Ramona and Jenn
At least her grammer stays intact, and she’s pretty too!
You Asked: hello jenn
User: Joe
User: how old are you?
Ramona: Do you want me to tell you about it? I don’t want to ruin the ending for you.
Ramona: I thought it was great. It is about this computer that helps the colonists on the moon win their freedom from the authority on earth.
Ramona: You should read it.
Ramona: To you Joe?
User: yes
User: Yes
Ramona: I understand it very well.
Countrywide v. Congress and the China Connection
* Probably Mozilo was just a high powered opportunistic guy and probably was pretty much within the law with his trades and pay, however he must have known things were poised to melt down to some degree.
* Our congressional system is failing to produce people who are worthy of ruling the amazing American empire. I don’t think there is much corruption but these guys sure are uninspired. The congress-as-corrupt view is a “naivety of the skeptic” idea that is not based on a study of the money flow, personalities, and history of public servants who for the most part are bright, helpful people. However they are mostly lacking in the key skill sets required for innovation and smart reform. In short: American politics selects for the wrong skill sets. To wit:
* Republicans can’t see past Ayn Rand’s ass. They understand the virtues of capitalism, but simply refuse to focus any attention on the key topic of how our brilliant capitalisic experiment has *failed* in many ways to deliver enough products to the neediest folks and how many capitalists are mostly focused on the creation of opportunistic business structures that are exploitable by the clever and the wealthy to the detriment of the greater society. .
* Democratic congresspeople are overwhelmed by math and economics. They concentrate on people, “good vs bad”, “rich vs poor”. * People want to find bad guys rather than find the obvious. In the case of mortgages the system as a whole incentified unwise practicies. Reminds one of the savings and loan debacle although I think government regulations (loan guarantees) were clearly at fault with S&Ls were the mortgage crisis cannot be blamed mostly on the government.
* Is there a simple legal remedy for all the CEO pay and stock manipulation issues? I propose a “Captains go down with the ship” law. If a company you founded fails you lose everything you made from that company except some modest monthly stipend. This would incentify stability over pump and dump strategies. I don’t think it would inhibit founding quality companies. What unintended consequences would this law bring to the business landscape?
Digg for sale! Again. This time it’s for real. Maybe.
TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is likely to get sold soon – probably to Google and probably for about $200,000,000. Good for Kevin Rose and the VC folks, but I’d like to know from the key Diggers if they’ll feel any loyalty to the new owners or to the project. Also, do they think they are owed more than … zero… on this deal?
Social sites do offer their participants something of value = participation and platform – but are there “losers” in these equations?
How do the high level participants who have put in thousands of hours and made the site what it is feel about these cash outs?
I’m wondering how often distribution of equity during the *liquidity* event properly reflects the building of equity. Entrepreneurial capitalism correctly asssumes you need to highly reward risk to get folks to take business risks and innovate. But as Mike Arrington has noted entrepreneurs have a value system that appears to actually assign a high value the thrills and chills of the experience. Thus to get optimal production and innovation it appears to me we need to pay “deeper” on these big internet deals. In the case of a YouTube, DIGG, or Facebook I’d find a way to reward those down the food chain in some proportion to their contribution to the enterprise. It’s possible that these rewards would be small enough that I’m wrong to think this matters much in the overall equation of optimizing the capitalist experience, but even a modest reward would brand the mega deals as “fairer” than simply a situation where fat cats effectively exploit self-motivated worker bees who have generated the user content and social networking that the market values so highly right now.
Of Rats and Men: Rat brains, Blue Brains, and the coming AI age.
SEED magazine reports on the Blue Brain, which IMHO is the most likely project to attain machine-based self consciousness. This in turn will change everything completely and usher in a new era that will bring more change to humanity than any previous event in history.
“The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.
As I’ve noted many times before I believe that machine consciousness will bring profound changes to humanity which will be hugely positive. Now, we allocate resources very ineffectively. Conscious computers will be able to do vastly superior resource allocations and staggering design improvements. These alone will likely resolve all global resource issues such as energy, food, and water. It’s not as clear if the AI age will bring a resolution to problems that have as a a core cause our human defects. Health, Education should benefit enormously but some of the human thinking that creates war, intolerance, crime and suicide will persist and it will resist the improvements.
However the abundance that the AI age will bring to the world should allow us to manage many of these human problems much more effectively.
Markram: “What is holding us back now are the computers.”
Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data – about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
Energy consumption is another huge problem …. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion …. But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.
This 10 year estimate is even more optimistic than Ray Kurzweil’s but in the same league. Although most of the computer programmers I know strongly reject this view, I think it’s also possible that AI could emerge with very limited human intervention from the massive parallel processing environments such as Google’s search server farm of hundreds of thousands of connected machines. Consciousness and human intelligence, if it is as overrated as I believe, is best seen as something of a byproduct of simpler, evolutionarily derived mental processes and other mental activities. As the number of interconnections in machines approaches the number we have in our brains (again we bump into a 10-20 year time frame), and machines are programmed with current routines to do the same mental tasks we do, I’ll be very surprised if machine consciousness will require more than a modest level of additional tweaking of the type they have already started at Blue Brain.
So, I’m not buying my laptop a birthday cake quite yet, but remain cautiously optimistic about the end of the world as we know it.
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