Tag: Featured | Page 54

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Gary Smith
Date
July 7, 2020

Categorized
Business and Finance, Ethics

Tagged
Featured, stock market}

Stocks Are Not a Ponzi Scheme and Here’s Why Not

_{Gary Smith
July 7, 2020

7

Business and Finance, Ethics}

When you mail a letter to someone in another country, you can enclose an international reply coupon (IRC) that can be exchanged for that country’s postage stamps and used to mail a letter back to you. It is like enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope except that you do not need to figure out how to buy foreign postage stamps. It is the polite thing to do but also the source of the most famous swindle in history. In 1920, a Massachusetts man named Charles Ponzi (right, in 1920) promised to pay investors 50 percent interest every 45 days. Compounded eight times a year, the effective annual rate of return was 2,463 percent! He said that his profits would come from Read More ›

person holding baseball ball in black leather baseball mitt

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post

Jonathan Bartlett
Date
July 7, 2020

Categorized
Business and Finance

Tagged
Blockchain, cryptocurrency, digitization, Elon Musk, Featured}

Collectors’ Items Are Now on the Blockchain

_{Jonathan Bartlett
July 7, 2020

3

Business and Finance}

When I was growing up, trading cards were all the rage. They mostly centered on baseball but trading cards for every major sport emerged. The Topps Company has long had the lead in baseball cards, with Fleer and Upper Deck trailing far behind. Recently, Topps made a radical move into the digital sector by making some of its trading cards available via the WAX blockchain. WAX stands for Worldwide Asset eXchange. WAX is a blockchain (i.e., cryptocurrency) system that is geared around the buying, selling, and trading of virtual items. Previously, WAX was primarily used to trade goods within gaming platforms. For instance, the massively multiplayer economic strategy game Prospectors utilized WAX to allow users to trade items. However, in Read More ›

Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism - illustration

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post

News
Date
July 7, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Technocracy, Transhumanism

Tagged
2084 (book), Featured, John Lennox, New Soviet Man, transhumanism}

John Lennox: Transhumanism Is Not a New Idea

_{News
July 7, 2020

2

Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Technocracy, Transhumanism}

In his just-published book, 2084, Oxford mathematician John Lennox points out that, in the 20th century, both the Communists and the Nazis had attempted transhumanist projects. For example, In the former Soviet Union, attempts were made to use science to create a “New Man.” In 1924, Leon Trotsky wrote: “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.” What that program of eugenics involved is explained by historian Andrey Zubov as cited by Read More ›

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News
Date
July 6, 2020

Categorized
Global Technology, Philosophy of Mind, Technocracy

Tagged
Featured, free will, Lucas Skrobot, Michael Egnor, totalitarianism}

Michael Egnor: Denying Free Will Is Totalitarian

_{News
July 6, 2020

2

Global Technology, Philosophy of Mind, Technocracy}

Specifically, “The denial of free will is the cornerstone of totalitarian systems.” That’s what he told podcaster Lucas Skrobot in the second of two podcast discussions: Dr. Michael Egnor | Free Will and Totalitarian Ideologies (Part 2 of 2) [E152] Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has written a fair bit on free will for Mind Matters News. Here are some selections to consider: No free will means no justice: “Free will is the cornerstone of all human rights and the cornerstone of our Constitutional rights. The denial of free will is, literally, the denial of human freedom. Without free will, we are livestock, without the presumption of innocence, without actual innocence, and without rights. A justice system that has no respect for Read More ›

Psychology concept. Sunrise and woman silhouette.

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post

News
Date
July 4, 2020

Categorized
Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Featured, Lucas Skrobot, Michael Egnor, p-zombie}

Neurosurgeon Explains Why You Are Not a Zombie

_{News
July 4, 2020

2

Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Podcaster Lucas Skrobot recently interviewed neurosurgeon Michael Egnor on the difference between the mind and the brain. Egnor told him, “My wife jokes with me that meeting me is always the worst part of a person’s life.” At 22:08, Dr. Egnor provides a thought experiment to explain that minds must transcend materials—the zombie problem. The zombie problem? Ah yes, the philosophers’ zombie: For that, you might also see one of Egnor’s articles: “Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the p-zombie.” To understand consciousness, we need to establish what it is not before we create any more new theories: A p-zombie (a philosophical zombie, as distinguished from the kind that sells movies) is identical to a human being but has no first-person Read More ›

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post

News
Date
July 3, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, Technocracy

Tagged
2084 (book), Featured, John Lennox, Robert J. Marks, Shoshana Zuboff}

2084 vs 1984: The Difference AI Could Make to Big Brother

_{News
July 3, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, Technocracy}

In a recent podcast, Oxford mathematician John Lennox answered some questions raised about his new book, 2084 by Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks, including questions as to how the loss of privacy could wind up really harming us: https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-089-John-Lennox.mp3 From the transcript: Robert J. Marks: It’s been said that AI is the new electricity. It’s neither good nor bad. You have addressed some of the potential negative uses of artificial intelligence or the negative impacts of artificial intelligence, but expanding on that, what are some of the big threats that you see in the use of AI technology in the near future? John Lennox: Well, the threats are best explained by comparing them with the advantages. Let’s take Read More ›

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post

News
Date
July 3, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Data Privacy, Surveillance

Tagged
COSM, Featured, Geofencing, Privacy, Smartphone}

AT&T CTO Says, Yes, You Can Live Without Your Smart Phone

_{News
July 3, 2020

2

Artificial Intelligence, Data Privacy, Surveillance}

At COSM 2019, Jay Richards interviewed AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch (the guy who says your smart phone will disappear). Is that true? And how will we live? From the interview: Andre Fuetsch: We are now on the brink of being able to connect many, many more things than we’ve ever seen before. And just by the fact of being able to connect more things … look at the more traditional wireless networks that we’ve had in the preceding generations. It frankly was just about connecting phones, right? “Some were sort of dumb phones, some were more feature phones. Some are now obviously more smartphones. And these were really more of kind of a one to one relationship with people. 5G, Read More ›

3D rendering abstract round light background

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post

News
Date
July 2, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Global Technology, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
2084 (book), Featured, John Lennox, Max Tegmark}

John Lennox: How AI Raises the Stakes for All of Us

_{News
July 2, 2020

3

Artificial Intelligence, Global Technology, Philosophy of Mind}

This is an excerpt from John Lennox‘s 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (Zondervan 2020) published with permission: In April 2018 at the TED talks in Vancouver physicist and cosmologist MaxTegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute at MIT, made this rather grandiose statement: “In creating AI [artificial intelligence], we’re birthing a new form of life with unlimited potential for good or ill.” A study by Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson entitled The Digital Ape carries the subtitle How to Live (in Peace) with Smart Machines. They are optimistic that humans will still be in charge, provided we approach the process sensibly. But is this optimism justified? The director of Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study Read More ›

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News
Date
June 30, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Global Technology, Surveillance

Tagged
2084 (book), China, Featured, John Lennox, Martin Rees, Nick Bostrom}

Exclusive!: John Lennox Answers Our Questions About AI in 2084

_{News
June 30, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Global Technology, Surveillance}

In his new book, 2084, the Oxford mathematician doubts that AI, now or then, will out-think humans. Our real worry is how they will be used.

Why is Bell’s Theorem Important for Conservation of Information?

_{Proving a negative is difficult. Demonstrating that there are no leafy green crows is hard to do without examining every crow. But there's another way.} _{Eric Holloway
June 29, 2020

4

Information Theory, Mathematics}

Proving a negative is difficult. Think about it. For example, demonstrating that there are no leafy green crows is hard to do without exhaustively examining every crow in existence. On the other hand, proving there are no crows naturally emblazoned with the text of the King James Bible is a bit easier to do. Proving a negative is possible if the extremes are large enough. Such as result is known as a no-go theorem. One of the most profound no-go theorems can be found in quantum physics. Physicist John Bell (1928–1990) proved — entirely from first principles — that there is a fundamental difference between how particles interact classically compared with how they interact within quantum physics. In classical physics, Read More ›

The economic crisis of 2020 with the red arrows indicating the economic recession in 2020.

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post

Gary Smith
Date
June 29, 2020

Categorized
Business and Finance

Tagged
Banking, Debt, Featured, government, Great Recession, Inflation, Recession}

Inflation Is the Least of Our Worries!

_{Yet some fear that the inflation dragon is about to roar} _{Gary Smith
June 29, 2020

7

Business and Finance}

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) can throw the economy into a recession whenever it feels that it is in our best interests to be unemployed — typically because the Fed is convinced that an unruly inflation needs to be tamed by the discipline of unemployment. For example, in 1979, as the rate of inflation peaked above 13 percent, the Fed moved to make borrowing prohibitively expensive. When Fed Chair Paul Volcker was asked if the Fed’s policies would cause a recession, he replied, “Yes, and the sooner the better.” Interest rates reached 18 percent on home mortgages and were even higher for most other bank loans. Households and businesses cut back on their borrowing and spending and the unemployment rate Read More ›

smart medical technology concept, doctor use smart glasses to use augmented reality to show the anatomy body of the patient for analysis and find the way to treatment in surgery room at hospital..

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News
Date
June 20, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health

Tagged
Featured, Human Interface Technology Lab, Robert J. Marks, Thomas Furness, Virtual Reality}

Virtual Reality Joins Actual Reality — and It’s a Real Advance

_{The grandfather of virtual reality explains how everyone began to think of ways VR might help them} _{News
June 20, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health}

As a result of media reports of his success in pioneering virtual reality for the US Air Force, many people contacted Thomas Furness. asking about civilian uses for virtual reality. In a recent podcast, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks continued his discussion with the “grandfather of virtual reality.” And the people who contacted Furness were not asking for better computer games. They were talking about really serious issues: https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-086-Thomas-Furness.mp3 Transcript. Partial transcript: Thomas Furness: One question that came, one of the first ones I received, was from a mother who had watched a program that, apparently I was talking about the virtual cockpit. She called me and said, I watched this program. I want you to know my Read More ›

EEG Test on an Elderly Man at Hospital Laboratory

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News
Date
June 19, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
COSM, Electroencephalography, Featured, Jay Richards, Mind Uploading, Ray Kurzweil, Robert J. Marks}

Can We Really Cheat Death by Downloading Our Brains?

_{Through the ages, we have thought of unique ways to avoid death. Could the internet and artificial intelligence help?} _{News
June 19, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Last October, Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage, caught up with Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks, a Baylor University computer engineering prof, at COSM 2019 to ask, what are our cheat-death chances? They were responding to futurist Ray Kurzweil’s heady claims made at the conference that we will merge with computers by 2045 and live on as AI. Richards and Marks reflected on Kurzweil’s claims and the thoughts of the panel responding to them. Here’s a partial transcript: Jay Richards: He’s (Kurzweil, below right) very much a sort of, I’d say, a techno-optimist. And in fact, he sort of thinks we’re going to get brain scans and upload ourselves, whereas the panel… Though I know there was a Read More ›

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post

Heather Zeiger
Date
June 18, 2020

Categorized
Global Technology, Social Media

Tagged
___longform, China, COVID-19, Featured, Twitter, Wolf Warriors}

The Age of the Wolf Warrior: China’s Post-Pandemic Strategy

_{The younger diplomats take their cue from a Chinese Rambo-style movie and the rewritten history they learned at school} _{Heather Zeiger
June 18, 2020

9

Global Technology, Social Media}

While countries around the world have been dealing with the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus), China has claimed disputed areas in the South China Sea, taken over the Hong Kong government, and flown planes over Taiwan. One result was a standoff between warships from the U.S., Australia, and China. A 2016 international tribunal in The Hague ruled that China has no legal sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. China, saying that the ruling was void, claims areas that are also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Japan. The Chinese Liberation Army has also increased the number of troops at its border with India (the Line of Actual Control) disputed since the Sino-Indian war in 1962 (below Read More ›

F35 advanced military aircraft locking on target and firing Missile's . 3d rendering

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post

Eric Holloway
Date
June 17, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Military

Tagged
Autonomous drones, Featured, Gary Kasparov}

Will AI or Fighter Pilots Win the 2021 Dogfight? Or Both?

_{The outcome of future warfare will be decided, not by AI alone, but by finding and optimizing the tradeoff between human and artificial intelligence} _{Eric Holloway
June 17, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Military}

The US Air Force began as Billy Mitchell’s prophecy that air power could decide the next war. That happened, of course, when the B-29 superfortress dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ever since, the USAF has sought to adapt to the latest and most decisive forms of military technology. But the challenges have drastically changed. Most recently the USAF started USCYBERCOMMAND, due to the fact that a lone hacker can paralyze an entire nation’s infrastructure. The USAF also started the new Space Force, since a well placed orbital burst can take down the world’s satellite grid. Now USAF is delving into the world of autonomous drones, the next logical step from the manned drones (drones operated by a controller on Read More ›

Abstract Chinese flag painted on digital sphere. Futuristic network cyberspace illustration background. View from space. Selective focus used.

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post

Denise Simon
Date
June 16, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Global Technology, Surveillance, Technocracy

Tagged
China, Featured}

China Aims at Global AI Dominance by 2030

_{China’s systematic use of AI for social surveillance and control should cause us to think carefully about what that means} _{Denise Simon
June 16, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Global Technology, Surveillance, Technocracy}

A 2017 central government document laid out the country’s plan for global dominance in AI by 2030, asking all “people’s governments of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, all State Council ministries, and all directly controlled institutions” to ”please carefully implement.“ (translation) To achieve that timeline, China has employed several operations against the United States including the Confucius Institutes (fronts for Chinese propaganda according to the FBI, 2020), the Thousand Talents Program (spying and intellectual-property theft, Bloomberg, 2019) and cyber theft. While many Confucius Institutes have been exposed by key members of the Senate and many are being terminated domestically as a result, Chinese-driven cyber theft is costing the U.S. economy more than $100 billion per Read More ›

Composite image of digital illustration of pixelated 3d woman

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post

Robert J. Marks
Date
June 16, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Information Theory

Tagged
Data processing inequality, Featured}

At the Movies: Can AI Restore Blurred Images?

_{Working with pixels, we can do remarkable things—as long as we are not asking for magic} _{Robert J. Marks
June 16, 2020

5

Artificial Intelligence, Information Theory}

It’s an exciting scene in crime investigation movies. A critical image, like the one on the left below, is blurred by pixelization. The detective commands the technician, “Sharpen it!” and the technician pushes a key on a computer keyboard. The key activates an algorithm and, magically, the deblurred image on the right appears. That can’t be done in real life. An image cannot be sharpened using only the information in the image itself. This is proven by a mathy theorem called the data processing inequality. 1 The mutual information between an image and a corrupted blurred image cannot be increased by further processing. Period. That’s why the title of a recent news article from Duke University is misleading: “Artificial intelligence Read More ›

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Jonathan Bartlett
Date
June 15, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance, Social Media

Tagged
Android, apple, Featured, NFC, Nokia, NXP, RFID}

What You Need to Know About The Tactile Web

_{It’s a user-directed integration of technology into life} _{Jonathan Bartlett
June 15, 2020

4

Artificial Intelligence, Business and Finance, Social Media}

Many people have heard the term RFID, “radio frequency identifier,” a technology pioneered in the 1980s for creating tracking chips that needn’t be powered to work. This technology has improved quite a bit over the years. The technology area in which RFID originated is called NFC, for “Near-Field Communication.” In themselves, NFC chips are small and unpowered, but they can receive power from nearby devices, thus enabling them to communicate. The amount of work that modern NFC chips can do is amazing. The NXP firm, for instance, manufactures chips that can do full-blown data encryption and signing. These chips are not only powerful, they are also very inexpensive. NFC tags are available as label stickers at prices as low as Read More ›

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post

News
Date
June 12, 2020

Categorized
Business and Finance

Tagged
__focus-north, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, Featured, Steve Forbes, video}

Cryptocurrency a “High-Tech Cry for Help” Says Steve Forbes of Forbes Media

_{News
June 12, 2020

2

Business and Finance}

Jay Richards interviews Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, regarding the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, and the implications of the technologies for global money, global security, and internet architecture.

Is There Hope for People in a Persistent Vegetative State?

_{Yes! Modern neuroscience is shining a light on their minds} _{News
June 10, 2020

2

Medicine and Health, Neuroscience}

Today, many neuroscientists don’t even call it a persistent vegetative state. The new term is disorders of consciousness. One neuroscientist recounts, In the past 20 years, advances in neuroimaging techniques have allowed us to explore brain functions in these altered states of consciousness. One breakthrough study conducted at our lab, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, involved 54 DoC patients. The researchers asked the patients to perform two mental-imagery tasks while they lay in a brain scanner. In the first, they were asked to imagine playing tennis; in the second, to imagine walking from room to room in their home – mental tasks that are associated with contrasting patterns of neural activity. Remarkably, five patients Read More ›