Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling [...]
It in the last few days I’ve had two startling, and somewhat depressing, conversations.
In both instances, I had a debate with people I admire, for their intelligence and intellectual rigour, about the merit of the scientific method. In both cases, my opponents made claims which felt unscientific to me. When I challenged their thinking on [...]
In #323 I welcome back a previous G’Day World guest, one of my favourite scientists, Dr Aubrey de Grey.
Aubrey is the founder of The Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit 501c(3) organization committed to the acceleration of progress toward a cure for age-related disease, disability, suffering, and death.
They are running a special conference on aging [...]
WarWraith sent me this link. Even if it doesn’t prove to be the basis of a Theory of Everything, this E8 is an amazing thing to look at. I’ve printed it out and put it up on my wall. Read the below article for an explanation on the new theory that it could be a [...]
Have you ever stopped to think about how old you REALLY are? I don’t mean this arbitrary thing we call your date of birth - I mean how old you REALLY are.
Every atom in your body is old - REALLY old. Many of them, such as oxygen and carbon, are only produced via stellar [...]
Cait pointed to this on Twitter. There is some debate in the article about the interpretation of the data, and it isn’t the first time I’ve seen researchers claim to have broken the speed of light (I remember having an email conversation with Aussie physicist Paul Davies about the teleportation of an electron about [...]
Wendell Wallach is a lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics where he chairs the working research group on Technology and Ethics, leads a seminar for bioethics interns, and functions as a senior coordinator for other working groups and projects. He has lectured worldwide, published many articles, and is presently writing two [...]
Steve Omohundro is a computer scientist and President of Self-Aware Systems in Palo Alto, California. Since April 2007 he is a research advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. We chatted this morning about his timeline and vision for the possible ways that artificial intelligence will emerge and how he believes self-aware machines will [...]
Eliezer Yudkowsky (recently heard on G’Day World #238) is back. This time we’re having a discussion about another one of Eli’s favourite memes - rationality. We had originally planned to discuss his “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” but got side tracked into why “faith” and “religion” are irrational and dangerous and… well… we never really got [...]
Didn’t expect THAT, did you?
I’m prepping for my chat with Vint tomorrow morning and happened upon this recent interview with Kuzweil on CNNMoney where he says:
“These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous,” says the man who once delivered a tech conference presentation as a singing computer avatar named Ramona. (That stunt was the [...]
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