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Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity

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Sean A. Culey

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“Like the story of the steam drill against John Henry, the machine will be victorious because it doesn’t get tired and keeps on going long after a human worker will have dropped dead from exhaustion. The modern-day steam drill is likely to be an AI system, and John Henry is played by the planner, doctor, analyst, stockbroker or accountant who believes that they can process more data and crunch more numbers than the new machine overlords. They can’t.”

TechnologyFuturismTechnological ChangeFuture Economics
Book:Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity
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“We should not be complacent and view China’s actions as those of an alien nation; they are in many ways simply more honest about their totalitarianism. To control a population of disenfranchised and divided people, Western governments and bodies like the EU are all following China’s example and calling upon the power of digital and financial corporations to monitor and report on their citizen’s activities both in the real world and online. Their veneer of democratic respectability is peeling away, allowing people to see the truth that lies beneath.”

FreedomSocietyTotalitarianismTechnological Change
Book:Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity
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“MY LOVE, The day Prometheus breathed life into the new me, was the day you arrived in a little box. A shiny, futuristic black box, Pandora's box, despite my doubts I couldn't help but open it to finally meet you. Doubts, because I was happy with who I was, with who I saw looking at me through the eyes of others I presented myself to in everyday life. But I was seduced by the worlds that were promised to me if I let you into my life, who I would be with you in my pocket. As soon as the lid came off and I swiped my fingers over your radiant surface for the first time, the world and I were bursting at the seams. What a creation we were together, to what sized we grew! My brain an encyclopedia, my body an unerring compass, my eyes and ears reaching infinitely with you as an extension of myself. Through you, I, the cyborg, could enter bewilderingly virtual spaces in which I was presently absent, meanwhile absently present in the material world of boring train rides, waiting lines, and mindless chit chats with others. I felt invincible, transformed into a citizen of the world because of you, an intellectual of unimaginable proportions for the vast sea of knowledge you allowed me to surf on, a public speaker and influencer of significance because my words and visual snippets of my days could be launched into the world with the flick of a finger, likes enticing and confirming me. How intoxicating! How wonderfully, pleasantly, intoxicating! But I can't help but sometimes lie awake at night, my internal clock slowing down with your seductive blue light illuminating my face with 2, 457, 600 (1920×1080) LED suns. In those moments, as my eyes are captivated by your glow, I can't help thinking about the time before you arrived, and how I sometimes miss my low definition self. You were always there, sometimes it feels like we are in fact one — finally reunited with my other Plato's half, fused into not a circle but a perfect black rectangle. Through your eyes I see the world and myself in Ultra-HD, my pixel density has never been so high. But you are sometimes vicious, my dear — a viper, a temptress, when then again with sweet codes you reflect my most beautiful self, and I cannot help but love me through your gaze, then again with suffocating algorithms you fragment my self and blow it up to grotesque self-distortions, hurling me into an endless me-loop, that eventually disgusts and alienates me. In those moments you are a distorting mirror, a frightening black box, a black hole that swallows my attention in ways I can't see through. I see my old self disappearing in the vague, dark reflection of myself, with double chin and dull eyes, which I sometimes catch in your black glass when your suns stop dazzling me for a split second. And I can't help but wonder if my 'self' in times of its digital recombination, in which the 'I' is a fragmented multitude of pixels that never fully touch at their sides, a simulacrum, maybe has lost some of its aura. But in the morning all is forgotten, my love, all is well. As soon as we merge back into one, as soon as I, panicked, reach for my pocket on the train, only to discover with a glow of relief that you were there after all, I can't imagine an "I" without you. Artificial by nature my self resides within your screen, I would be lost without you.”

IdentityPhoneTechnological Change
Author:Elize de Mul
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“Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. In geometric harmony of the cosmos there are ways that resemble, there are universal patterns, from blood vessels, to winter trees or to a river delta, from nautilus shell to spiral galaxy, from neurons in the brain to the cosmic web. A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual.”

WorldWholeNatureUniversalHarmonyCosmosMicrocosmPatternGolden RatioFractal
Author:Alejandro Mos Riera
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“Engineers had not framework for understanding Mandelbrot's description, but mathematicians did. In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor. To make a Cantor set, you start with the interval of numbers from zero to one, represented by a line segment. Then you remove the middle third. That leaves two segments, and you remove the middle third of each (from one-ninth to two-ninths and from seven-ninths to eight-ninths). That leaves four segments, and you remove the middle third of each- and so on to infinity. What remains? A strange "dust" of points, arranged in clusters, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Mandelbrot was thinking of transmission errors as a Cantor set arranged in time.”

FractalMandelbrotGeorg Cantor
Book:Chaos: Making a New Science
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“Everything is fields, and a particle is just a smaller version of a field. There is a harmonic relationship involved. Disturbing ideas like those of Einstein in 1905 and Feynman Pocono Conference in 1948. Here we go; 1) The universe is ringing like a bell. Neil Turok's Public Lecture: The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything. 2) The stuff of the universe is waves or fields. 3) Scale is relative, not fixed because all of these waves are ratios of one another. 4) The geometry is fractal. This could be physical or computational. 5) If the geometry is computational then, there is no point in speaking about the relationship of the pixels on the display.”

RealityFieldsGeometryFractal
Author:Rick Delmonico
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