The United States is facing a big economic problem, along with Europe, who has it worse. The problem is simply that as the [tag]population[/tag] grows older there are fewer young people to work and support the economy. There are two separate causes: Americans now have few children, just equal to the replacement rate, and [tag]life expectancy[/tag] for Americans has increased – to 77.6 years up from 66.2 years in 1950. A third factor is the “baby boom” after World War II whose members are reaching retirement age.

This economic problem is substantially one of policy and the expectations of Americans. The policies established in the ’50s assumed that one would retire at 60 or 65 years and have 5 or ten years of retirement. We now have an average life expectancy of 11.6 years after a 65 year retirement instead of the 1.2 year expectancy in 1950. (more…)

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most vocal proponents of the acendency of thinking machines. His The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, written in 1999 is dated, but that is a good thing for a book predicting the future! You can see how many predictions have come true. Much of what he predicted for 2009 is on the money. The interesting thing is that these predictions, which must have seemed wild in the last century, are just part of our everyday life!
The picture of the future he paints is one where machines and humans join to form a new intelligent species. His positive view of this brave new world is infectuous, but he is careful to evaluate the position of the naysayers, and respond. (more…)

Allan Snyder and his team of researchers have shown that “savant” capabilities can be induced in people without Autism by using the strong magnetic field of a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator to inhibit the action of the left anterior temporaral cortex. According to a post on www.huge-entity.com the theory behind this effect is that the TMS suppresses filtering and grouping mechanisms of the brain, thereby directly “connecting” the raw sensory data to the number estimation functionsof the brain. By allowing this direct connection between the estimation process and the raw data the brain was able to function in the ‘savant’ mode. (more…)

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case, presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. (more…)

Dileep George has conducted research into modeling the structure of the human neocortex and constructed artificial neocortical arrays that mimic thought processes. These arrays are arranged in a heirarcial structure, with some closely connected to sensors and others a level removed, and so forth. Each heirarchial level resolves the invariant portions of a signature of the inputs through learning. His example of the visual cortex’s ability to identify the difference between a dog and a helicopter independent of position, version or race through learning. An audio recording of Dileep’s paper is at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail732.html
The structure and organization of the neocortex requires a number of relationships and feedbacks including statistics, probability and temporal feedback. It occurs to me that the human perception of time may be inextricably linked to this temporal feedback. If time is not a fundimental feature of the universe, but instead simply a “rate variable” clocked by our own neocortex, then the time we have used as reference for all of our present science may be merely an artifact of our mind’s perception. (more…)

String theory postulates ten or eleven dimensions, only three of which we can “travel” in. Time is a fourth dimension that we experience “now” and can experience “the past” through memory, but we have no knowledge of “the future”.One could say that we traveling in only one direction on the time dimension, and cannot reliably control our transit through time. (Although when one is bored, time certainly approaches stopping!)The other six or seven dimensions are often referred to being “curled up” in a microscopic manner so that we cannot experience them. This is not something that is intuitive, and is tough to keep straight.

One alternative to envisioning these other dimensions as curled is to postulate a brane – a flat surface that is analogous to an infinitely large and thin piece of paper, but in two (or more) of the “other dimensions”. Any entity that inhabited a brane would have no or little knowledge of anything the might exist outside of the brane.

The existance of branes, facilitates string theory to describe gravity, and could be the source of missing “dark matter” and where particles in an adjacent brane reduce gravity to the weaker than expected effects of recent experiments.

(more…)

There has been a lot of research into the human genome. A few very interesting things came to my attention in reading about recent “evolutionary improvements” to some human Genes. It appears that evolutionary pressures can encourage genetic shortcuts that help the survival of one group. Sometimes these shortcuts can cause a lot of havoc. (more…)

If ever there was a book that needs CliffsNotes, Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is the one. This book has been dismissed as “no big deal” by some who have read only the first few hundred pages. Unfortunately, you have to wade through many more of the 1200 pages of this book to get to the main points that Wolfram is making.

The insights in this book are be as profound as Newton’s in Mathmatical Principles of Natural Philosophy but they take work to understand. Part of the problem is that his insights are as foreign to our worldview as quantum theory was to Newtonian physicists in the 1920s.

A major premise of A New Kind of Science is that science as we know it is blind to many relationships in nature because of the way that traditional science sets up experiments. Wolfram shows that all of nature is found in the execution of simple rules.,

(more…)