pls go read this and watch the vid Another reason why CI will dominate IQ is that individual intelligence is subsumed by the collective. An expert or genius can participate in a group task as easily as an average person. Collective intelligence reflects the group work of the smart, the average, and the dull. While this may seem to average out, a wise application of CI will be able to filter out the dross while saving the best work – no matter where it comes from. |
To this end, CCI at MIT is working to understand and guide collective intelligence. Their research includes way to measure CI, studies of how CI is already used in organizations, and tracking how individuals interact in a group. They’ve even started a Handbook of Collective Intelligence – it’s written and edited as a wiki of course. CCI at MIT is also working on applications for collective intelligence: they’re looking into how groups may generate solutions to climate change, make accurate predictions about the future, or find ways to improve healthcare. Read more at singularityhub.com |
“I’ll leave you with this scenario: Would you use cognition enhancing drugs? What if others in your class/office do – could you risk being less competitive?”
nothing to do with competition- and though the actual drugs mentioned are in no way smart- these will in the coming future arrive to our disposal, what then? would you join the smart class? Almost 7% of American university students have used prescription stimulants. Not to party all night, but to study.
The cast of characters here are familiar; Adderall, Ritalin and the newest sibling, Modafinil (aka Provigil). Smart drugs, developed for the treatment of the ill, are now finding homes in the medicine cabinets of the healthy. The question is: will they be in yours? |
Our understanding of the inner workings of the human brain has exploded over the last decade. And the drugs to treat many debilitating disorders like ADHD and narcolepsy have followed. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. |
Actions which just happen to include maintaining attention and aiding the formation of new memories. |
Take two, and call me in the future |
And with the gap between rich and poor ever widening, and these drugs being expensive, are we on the cusp of a new social class, the Smart-class? Read more at veryevolved.com |
fascinating.. maybe 99.9… would be a more accurate assessment..:-) | (PhysOrg.com) — Human behavior is 93 percent predictable, a group of leading Northeastern University network scientists recently found. Distinguished Professor of Physics Albert-László Barabási and his team studied the mobility patterns of anonymous cell-phone users and concluded that, despite the common perception that our actions are random and unpredictable, human mobility follows surprisingly regular patterns. The team’s research is published in the current issue of Science magazine. |
“Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population. Despite the significant differences in travel patterns, we found that most people are equally predictable,” said Barabási, who is also director of Northeastern’s world-leading Center for Complex Network Research. “The predictability represents the probability we can foresee an individual’s future whereabouts in the next hour based on his or her previous trajectory.” Read more at www.physorg.com |
the very idea that evolutionary novel values correlates to novel ideas in culture is fascinating and might shed some light on our futures. the problem of course is that we still do not understand correctly what is intelligence. | More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds. |
“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.” |
An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel. Read more at www.physorg.com |
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?
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UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope is ready to introduce computer software that creates original, modern music. (Catherine Karnow) |
| The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles |
| A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek out from the intellectual rubble. Above, something like 200 sets of wind chimes from around the world hang, ringing oddly congruent melodies. |
“Our Digital Lives Have Evolved — So Must Trust” go read this
After reading that headline, I can see some (maybe lots) of you scratching your heads saying: “Wait a minute — trust is a not a technology!”
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A decade ago that would have been true — it is not now.
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Our digital lives were once confined to e-mail, some web surfing and an occasional online purchase (for the braver among us). A mere decade on and our lives are increasingly being lived online. Yet, while our dependence on the internet has grown exponentially, the technologies we use to navigate the sometimes dangerous, somewhat untrusted waters of the internet remain the same — largely confined to incremental improvements in narrowly defined segments of security or access.
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““Much more of our behavior is probably determined by cortical structures that are sort of integrating what is the social structure, what is expected of me,” Young says.” Neuroscientist Larry Young has been studying brain chemicals linked to the ability to form lasting bonds of affection. “A single molecule can have a profound effect on relationships,” he says.
The work by the Emory University researcher involves prairie voles, highly social animals that tend to form life-long bonds with their mates.
An infusion of oxytocin, a hormone associated with neural rewards and addictions, can cause female prairie voles to become attached to the nearest male, while the hormone vasopressin spurs males’ interest in a female. |
Biology plays an undeniable role in our ability to love and form social bonds, says Larry Young. “A lot of people say, ‘Doesn’t that take away a lot of the magic?’ But, to me, it’s even more beautiful to think that love is being produced through neurotransmission.” (Courtesy: Emory University) Read more at futurity.org |
“How natural selection could explain one of the biggest conundrums of quantum mechanics: The emergence of objective reality.”
go read this.. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in which he laid forth his theory of natural selection, revolutionizing our understanding of biology in the process. At first glance, Wojciech Zurek shares little in common with Darwin. Born almost a century and a half later, he is a physicist who is far more interested in the spread of quantum information than the dispersal of biological traits. But Zurek is now channeling the biologist to explain one of the deepest mysteries of physics: just how the quantum realm transitions into the classical world we see around us. It’s all down to the survival of the fittest.
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It’s like a billboard
which floats multiple copies
of the information about
our universe all over
the place. |
| But this does not yet explain the emergence of an objective reality. After all, these einselected quantum states could still be perturbed by a direct measurement carried out by an observer. |
Save your tears for Tiny Tim. A boom in sophisticated prostheses has created a most unlikely by-product: envy. |
There are many advantages to having your leg amputated. |
Anybody who hears “prosthetic” and thinks “peg leg” might wonder about Herr’s sunny hubris. The thought that an artificial limb could make anybody stronger or faster, or confer social advantage, is an opinion ripe for skepticism. Wearing one is inconvenient at best. It often hurts. It can break. It is obvious proof of loss. It seems by its very nature to announce a lack of health or vitality. |
In the meantime, Herr says, you can dispense with the Tiny Tim pity and the warm fuzzy feeling you get when a little girl struggles to her feet on poorly designed stilts. Because the new machines — and they are machines — are becoming so lustrous and so efficient that some people are already willing to chop off a perfectly good limb to get one. |
“Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstraction that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism.” Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network itself. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere. |
| Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and starts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. As digital computing matures and meshes with increasingly mobile networking technology, society is also changing, undergoing a cultural shift. Just as modernism and postmodernism served as crucial heuristic devices in their day, studying network culture as a historical phenomenon allows us to better understand broader sociocultural trends and structures, to give duration and temporality to our own, ahistorical time. |
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