Avatars on Earth Day

Avatar highlights the threats posed by an advanced, war-mongering, and artificial society to a primitive, pacific, and organic culture.

Today is as good a day as any to start thinking about how your life impacts other people and the present earth, and influences our trajectory toward the future of life (and artificial life).

NOTE: This post is more to spur discussion as opposed to professing my viewpoint. Happy Earth Day and Thanks Gaylord Nelson!

My Life with Milo

Pretty Amazing.

Life's Just A Game We Play

In my recent post on Quora, I draw from some of Jesse Schell's points in this video as they apply to education reform in K-12. In this post, I also make references to Tara Hunt, who popularized the term "whuffie" (a universal reputation score) and Lee Sheldon, an Indiana University professor who abandoned grades for experience points.

Who Said You Need Legs to Strut?

The 2010 Paralympic Games continues to push the capabilities of - in some respects - impaired athletes while maintaining its tradition as a "fair competition."

(Source: Boston.com)

Subjectified: Re-emphasizing the Human in Human-Computer Interactions

(commentary to come. Enjoy!)

Smarts: Computations and Predictions Abound

I've come to appreciate over the years the degree to which life's incidents are interrelated. Prior to moving to Silicon Valley, I planted the seed of semantic results, recommendations, and predictions thanks primarily to the discovery of Wolfram Alpha. After several months out here, I joined a fresh start-up, MyFit, which aims to do 3 things better than anybody out there:

• Calculating people's chances of getting into a college;
• Recommend schools that would be a good social and academic fit (yes, we leverage social graphs and profiles); and
• Recommending ways to improve chances of acceptance as well as the best ways to afford any given college.

This is powerful stuff! And shortly thereafter I discovered another start-up, YouNoodle, which attempts to rate the current health and predict the future success of startups much like a financial markets are used to gauge public companies as well as private companies a la SecondMarket. So let me get this straight, I will soon be able to predict the following? 

• my health conditions a la 23andme;
• my knowledge a la my activity on Wolfram Alpha;
• my success in school a la MyFit;
• the success of the school in which I will be enrolled - TBD;
• my success in work - TBD;
• the success of the company in which I will be employed a la public markets, SecondMarket, and YouNoodle; and
• my success in marriage a la eHarmony - did you know they account for 2% of US marriages?!?!

It's obviously not as gloomy as I suggest, or as absolute for that matter. We still have an abundance of liberating options and control over our future...and will for quite some time. But it at least raises questions in my head about how these developments many hinder and empower individuals. Speaking of the future, however, what about singularity? Stephen Wolfram was recently spotted at the annual Singularity Summit to explore the rising impact of science and technology on society with an elite global crowd of intellects. 

Objectified: Our Environment, Our Merchandise, and Ourselves

The documentary Objectified by Gary Hustwit is the first modern film I've become aware of that comprehensively explores our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. In addition to watching a screening of this documentary, it would be beneficial for many people to look deeper into the next generation of products and product designers coming out of world-class schools like Stanford's School of Design, the "D.School", established by the founder of IDEO.

Grow It Like a Salamander!

...and shake it like a salt shaker. In recent history, we've made astonishing advances in three applications of genomics, one of the holy grails in understanding and manipulating lifeforms as we know it:

• limb regeneration in vertebrates
• creation of synthetic lifeforms
• commercial human genome sequencing
  

In late 2006, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that we could reactivate the regeneration gene presumably innate in vertebrates though only still naturally found in frogs, zebrafish, and salamanders. Lead author of the original report, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, then declared "By changing the expression of a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscles, and skin - everything that is needed." Although limb regeneration to date is primarily the practice of engineers simulating natural mechanics, culturing of skin to treat burn victims and early stage experimentation such as the aforementioned suggests I will see a human limb regenerated before I die.

Today, Craig Venter, known for sequencing the first human genome in 2000 in partnership with the Human Genome Project and founder of Synthetic Genomics, is working to create the first synthetic lifeforms. His immediate goal is to develop a controllable alternative source of biofuels, but the potential purposes of future synthetic lifeforms goes far beyond alternative energy.

In parallel, many commercial companies are attempting to make it cost-effective for consumers to purchase the data to their personal genome sequence. Currently, companies like 23andme, Navigenix, and deCODE can only measure roughly 500,000 points in the genome out of 6,000,000,000 in the entire genome and report on 23 genes for about $1,000. Look forward to the points mapped rising, and price falling.

The vast majority of people I have spoken with firmly defend the position that new knowledge of your genome is problematic. I believe, like the first telephone, automobile, plane, email, cell phone, and twitter, it will simply be a new paradigm that the wealthy and progressive will leverage to their benefit in our collective evolution. Conceptually, it's unfortunate that we as a global society would drive ourselves to essentially "defining" people - your baby, sibling, spouse, or parent. However, the reality is that it has great promise of being the most effective measure for preventing diseases, enabling early detection of them, and possibly altering outcomes long before they could ever appear. It could also be a source of individual empowerment by allowing people to focus on their inherent strengths instead of struggling their entire lives making choices that exacerbate their "inherent deficiencies" (for lack of a better term) of which they would otherwise be unware.

The benefits of understanding even the limited repertoire that we can understand from Craig Venter's genome has been reinforced time and time by the man himself. And the challenge is not going to be a scientific as much as a social one. We live in a society that prefers to deal with disasters after they happen instead of preventing them from happening. We have a stock market that's managed by the quarter, a government that only thinks in terms of elections, our youth that lives by semesters and seasons, but we need to pick our heads up and look further into the future to address potential genetic misfortunes. Craig concluded himself that the primary way shepherd society toward that paradigm is "to convince 3rd party payers and insurance companies that they're going to make more money by preventing diseases than treating them after the occur."

There is still time to debate this topic but time is running short as advances in technology continue to accelerate development in the groundbreaking field of genomics. The one caution I offer is to move forward with consideration of all lifeforms not the human-centric world we live in day-to-day. Otherwise, the majority of what life has to offer will go unobserved and, more importantly, unappreciated.

Second Skin - Behind the World of MMORPG

I love hulu and the auteurs. My friend, Jason Mueller, recently sent this to me and I thought it was, again, worth sharing. Check out Pure West for more amazing digital stories! And then there's more geekdom from my friend, Dan Lovera. Apparently you can better Understand the World of Warcraft using Super Mario Brothers. Spare time to write posts since my move to San Francisco three weeks ago has become more precious as it is in far shorter supply than in the suburban Rochester, NY.

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us

Old one but comprehensively insightful. Some thoughts I had while reviewing this TED Talk are as follows. If technological power and pervasiveness is growing exponentially and becoming further integrated into biological functions, particularly in humans, won't that create a supremely unfair and possibly insurmountable advantage to the privileged? One might state that secondary markets will prevent the gap from becoming too great, which is what happens today. However, two postulates come to mind that contradict such an assertion:

• the growing difference in performance between each subsequent technological iteration will inherently create a greater gap in one respect.
• the nature of that performance will become more valuable as we progress from the information age, to understanding, to knowledge, to wisdom, thus creating a greater gap in another respect.

As the velocity of life in general accelerates - commerce, communication, travel, and so on - and access to resources, particularly natural resources, becomes increasingly controlled by humans, a moral dilemma arises between the Haves and Have-nots. This moral dilemma is the diminishing of human will for the sake of societal progress. Fewer and fewer aspects of life on Earth exist outside of humanitarian constructs over time. As a result, the ability for any creature (including humans) from surviving and thriving becomes less about what they are able to will upon themselves and more about what those in "power" will upon other creatures, the global society. For the sake of progress we as a society are subjecting ourselves to an advanced system beyond our practical comprehension and beyond our control in many respects. The concept of subjugation is no longer a matter of obvious brute force but rather subtle deceptions of truth. Who, ultimately, will have the power to do so? Politicians and technologists? Executives? I leave that to you...