kalkwerk of trouvailles

“ Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. ”

“ Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now

14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)

PT: Pretty close. At the very least, more couples are choosing advanced fertility techniques over old-fashioned conception. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, in which an artificially inseminated embryo is carefully selected among other inseminated embryos for desirability, is becoming increasingly common in fertility clinics. Using this technique, it's now possible to screen an embryo for about half of all congenital illnesses. Within the next decade, researchers will be able to screen for almost all congenital illnesses prior to embryo implantation.

IP: Likelihood 5/10. ”

“ The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech. ”

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“ In “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel.

(...)

“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” — this quote is often attributed to Gibson, though no one seems to be able to pin down when or if he actually said it. Still, it neatly sums up his own particular flavor.

(...)

Steampunk is more than mere fantasy. It’s all around us. In many cities, the petti­coats of Victorian buildings brush up against Wi-Fi hot spots, and if you want to time travel, all you have to do is walk down a street and open your eyes. In Tokyo, Gibson detects “successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel.” Lurking in the back corner of a noodle stall, he watches a man playing with his phone. The gadget is glossy, “complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral-looking,” shining with “Blade Runner”-ish reflections of the city around it. Gibson zooms in on an accessory hanging from the phone — a “rosarylike anti­cancer charm.” According to Japanese pop-­culture lore, such talismans are supposed to protect against microwaves.

It’s the perfect Gibson detail: a hybrid of high technology and magic wand. Every­thing he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions.

(...) according to the logic of those old science-fiction books, civilization should have ended when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off; a rain of missiles should have reduced the human race to a band of mutant survivors. Instead, the crisis fizzled, and became for him a footnote. “I can’t recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all,” Gibson writes. “My anxiety, and the world’s, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on. . . . I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently,” its sense of events seemed so far off the mark.

And so Gibson began to think about building another sort of time machine, one made of words — bolted together, spliced, enjambed. In this beguiling collection, we have the chance to travel with him as he rockets around in that machine, visiting a future that already exists. ”

“ And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library. And they protected us from the bleak high-rise view through the plate glass windows, of that world, in Larkin's lines, whose loves and chances "are beyond the stretch/Of any hand from here!"

(...)

In Walter Pater's famous phrase, he burned "with this hard gem-like flame". Right to the end. ”

“ Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free. ”

“ (...) nasze prawo, zresztą jako jedyne w Unii Europejskiej, daje Kościołowi katolickiemu pełną swobodę w dysponowaniu danymi osobowymi. Taki przywilej mają jeszcze tylko - co w pełni zrozumiałe - służby specjalne: CBA, ABW, Agencja Wywiadu, Służba Kontrwywiadu Wojskowego, Służba Wywiadu Wojskowego. Jednak to, że polskie państwo pozwala Kościołowi na gromadzenie dowolnych danych na nasz temat, jest sprzeczne z nadrzędnym u nas prawem unijnym. ”

“ Mirosław Bałka pokazał w Londynie fantastyczną instalację przedstawiającą ciemny tunel wymalowany czarną farbą, która pochłaniała każdy promyk światła, tworząc niemalże imago czarnej dziury. A ciemność jest symbolem niepewności. W ciemności wszystko się może stać: nie wiemy, co się wydarzy i czy będziemy w stanie zatrzymać to, co się będzie działo. W ciemności poruszamy się niepewnie. To rodzi lęk.

Mirosław Bałka wygenerował tę absolutną ciemność w hali wystawienniczej galerii Tate Modern. Osoby zwiedzające to miejsce stwierdzały, że ukojenie lęków zrodzonych z ciemności przynosiły jedynie dźwięki wytwarzane przez innych zwiedzających, szepty, dotyk łokci. ”

Reposted by wojtekj

“ Nobel często jest już po nic, jest nagrodą pocieszenia u progu nieskończonego, jakoś wydaje mi się, iż sprawiedliwiej by było, gdyby Noble dostawali ludzie na progu kariery, a nie na jej zwieńczeniu. Wszystko jednak, niestety, co sensowne, otrzymuje się na starość: mądrość, nagrody i chęć do życia, choć przecież wszystkie te rzeczy są już wtedy bardziej zbędne niż w czasach młodości. ”

“ NEWSWEEK: To może lepiej w ogóle zrezygnować z prawnej ochrony symboli?

JACEK HOŁÓWKA: Zupełnie się z tym nie zgadzam. Jest doskonałe powiedzenie Johna Stuarta Milla, że lepiej liczyć podniesione ręce niż rozbite siekierą głowy. Jeżeli zablokuje się ludziom możliwość prowadzenia sporów symbolicznych, przechodzą do walki wręcz. Jestem za tym, żeby pewna doza walki symbolicznej była prowadzona, ale na właściwym poziomie. Symbole nie powinny prowadzić do walki wręcz – nie powinny w jawny sposób, tak jak „zakaz pedałowania”, dyskryminować i szerzyć nienawiści. Symbole powinny walkę wręcz zastępować. Dla mnie, na przykład, moje zdjęcie nie jest świętym symbolem – gdyby ktoś na ulicy chciał je podeptać, byłoby mi przykro, ale pogodziłbym się z tym. Ponieważ to zdjęcie jakoś mnie reprezentuje, a ktoś depcząc je chciałby wyrazić swoje negatywne względem mnie emocje, to za bardziej cywilizowaną formę ekspresji takich emocji uważam deptanie zdjęcia niż fizyczny atak na mnie. W ten sposób autentyczna przemoc realizuje się na poziomie symbolicznym. ”

Reposted by cecylia

“ "We all aware of traditional spy stories of intelligence agencies like MI5 bugging the phones of one or two people," Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told the Bureau. He continued:

    "In the last ten years, something else has happened. We now see mass surveillance, where computer systems of an entire country are infected by surveillance programs, where the entire phone calls of a nation can be and are recorded by a company.

    "Previously, we had all thought, why would the government be interested in me, my brother? My business is not interesting; I am not a criminal. Now these companies sell to state intelligence agencies the ability to spy on the entire population at once and keep that information permanently. In five or six years' time, if your brother or someone becomes of interest to that company or the government, they can go back in time and look to see what you said or what you emailed."

(...)

Police authorities are excited about the potential: Jason Scheiss, analytical services division manager at the Durham police department in North Carolina, told Government Computer News that they were hoping to expand the data-collecting to include data on water and sewage billing, visitor logs from parks and recreation facilities and correlate it with the daily jail list. "So we could say, 'Hey, look here. All of these crimes only occur when this one guy's not in jail,'" he told the magazine.

Therein lies the rub: apart from the massive violation of individual privacy, or the risk of abuse by corrupt officials, these tools could easily allow security agencies to jump to the wrong conclusion. Indeed, these tools have the potential to make computer cables as dangerous as police batons.

"What we are seeing is the militarisation of cyberspace. It's like having a tank in your front garden," says Assange.

You have been warned and you have a choice: you can avoid the wonderful world of the internet (unlikely, since you are reading this online) and digital data (virtually impossible if you pay for electricity or go camping) – or you can join the movement to say there need to be limits to how government authorities use our information against us. And if you choose the latter, check out WikiLeaks and Privacy International. ”

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“ I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. Then I wrote a novel that is not erudite at all, that is written in plain language, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and among my novels it is the one that has sold the least. So probably I am writing for masochists. It's only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged. ”