One of my hypothesis is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the developed world but quite common in the developing world. For instance, Burma is full of ox-cart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning still thriving in Bolivia. A technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if...

 Max Read You are looking at, more or less, a portrait of the internet over an average 24 hours in 2012—higher usage in yellows and reds; lower in greens and blues—created by an anonymous researcher for the “Internet Census 2012″ project. How, exactly, do you gather this much data? Well: not legally, that’s for sure.   In order to track the geographical location and usage patterns of the internet, our researcher created a “botnet”—a network of nearly half a million hacked computers, chosen from a selection of Linux machines with no or default passwords, pinging everything they could and reporting back. The...

A “techno-optimist” response to William Deresiewicz’s article  ’The End of Solitude’ -http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708 Just as television, with all its negative propaganda and harmful influences, can offer educational programming and a mental respite for the weary intellect, so digital technology, with its propensity for self-isolation can offer deeper connections to loved ones, and fast relief in emergency situations. Although, I agree that loneliness is indeed furthered by the continual “stream of mediated contact”, and television has no doubt perpetuated the capacity for boredom, I...

CONTINUUM is a feature documentary about our interconnection with each other, the planet, and the universe. We are Planetary Collective and over the past three years we’ve been working on Continuum, a ground-breaking feature-length documentary that began as a dream more than 13 years ago. We hope that this documentary will change the way we think as a species – to stop seeing ourselves as separate from each other, from the planet and the cosmos – and inspire us to work together to transform our planetary crises. By weaving together perspectives and ideas from some of the key theorists and thinkers in the fields of cosmology,...

In preparation for an upcoming podcast with Randal A. Koene check out the videos and links below:   Competition is an inescapable occurrence in the animate and even in the inanimate universe. To give our minds the flexibility to transfer and to operate in different substrates bestows upon our species the most important competitive advantage. (http://www.tedxtallinn.org/randal-koene/) Realistic Routes to Substrate-Independent Minds Randal Koene is a brilliant multidisciplinary scientist with focus on Neuroscience. He is also a great networker and has a great talent for bringing great minds together to think about the long term...

IBM’s Watson is like nothing we have ever seen before. While humans use neuronal memory banks to access information stored in the brain, Watson has the ability to use the Internet and internal data as its extended mind. When asked a question, it creates a statistical average based upon the information gathered, and gives a confident probabilistic answer. Yes, I said confident. Let me give you an example to explain my meaning. If an individual earns a PhD in medical school, they become confident in their ability to diagnose disease, based on the information they gathered. Watson is the same. To date, it can process 500 gigabytes...