Quotes

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the “brains” of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World’s Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into “throw away” and “set aside.” (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)

…

Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with “Robot-brains”*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other.

…

For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.

Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014.
Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest. However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.

Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014
By ISAAC ASIMOV – http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html

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In 1986, the military’s psychic friends were asked to locate Muammar Gadhafi before the US bombing raid on Libya. The next year, the DIA requested some of the purported psychics to divine the purpose of a Soviet facility at Dushanbe, and in 1989 the Joint Staff asked for help in determining the exact function of a suspected terrorist training facility in Libya. In 1993, the DIA asked the psychics to locate tunnels that the agency suspected the North Koreans were digging under the demilitarized zone separating their country from South Korea. In 1994, some of the alleged psychics were tasked to find plutonium in North Korea. In 1995, despite its claim that the program produced some successes—including the 1979 prediction that a new Soviet submarine would be launched within 100 days and the identification of a building where Lt. Col. William Higgins was being held in Lebanon—DIA was planning on terminating its STARGATE program.

The Wizards of Langley, by Jeffery T. Richelson

[Don’t be fooled by the title… the book is a general history of the CIA, and this bit about remote viewing programs is just an (albeit true) aside.]

(via wolvensnothere)

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If you think of Google’s Mountain View campus as a city state, and all its satellite campuses as colonies, then it was kind of inevitable that the company would raise an army. Already, it has a culture within its walls that is as strong as any city-state’s. Googlers across the globe share common values, types of work and meals. They exist within a social hierarchy as clear-cut as any caste system in ancient Greece (though Google doesn’t have slaves, which is nice). And they’ve even taken on a state-like role in defending U.S. assets against Chinese hackers. But recently, Google’s cultural goals have gotten a little more pronounced. They’re not just out to make great web services like search, maps, and gmail. They’re making driverless cars and funding Ray Kurzweil’s efforts to eliminate human death. It’s almost like the company is trying to build its own religion, based on vaguely environmentalist and Singulatarian ideas. They’re acting less like a company, whose goals are entirely economic, and more like a city-state, whose goals include ineffable things like quality of life. Google’s robot army reminds me of novels like Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age or Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, where companies form city-states that occasionally go to war with each other. In He, She, and It, the company/city makes its living from selling software, but has to build cyborg soldiers to defend its walls against hostile takeovers. And in Diamond Age, corporations create islands devoted to pursuits like recreating the Victorian age. The companies in these novels are no longer just economic entities. They are cultures, conducting social experiments and propagating belief systems that won’t lead directly to profit. These days, Google reaches into almost every corner of our lives in the West — it shapes the way we see the digital world. Those of us whose culture comes from the internet are already living in a Googlized world, just as people beyond Greece lived in a Hellenized world back in the 300s BCE. It makes sense that this city-state corporation known as Google now has the ability to wage war in the real world as well as cyberspace. Though Google’s leadership may believe its acquisition of Boston Dynamics will help usher in a future of AI robots, it may actually be ushering in a future that looks more like history than The Matrix. We may be witnessing the return of the city-state, led by corporations rather than governments. Inside Google’s walls, this transformation might be Utopia. Outside — well, we don’t have to worry about outside. We’ll have the robots to protect us against that.

http://io9.com/heres-why-google-is-building-a-robot-army-1491876836

Update: see also Almost Human

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NASA remains an agency driven by its human spaceflight division. If NASA has an original sin, it is that the agency was spawned by the Cold War and its early exploration activities were a technological battle against the Soviets for high-ground superiority; science was essentially a fringe benefit of this quasi-military enterprise.

To go boldly (and on budget)

Yuuuuup

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Fuel is running low on Cassini, but there’s enough for another four years of maneuvering. Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have mastered the art of using Titan’s gravity to steer Cassini into new, interesting orbits. NASA hopes to send the spacecraft diving inside the majestic rings of Saturn to study their composition. The extended mission would cost about $60 million a year. But that money has not materialized in the NASA budget. If there is no funding, NASA will have to end the Cassini mission next year. For robotic spacecraft, the greatest hazard in the solar system turns out to be the NASA budget.

To go boldly (and on budget)

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I don’t think you can last by meeting the
contemporary public taste, the taste from the last
quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following
demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t
know many works of art that last that are condescending.
I don’t know many works of art that last that are
deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
written all over you; you should aim to be one geek
they’ll never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t
hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of
pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should
fully realize what society has made of you and take a
terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get
dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird
and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you
have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to recognize
your own significance in culture!

Bruce Sterling (via ce-douglas)

Amen

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Keynes had eagerly collected Newton’s occult manuscripts all his life and he stated the situation in a very stark way. He said that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”

This is important because scientists and magicians seem to tell very different stories about the world. The stories that science tells are meant to interlock with each other, like Legos. Every scientific story has certain features in common with every other scientific story. These features, like the use of mathematics or logic or the conceit that matter is atomic, allow explicit connections to be made between them, even if their subjects are widely separated. This availability for interconnection is one of the things that makes science a powerful force in our world.

The stories that magicians tell would seem to be very different. The word occult means “hidden;” this tends to describe the types of stories whose logic is not readily apparent. However, the important thing to remember is not that magical stories “don’t make sense” or that alchemy “doesn’t work,” but that Newton thought they did. This primordial connection between science and magic in a person like Newton allows us to tell a more interesting story about science than we otherwise might.

THIS IS UNSTART, A NEW COLUMN BY GEORGE LAZENBY (via interdome)
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planetary scientists increasingly suspect that comets (frozen balls of dust and ice) and ice-laden meteorites crashing into the primordial Earth probably provided most of the planet’s water—and perhaps much of the organic material—necessary for life.

Organic molecules have been detected in comets such as the Hale-Bopp, and, in a recent study, researchers simulated those cosmic crash landings by using a gas gun to fire metal projectiles at 16,000 miles per hour into blocks of ice containing some of the same chemicals that make up comets. The shock wave and heat generated by the impact created molecules that formed amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

Yet the very same objects that gave this planet life could also spell its demise. Astronomers predict that a comet or asteroid large enough to cause global devastation will smash into the Earth about every 100 million years or so.

Fortunately, if such a comet or asteroid were to arrive sooner than expected, we are constructing observational systems to discover and track near-Earth objects, conceivably providing us with sufficient time to pre-empt catastrophe.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/What-Does-the-Future-of-the-Universe-Hold-236106251.html

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