superconcepts

I recently moved to Substack where I now write about the same stuff that this blog always did - the nerdy and the audacious.  Please join me there.  https://wiredlegacy.substack.com/  

I've been a gamer for 3 decades, seeing the games industry mature from dots on a screen into a prolific mainstream industry. I'm not afraid of controversy in games. I want to make it abundantly clear: I'm not advocating banning anything.  I've seen many disturbing titles, far worse than Grand Theft Auto. But this was when games were a cult market, and the technology was so basic, it was easy to dismiss the phenomenon. Now, games have matured. They can do more and they reach more people. Like movies and other entertainment, they have the power to influence society. With this influence comes some level of responsibility. It's not an obligation - games are art and should be able to push boundaries - but rape in a video game is not art. It's gratuitous indulgence in a sickness, a sickness that hides behind freedom of expression. If we're going to get philosophical about it (and I guarantee the proponents will) you could ask “where does it end? Should we ...

George Dvorsky's article about How to Build a Dyson Sphere was absolutely fascinating and I feel the concept deserves much further exploration. "By enveloping the sun with a massive array of solar panels, humanity would graduate to a Type 2 Kardashev civilization capable of utilising nearly 100% of the sun's energy output. A Dyson sphere would provide us with more energy than we would ever know what to do with" Now, this is the kind of ridiculous, overambitious idea that that really captures my imagination. It would be a hyper structure, like the Hoover dam but on steroids, where we would create unfathomable devastation, calling on the skills and labour of thousands, enduring the harshest that nature can throw at us in order to tame it - all in the name of energy. Where the Hoover dam transformed a country, this would transform our entire solar system. But it's not without cost. And that's what I want to discuss. In order to get the materials to...

As image memes gain popularity on social networks and forums, they are fast securing their place as a defining cultural aspect of the early tweenies...(unlike the word "tweenies", thankfully). Most of these images are humourous, as this is great for virality, many are profound, some just witty nuggets of wisdom. And then there is the propaganda. Intended to illicit an emotional response to a political idea, propaganda memes are used to affirm or reaffirm a political bias or dogma. They are often aimed at a very particular niche. If you have any particular political or activist persuasion, you will no doubt have seens endless streams of these one-sided affirmations. At best, they are intellectual masturbation. At worst, it's pseudo-scientific social engineering. The worst form of this that I have seen is data correlation inferences. Just because something happened on a certain date does not mean it caused something else that happened around the same time. It...

Distributed infrastructure, such as that provided by the internet, allows for more reliability - if one node is damaged, it barely affects the rest of the network. It affords more freedom - less reliance on a centralised 'grid' controlled and manipulated by the elite. It is more in-line with nature, creating a symbiotic entity where the sum is greater than its parts, and each participant compliments the rest with cooperation but doesn't burden the whole either. However, the centralised systems we are used to, those which provide our public infrastructure, still have a place, because they can often be more efficient than a distributed system. For example, it would be difficult to run a train system with solar panels on the station roof, so the train taps into the main grid. When assessing and managing the Earth's resources, a global inventory would be important. We would need to decide on the most efficient solution between distributed and centralised infrastructu...

Every day seems to see new reports about incredible robots being developed. Robots that carry stuff for soldiers, robots that perform surgery, and robots that play football. It's all very exciting, but what we really need are robots to make our lives easier. To give us more time to do what we want. To do the mundane jobs and free us up to take on more creative work that robots can't do. But how do we go about this? How do we bring robots and automation into our everyday lives, unless robot intelligence is significantly improved? Well, while this intelligence is improving at a rapidly accelerating pace, there is a huge potential for solving problems using simple, task repeating, programmable robotics. The key is to standardize everything . We have to "put it on rails". As an example, let's look at making an automated dish washing system. We have dishwashers, but we still need to load and unload them. We need to develop 2 things. Firstly, we need a robot tha...

  Photo by Alazar Kassahun on Unsplash Matter Evolution Since the first particles were set in motion, every action has been part of a chain reaction. At first, there were the simplest of elementary particles in an empty universe. Hydrogen atoms — single electron entities, were the pinnacle of complexity. Eventually, a few of them collided, stuck together, and f o rmed more complex atoms, and then molecules. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea. These molecules accumulated until there were so many that gravity and magnetism began to have a significant effect. As the gravity increased, the mass increased, and nuclear fusion commenced. Star systems were born. The planets continued a sequence of their own. Eventually molecules increased in complexity by way of chemical reactions in order to form amino acids which then combined to create proteins. These proteins and amino acids increased in complexity until living cells emerged from the chem...

https://www.osvehicle.com/ It should be obvious that Product Longevity is incompatible with capitalism as we know it. Our system relies on continuous consumption to perpetuate the workforce, grow enterprise, and maintain profits. While there may be a capitalist incentive to produce long lasting products in some industries, the fact remains that breaking down just outside of the warranty period is the most profitable circumstance. Constant technological advancements seem to be a licence for excessive consumption, ongoing changes justifying the buy-and-throw-away culture. Things, in general, are not designed to be upgraded, they are designed to be superseded and replaced. How do we address this from a sustainability perspective? It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the decoupling of monetary gain from production is imperative. Would it be possible (profitable) for a company to start up, complete a production run of one very long lasting product, and then move onto another, different ...

The question of designer babies is usually met with disdain. You don't even have to be religious to object to the idea of customising a human before it's born. Indeed, this concept doesn't just "go against nature", it makes us question what it means to be human. The possibility of customising an embryo with the view to having an "enhanced" child opens up a veritable test tube of questions. What are the implications of being able to set a child's intelligence, their strengths, their abilities? Then there is the questions that really hit a nerve: "Would people chose not to have a black baby when they know it will be subject to persecution and prejudice?" The whole issue is surrounded by frightening dilemmas. The problem is, it's already here. We currently screen embryos for birth defects such as spina bifida, and many would argue that prevention or removal or deficiencies is a form of enhancement. Of course, we can try to sep...

Kurzweil and his proponents seem to be unshakable in their belief that at some point, Advanced Artificial General Intelligence, Machine Sentience, or Human Built Consciousness, whatever you would like to call it,  will happen. Much of this belief comes from the opinion that consciousness is an engineering problem, and that it will, at some point, regardless of its complexity, be developed. In this post, I don't really want to discuss whether or not consciousness can be understood, this is something for another time. What we need to be aware of is the possibility of our endeavours to create Artificial Intelligence stalling. Whatever happened to...Unified Field Theory? It seems sometimes, the more we learn about something, the more cans of worms we open, and the harder the subject becomes. Sometimes factors present themselves that we would not have expected to be relevant to our understanding. Despite nearly a century of research and theorizing, UFT remains an open line of...

One of the main challenges in creating a greater-than-human Artificial Intelligence is ensuring that it's not evil. When we "turn it on", we don't want it to wipe out us out or enslave us. Ideally, we want it to be nice. The problem is how we can guarantee this. Trap it Some have suggested limiting the Artificial Intelligence by "trapping it" in a virtual world, where it could do no damage outside the confines of this environment. While this might be a safe solution it could limit the AI to only function within the limits and reality of the virtual world. Ok, so we might be able to program a perfectly realistic and isolated virtual world, but would this happen? Is there a parallel project to create such a "virtual prison" alongside AI research? And what if AI was to evolve or emerge from existing systems (such as the internet or a selection of systems within it) before we could develop such a prison? Then of course there is the possibility o...

"I've lost everything, my business, my property and to top it all off my lass of six years has gone off with someone else." Raoul-Thomas-Moat-shoots-policeman-gunning-ex-lover-boyfriend The concept of perpetual association, the "permanent record", causes despair in people's lives every day, although we don't hear about it unless they decide to make sure we hear about it. How can we blame people for going psycho when a criminal record stands in the way of their entire future, giving them nothing left to live for? It's time to acknowledge and address the implications of Actuarial Escape Velocity in respect to crime and punishment. For, with infinite lifespans, ruining people's lives will not only have much greater significance, but it will not be in the interests of society. Who wants their infinite lifespan cut short by a crazy gunman? There seems to be this incredibly misguided notion that all criminals are evil, they're born evil,...

The mind is curious thing. We believe the perceptions from our awakened state to be the ultimate reality - the be all and end all of our existence. The way things work in our day to day world, our interactions, our actions, their implications, and our understandings, appear to be the true representations of reality. So when we sleep, why do we not question the random strangeness and non-realities that perpetuate our slumber? What causes dreams to be so bizarre compared to our awoken reality? Dreams make no sense It's not just a sensory thing. In dreams, even concepts are twisted and stretched and mixed together. I was once in a state of half-asleep dozing and had someone dictate what I was saying - and it was complete nonsense, quite hilarious with absolutely no reference to my experiences or thoughts of the day (or reality in general). Dreams seem to be a regurgitation of our minds but absent of any of the framework to hold it together. This made me wonder. Did humans dream b...

If we were to replace our bodies, one atom at a time, would we be the same person? One would think this would be the case. Every 10 years, every cell in our body will have been replaced at least once, with bone marrow taking the longest to renew. Most of the body renews every 7 years. Our bodies are an ecosystem not unlike any other. Take the sea – remove and replace it one atom at a time and no fish will notice. Replacing larger pieces will cause problems for its inhabitants, but it will soon renew itself. Replace a large proportion, and this will likely have huge implications for the entire ocean. As it is with humans, replacing one small section at a time would be easily accounted for and would not have any dramatic effect on the system as a whole. This is a dramatic realisation – for what are we if not our bodies? We are not single entities. We are systems, and we are made from smaller systems, which in turn are made from smaller systems. Cells take in matter from our food ...

There's no doubt that Google is the "Ford" of the day, pioneering a new industry which is changing our lives on a fundamental level. With this in mind, it was only a matter of time before this monopolistic driving of our destinies was called to question. I recently attended a debate held by Spiked which asked the question "Has Google got too big?" As a debate, it was relatively tame, given that no one person was strongly on the side of either "yes" or "no". However, this was due mainly to the complexity of the question, so as a discussion, it became rather in depth. Size Doesn't Matter Proponents of Google tried to void the argument, pointing out that the use of the adjective "big" was irrelevant, and that size had no implications, and that we should be asking ourselves whether they are "good" or "evil". While this is true, there's no doubt that Google's size is intimately connected to its ...

Sum of all Thrills Robot Arm by tom.arthur Many people have an aversion to automated machines and computers running things. There are likely two reasons for this. The first is due to the lack of trust we place in automation. This is mainly due to their track record. Machines have proved themselves to be unreliable in the past, and need to do a lot to regain our trust. Secondly, machines have been known to make mistakes that are "machine" in nature, exposing human qualities that we took for granted. In other words, they will miss seemingly obvious details, or make mistakes relating to the human experience. So it's not surprising that people don't really trust machines yet. They're not as good as humans in some areas yet they have superseded us in others. This also leads to discontent when humans see their jobs disappear as a result. It's a shame that machines have developed such a bad reputation, because they don't really deserve it. Most of their ...

"For the last 8000 years human history has been guided by Earth 1.0, an operating system dependent upon the relentless exploitation of both people and planet alike. Earth 1.0 promotes an obsession with money, profit and personal advantage. Earth 1.0 is sustained by artificial boundaries and stagnant institutions – all held in place by carefully designed weapons of mass destruction. Earth 1.0 cultivates ecological insensitivity and an unhealthy estrangement from the rest of the biosphere – so much so that the very integrity of the web of life has been compromised. In short, Earth 1.0 is corrupt and unsustainable. In contrast, the operating principles of the all new Earth 2.0 upgrade are based upon global co-operation – between one another and with the rest of the web of life. Earth 2.0 promotes the dissolution of artificial boundaries and the creation of a sustainable human culture in accord with the rest of Nature." "Symbiosis and cybernation will become buzzwords ...

As humans, we are motivated and driven by our needs. Our primary needs are physiological; food, sex, and comfort. At the current state of society, these needs are quite often not met, leading to all kinds of consequences. In fully realised virtual immersion, satisfying these needs is as simple as programming the environment. The implications of this are profound, and will change the fabric of society. Even now we see the impact of desires being met with virtual reality. Millions of online gamers are able to live virtual lives that are better than real lives, having adventures, being different people, and fulfilling their fantasies, albeit via a keyboard and monitor. Not only does this cause reduced productivity for society, it changes our psyches. In realising that these fantasies are possible, our general expectations in life are altered. Our priorities are distorted. Our morals and ethics are altered by the alternative environments we occupy - we are a product of our enviro...

What is it with cities? There seems to be a rush to get anywhere. And what are people rushing to? Do they enjoy their job that much? If they’re late, they should leave earlier. Everyone can’t be late every day – can they? Maybe they’re running from crazy people? If we don’t interact with people, we won’t need to learn about their problems (which we know, aren’t even close to the problems of those kids we see on the news, but they can’t see us through the TV, so it’s ok). Maybe people are worried that if they just stopped to talk with someone, they might actually find the answer. All around us, things are happening. Interesting things. Yet our headphones and free newspapers protect us from it, keeping us in our self obsessed bubbles. Are people chasing their dreams, or running from themselves? Either way, there’ll be another train along any minute. Image courtest Egan Snow .

As a (very casual) fiction writer, specifically science fiction, I have had to learn the fundamentals of creating an interesting story. In doing this, I’ve become subject to analytical observation, the kind that tends to dilute the beauty of life by trying to understand it too much. However, one thing it has taught me is that there can be no story without conflict. I once read a book about a couple who had beaten the trials and tribulations of 80s Northern Ireland (in the previous book) and were now building a home together in the country. Everything went wonderfully for them, as the book documented their “happily ever after”. It was the worst story I had ever read. Hollywood is a mega-conglomerate story making factory, so it stands to reason that everything they create must contain conflict in one way or another. It’s no surprise then, that we have yet to see a story of man and machine living in harmony. (Even in Short Circuit, the American military did what they do...