The Singleton

Mirror Beach | a piece by yours truly, depicts, in indirect fashion, the looming spectre of AI and what it means for mankind as neural net driven technology is open-ended and intrinsically unknowable as this code learns about its domain independent of the creators who built it in the first place. With this in mind, the notion of a singleton governing the world is no longer fantasy given just how pervasive AI is becoming due, in large part, as to just how much money is being made on an evolving tech that is no longer under our control.

To whit.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth 
  will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

The question to ask ...

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Something to consider without question.

Click What is a Singleton? to learn why Bostrom's take on civilization 's possible future rings true. 

Future Tense ...

Bubbles of a different kind :)

Yours truly has written copiously about Quantum Foam and how it relates to reality, a take on same that actually seems to be relevant given that said writer's ability with math is limited to say the least. :) With that being said, I must say this Vice article supports, in part, what this rube has written over the years BRT has been in existence.

What was previously assumed to be empty space in the universe now had to be filled with huge amounts of mysterious anti-energy in order to explain observations of the universe’s ever-quickening expansion. Even so, observations of the universe’s expansion suggest that the energy is 60 to 120 orders of magnitude lower than what recent quantum field theory predicts.

What this means is that all of this extra energy is somehow missing when we look at the universe as a whole; either it’s effectively hidden or very different in nature to the energy we do know about.

It gets better ...

To try and solve the mystery of what fills the universe, scientists have been exploring the possibility that it's actually full of bubbles.

In 1955, influential physicist John Wheeler proposed that, at the quantum level, spacetime is not constant but "foamy," made up of ever-changing tiny bubbles. As for what these bubbles are "made" of, recent work suggests that spacetime bubbles are essentially mini-universes briefly forming inside our own.

The spacetime foam proposal fits nicely with the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminism of the quantum world. Spacetime foam extends quantum uncertainty in particle position and momentum to the very fabric of the universe, so that its geometry is not stable, consistent, or fixed at a tiny scale.

The idea is that in spacetime foam, every point in spacetime has the huge amount of vacuum energy—the lowest energy state equivalent to "empty space"—predicted by quantum theory, but behaves differently to other points. For any particular way in which a point in spacetime is behaving, the exact opposite is equally as likely to occur at another point in spacetime. This is the feature of spacetime foam which “cancels out” the extra energy and expansions at a tiny scale, resulting in the lower energy that we observe at the scale of the whole universe.

For this to work, one has to assume that at the quantum level, time has no intrinsic "direction." In other words, there is no "arrow of time." According to Carlip, in the quantum world, this isn't such a wild suggestion. “Most physicists would agree that we don't know at a fundamental level why there's an arrow of time at all,” he said. “The idea that it's somehow 'emergent' on larger scales has been around for a long time.”

Ain't science grand? :)

Avian Soundboards

And of course, the Superb Lyre Bird :)

Nature never disappoints. 

Non Sequitur or ... Once in a Lifetime :)

In a very odd way, Once in a Lifetime | Talking Heads, applies.

[Verse 1]
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Verse 2]
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Bridge]
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Any questions?

Invisibility cloak becomes real ...

Harry Potter's invisibility cloak becomes real. Hyperstealth rules ... for now.

Here's another clip. Metamaterials and AI, a heavy combination without question.

Hyperstealth Invisibility Cloak 9 Minute Promotional Video from HyperStealth Corp. on Vimeo.

Any questions?

It's Bad, It's Really Really Bad! :)

Any questions?

Night Walks

Patterns

Archway

Night for Day

Open for Dinner

Red Moon Rising

Fractured Geometry

Fractured geometry, with yours truly's feet purposely left in, shows, in indirect fashion, how tech is generating uncontrolled feedback loops and reality distortions fields to the max, thus driving the US populace into the madhouse as uncontrolled recursions can make one mad, especially when viewing the never-ending regurgitation of news 24/7 with particular emphasis on politics and what it means for America. 

To whit ...

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It’s a major unanticipated consequence of the digital “revolution.” It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we’d only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Read the rest of Kunstler's piece to see the ramifications of a looming Constitutional Crisis of biblical proportions as we move ever closer to the year of our lord 2020.

A Constitutional crisis looms ...

Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

This illustration by Victor Juhasz truly represents the inner character of The Donald. If one goes to Rolling Stone, one will see other Juhiaz gems of the esteemed POTUS but ... as my loyal readers know, this blurb isn't about a great illustrator but rather about impeachment and what it means for America.

What happens, though, if a president uses the powers of office to disrupt the next election? What if that president does so by brazenly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power? Or if he does so by trying in secret to extort cooperation from a foreign ally threatened by that same hostile power? What if the president has denied the existence of an ongoing systematic cyberattack from the hostile power, which every U.S. intelligence service calls a clear and present threat to our democracy? What if the actions of that president raise urgent questions about the legitimacy of the next election and cast a darker cloud over how he gained the office in the first place?

On most of these issues, yours truly agrees but to this writer, the real transgressions lie with the denial of science, the gutting of the EPA and Trump's muzzling  of NOAA/NASA regarding hurricanes or the adverse impact of global warming on the world, as these acts compromise the well being of the country's people and, to me, constitutes the real reason for impeachment (not Ukraine or Russiagate) 

Being above the law also applies  ... 

There have been earlier impeachments and interferences with democratic institutions in our history, but nothing like this one. In this, as he likes to say, Trump truly stands alone. He has assaulted American democracy, claimed he has the authority to do so, and dared anybody to do anything about it, dismissing with contempt Congress’ clear constitutional authority to oversee and check the executive branch. He thinks he can use the office of the presidency as a personal instrument, along with private emissaries, to desecrate the rule of law and then protect himself from the consequences. He even declares in public that he is the law, claiming that, according to Article II of the Constitution, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Not even the most corrupt and criminal of our previous presidents has tried to pervert our most sacred institutions as openly as Trump has.

Question ... If impeachment does succeed, the stellar Mike Pence becomes god's warrior for America. Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it?

The betting pool says ...

The betting pool says, in IMHO, that life on Mars is a given.

NASA’s reservation against a direct search for microorganisms ignores the simplicity of the task accomplished by Louis Pasteur in 1864. He allowed microbes to contaminate a hay-infusion broth, after which bubbles of their expired gas appeared. Prior to containing living microorganisms, no bubbles appeared. (Pasteur had earlier determinted that heating, or pasteurizing, such a substance would kill the microbes.) This elegantly simple test, updated to substitute modern microbial nutrients with the hay-infusion products in Pasteur’s, is in daily use by health authorities around the world to examine potable water. Billions of people are thus protected against microbial pathogens.

This standard test, in essence, was the LR test on Mars, modified by the addition of several nutrients thought to broaden the prospects for success with alien organisms, and the tagging of the nutrients with radioactive carbon. These enhancements made the LR sensitive to the very low microbial populations postulated for Mars, should any be there, and reduced the time for detection of terrestrial microorganisms to about one hour. But on Mars, each LR experiment continued for seven days. A heat control, similar to Pasteur’s, was added to determine whether any response obtained was biological or chemical.

The Viking LR sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained. This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data, even though their interpretation is debated. - Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

So why wasn't the LR on Curiosity or installed on the next rover, scheduled to land on Mars in 2020?