Joe Duck

My son summed up the situation well about the Roma Pass, which probably isn’t worth the $25 Euros to most if they can avoid the Colosseum lines, which I think you can do if you buy that ticket as a combo ticket at the Palatine Hill Entrance to the Ancient Rome area.

It’s important you see the Forum and Palatine Hill as well as the Colosseum, and with an audio tour of these three you’ll spend perhaps a half to full day in this area for about half the cost of the Roma Pass. The Vatican is NOT included in the Pass so our 2.5 Rome days involved only one where we used the Pass. We DID get to skip a huge line at Colosseum but I think we could have done that with the combo ticket you get at Palatine Hill or Forum area where lines are likely to be much shorter.

Ben:
“We decided to buy the ‘Roma Pass’ which lets you skip lines, get into the Colosseum and stuff, and ride public transportation for free. We picked up the passes in the station for 25 euro each. The kit it’s contained within is well put together, it contains a little map and some tourist information. However, in hindsight we’ve determined it wasn’t worth the cost in our case – mainly since the metro here is cheap, only 1 euro a ticket.”

This is an OLD video from Craig Venter speaking at the TED Conference.    Today he announced that his team has done it.   Amazing.

This video clip does not do it justice, but the Aria Resort fountain was really cool.

I’m sure anxious for Ray Kurzweil to hurry up and finish his film “The Singularity is Near” based on his remarkable book of a few years ago because I think the film will spark the global conversation we need to have about the Singularity.    If even the most modest predictions about this even come true it will be the most significant development in the history of humanity, and will reshape our lives and the future of earth in unimaginable ways.   

I am less optimistic than Kurzweil about the time frame and impact of what he sees as a likely explosion of ”cosmic intelligence” that rapidly expands throughout the universe,  but I think the notion we will NOT see any conscious computers within 10-15 years is pessimistic and perhaps even naive, resting mostly on the notion that the human intellect is a lot more profound than … it appears to be.

Once self-awareness develops in machines the possibilities are literally endless for the future of humanity.  

An alternative to the “Singularity, Wow!” perspective is offered by brain researcher Edward Boyden who wonders about the role of motivation in the coming crop of artificial intelligences:

Indeed, a really advanced intelligence, improperly motivated, might realize the impermanence of all things, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence, concluding that inventing an even smarter machine is pointless.

More from Ed here

Clever writing aside, I think the last thing we need to worry about is motivating the coming AIs.   On the contrary it would seem logical for a self- aware machine with the speed to think billions of times faster than humans to explore (or to use a non-motivated term “analyze”) millions, billions, and trillions of alternatives nearly *simultaneously*.  Unlike the human brain, which has been tuned by the s-l-o-w process of evolution to be slow and very selective and not very efficient, the machine cognition will at the very least be extremely fast and able to process billions of scenarios in very short time frames.    It seems reasonable – in fact inevitable – that at  least a few of those will involve human-like emotional structure and motivation.  Thus even if *most* of the AIs do as Boyd suggests they might and sit on a virtual couch eating virtual potato chips and playing games, some of the others will reinvent humanity in a spectacular way.

Count me in.

Both DARPA SyNAPSE and Blue Brain represent promising approaches to establishing conscious or “self aware” computers, which many believe are the first step to the Singularity.