought a top of the line computer only to find that it is obsolete a year later, this should come as no surprise. A similar trend of exponential growth applies to how much we know about the human genome, the amount of bandwidth available to the average user and various other indicators of technological progress.

http://taboojive.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Moores-law1.gif

Think about how bizarre the world of today must look to someone who lived 80 years ago. Is it really so irresponsible to predict that in the next 80 years, the world will be even more different? The fact that the world is changing quickly and that technology is changing even quicker is conventional wisdom. 40 years ago, it would have sounded ridiculous to suggest that Indian fishermen would be using tiny battery powered phones to coordinate their harvest from the sea, but that is exactly what they are doing. 30 years ago it would have sounded naïve to suggest that over three quarters of America would have their own personal computers, but they do.

If you sometimes feel like the line separating science fiction and reality is blurring, it’s because it is. Which proposition is more ridiculous, the notion that tomorrow will always be pretty much the same as today and that we are the beneficiaries of the final culmination of human self knowledge or the notion that we are on the verge of the biggest step forward in the expansion of the human experience since the evolution of the frontal lobe? If Kurzweil is right, then we are not only approaching a time in which our potential to experience life as people who are fully human, but we are approaching a time in which the definition of the word “human” will be subject to revision. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

From Taboo Jive @ http://taboojive.com/?p=2490

And see The Emerging Global Brain @ http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2011/04/emerging-global-brain.html

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Monday, 16 February 2009

Here at Half Past Human we forecast the future

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We are not alone in forecasting the future, all humans do it to some degree. Just a quick search of the internet will provide dozens of forms of future forecasting. Some use astrology, some use other methods.

We employ a technique based on radical linguistics to reduce extracts from readings of dynamic postings on the internet into an archetypical database. With this database of archtypical language, we calculate the rate of change of the language. The forecasts of the future are derived from these calculations. Our calculations are based on a system of associations between words and numeric values for emotional responses from those words. These 'emotional impact indicators' are also of our own devising. They are attached to a data base of over 300/three hundred thousand words. This data base of linked words/phrases and emotions is our lexicon from which the future forecasting is derived.

We call our future viewing the ALTA reports for 'asymetric language trend analysis'. The ALTA reports are available by subscription.

In the beginning...

The beginning of all of our processing is the word. Or words, rather - actually excessively large amounts of them. Totals of words beyond all reason. These then are distilled down into a thick syrupy mass and placed in an inadequate visual display and from there interpretation proceeds.

Our interpretations of the data sets that we accumulate are presented in the form of a seriesof reports which detail the interpretations of the changes in language and what we think that they may mean.

Please note that our interpretations are provided as entertainment only. We are to be held harmless for universe placing substance behind our words. Or not, as it so chooses.

The interpretations provide a broad brush view of the future over the next few years. The broad view of the future is based on set theoryand provides a collection of linguistic clues which can be used to forecast developing trends.

Some of our subscribers use these forecast interpretations to develop models of their own futures in our collective and changing planetary future. Some use the forecasts for trading purposes. Others for wild entertainment of the mostly implausible and highly improbable kind.

Even by our own rigorous standards, our forecasts are proving out better than mere chance would allow. Our track record is being tested with each new report series. So far, so good. We have a very high rate of returning subscribers (over 90%) which is likely an indication of needs being met.

Please see the other areas of this site for discussions about our process, the creation and format of the reports, and the conceptsbehind this approach to the adventures available in future viewing.

Meta Art - Patterns Reveal/Conceal

Given the full and increasingly chaotic nature of modelspace, and manifesting reality, we need to take a moment to discuss design patterns and how they relate to our work. Necessarily the discussion starts with the idea of an observer, minding her own damn business, and the future.

She stands there. Universe decides to create an event in the future on the timeline that our observer stands. We can argue that the decision itself is actually the 'pre-creation' start, the actual beginning, and what comes before that is not pertinent to the image we need to convey. In our example future, the event manifesting has/is/does create 'waves of pre-creation' "disturbance"...yes, very much of the language used in Star Wars, and centered around the 'disturbance in the force' *can* be thought of as accurate. As in the image below, our observer perceives the future event as a series of 'bow waves' through the force of universe which increasingly lead back into the center of the event itself. This effect can be conceived of in much the same way as an atom (or any) bomb explodes. In the very first nano second of the explosion, the totally of the energy *has* been released, but it is still relatively small. Then as time progresses, the energy release expands until the human observer sees the famous landscape dominating mushroom cloud. But at first, the explosion event itself is small.

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As the explosion (or other event) "expands" in time, its ripples go in all directions, not merely 'forward' with time. Rather the event itself has 'pre creation' impacts, as well as 'post creation' residual effects. As we are in the 'pre creation' gnawing business, it is this end of things which is of interest here.

These pre-creation waves are the 'blood' in our system. We use the words people employ in daily life and their constant shifting and treat them as a 'pulse' of the 'blood' of these 'event pre-creation waves/streams'. Make sense?

As can be noted from the illustration above, in the case of a 'big event' off in the future, it *should* be an easy enough task to 'take the pulse' of the thing, and determine what is what.

Of course, in universe nothing is simple, and in this case it is the mind numbingly complex nature of bizzillions of events all interacting which create the problems. As noted in the graphic below, *all events* send out waves in the pre-creation force, and thus all are creating 'pulse points'.

So, the poor observer gets a view of the future which resembles the jumble seen in the next graphic.

[for correct image see Half Past Human - link below]

This view of patterns within patterns all interfering with each other is what makes future prediction an art.

At this point within the series, the processing patterns themselves are revealing. We note that at a meta art level, the manner in which the data types are accruing and to which entities is itself revealing of the large scale changes to manifest over the course of this year. We note that accretion patterns are heavily favoring large scale natural disaster, as well as the 'space contact' meme. Further, the 'revolution' meta data layers are growing in all entities, and may be forming a tipping point around our current target date of October, 2008. Further layers of 'revolution' are forming in sub sets across all the sciences, and within areas such as the military, and the TPTB, new contexts are being exposed within these patterns. The multiplicity of cross links continues to expand, both in the number of entities involved in any given context, as well as the depth of supporting layers of aspect/attribute sets.

At this point in the processing of all the data types (immediacy values, shorter term values, and longer term sets), the patterns of accrual are largest around 3/three central memes: dollar death, natural disasters, and 'space energies'. All three have very high visibility summations, as well as multiple points within multiple entities where [manifestation] is set to occur.

Of course, none of this helps with the details. As the complexity of filtering out language grows over time due to language itself changing, there are also problems presented by being able to note such changes at lower levels of granularity. At these levels where it may be suspected that some details might be located, it becomes even more apparent that details do not always suffice to explain the events.

This will be especially true in 2008. The detail layers suggest vast changes across the whole of the social order on this planet. And on other planets in our solar system as well. Leaving our solar neighbors out of the picture for just now, the details suggest that meta data levels of activity here on Terra will combine to produce alterations at such levels as to affect *all* of daily life in this next year. It will start and end with food production. From large scale changes in weather/climate patterns which will devastate the growing of food crops, to coast changes growing in [presence/affect] over the year, the [planet in peril] meme will dominate. Other impacts on food production will come from the expanding [dollar death] meme, and its impact on energy costs, and thus food supplies globally. Further impacts on all other parts of the social order will be felt as well.

It is possible to lift out whole layers of meaning from the concealing jumble of the patterns of the pre-creation ripples from future events. Now we can note that the very last gasp effort of the 'dominator' culture will be expressed over 2008 and 2009. These 'control freaks' otherwise variously described as 'illuminati', and 'cabal', and 'Bilderbergers', are going to be using *every* effort, that is to say, *all* their energy over these next 2/two years to attempt to [restrain] the [loss of control] which are implied by emerging future patterns. That the effort is doomed to fail will not deter them from wasting vast quantities of the planet's dwindling resources in the attempt. They are truly desperate people now. And the data sets point to the [desperation] rising at a very rapid rate from the [vernal equinox, spring] onward…