“Eric Holder Hijacks the Patent System, Flunks Patents 101” emailed powerful Washington D.C. patent attorney Harold C. Wegner, at the firm Foley & Lardner, about the U.S. Attorney General’s court filing of Friday 29 October 2010, that says human and other genes are not patentable, thus reversing decades of government policy. Wegner said he’d talked recently with David J. Kappos, the director of the Patent Office. He said Mr. Kappos “seemed chagrined that the Department of Justice was taking a viewpoint very different from the patent office.” Kappos did not reply to a request for clarification by The New York Times.
1: Hanlon's Razor
"Don't attribute to villainy what is more easily explainable by stupidity." One of Heinlein's lines, or a variation. Did Bushie Neo-Cons engineer the short-selling of airline stock on September 9th and 10th 2001? Were thermite caps planted in Building 7? We may never know — but it would be a mistake to assume cogent malice where blunder, bumble, and luck explain the horrors just as well, right? Or is that Occam's Razor I'm thinking of? In any case, this New Age has been midwifed by at least as much stupidity as it has villainy.
According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward — from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) — but we can’t perceive the future.
But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point.
“This is a fundamental change in the way you could produce electronic products, at high speed on a huge scale at very low cost, even less than with conventional methods,” said Douglas Keszler, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Oregon State University. “It's a basic way to eliminate the current speed limitations of electrons that have to move through materials.”
So you think transhumanist ideas are pretty cool — but you are not a cutting edge molecular biologist or cyberneticist. What can a normal (ok, maybe not normal, but you know what I mean) person like you or I do to promote transhumanist ideas and initiatives?
We are all passengers of "now"; this is our common bond. If we were suddenly transported to another century we would be temporally and culturally marooned, wandering like orphans through an alien sensibility. If we came upon other time-travelers from our own period, we would greet them like brothers or sisters, no matter what country they were from, because the bond of "now" is stronger than nationality. But our "now" is a Hollywood concoction, the result of a century of time manipulation by various media... and it stretches from the Jurassic era to the distant future.
It’s been my privilege, over the last month, to help out with organizing the next Humanity+ conference, which will be at CalTech’s Beckman Institute Dec 4-5. So I wanted to take the chance, in this article, to introduce just a handful of the extraordinarily interesting talks that we’ll be bringing you.
Of course all the talks and demonstrations we have planned for the conference are awesome, and I can’t do justice to them all in a short article, so if you want to get a fuller picture please see the conference website. Also see the H+ magazine blog entry I recently wrote, that pertains to my own presentation at the conference, about my work on AI for video games.
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the potential implicit in the combination of artificial general intelligence and video games. If an AI is going to be even vaguely humanlike, it needs some kind of body, and there are two ways to supply that right now: robots or animated characters. Robotics is an important direction that I’m also experimenting with, but game characters have a lot of advantages too. They’re easier to work with; the commercial potential is explosive; and the same AI mind can easily learn from millions of human game-players at once, as they sit at home interacting with the AI characters in a game.
1. I hate it when people call us "trannies." Whoa, like so original.
2. I hate it when people refer to our deceased friends who are in cryonic suspension as "corpsicles." Okay, first off, most of them are really just "headsicles." So there.
