Endarkenment

[betty]

zasto bi neko (npr. ja) ucio nesto sto ne zeli (umesto neceg sto zeli!) samo da bi me neko razumeo? -_-

zato sto ti je stalo da se kreacionizam ne predaje rame uz rame sa evolucijom, da se globalno otopljavanje uspori, da se epidemiji dijabetesa stane na kraj, da se morning after pill ne smatra ubistvom, da se bitne drzavne odluke ne baziraju na verovanju u kemtrejlze i vanzemaljsku bazu na mesecu... i tako to. meni je stalo da se (retkim prilikama kad izadjem iz laboratorije) lakse nosim sa vecitim pitanjem da li je istina da koristimo samo 10% mozga.

[Indy]

A, pa stalo mi jeste, ali ne zato sto sam (ex) naucnik, vec zato sto sam progresivac, nereligiozan i zelembac. :PSalu na stranu, donekle se slazem s tobom (naravno), ali isto tako na kraju krajeva svako je sam odgovoran za ono sto mu je izmedju usiju. Barem u danasnje vreme se nije tesko obrazovati, formalno ili ne, dostupno je skoro svima (osim ekonomski najugrozenijima). Svako neka se postara za se, ili neka trazi pomoc (naci ce je).

[Indy]

Zanimljiv clanak ovde. Izgleda da je do situacije u kojoj su naucnici "umirivali javnost" doslo sticajem dosta nesrecnih okolnosti, posto su oni u stvari neposredno reagovali na najavu nekog "amatera" da ce "doci do razornog zemljotresa." Posto su smatrali (verovatno opravdano) da on to ne moze znati, hteli su da "umire javnost"... premda su imali neke podatke da je verovatnoca zemljotresa malo povecana (od 1:200.000 rizik je bio skocio na 1:1000 - i dalje vrlo mali).Ispada da jesu na neki nacin odgovorni za losu komunikaciju (mada se uglavnom svi slazu da je zatvorska kazna van svake pameti... u stvari prilicno ocito je u pitanju prinosenje zrtvenih jaraca).

Somerville suggests earthquake scientists should stick to better communication of the numbers and leave it to society at large to decide their significance."The experts have to learn how to make carefully constructed probabilistic statements and then it's up to the decision makers to use them as they see fit

[Indy]

[Indy]

Cambridge to study technology's risk to humansUpdated 12:01 PM Nov 26, 2012LONDON - Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction?Philosophers and scientists at Britain's Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Centre for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could "threaten our own existence", the institution said yesterday."In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology," Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.When that happens, "we're no longer the smartest things around", he said, and will risk being at the mercy of "machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don't include us".Fears that machines could overtake humans have long been the subject of science fiction - the computer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, is one of film's best-known computer threats.Dr Price acknowledged that many people believe his concerns are far-fetched, but insisted the potential risks are too serious to brush away."It tends to be regarded as a flakey concern, but given that we don't know how serious the risks are, that we don't know the time scale, dismissing the concerns is dangerous. What we're trying to do is to push it forward in the respectable scientific community," he said.While Dr Price said the exact nature of the risks is difficult to predict, he said that advanced technology could be a threat when computers start to direct resources towards their own goals, at the expense of human concerns like environmental sustainability.He compared the risk to the way humans have threatened the survival of other animals by spreading across the planet and using up natural resources that other animals depend upon.Dr Price is co-founding the project together with Cambridge professor of cosmology and astrophysics Martin Rees and Jann Tallinn, one of the founders of the internet phone service Skype.The university said yesterday the centre's launch is planned next year. APURL http://www.todayonli...-risk-to-humans

Edited November 26, 2012 by Indy

[Indy]

Neka, neka dodje terminator: Black Friday in USA. I, for one, greet our new silicon overlords.

Edited November 26, 2012 by Indy

[Prospero]

Kenneth RogoffInnovation Crisis or Financial Crisis?CAMBRIDGE – As one year of sluggish growth spills into the next, there is growing debate about what to expect over the coming decades. Was the global financial crisis a harsh but transitory setback to advanced-country growth, or did it expose a deeper long-term malaise?Recently, a few writers, including internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel and political activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, have espoused a fairly radical interpretation of the slowdown. In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation. As such, they are unlikely to see any sustained pickup in productivity growth without radical changes in innovation policy.Economist Robert Gordon takes this idea even further. He argues that the period of rapid technological progress that followed the Industrial Revolution may prove to be a 250-year exception to the rule of stagnation in human history. Indeed, he suggests that today’s technological innovations pale in significance compared to earlier advances like electricity, running water, the internal combustion engine, and other breakthroughs that are now more than a century old.I recently debated the technological stagnation thesis with Thiel and Kasparov at Oxford University, joined by encryption pioneer Mark Shuttleworth. Kasparov pointedly asked what products such as the iPhone 5 really add to our capabilities, and argued that most of the science underlying modern computing was settled by the seventies. Thiel maintained that efforts to combat the recession through loose monetary policy and hyper-aggressive fiscal stimulus treat the wrong disease, and therefore are potentially very harmful.These are very interesting ideas, but the evidence still seems overwhelming that the drag on the global economy mainly reflects the aftermath of a deep systemic financial crisis, not a long-term secular innovation crisis.There are certainly those who believe that the wellsprings of science are running dry, and that, when one looks closely, the latest gadgets and ideas driving global commerce are essentially derivative. But the vast majority of my scientist colleagues at top universities seem awfully excited about their projects in nanotechnology, neuroscience, and energy, among other cutting-edge fields. They think they are changing the world at a pace as rapid as we have ever seen. Frankly, when I think of stagnating innovation as an economist, I worry about how overweening monopolies stifle ideas, and how recent changes extending the validity of patents have exacerbated this problem.No, the main cause of the recent recession is surely a global credit boom and its subsequent meltdown. The profound resemblance of the current malaise to the aftermath of past deep systemic financial crises around the world is not merely qualitative. The footprints of crisis are evident in indicators ranging from unemployment to housing prices to debt accumulation. It is no accident that the current era looks so much like what followed dozens of deep financial crises in the past.Granted, the credit boom itself may be rooted in excessive optimism surrounding the economic-growth potential implied by globalization and new technologies. As Carmen Reinhart and I emphasize in our book This Time is Different, such fugues of optimism often accompany credit run-ups, and this is hardly the first time that globalization and technological innovation have played a central role.Attributing the ongoing slowdown to the financial crisis does not imply the absence of long-term secular effects, some of which are rooted in the crisis itself. Credit contractions almost invariably hit small businesses and start-ups the hardest. Since many of the best ideas and innovations come from small companies rather than large, established firms, the ongoing credit contraction will inevitably have long-term growth costs. At the same time, unemployed and underemployed workers’ skill sets are deteriorating. Many recent college graduates are losing as well, because they are less easily able to find jobs that best enhance their skills and thereby add to their long-term productivity and earnings.With cash-strapped governments deferring urgently needed public infrastructure projects, medium-term growth also will suffer. And, regardless of technological trends, other secular trends, such as aging populations in most advanced countries, are taking a toll on growth prospects as well. Even absent the crisis, countries would have had to make politically painful adjustments to pension and health-care programs.Taken together, these factors make it easy to imagine trend GDP growth being one percentage point below normal for another decade, possibly even longer. If the Kasparov-Thiel-Gordon hypothesis is right, the outlook is even darker – and the need for reform is far more urgent. After all, most plans for emerging from the financial crisis assume that technological progress will provide a strong foundation of productivity growth that will eventually underpin sustained recovery. The options are far more painful if the pie has ceased growing quickly.So, is the main cause of the recent slowdown an innovation crisis or a financial crisis? Perhaps some of both, but surely the economic trauma of the last few years reflects, first and foremost, a financial meltdown, even if the way forward must simultaneously treat other obstacles to long-term growth.

[Indy]

Slazem se s Kennethom. Problem je pre svega u finansijskom ludilu (i srodno tome, pomahnitalom CEO grabezi). To ima neverovatnu moc (u smislu crne magije).Imali smo na pocetku nesto kao debatu o tom smanjenju inovacija, nisam uopste siguran da je to moguce dovoljno smisleno pretvoriti u brojke da bi se racunalo u neku ozbiljnu analizu. Srpski receno, moz da bidne, al ne mora da znaci.Na kraju, ne znamo ni da li je povecanje inovacija uvek izadje na dobro. Ne mislim tu na stvari tipa atomske bombe (pre svega), vec sad gledam negde navode kao primer za dokaz toga kako smo posustali u inovacijama, nesto iz moje bivse struke: "The Green Revolution improved grain yields by 126 percent from 1950 to 1980, but yields have risen only by 47 percent in the decades since" - ali, to je vrlo povrsno gledanje. Prvo, pocelo se od vrlo niskih (posleratnih) prinosa, drugo to je doslo sa velikom cenom u (standardno) neobracunatim eksternalitetima (kamo efekt odbeglih azotnih djubriva i drugih agrohemikalija npr.), trece i najbitnije kreiralo je u najdirektnijem smislu majku svih problema danas: naime - nas 7 milijardi.Po koju cenu inovacija?

[rajka]

27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012

[bigvlada]

Dobar članak, ima zanimljivih stvari. :) Ovo sa planetom - dijamantom je varijacija ideje iz Odiseje 2010.

[Indy]

Samo zato sto je nesto moguce, ne znaci da to i treba uraditi, niti da je to dobra ideja. Doduse, kreiranjem hajpova (sto ide u talasima) dize se rejting kompanija i obezbedjuje profit (za one u stanju da brzo uteknu sa njim u nove poduhvate, kad se hajpovi ispuhaju, sto ce vecini da se desi, brze pre nego kasnije). (Bold moj).

The Internet Of Pointless, Perilous ThingsNetwork-aware appliances and everyday objects may be inevitable, but they should be developed and deployed with some of the smarts they supposedly possess.By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek January 14, 2013URL: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/peripherals/the-internet-of-pointless-perilous-thing/240146146 Another CES, another hype cycle. This year, it's network-connected devices, which got their own interest group in the form of the Internet of Things Consortium. Be afraid. The CES spotlight tends to reveal the absence of innovation rather than the next big thing. Last year, we had the year of the ultrabook. But it wasn't. PC sales declined 7% in 2012, according to IDC. Before that, it was the year of the tablet, but only Apple iPads were really selling. CES 2010 brought us the year of the 3-D TV. I thought it was a bad idea at the time and now it seems others share that view.But the Internet of Things -- making objects Internet-addressable and responsive -- is a better bet than 3-D TV. It's inevitable and is already manifesting in many ways. It's evident in traffic data aggregated from mobile phones and in the way TiVo customers can program their DVRs from the Web. It's evident in the way Nest customers can read and alter their thermostats online. It's the next big thing because it's already here.But in the rush to connect physical objects, we risk ignoring the return on investment and the cost to ourselves.[ Tech fans see a lot to like at CES. And then there are the things we love to hate. Check out CES 2013: 5 Dumbest Ideas. ]Let's start with an easy target: Samsung's Smart Refrigerator. It's not smart, and at $3,700 it's not very affordable. It's a fridge with an attached touchscreen, something that could be accomplished with an iPad Mini and tablet mounting hardware ... if that were preferable to just placing your favorite tablet computer on a nearby counter.Samsung's suggested uses reveal just how useless this product is: "Check the morning weather, browse the Web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family -- all from the refrigerator door." None of these tasks enhance this refrigerator's primary function, storing perishable food. All of these tasks would be better accomplished with a smartphone or a Post-It note, or through the miracle of human speech.It's possible to imagine how a smart refrigerator might be useful, if it could, say, tell you to buy more milk as you approach a grocery store on your way home. But it would take a fairly sophisticated system to assess the remaining volume of milk in the fridge and to communicate that information at the optimal time.Better to rely on a smart person than a smart appliance. People are extraordinarily well-equipped for assessing what's in a refrigerator -- hey, we're low on milk! -- and re-stocking it as required, without a network connection. Consumers do not need the inventory tracking capabilities of Walmart.Moreover, people actually get something out of running their own lives rather than being mere endpoints for network notifications. By outsourcing attention to sensors connected by the Internet of Things, people risk surrendering their core competency: engaging with the real world.What's more, we should be wary about fetishizing data. If you need data to make decisions, by all means gather your data and act on it. But detailed graphs of energy usage, courtesy of your networked Nest thermostat, won't change whether you want more heat because you're house is too cold. A $50 sweater is probably a better energy savings investment than a $200 Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat.This is not to say the Internet of Things Consortium is a bad idea. Quite the opposite. But as group chair Jason Johnson explained in a phone interview, the IoTC isn't in the business of creating networkable things, a business sure to produce more disasters than diamonds. Instead, it aims to promote data sharing and API development and to analyze market trends."When you have one company doing one thing really well, it's very important that others can interact with that product in a two-way manner, where said company could not do that on its own," said Johnson.Johnson cites Sonos and Logitech as examples of companies making devices that play well with other products. This is an implicit rejection of companies that seek to be platform gatekeepers. Networking things should rely on open standards rather than license-based connectivity. And to the extent the IoTC advances that agenda, it should be appreciated.But just because you can network your refrigerator, clothing or fork doesn't mean you should, not only because human oversight is often much more effective than mechanical monitoring, but because some of the potential benefits of Internet-connected objects obscure even greater costs.Have you ever jaywalked, exceeded the speed limit, lingered in a parking space beyond the time you paid for or broken rules in a minor way? Would you want to pay for these infractions? When everything is connected, nothing can be hidden, particularly when exposure translates into revenue for government agencies, businesses or entrepreneurs. Would an insurance company pay to know if its health insurance clients keep only unhealthy food in their refrigerators, so it could mitigate a higher risk of health problems with higher premiums? Count on it. This is the world the Internet of Things makes possible.It doesn't have to be that way. Having a car with Internet-accessible systems shouldn't mean that law enforcement will have a backdoor to track you or to shut your car's engine down remotely. It shouldn't mean that your driving data will forced to testify against you. It shouldn't mean that air quality sensors in your home or chemical sensors in your sewage pipes should notify the authorities when controlled substances are detected.Be afraid of the Internet of Things, because things are not the same as friends. But be open to things that can be tamed.

[Prospero]

skidelski mrači, a ja osećam u kostima :) da je text za ovu temu iako se ne bavi usporavanjem inovativnosti, naprotiv:

Robert SkidelskyThe Rise of the RobotsLONDON – What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises.In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed the textile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.Then the fear of machines died away. New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – were soon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fear was wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.For some countries, this long-run prospect might be uncomfortably close. So, what are people to do if machines can do all (or most of) their work?Recently, automation in manufacturing has expanded even to areas where labor has been relatively cheap. In 2011, Chinese companies spent ¥8 billion ($1.3 billion) on industrial robots. Foxconn, which build iPads for Apple, hopes to have their first fully automated plant in operation sometime in the next 5-10 years.Now the substitution of capital for labor is moving beyond manufacturing. The most mundane example is one you will see in every supermarket: checkout staff replaced by a single employee monitoring a bank of self-service machines. (Though perhaps this is not automation proper – the supermarket has just shifted some of the work of shopping onto the customer.)For those who dread the threat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to train people for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the better jobs, too. A wide range of jobs that we now think of as skilled, secure, and irreducibly human may be the next casualties of technological change.As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, data analysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation of workers be trained for?Optimists airily assert that “many new types of job will be created.” They ask us to think of the lead drivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up “convoy-style”), big data analysts, or robot mechanics. That does not sound like too many new jobs to me.Imagine a handful of technicians replacing a fleet of taxi drivers and truckers, a small cadre of human mechanics maintaining a full robot workforce, or a single data analyst and his software replacing a bank of quantitative researchers. What produces value in such an economy will no longer be wage labor.We can see hints of that future now. Twitter, the social-media giant, is an employment minnow. It is valued at $9 billion, but employs just 400 people worldwide – about as many as a medium-size carpet factory in Kidderminster.It is not true that automation has caused the rise of unemployment since 2008. What is noticeable, though, is that structural unemployment – the unemployment that remains even after economies have recovered – has been on an upward trend over the last 25 years. We are finding it increasingly difficult to keep unemployment down.Indeed, the days when we in Britain thought it was normal to have an unemployment rate of 2% have long since passed. It was considered a great achievement of the last government that it brought unemployment down to 5% at the height of an unsustainable boom. And it only succeeded in doing so by subsidizing a lot of unnecessary jobs and useless training schemes.No doubt some of the claims made for robots replacing human labor will prove as far-fetched now as they have in the past. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that “technological unemployment,” as John Maynard Keynes called it, will continue to rise, as more and more people become redundant.The optimist may reply that the pessimist’s imagination is too weak to envisage the full range of wonderful new job possibilities that automation is opening up. But perhaps the optimist’s imagination is too weak to imagine a different trajectory – toward a world in which people enjoy the fruits of automation as leisure rather than as additional income.During the Industrial Revolution, working hours increased by 20% as factories replaced feasting. With our post-machine standard of living, we can afford to shed some of the Puritan guilt that has, for centuries, kept our noses to the grindstone.Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poor countries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of available work go around. Economists call it “disguised unemployment.”If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of “spreading the work” that still has to be done by human labor.If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with each diminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.

[Indy]

A parallel development is the corporatization of the universities. During the neoliberal period there has been a rapid increase in highly paid professional administrative staff. In earlier days, administration wasn't much of a big deal. Typically faculty members would take off a few years and work as administrators. That’s much less true today.There's a very good study by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. It has many repercussions. One effect of imposition of a business model is a drive towards what is called efficiency, which is an interesting concept. “Efficiency” is not really an economic concept. As I already mentioned, transferring costs to individuals is called “efficiency.” We see that all the time. So suppose you call a bank or an airline to check on an error or for information. You know what happens: You get a recorded message, which tells you “we love your business, we love you. Please hang on!” You hang on while this message is repeated every couple of minutes, you listen to some music, and finally, at the end of it all, you get some kind of a menu, which often doesn't include the option you want. Finally, if you don't give up, you get connected to an actual person.For business, this increases efficiency. Their costs are lower, and for ideological reasons, that's all that counts. For the consumer, it’s very costly. You're wasting your time and energy. When those costs are multiplied across the population, they become quite large. But it is called efficiency. There are many other illustrations. For example, I just flew down here yesterday. Airlines no longer circulate air. That saves them money; it’s more efficient. It also spreads diseases among passengers. But that just transfers costs to individuals, and that doesn’t count under contemporary ideology.The same applies when the corporate culture is imposed on universities. One way to achieve efficiency is to reduce the proportion of faculty to students. Replace faculty by cheap labor -- temps -- just like in the business world. In this case graduate students for instance. They are easily replaceable and exploitable. You don't pay them much and they can't ask for their rights. It is very good for the bottom line, the professional business administrators, who are running the colleges. The harm done to the students is not counted. That is part of the ideological character of cost estimates. Another strategy is eliminating programs that are too expensive. A recent discussion in the New York Times pointed out that state colleges around the country are eliminating programs in engineering, computer science and nursing, which happen to be the fields where there are job opportunities. But the courses are expensive. Therefore, by good corporate logic, you eliminate the programs that society and people need. There was a special twist in Florida, where the governor eliminated these programs at the university but increased funding for the football team, which produces revenue and therefore serves a valid educational purpose. If you want to privatize something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it, so it doesn't work anymore, people get upset and accept privatization. This is happening in the schools. They are defunded, so they don't work well. So people accept a form of privatization just to get out of the mess. There’s no improvement in education, but it does help to instill the new spirit of the age: "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self." In the background are debates about what education ought to be. It was a lively issue during the Enlightenment, when some evocative imagery was used to contrast different approaches. One image is of education as being a kind of vessel into which you pour water. As we all know, it is a pretty leaky vessel. Everyone has gone through this. You memorize something for an exam, and a week later, you can't remember what the subject was. The other image is that teaching ought to be like laying out a string along which the student can progress in his or her own way. Education fosters discovery, not memorizing. The structure is designed so that the process of gaining understanding and gathering information is a creative, individual activity, often in cooperation with others. That's the Enlightenment ideal, deriving from more general conceptions of human nature and legitimate social relations. Pouring water into a vessel has a new name these days. It is called “No Child Left Behind,” or “Race To the Top.” It kills interest, deadens the mind, but makes students more passive and obedient and less trouble.

Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education Edited March 11, 2013 by Indy

[3opge]

Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education

као и увек, јасно, поткрепљено фактима и тачно.универзитети су само фабрике паметног меса за исхрану монструма, корпорејт Америке.

[palikaris]

A i to meso je sve manje pametno, a sve vise se sastoji od treniranih majmuna naucenih da obavljaju samo malo komplikovanije operacije od onih u fabrikama. Trening umesto edukacije. Svi to tako i zovu, "i was trained as engineer/ lawyer/ planner/ sta god". Niko nije educated, svi su trained.