24. Bionic Contacts - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIME

24. Bionic Contacts - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIME: "The University of Washington's Babak Parviz has created a prototype 'bionic' contact lens that creates a display over the wearer's visual field, so images, maps, data, etc., appear to float in midair. The lens works using tiny LEDs, which are powered by solar cells, and a radio-frequency receiver"

17. The Mobile, Dexterous, Social Robot - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIME

17. The Mobile, Dexterous, Social Robot - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIMENexi is the first of a new class of robot being developed at MIT's Media Lab and referred to as MDS, which stands for mobile, dexterous, social. Nexi can, or eventually will be able to, move around on wheels (hence mobile), and it can pick up objects (dexterous). But its most striking feature is its humanlike, albeit creepy, face, which can express a startling range of emotions (social).

14. The Bionic Hand - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIME

14. The Bionic Hand - TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 - TIME: "The world's first commercially available bionic hand took many hands many years to develop. Created by Touch Bionics, it's multi-articulating, meaning each finger has its own motor. Artificial hands are often hooklike, limited to simple open and close gestures, but the iLimb has more subtle capabilities, like a credit-card grip for grasping narrow objects. It also has a power hold for larger things like coffee mugs. Research on the device began in the United Kingdom's national health system back in the 1960s. Now hundreds of people around the world are using it. Next up for Touch Bionics? A prosthetic wrist unit, prosthetic fingers and a full bionic arm."

Turn on, jack in, zone out - the coming of the global computer hive-mind | Blog | Futurismic

Turn on, jack in, zone out - the coming of the global computer hive-mind | Blog | Futurismic: "Kevin Kelly admits he’s not the first person to postulate that “a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet.“ He also reckons that cloud computing is amplifying the effect:
The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud created by consumers and enterprise - the tons of smart phones, Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of.
Nova Spivak agrees - which makes sense, as he’s trying to build Web3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web - but suggests that we’ll avoid a Terminator-esque ending because human consciousness may be the key to the whole thing:Kevin Kelly admits he’s not the first person to postulate that “a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet.“ He also reckons that cloud computing is amplifying the effect:
The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud created by consumers and enterprise - the tons of smart phones, Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of.
Nova Spivak agrees - which makes sense, as he’s trying to build Web3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web - but suggests that we’ll avoid a Terminator-esque ending because human consciousness may be the key to the whole thing:"What all this means to me is that human beings may form an important and potentially irreplaceable part of the OM — the One Machine — the emerging global superorganism. In particular today the humans are still the most intelligent parts. But in the future when machine intelligence may exceed human intelligence a billionfold, humans may still be the only or at least most conscious parts of the system. Because of the uniquely human capacity for consciousness (actually, animals and insects are conscious too), I think we have an important role to play in the emerging superorganism. We are it’s awareness. We are who watches, feels, and knows what it is thinking and doing ultimately.

Maybe that sounds a little bit Mondo-2000 techno-hippie nineties-retro to you, hmmm? OMGZ maybe Spivak is a victim of terrible brain changes wrought by teh ev1lz of teh intarwubz!!!1 OH NOES:

Researchers have found that the brains of ‘digital natives’ are developing to deal more efficiently with searching and filtering large amounts of information, and making quick decisions. On the down side, that behaviour is changing the brain’s neural patterns impairing the social skills of heavy web users (what’s new?) and even triggering an increase in conditions like Attention Deficit Disorder.

Well, it looks like the internet must have eroded the fundamentals of cause and effect, too… who knew? I guess there’s no point in delaying the inevitable, so I’m off to get my cerebral jack fitted so I can transcend the limitations of this stupid meat prison. The future is within our grasp, brothers and sisters! [image by Katiya Rhode]

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Expectation of Machine Intelligence Could Change Social Behavior, Says Economist | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Expectation of Machine Intelligence Could Change Social Behavior, Says Economist | Gadget Lab from Wired.com: "As computers get smarter machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to an event dubbed the Singularity.
Technologists are still debating the possibility but what if just enough people believed it is likely?
Whether the singularity occurs or not, just the expectation of it could significantly change human behavior, says James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College.
“Long before there is a singularity, people will come to expect it,” Smith told attendees at the Singularity Summit in San Jose. “And it is very likely that could happen within 20 years.”
The belief that a vastly different future is near could change how people make choices in life, education, investment and retirement, says Miller. “People will become very fearful of death, save less and invest differently,” he says.
Most significant among their choices would be the emphasis on extending life, says Smith. “If you think there will be a machine-driven future then your top priority is to survive long enough to make it to the singularity,” he says.
That means people force Governments to increase its defense spending in a bid to ensure the greatest chance of survival.

“Believers will also want to spend more money to increase their chances of making it to the singularity with things such as safer cars and machines that make jobs such as construction safer,” he says"

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The Rise of the Machines

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology