I'm continuing to get caught up on the Linkathon email. "Happy Crow" writes us:

You inspired me to write something while listening to the latest Fast-Forward radio. I don't know what all the limits are on push-prizes, but what about one that created courses designed to let "the rest of us" benefit from the same kind of linguistic logic that allows philologists to comprehend a dozen-some languages?

Anyway, whether for link, or just for your reaction, here's the url, and thanks in advance."

My thought is that push prizes can be effective for most any type of development that people would like to see happen. The keys, I think, are:

1. Have a realistic goal that is within the grasp of foreseeable science,
2. Offer a sum that's sufficient to inspire action, AND
3. Be someone (or a foundation or whatever) that potential competitors will trust to actually pay the prize when its won.

The amount of money that's offered for these prizes varies according to what needs to be accomplished. We've had fun recently talking on FastForward Radio about the success of both the DARPA Urban challenge, and Stephen Wolfram's universal Turing machine question. DARPA paid out $3.5 million, Stephen Wolfram paid out $25,000. They both got their money's worth I think.

-Linkathon.

If you'd like get linked by The Speculist, email us.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I apologize for not checking the Speculist email box more often, but 3/4th of the Speculist email starts out:

Dearest One:

You may be surprised by my writing....

Actually, after thousands of these emails my level of surprise has diminished somewhat. Apparently there are a lot of very wealthy Nigerians that think that "Speculist" is English for "Bank." But I digress.

Wading through the spam I found this letter from Florian Widder:

Hi Phil and Stephen,

just read a blog post on a big German blog I frequent (this post is in English though, so check it out if you like) that talked about a team at UC Berkely having created the first fully functional radio from a single carbon nanotube.

The second link above goes to the Berkeley Labs website and explains the whole project in greater detail - makes for a fascinating read and it is an incredibly exciting showcase of what we can do in our ever-expanding quest use the laws of nature for our purposes..

I know, I know a radio may not seem all that exciting with everyone in futurist and pro-technology circles talking about AIs, self-replicating nanobots etc... but personally, I find this insanely exciting. Just reading about the long-term possibilities is exhiliarating:

Just one quote to deomonstrate what I mean:

“The entire radio would easily fit inside a living cell, and this small size allows it to safely interact with biological systems,” Zettl said. “One can envision interfaces with brain or muscle functions, or radio-controlled devices moving through the bloodstream.”

Need I say more?

No you don't.

Phil and I were also impressed. We spoke about this in our October 21 FastForward Radio podcast.

-Linkathon.

If you'd like get linked by The Speculist, email us.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Will Brown emails us with a link to an Al Fin's post:

Introducing the grobyC--the Inverse of a Cyborg

The "grobyc" ....clever name, but I'm hopeful it doesn't catch on. It doesn't roll off the tongue. While a cyborg is a biological organism that has had one or more biological functions replaced or enhanced by machinery, a grobyc is a machine with biological parts.

The problem of devising linear actuators for autonomous robots is an interesting one. Several artificial substitutes for muscle have been devised and tested. Scientists from South Korea have decided to avoid the substitutes and go straight to the real thing--using actual living muscle tissue as robot actuators!

...

According to Chemical Science, Sukho Park of the Nano/Micro System Laboratory at the Seoul National University and his colleagues "made the robot by growing heart muscle tissue from a rat onto tiny robotic skeletons made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)."

Al Fin mentioned a previous biologic/machine hybrid - the ratbrained F-22. I'm not sure that project would qualify as a grobyc. If the brain is biological, shouldn't it be a cyborg, or would it be something else completely? This area may end up with as many classifications and subclassifications as the Animal Kingdom.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Our friend Will Brown points to this article from Chris Chatham:

10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers

Chris argues that the metaphor that "our brains are computers" has been valuable. But, like most metaphors, it is eventually checked by reality. He points out how vastly different our brains are from digital computers. Why it's almost as if one evolved biologically, and the other were artificial!

I suspect that the brain/computer comparison is more than a metaphor. The brain is a strange organic system far different from what any human computer scientist would design. That said, I suspect that it can be emulated by a sufficiently powerful Turing Machine.

Informally the Church–Turing thesis states that if an algorithm (a procedure that terminates) exists then there is an equivalent Turing Machine (equivalently: recursion|recursively-definable function or lambda calculus|λ-definable function) for that algorithm. One conclusion to be drawn is that, IF a computer can effectively calculate an algorithm THEN so can an equivalent Turing Machine.

So even if the brain is not a Turing machine, it could be emulated by a sufficiently powerful Turing machine. In theory.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Pop quiz: how many cool 2015-era product placements do you see in this picture?

Well, if you ignore the blurry stuff in the background, there's just two - a Mattel Hoverboard and a nifty pair of self-lacing Nike sneakers.

We reported a month ago about efforts to make the levitation technology behind the hoverboard a reality. Obviously it'll be a long road to the hoverboard. But is there really any reason we can't have those Nike sneakers now?

What exactly would be required? They glow and they pull their laces tight. So they would need the ability to hold a charge - a battery or a capacitor of some sort. It would be cool if the act of walking kept them charged, but that could be a version 2.0 improvement. We'd accept plugging them in for now. You'd need a small electric motor to pull the laces and a couple of LED's for lighting.

By comparison to a hoverboard, this is really low-hanging fruit.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. Michael Maloof emails to inform us of his "McFLY 2015 project." Apparently he's petitioning Nike to make this happen.

If you're Nike and you're looking for ways to get aging Gen-Xer's to shell out serious cash for sneakers, this seems pretty obvious.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our old buddy Karl Gallagher steps us through some of the more entertaining scenarios featuring nanobots run amok:

A couple of the books I've read recently illustrated the powers and dangers of nanotechnology. One of the disputes in the field is whether molecular manufacturing can provide exponential production capabilities. MM would let us create a "nanofactory", a machine which builds things atom by atom, capable of producing anything it has the design data for. Exponential production happens when a nanofactory can build a duplicate of itself. Then the they could both duplicate themselves, until we have 4, 8, 16, 32, . . . enough nanofactories for every household in the world to have one. That would totally eliminate the world economy as we know it. If there's no limits on what the nanofactories can produce there could be a wave of homemade WMDs that would eliminate the world as we know it.

My favorite would have to be the "flesh-eating assemblers." Yikes!

-Linkathon.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Dr. Pat offers thoughts on living in a simulation. If this is a simulation, what is the Simulator trying to learn?

In what way is the simulation different from the original?

This could be very subtle, it could be a butterfly effect type change, like altering the gravitational constant by 1/googleplex or (in a more local, less basic tweak) change the size of a continent slightly, change visible constellations.... in other words, something we could never guess.

Rejecting these possibilities as unguessable, and hence boring, what contingencies would I fool with to see how history changed. This is (I imagine) part of an overall scheme to gain divergent views, possibly even divergent technologies, that would be useful to the instigator of the simulation.

...

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel argues that the long East-West axis of Eurasia determined its greater technological development compared to Subsaharan Africa, Australia and the Americas. Well that would be worth playing with.

More here.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Keitousama predicts a world full of flying cameras that he cleverly calls iFly's. Some would be owned by individuals, others would be used publicly like webcams.

He seems excited about this, but I have to wonder whether any privacy would be possible in a world where everyone is a iFly on the wall.

-Linkathon.

Yes, the Speculist Linkathon continues. If you'd like get linked by The Speculist, email us.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What do Better All the Time, the Fermi Paradox and baby universes have in common? Matt at Dancing In the Minefield has the fertile mind to contemplate the answer.

-Linkathon

Posted by Kathy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some have asked, "Why care about technology if it doesn't bring happiness?" Kaj Sotala explains why that premise is wrong for some technologies. He makes the case that developing technology can enable happiness, equality, and choice.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Emily at "Considering the Universe" blog is discovering the concept of The Technological Singularity. Like many of us, she has gained respect for Eliezer Yudkowsky as part of the deal.

And she's going to The Singularity Summit.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check out Brian Gongol's Future Scale. A favorite prediction:

2012 First private hotel in space opens for tourists

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Andrew Salamon has written up his thoughts on manned missions to asteriods.

-Linkathon.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attention futurists...

If you've created an article, a blog post, a podcast, a book, or any other creative work that you think would interest the 61,000 70,000 Speculist readers, write us! Our email address is:

speculist1@yahoo.com

If you've already published your work to a blog or website, be sure to include a URL so we can link to it. If you haven't yet published your work and want to premier it at The Speculist, just email it.

If while surfing you see a story you think we should discuss, forward that too!

Here's a nonexclusive list of the subjects we like to cover:

• Accelerating technological development
• Artificial Intelligence
• Astronomy/cosmology
• (Things are getting) Better All The Time
• Biomimetics
• Bionics
• Biotechnology
• Cloning
• Computers
• Cryonics
• Economics
• Energy
• Environment
• Evolution
• Extra-Terrestrial Life
• Flying Cars
• Futures Past (or past futures)
• Geek Projects (cool stuff you've created in your garage)
• Genetics
• Global Warming
• Health/Medicine
• Humanity (defining humanity)
• Intelligence
• Inventions
• Life Extension
• Nanotechnology
• Nuclear Power
• Nutrition
• One Laptop Per Child
• Optimism
• Philosophy
• Physics
• Push Prizes (The X prize, DARPA Grand Challenge, etc.)
• Prediction
• Publishing
• Quantum Computing
• RepRap / Fab Lab
• Robotics
• Scenarios
• Second Life
• Self Defense
• The Singularity
• Space Exploration
• Space Tourism
• Space Elevator
• Speculative Fiction
• Transhumanism
• Transportation
• Virtual Reality

UPDATE:

Our year-to-date average is about 61,000 unique visitors a month. But Phil pointed out, correctly, that The Speculist has actually broken 70,000 unique visitors for several months now.

And that works for me.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)