There’s a LOT of them…see the list HERE.

This is fascinating…

Switzerland’s Brain Mind Institute

Welcome to the Brain Mind Institute

Switzerland has established a major new drive in Neuroscience by forming the Brain Mind Institute. It is a rare opportunity to form a Neuroscience Institute that is unconstrained by tradition, constructed as a network of closely related laboratories, on a foundation of futuristic technology, in a manner that can be recurrently interconnected with labs around the world and a vision to go beyond established concepts to explore the emergence of higher brain function.

The BMI is composed of an international faculty with a target of 18 laboratories and more than 200 researchers.more>>>

IBM’s Autonomic Computing website lays out its plan to create it.

One page in particular is very interesting, it lists 8 defining characteristics of an autonomic system:

1. An autonomic computing system needs to “know itself” – its components must also possess a system identity. Since a “system” can exist at many levels, an autonomic system will need detailed knowledge of its components, current status, ultimate capacity, and all connections to other systems to govern itself. It will need to know the extent of its “owned” resources, those it can borrow or lend, and those that can be shared or should be isolated.more>>>

Check out the tinmith AR System

In case you’ve ever wanted to know more about it, here is A Brief Introduction to the Brain.

Ok, this is really COOL! Check out this video from MIT HERE

This is a sweet video that outlines all the technologies I love to blog about here at Blogging the Singularity.

Watch it and just…imagine.

This is a great article by Robert Cringely who writes a respected long-running weekly column/blog for PBS.org.

It’s called ‘I, Cringely: Survival of the Nerdiest with Robert X. Cringely’

Well, he wrote a column on Aug. 17th called “Surviving Immortality” and wouldn’t you know, put a link to BTS next to the article! That’s soooo cool! Thanks Bob!

Well here is the first part, you can click ‘more>>>‘ to read the rest:

I’ve been thinking about the Technological Singularity, which to proper geeks is that point where computers become smarter than humans and supposedly all bets are off as technological development races forward faster than we can catch it and you and I are either left eating bonbons or are put to death by computers no longer amused by serving us. Life post-Singularity will, of course, be somewhere in between those two eventualities. Zits may be abolished but youth will still be anguished. Computers may be designing warp drives but I’ll still be paying my mortgage. Rather than a technological Hell or Utopia, the Singularity is likely to leave us still in our sitcom just with different props. What’s fascinating about the Singularity is not so much guessing what life will be like then as looking at our very approach to the concept and some likely side effects we’ll bump into along the way.more>>>

At least, that’s what the server report says. Since many ISP’s cache websites, the figure is likely much higher. WOW!

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate all of you who rely on BtS for your news and information. I am proud of mine and other bloggers’ efforts to spread the word about the Singularity and Transhumanism. It’s a growing subject and you’re one of the few who are aware of it. That’ll change as time goes on and eventually it will reach everyone.

When I check my stats and see that so many people have been here in the four months it’s been up, it really motivates me to keep doing this and doing my best.

I think I got a good thing going here and other than video editing, The Singularity and Transhumanism are my favorite subjects.

I LOVE being a part of this community of thinkers and dreamers. Let’s keep spreading the memes! Thank you all! – Chris

An ITnews.com.au article has this to say:

Cisco found that American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000.

Yet another fine example of exponential growth on track toward The Singularity. I bet $20 that Kurzweil makes a graph about this!

If you look at the graphic atop the Blogging the Singularity blog, you’ll see a line curving exponentially upward into infinite.

We are at the knee of the curve right now, represented by the shining light in the middle of the curve.

Technology and our use and dependence on it is growing at an exponential rate and there is nothing we can do about it. Our existence is now tied to it due to our economic situation. If the capitalist system stopped growing, then everything would crash and the supply lines we depend on for survival would disappear and billions would die. Only those who aren’t ‘plugged in’ the systems would survive…those in third world countries who don’t depend on food supply lines, electricity, and oil for survival.

Investors continually seek profit, which can only mean growth. The system must keep growing in order to survive, and it must be stable or those with power will lose it. It’s our hate and contempt for our fellow humans that breathes life into the Singularity. A lot of resources is spent to develop weapons and armed robots. The U.S. Military jumps at any new technology that can help them kill our fellow humans. Military money is being spent on making robots conscious at this very moment.

There is no homeostasis under this system and it’s leading us inexporably toward a future we utterly cannot predict let alone control. But alas…that’s just the way it is.

I’m not Mr. ‘Capitalism is bad’. That is a black and white statement that ignores the good that has come from it. In fact, I believe that its just an inevitable consequence of causality, just as utterly impossible to control as our march toward The Singularity.

I’m just an observer. What else can I do? Fight the system? I’d rather keep the armed robots’ sights’ off of me thank you very much.

Subscribe to this blog or check back often to keep up with the reality of the world in which we live. I’ll be here every step of the way to explain, entertain, and inform.

If you’re a fan of this site and wish to comment on anything, just click on ‘No Comments’ below this post. I don’t know why it doesn’t say ‘leave a comment’. It’s just how this layout is. Maybe I’ll try to figure out how to change that

Thanks to my good friend Davis Diosdado for this one!

From Breitbart.com:

Aug 19 11:52 PM US/Eastern
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) – Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

That first cell of synthetic life—made from the basic chemicals in DNA—may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.

“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

—A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

—A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

—A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.more>>>

There was a time when you could say “In the future…” and it would make sense. It was predictable.

That time is long gone.

Robocop was a fantasy. A fictional story about a cyborg who has to fight against an evil corporation and a full-on robot with automatic weapons and rocket launchers.

Robocop was the good guy because he was, at least partly, a real guy. The corporation and the robot were non-human entities.

A few days ago I heard that the military has robots on patrol in Iraq, and yesterday I saw on Kurzweil’s news widget on my blog that they are trying to deploy them on American streets.

“This is insane.” my thoughts announced as I read the article, “Just insane!”

So you want robots to have physical control over this so-called ‘free’ population? I thought the corporations and governments were bad enough! This is a form of intimidation and social control.

———-

Like all great empires and social systems, the American Empire and Capitalism will eventually fall. The only constant is change. They had a great run but the time will come. How will it happen?

1. The human network knits together an intricate web that produces an ultra-conscious entity. We become greater than the sum of our consciouses. This will probably happen by force…utilizing tracking technologies and killer robots to force the population into submission, thereby forcing us all to take part in the creation of a single super-entity of which we are a cog.

2. Those who benefit the most by the way things are do NOT want the democratizing force of the Singularity to occur and fight against it, resulting in a world war the outcome of which we could not even imagine at this point.

I mean really, who honestly thinks that this whole Singularity thing will be a blissful event? There is just no way. No complete revolution of a social system has been without blood shed.

I don’t blog the Singularity because I think its going to be the second coming of christ, a heaven, a cyber-communist paradise, or an Armageddon. I blog the Singularity because from my perspective it really does seem not only possible, but plausible. Because all empires, eras, and social systems fall. That’s a fact, and the Singularity is precisely the kind of event that will break open the floodgates of the future and render our lives forever changed.

We can no longer envision the future, for the world will probably be completely remade. I just hope that it becomes the mind-uploaded cyber-paradise that some predict will occur.

Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that everything will be okay. Sorry if I scared anyone, I think the robo-military-cop machine has me a little perturbed.

-Chris

Thank you MacTonnies from Posthuman Blues for the heads up this is really cool!

31 Jul 2007

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might have been unprecedented in its time, but since then popular culture has been clogged with a fascination for the concept of artificial intelligence, from the eerily humanoid robots of The Twilight Zone to films like AI and Robocop. People can’t seem to get enough of the idea that advanced technology may one day create sentient life, but at the same time seem to dread the consequences of an apparent transgression against the laws of nature.

It may therefore come as a surprise to find that advances in the field of nano biotechnology are now taking place that have nothing to do with creating monsters. Instead, for Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob and his graduate student, Itay Baruchi of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Exact Sciences, the goal is to find treatments for neurological disorders such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

With the use of chemical stimulation, Ben-Jacob and Baruchi discovered that they could trigger a man-made network of neurons to imprint patterns – the same process by which the brain creates memories. This discovery marks an early but crucial step toward the invention of a computer chip with the capability to create and store information the same way our own brains do. By linking the network of neurons to software which reads the neural activity, the network and the computer can work together to carry out tasks of which computers are currently incapable.

Their findings were published in the May issue of Physical Review E, and later made headlines in Scientific American. more>>>

What we have here is a group of people who want to do the Singularity like a hit of ectasy. Take a trip over to THE HEDONISTIC IMPERATIVE for more information.