Mission for Finland – IN 2030 FINLAND WILL BE THE PROBLEM-SOLVER OF THE WORLD http://www.nation-branding.info/downloads/mission-for-finland-branding-report.pdf

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Kevin Kelly

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“Txchnologist is an online magazine presented by GE. Every week, we offer an optimistic, but not utopian, take on the future and humanity’s ability to tackle the great challenges of our era through industry, technology and ingenuity.” http://www.txchnologist.com/

http://www.txchnologist.com/feed

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Daniel Henninger: A Presidency to Nowhere

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“The rise of artilects (artificial intellects, i.e., godlike massively intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level) in this century makes the existence of a deity (a massively intelligent entity capable of creating a universe) seem much more plausible. [...]” http://www.kurzweilai.net/from-cosmism-to-deism

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The Rosetta Project – A Distributed Archive Model

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Imagine it’s the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don’t exist any recordings. We’ve read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–” then you specify a group of instruments– “was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume,” for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it.

http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7875-brian-eno/

Listen to the interview: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130918991
Buy the album: http://www.amazon.com/Small-Craft-Milk-Sea-Brian/dp/B0040V7J36
Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE0CUL0kT_o&p=00694AEC2F425B47&playnext=1&index=1

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http://www.kurzweilai.net/nasa-ames-worden-reveals-darpa-funded-hundred-year-starship-program

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Why the U.S. Has Launched a New Financial World War — and How the Rest of the World Will Fight Back http://www.alternet.org/economy/148481/why_the_u.s._has_launched_a_new_financial_world_war_–_and_how_the_rest_of_the_world_will_fight_back_?page=entire

What do you think?

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A new planet that’s the right size and location for life has been discovered 20 light-years away.

The newly discovered world exists in a solar system very similar to our own but much smaller.

Current technologies won’t allow scientists to study the planet’s atmosphere for chemical signs of life.

http://news.discovery.com/space/earth-like-planet-life.html

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The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? Sept. 15, 1998 by Robin Hanson “Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? [...]

Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should seek evidence of extraterrestrials, such as via signals, fossils, or astronomy. But contrary to common expectations, evidence of extraterrestrials is likely bad (though valuable) news. The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are. [...]

So far, life on earth seems to have adapted its technology to fill every ecological niche it could. Previously stable populations and species have consistently expanded into newly-opened frontiers. All known life seems to have a “dispersal phase” to encourage colonization, with non-trivial mutations and sexual mixing to encourage exploration of new technologies.

Similarly, humanity has continued to advance technologically, and to fill new geographic and economic niches as they become technologically feasible. For example, while imperial China closed itself to exploration for a time, other competing peoples, such as in Europe, eventually filled the gap.

This phenomena is easily understood from an evolutionary perspective. In general, it only takes a few individuals of one species to try to fill an ecological niche, even if all other life is uninterested. And mutations that encourage such trials can be richly rewarded. Similarly, we expect internally-competitive populations of our surviving descendants to continue to advance technologically, and to fill new niches as they become technologically and economically feasible. [...]

No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life. [...]

To support optimism regarding our future, we must find especially improbable past evolutionary steps. And in fact we can find a number of plausible candidates for groups of hard trial-and-error biological steps: life, complexity, sex, society, cradle and language. Presuming there are about nine hard steps total here, the Great Filter could be explained if the expected time for each of these steps averaged (logarithmically) to about thirty billion years, if only one percent of stars could support such steps, and if we have only about a one percent chance of not destroying ourselves soon (or permanently banning colonization).

[...] the Great Filter is so very large that it is not enough to just find some improbable steps; they must be improbable enough. Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter: why we haven’t seen an explosion arriving here from any other galaxies in our past universe? And if we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future.”

http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html

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Here is what the theorem looks like in a picture:

[...]”

http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/06/the-inescapable.html

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“[...] consider: passion about pacifism. There have been times, when the world was divided into sides fighting vicious and deadly wars, that some folks took the side of stopping the fights. They took the natural passion of fighting an enemy and channeled it into fighting the fighters. I’d like to get folks to similarly see the wasteful pointlessness of today’s political battles. Today we induce millions of people to make up mostly-random political opinions on hundreds of diverse complex policy topics they hardly understand, split into warring factions based on shared opinions, and then fight vicious political battles over which factions get to make the government implement their random opinions. I’d rather folks focused on generating meta-political-opinions, not about particular policies like wars or bank bailouts, but about what political processes best choose effective policies.

[...] nations where citizens can effectively control their government by just specifying a national welfare function, and tweaking it a bit periodically, should be higher status than nations where ordinary citizens must continually form opinions on the effectiveness of hundreds of rapidly changing policies.”

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/fight-the-fighters.html

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/futarchy

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