Food for Thought with Ervin Laszlo a succes!
Finally, Saturday the 16th of May arrived. The first Friends4Change event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. And was not ‘just another event’. There was a larger audience then we expected and that was cleary contributing to the dynamics and the very positive and relaxed atmosphere. Lees meer
Robotics
I have been following robotics from a distance for some time now. Decennia ago we thought that we would have dish washing robots, a hang-the-laundry-droid and other tin slaves in a very short period of time. Now we know that this is not the case. But looking at the development of information processing capabillities of robots things have changed and are going faster than we think. In the early 90ties a robot could be controlled with 100 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) now my Macbook works with 10.000 of those.
This makes me wonder about the status in less than 50 years. We most probably will have computers and robots that outrun us in loads of areas and at the rate they are developing we might not be able to catch up with them. I can’t say that I like that perspective but anyway, judge for your self: Rise of the Robots–The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Hans Moravec
Credit crisis?
Credit crisis. I can’t stand the words anymore, to be honest. Ik kan het woord eigenlijk niet meer horen. I am affected by it and I don’t want it to be that way at all. Companies firing people, financials proving to be thieves, entrepreneurs with fear of innovation and fear of thinking more than one step ahead and so on.
I am going to put a ban on these words and thoughts. I will do my very best to replace words and thoughts with something positive, anytime I hear or think them. And when you talk to others it seems that more and more people are getting tired of it.
My advice to the government, media and other ‘outspoken’ organisations is very simple. Bring in something positive, for example teach people how to convert this in to their advantage.
Enough is enough!
Wolfram Alpha?
New star on the search and find horizon? Wolfram Alpha. Stephen Wolfram is a scientist who has been working, with over 100 others, on what might become Google’s competitor. The Wolframists call it a ‘knowledge engine’ powered by calculations based on numerous algorithms and the use of natural language. Far to difficult for me to understand. That’s something I better leave to all the smart ones out there. Nevertheless it’s watched with great interest, it could just be the case that Google is in for some difficult times in the near future. We’ll see what happens.
Edugame
Games in education can deliver a valuable contribution to development of knowledge and they create more insight in various difficult subjects. I found a very nice game some years back. You could play it from cd-rom and online. Those people were way ahead of their time. They had funny mathematics, history and other educational subject going. All through a very inviting interactive approach.
Because I feel that you can never write or think enough about this subject I will continue to do so right here. It is a really nice thing to do. Who amongst you already has a lot of experience with games in the educational field? Would be very nice to hear from you.
Minority report
Press agency ANP published a press release where Willem Verbeke from the Erasmus university explains that he expects that within 5 years from now organisations will start taking brain scans from employees and employees to be. In that way it would be possible to filter for people who are not suitable for the job because they are ‘crazy’ or because they don’t fit the job profile.
Looks like a scene from a movie like ‘Minority Report’. Iris scan, brain scan and finger print identification. Personally I think this direction is unethical, it intrudes privacy and if it where up to me we should stop this type of activity right at the root. I would really like to know how you feel about the subject.
From heartbeat to electricity
It really looks as if Google wants to leave no stone unturned. I recently wrote about their heart rate meter, now they have the Google Powermeter. It is getting stranger by the minute. They already started to deploy millions of smart meters and they plan to deploy even more of those in the coming year(s). Is their strategy aimed at becoming the all seeing monitor of our health, our consumption and even our homes?
