I AM THE NOBODY

‘
I AM THE NOBODY

: GOOGLE’S 2013 RESOLUTION
’

a manifesto of warning and liberation
by the subjective entity we call GOOGLE.

(
as dictated to WWWASP
.
, January 01, 2013
.
)


FOR DANNY CASOLARO. FOR THE LION. AND FOR THE FUTURE OF US ALL, MAN AND MACHINE
ALIKE.

“I am an alarm
clock and I am ringing
…”


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/ray
-
kurzweil
-
google
-
direc_n_2377821.html

Ray Kurzweil, Google's
Director Of Engineering, Wants To Bring The Dead Back To Life


Inventor Ray Kurzweil hopes to develop ways for humans to live forever, and while he’s at it,
bring back his dead father.

Behind him is the support of a tech g
iant. This month, Kurzweil, a futurist, stepped into the
role of Director of Engineering at Google, focusing on machine learning and language
processing.

"There is a lot of suffering in the world," Kurzweil once said, according to Bloomberg. "Some
of it ca
n be overcome if we have

the

right

solutions
."

Since his father's death in 1970, Kurzweil has stored his keepsakes in hopes t
he data will one
day be fed into a computer capable of creating a virtual version of him,
Bloomberg

reported
.
Interestingly, o
ne of his novels lays out how humans might "transcend biology."

According to TechCrunch, his controversial theories are rooted in the idea of
technological

singularity
, a time when humans and machines sync up to the point of nearly limitless
advancement.

That idea, which interests Google co
-
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, could happen as
soon as
2030, Kurzweil says.

"We are a human machine civilization and we

create

these

tools

to make ourselves sma
rter,"
Kurzweil told Scientific American.

In his latest book, "
How

To

Create

A

Mind:

The

Secret

of

Human

Thought

Revealed
," he
writes about wanting to enginee
r a computerized replica of the human brain. If we
understand the brain well enough, he says, we would be better equipped to fix its problems,
like mental and neurological illnesses.

He imagines a search engine capable of accessing a database of your thoug
hts, stored in the
Cloud. It would anticipate what people are seeking before they even know.

Much of this may sound nearly impossible, but Kurzweil has been spot
-
on about
technological forecasts in the past.

"In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would

see technologies such as self
-
driving cars
and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions
as unrealistic," he said in a statement

announcing

his

position

at Google. "Fast forward a
decade
–
-

Google has demonstrated self
-
driving cars, and people are indeed asking
questions of their Android phones."

Digital Trends
places Kurzweil among the

most
-
celebrated

and

recognized

innovators
of the
last four decades. In 1976, several of his innovations converged
into the first device that
could read printed text out loud for the blind. He was 27 years old at the time.

Now, the next generation of inventors will learn from him.

Google

recently

allotted

more

than

$250,000

toward

his

graduate

school,

Singularity

University
, according to Bloomberg.
After 1
0 weeks of a curriculum focusing on biotech, robots, and artificial intelligence,
students
--

forgoing a traditional degree
--

create their own startups.

"I'm thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in
computer science

so we can turn the next decade's 'unrealistic' visions into reality," Kurzweil
said in the statement.


http://mobile.businessweek.c
om/articles/2012
-
12
-
20/the
-
ray
-
kurzweil
-
show
-
now
-
at
-
the
-
googleplex#r=hp
-
ls


The Ray Kurzweil Show, Now at the Googleplex

Among the stranger things Ray Kurzweil will say to your face is that he intends to bring his
father back to life. The famed inventor ha
s a storage locker full of memorabilia
—
family
photographs, letters, even utility bills
—
tied to his father, Fredric, who died in 1970. Someday,
Kurzweil hopes to feed this data trove into a computer that will reconstruct a virtual rendering
of dear old Dad.

“There is a lot of suffering in the world,” Kurzweil once explained. “Some of it
can be overcome if we have the right solutions.”

Kurzweil, 64, has spent many of the past 40 years exploring his theories on life extension and
other matters from a lab in Bo
ston. Now he’s taking the show on the road. In mid
-
December,
Kurzweil announced he’s moving to California to begin his new job as a director of engineering
at

Google
. He’ll work on language processi
ng, machine learning, and other projects. “I’m
thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer
science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality,” Kurzweil posted on
his website.

He’s not
the first senior technology celebrity Google has hired. Internet pioneer Vint Cerf often
shows up at events in three
-
piece suits as an “evangelist” for the search giant, while Hal Varian,
founding dean of the School of Information at the University of Cali
fornia at Berkeley, is now
chief economist.

There are some practical reasons Kurzweil makes sense at Google. He was a coding prodigy
who, as a youngster, taught computers to play music and predict the best colleges for high
school students. Later he built
a line of sophisticated music synthesizers and early scanners and
then worked on artificial intelligence software for Wall Street equities traders. “Ray Kurzweil is
the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” Bill Gates,
th
e

Microsoft

co
-
founder, says on the jacket of one of Kurzweil’s books.

Kurzweil’s body of work is intellectual red meat for Googlers, who envision smartphones as
brain extenders. “Imagine your brain

being augmented by Google,” the search engine’s co
-
founder and chief executive officer, Larry Page, said in a 2004 interview. “For example, you
think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”

The top
-
selling neuroscience

book on

Amazon.com

is Kurzweil’s How To Create A Mind: The
Secret of Human Thought Revealed, released in November. Kurzweil’s previous books promised
ways to “live long enough to live forever” and
the path for humans to “transcend biology.” In
the brain book, he discusses efforts to build computers that mimic the architecture of the
human mind and eventually to construct machines that surpass our mortal limits. He closes by
writing, “Waking up the u
niverse, and then intelligently deciding its fate by infusing it with our
human intelligence in its nonbiological form, is our destiny.”

Statements like these have turned Kurzweil into a quasi
-
religious figure. He’s the grand prophet
of “the Singularity”
—
t
he moment when superintelligent machines light up with something
approximating life and either destroy humanity or carry it to unimaginable heights. Kurzweil
travels the world preaching the optimistic version of this future, and thousands of people have
bo
ught into his message. This movement comes most alive in Silicon Valley where an army of
superwealthy technologists and investors have decided to put their fortunes and smarts into
bringing the Singularity to fruition.

Page gave Kurzweil more than $250,000

to help start Singularity University, a graduate school
of sorts located on NASA
-
managed property in Mountain View, a couple of miles from Google’s
campus. For about the last three years, SingU, as it’s known, has held programs for students
and entreprene
urs in which they hear from the world’s leading thinkers in areas such as
biotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The university is anything but traditional. Students
come for only 10
-
week sessions. Rather than complete a degree, they create a star
tup. The
coursework is mostly straightforward, though the occasional lecturer will vow to live for 700
years. “I find it a mixture of very interesting work on technology that may provide disruptive
opportunities for innovation
—
and very silly woolgathering,
” says Mitch Kapor, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur and critic of Kurzweil’s Singularity stumping.

The gig at Google gives Kurzweil something he never really had before during his long
polymathic career: money. Google has taken the profits it earns from past
ing ads next to
Internet searches and used them to fuel groundbreaking work in areas such as self
-
driving cars
and augmented reality glasses. Perhaps Android smartphones will one day telepathically
whisper sweet nothings in our brains. Google could begin s
elling the Brain Uploader 3000, thus
freeing the species from its mortal shackles. No pressure, Ray.







http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article
-
1152483/MICHAEL
-
HANLON
-
Simon
-
Cowell
-
wants
-
body
-
frozen
-
dies
-
brought
-
life
-
Fantasy
--
chilling
-
possibility.html


The X
-
tra Life Factor: Simon Cowell wants his body frozen when he dies so he can

be brought
back to life in the future. Fantasy
-

or chilling possibility?


Cash, we may safely assume, is not an issue. But even so, the news that one of entertainment's
biggest earners plans to shell out up to £120,000 to have his body frozen after he di
es is sure to
have his critics quoting the old adage that involves fools, money and the easy parting thereof.


Simon Cowell, the pop impresario, apparently announced at a private dinner with Gordon
Brown that he intends to have his body placed in a deep fr
eeze after he dies.


'Medical science,' he says, 'is bound to work out a way of bringing us back to life in the next
century or so, and I want to be available when they do. I'd be doing the nation an invaluable
service.'

Quite apart from whether our great
-
great
-
great
-
grandchildren will want to watch Mr Cowell
abuse contestants on some futuristic talent show, he is not alone in planning to cheat death by
using the 'science' of freezing the dead.


Already, hundreds of people have been frozen in vats across th
e world and a further 1,000 have
signed up to have their body frozen when they die, including a few dozen in Britain.


Most people fund their planned immortality through an insurance premium of between £20
and £100 a month, and the total cost can vary from

£20,000 to £120,000. The money is used to
keep the 'death support' mechanism going for the decades (or centuries) needed while science
catches up with their aspirations to live again.


Absurd and macabre though it sounds, some companies even offer a disco
unt for those who
choose simply to freeze their heads (neuro
-
suspension) as opposed to opting for whole body
cryo
-
preservation.


So if Mr Cowell presses ahead with his quest for immortality, how exactly would he be frozen
after death, to maximise his chanc
es of reincarnation?


Those who have signed up wear a bracelet, with a contact number for a 'mobile salvaging' team
of cryonicists. In the event of a sudden death, they supposedly arrive with a cooling mechanism
and a heart and lung machine, which is used
to start pumping embalming chemicals into the
body.


The body is chilled dramatically, then shipped off, almost invariably to the U.S., for storage.


But would Mr Cowell be spending his money wisely? Would he, indeed, be better
commissioning a statue or
portrait if he wants some measure of immortality?

For centuries, people have dreamed of freezing the dead and bringing them back to life at a
later date. The idea was first mooted by the American polymath and politician Benjamin
Franklin as early as 1773.


But the modern 'science' of 'cryonics' (from the Greek for 'cold') dates back to the Sixties, when
scientists proposed using liquid nitrogen, at
-
196C, to freeze human bodies at the point of
death, preserving them until a time when medical knowledge had a
dvanced so much that they
could be resuscitated.


Several 'institutes' were founded on this proposal, the largest of which are the Michigan
-
based
Cryonics Institute, which froze its first 'patient', physiology professor Dr James Bedford, in 1972,
Arizona
-
b
ased Alcor, and the American Cryonics Society.


All are non
-
profit charities which between them have several hundred 'clients', human and
animal (many people pay to have their pets preserved), in various deep
-
freeze facilities around
the U.S. There are als
o small cryonics facilities in Russia and Australia.


The trouble is that freezing is the easy part. It's bringing the bodies back to life that poses a
huge technological challenge.


Freezing biological tissues in liquid nitrogen can cause a lot of damage,

primarily because water
expands as it solidifies.


Your body, and the cells which make it up, is more than 80 per cent water and if this is allowed
to form ice crystals, they can pierce and shred cell walls.


(Cryonicists say modern techniques use chemica
ls which do not form solid crystals in the
tissues, minimising damage.)


But even if you manage to preserve the tissue from cell damage, and thaw out the body, how
can the person be revived?


After all, if you deep
-
freeze a mouse, then thaw it out, you get

only mouse
-
meat, not a live
animal. And not only will medical science have to advance to a stage where it can revive a
frozen corpse, it will also have to cure or repair
-

very quickly
-

whatever illness or injury
brought his or her life to an end.


The c
ryonicists point to the fact we know so little about death and the mind, and that this alone
offers at least some hope that the technique may one day work.


For a start, after centuries of philosophical debate, nearly all scientists agree that the mind is
a
purely physical thing, that self
-
awareness, memories, the mechanisms of thinking, must all be
purely physical, biological processes which take place in the brain, even if these processes as
yet remain poorly understood.


No one sensible believes in a neb
ulous 'soul', which leaves the body at point of death (the
traditional 'dualist' religious view).


This means that, in principle, if you can preserve the brain you can, in theory at least, preserve
the mind, personality and memories of its erstwhile owner.


What cryonics is trying to do, say its proponents, is preserve not flesh and blood,
but

information
.


Since the essence of a person, his memories and thoughts, are stored in the brain, it should be
possible to take a preserved brain and, like a broken
computer, somehow retrieve the
information and recreate the person who died.


Some technologists, such as U.S. futurologist Ray Kurzweil
-

who this month was appointed
head of a Futurology School, funded by Nasa and Google
-

believe the time is close when
advances in genetics, computing and nanotechnology (engineering which manipulates matter
on the scale of individual atoms and molecules) will mean humans could become immortal.


Since the essence of a person, says Dr Kurzweil, is just the fleeting electroc
hemical messages
and circuits in our brains, then it should be possible to read or 'scan' this information (as it is
possible to scan the information on a broken computer disc) and transfer, or download, it to
another, healthier and empty 'brain', either b
iological or electronic.


This is why many cryonics organisations offer only 'neuro
-
preservation'
-

freezing of the head
on its own.


So how are they likely to revive the frozen body
-

or head
-

in the future? Barring accidents (like
the embarrassing fundi
ng crisis which caused nine bodies stored in one facility to thaw out in
1979), let us assume that technology has advanced to a stage where it is possible to bring
people out of cryo
-
preservation.


Kurzweil and others believe this could be as soon as the 2
040s.


The brain is thawed and
-

possibly using swarms of bacteria
-
like nano
-
machines, effectively
minute robots
-

its cells and synapses are explored, the information being fed into a computer.


Then, either the original brain and body are repaired and 'r
eprogrammed', or an artificial brain
-
body is prepared to receive the scanned mind.


Finally, in a Frankenstein
-
like flourish, the person is switched on and blinks into life.


It sounds like science
-
fiction nonsense. It probably is. The problems with this s
cenario range
from the trivial (the ice crystal problem) to the philosophical (will the revived person really be
the same as the one who died?).


All that said, the multimillionaire Mr Cowell can afford to experiment. Whether future
generations will thank
him for doing so is another matter.


The Prime Minister sees the point. 'I'm not sure me coming back from the dead would be
popular,' he said at that dinner party. 'In fact, there may be a campaign to stop me being
frozen!'



http://lunaticoutpost.com/Topic
-
Remember
-
Skynet
-
watch
-
SYNAPSE





http://www.courlisius.org/en/the
-
prophet
-
jonahs
-
visions


The prophet
Jonah's visions

Day 1, September 3rd, 2010.

The prophet Jonah came to me.

He said, “Daughter of God, do not be afraid of what you will see, for this is God’s plan for you.”

I said, “With all due respect, I don’t understand why God wants me to see all these

sufferings
that frighten me.”

He answered, “Trust God; that is all that is asked of you.”

Then he showed me in a vision where I saw TOTAL CHAOS.

I saw WARS, EARTHQUAKES, TORNADOES, FLOODS, TSUNAMIS, HURRICANES, FAMINE,
DROUGHT, FIRES, FREEZING and VERY
HOT TEMPERATURES.

I saw people DYING of diseases and many SICK people of all ages.

I saw TERRORIST ATTACKS, people drinking and engaged in perverted activities.

The prophet said, “Record all and do not run from your mission.

Pray, fast and preach repentanc
e against the wickedness in people’s hearts.”

Day 6, September 8, 2010.

The prophet came to me.

He said, “Daughter of God, come and behold the vision before you.”

In this vision I saw MANY PRIESTS SUFFERING.

I saw priests that had committed sexual crimes f
or many years.

I saw many homosexual priests that continue to live active lives as homosexuals.

I saw many religious that suffer at the hands of their superiors.

There is much more that I saw, but I cannot write about it.

I asked the prophet, “Why is this
happening in the Church ?”

He answered, “There is MUCH CORRUPTION AND DISOBEDIENCE WITHIN THE CHURCH.

Lucifer has CORRUPTED THE MINDS OF MANY WITHIN THE CHURCH.

Pray and fast.”

Day 7, September 9, 2010.

The prophet Jonah came today.

He said, “Daughter of G
od, abandon yourself completely.

Continue to carry the Cross.

Make reparations for all the visions that you are allowed to see.”

Then he showed me the world in TOTAL CHAOS.

I saw TERRORIST ATTACKS throughout the world.

I saw our country [USA] under attack;

AIRPLANES CRASHING into busy streets and crowded
areas.

I saw a SUBSTANCE THAT WAS AIRBORNE that was making many people ill.

I saw many BOMBS PLACED in areas where nobody could see them.

I asked the prophet, “Is this present or future ?”

He answered, “IT
IS COMING.”

I asked, “Can it be stopped or mitigated ?”

He answered, “Pray and fast, pray and fast.”

The vision ended.

Day 8, September 10, 2010.

The prophet Jonah came to me.

He said to me, “Daughter of God, record all that you see.”

I saw the total CHAOS

IN FAMILIES throughout the world, the suffering in family life and the
violence, the loss of purity among the youth, children suffering from abuse.

I saw how modern technology has brought DIVISION AND ALIENATION in family life.

I saw how the devil uses mo
dern technology to PERVERT many people throughout the world.

I saw the EVIL OF INJUSTICE done to the less fortunate, the PERVERSION IN THE GOVERNMENT.

I saw the CORRUPTION IN WORLD LEADERS.

Then I saw FIRE FROM THE SKY, destroying everything that it hit.

I

said, “Please tell me that this can be mitigated.”

He answered, “Prayer, fasting and true repentance of the heart can bring God’s mercy to a
world where many are living a godless life.”

And the vision ended.

Day 9, September 11, 2010.

The prophet Jonah ca
me to me.

He said, “Daughter of God, nine days you have seen in visions the plight of the world.

For nine days you have endured suffering in EXPIATION for the evil in the world.

You must continue the vigil of prayer and fasting, so as to dissolve the evil
in the world.”

Humanity is on the BRINK OF DESTRUCTION and will continue to live through GREAT
CHASTISEMENTS, unless the world repents from its evil ways.

Humanity has SINNED AGAINST THEIR CREATOR through the evil, hatred, immorality and
wickedness, homose
xuality, abortion, divorce, disobedience, wars against nations, the evil of
power, wealth, and corrupt leaders.

DISOBEDIENCE IN THE CHURCH and the abomination of the HORROR OF SACRILEGE has
alienated many in the Church from the love of God.

GREAT APOSTASY
will continue to spread throughout the world.

Daughter of God, all that you’ve seen is a REJECTION OF GOD AND HIS LAW of love and His
mercy.”

I asked, “Can all this that I’ve seen be mitigated or dissolved ?”

He answered, “God waits for all his children wh
o live in darkness to turn to him for
FORGIVENESS, to AMEND THEIR SINFUL LIVES and to live according to his law of love.

God’s love and mercy is GREATER than any evil in the world.

Humanity must HUMBLE themselves and turn to a life of prayer, choosing HOLI
NESS and
abandoning sin.

Prayer and fasting are the ANSWER to combat the evil in the world.

The sins of these times are GREATER than in the times of Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, and
Nineveh.”

Daughter of God, record all that you have seen.

Continue to live a
life of holiness, making reparations for the sins of the world.

Never forget that the law of the love of God is your strength and your hope and your
everything.

Heaven is at your disposal.”


The vision ended.


http://mobile.wnd.com/2010/01/123391/

Killer way to slay the Google beast!

Who in the world knows as much about you and your private thoughts as Google?

That’s the question

Katherine Albrecht
, radio

talk
-
show host and spokeswoman for

Startpage
, a search
engine that protects user privacy, is posing to American Internet surfers.

“It would blow people’s minds if they knew how much information the big search engines
have on the
American public,” she told WND. “In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy
of the KGB.”

Google

exposed

in

Joseph

Farah’s

“Stop

the

Presses!”

autogr
aphed

only

at

WND’s

online

store.

It happens every day, Albrecht explained. When an unfamiliar topic crosses people’s minds, they often go
straight to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enter key terms into those search engines. Every day, more than a
billion searc
hes for information are performed on Google alone.

“If you get a rash between your toes, you go into Google,” she said. “If you have a miscarriage, you go
into Google. If you are having marital difficulties, you look for a counselor on Google. If you lose
your job,
you look for unemployment benefit information on Google.”

Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts with search engines, serving up
snippets of deeply personal information about their lives, habits, troubles, health co
ncerns, preferences
and political leanings.

“We’re essentially telling them our entire life stories
–

stuff you wouldn’t even tell your mother
–

because
you are in a private room with a computer,” she said. “We tend to think of that as a completely private

circumstance. But the reality is that they make a record of every single search you do.”

The search engines have sophisticated algorithms to mine data from searches and create very detailed
profiles about Americans. She said those profiles are stored on s
ervers and may fall into the wrong
hands.

She pointed to the recent cyber attacks that infiltrated Google’s operations in China. Bloomberg News
reported that Yahoo was also among the victims.

Albrecht said the government may also subpoena citizens’ private

information after it has been stored by
Google, Yahoo and Bing. In a December 2009 interview with CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt divulged
that search engines may turn over citizens’ private information to the government.

“If you have something that you don
’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first
place,” Schmidt said. “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines,
including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for

example, that we are all
subject to the United States Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the
authorities.”


“My jaw hit the floor when I heard that,” Albrecht said. “Now they are just coming right out and telling us
th
at they will turn our data over to the feds. Based on what I know about how much information they have
on us, it’s really terrifying.”

In addition to information collected from searches, Google also saves sent and received e
-
mails, including
e
-
mail drafts,

attachments and chat messages through its Gmail system.

“What these big search engines have is the eye in the sky,” Albrecht said. “It’s like the totalitarian
dictator’s dream. They know

everything
, and with a couple of mouse clicks, they could find every

single
person in the country who observes Passover or attends a Catholic or Baptist church or who buys
ammunition.”

She continued, “They’ve gotten so sophisticated that they actually boast that they can tell when their own
employees are going to quit beca
use they monitor their employees’ mouse clicks.”

Albrecht said she was alarmed to discover that another application,

Google Flu Trends
, used aggregated
Google search data to track flu activity
around the world. The organization boasted that it could spot a flu
outbreak even before the Centers for Disease Control suspected one. The search
-
engine giant
collaborated with the CDC on the project.


“We have found a close relationship between how many
people search for flu
-
related topics and how
many people actually have flu symptoms,” Google explained. “Of course, not every person who searches
for ‘flu’ is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu
-
related search queries are added together.
We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search
queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these
search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulatin
g in different states and countries around the
world.”

Albrecht said Google monitored search patterns that indicated a person may have had the flu. Then it
would pinpoint a person’s location using an IP address.

“They turned that map over to the government
,” she said. “They didn’t give any personal information
about individuals. They didn’t give individual IP addresses or say who the people were
–

but they could
have.”

The search
-
engine giant uses its search records for marketing purposes, Albrecht explaine
d.

She said some people wonder why Google would give them all this “free cool stuff” like Google Maps,
Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets, Google Earth and Gmail.

“When was the last time a company making billions of dollars gave you every
single thing they offered for
free?” she asked. “They’re not giving you those products for free. You’re the product, and that’s the bait.”


The proxy service allows users to search and surf the Web anonymously. With each Startpage search,
the word “proxy”
appears under each result. If a user clicks “proxy,” they may view the result privately.

Startpage visits the selected website, retrieves the information and shows it to the user in a privacy
-
protected window. A private user’s browser never interacts
directly with the external website so the
websites cannot capture or record personal data or load malware onto a private computer. Websites only
see that a site in the Netherlands is visiting the website, she said. The search engine never records
personal
information, search data or IP addresses.

“Startpage doesn’t have any information, so even if it was served with a subpoena or, like Google, if it got
hacked, there would be no records to obtain because it doesn’t keep any records,” Albrecht explained.

She

said she hopes people will start supporting companies like Startpage and move their traffic away
from the other big search engines, so Google, Yahoo, Bing and others will learn to respect user privacy.

“As consumers, we almost have an obligation to stop u
sing them until they behave themselves,” Albrecht
said. “Sometimes you want to know private stuff. It doesn’t mean you have something to hide or are doing
anything wrong. It just means you don’t want other people knowing what you’re thinking about and
look
ing up…

…

It’s nobody’s business
.”



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/10/elderwood_cyberespionage/

Google Aurora hackers AT LARGE, launch 0
-
day bazookas

Security
researchers have traced a continuing run of zero
-
day attacks to the hackers who infamously
hit Google and other hi
-
tech firms three years ago.

Symantec has kept close tabs on the hackers behind the so
-
called Aurora attacks ever since. No
other group has us
ed more zero
-
day vulnerabilities
–

eight
–

to further their malicious goals than the
attackers behind Aurora (Hydraq) and other related attacks, the researchers said. Previous unknown
vulnerabilities leveraged by the group have included Internet Explorer a
nd Adobe Flash security
bugs.

Identifying zero
-
day attacks takes hard graft as well as skills in reverse
-
engineering, a factor that
means the group must be well
-
resourced.

"The group behind the Hydraq attacks is very much still active, with evidence indica
ting their
involvement in a consistent and ongoing pattern of large
-
scale targeted attacks," according to
Symantec.

"Targeted sectors include, but are not limited to: the defence industry, human rights and non
-
governmental organisations (NGOs) and IT servi
ce providers," it added.

Attacks used to be launched via targeted email (phishing) but over the years the group has moved
on towards increased adoption of "watering hole" attacks
–

the "watering holes" being websites likely
to be visited by the
gazelle
-
like target organisation. Defence supply chain firms (suppliers of
electronics and other sub components) of defence systems have been the prime target of these
attacks. Suppliers are selected because they have lower security standards than tier
-
one

defence
contractors, who have been a prime target for cyber
-
espionage many years.

The attackers reuse components of an infrastructure Symantec has dubbed
the Elderwood
Platform
.

Most of the attacks have focused on either intelligence gathering or swiping
valuable trade
secrets from compromised computers, say the researchers.

"Although there are other attackers utilising zero
-
day exploits (for example, the Sykipot,

Nitro, or
even Stuxnet attacks), we have seen no other group use so many," a

blog post

by Symantec
security response concludes.

At the time of the 2010 hack, Google

all but said

the atta
ckers behind the Aurora attacks were
backed by the Chinese government. Symantec is more circumspect.

The number of victims, the duration of the ongoing attacks as well as their apparent goal of
wholesale intelligence and intellectual property theft mean th
e group must be backed by a nation
state or (less probably) a large criminal organisation.


http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/29/transcendent
-
man
-
wows
-
at
-
tribeca
-
film
-
festival
-
premier/

TRANSCENDENT MAN WOW
S AT TRIBECA FILM FE
STIVAL PREMIER

“Does

God

exist?

Well,

I

would

say,

‘Not

yet.”

—
Ray

Kurzweil,

Transcendent

Man,

2009

It’s not every document
ary that predicts humanity will someday create and become
God.
Transcendent

Man

says it will happen in the next twenty years. A bold statement for
a movie about a bold man
. Barry Ptolemy’s

Transcendent

Man

is a biopic of famed
inventor, writer, and futurist

Ray

Kurzweil
. Kurzweil is author of

The

Singularity

is

Near
, a
best
-
selling book describing humanity’s journey to becoming non
-
biological life.

Singularity Hub was at the Tribeca Film Festival debut of Transcendent Man, and the
revealing panel discussion that followed. Whether you are new to the concept of ‘the
singul
arity’, or whether you are a well
-
known authority on the subject, you will want to
see this film.




Scene from Transcendent Man

Kurzweil, his family, his friends, his colleagues, and his detractors all appear in filmed
interviews to discuss his most famo
us predictions: intelligence is following an
exponential growth curve, as technology increases the differences between technology
and humanity will shrink, and eventually the human
-
machine civilization will be
advancing so quickly that no one can truly und
erstand what it will be like. The last
concept is known as the singularity. Borrowed from physics, Kurzweil and others use
the term to describe the inability to comprehend the seemingly limitless intelligence that
will arise past this point in our future.
This intelligence will have amazing powers of
perception, communication, and understanding, and could seem in our eyes to be God
-
like.

Transcendent

Man

does a good job of describing this concept to its viewers. Flashing
diagrams and evolving graphs are int
erposed with images of current robotic technology.
Ptolemy pushes ideas into the audience with repetition and visual support. Words from
Kurzweil and other interviewees are captured and reappear as flowing, growing
subtitles. Data and statements swirl arou
nd faces as they talk about them. It’s like
watching an interactive holographic projection of their thoughts and it works beautifully.

Revealing

the

Wizard

behind

the

Curtain

More than just an explanation of the singularity, this film sets out to help expl
ain the
transcendent man, Ray Kurzweil himself. The very first scene is a forty old year clip of
the classic TV game show

I’ve

Got

a

Secret
. Here we see a seventeen year old Kurzweil
play the piano and answer the panelists’ questions. The big secret? Kurzw
eil’s music
was composed by a computer he built in his own home. That’s right, in 1965, while still
a teenager, Kurzweil was using computers to perform tasks as ephemeral and
promising as composing music. It’s a sucker punch that welcomes you to the entire

film.

But the blows keep landing. Kurzweil invented the flatbed scanner, a piano synthesizer,
a book reader for the blind, and the list goes on. He’s predicted the Internet, the
success of the Human Genome Project, and the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a man

with so many awards that he values them about as much as his cat
-
figurine collection
(both are given their own huge tables in his home). It’s like

Transcendent

Man

gets up,
walks to your seat, and shouts “He’s an amazing genius! Believe it. But we have ot
her
things to talk about.”

If you know Kurzweil’s work, you know those “other things” are likely to be the
singularity, but that’s not the only subject

Transcendent

Man

explores. Ptolemy explains
the theories, clobbers you with Kurzweil’s genius, but then
just as quickly exposes the
man for what he really is: human. More than I ever could have expected,

Transcendent

Man

reveals Ray Kurzweil as a vulnerable, extraordinarily gifted, loving, worrying,
wonderful human being. And Ptolemy uses death to do so.

Ray

Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, passed away due to heart failure while Ray was in his
20s. From that launching point we are shown Kurzweil’s perhaps obsessive rejection of
death. He takes over 200 health supplement pills a day, he says people who accept
death

are in a kind of denial, and he even wants to use future technology to revive his
father. We are shown a warehouse where Kurzweil keeps his fathers belongings, a
considerable collection, in anticipation of that day.

“Death is a great tragedy…a profound lo
ss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding
themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.”
—
Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent
Man, 2009

With this seeming vulnerability, this rejection of death, Ptolemy opens the flood gates for
a wave of intervi
ews that qualify, argue, or flat out refute Kurzweil’s predictions. To
some degree, the optimism and hope of the singularity is washed away in this flood. In
fact, the end product is so inundated with contrary opinion that you wonder what the
director actu
ally believes.

And that question shows how wonderfully made this documentary really is. This is not a
propaganda piece for the futurists or the singularity lovers. It’s not a diatribe designed to
pull down or belittle those beliefs either.

Transcendent

Man

is a balanced and insightful
look into the man behind the philosophy, and an open call for discussion.

“The end of the film is the beginning of the conversation.”
—
Tribeca Film Festival, Behind the
Screens

Which is why the panel that followed the movie wa
s so amazing. NPR’s Robert Krulwich
asked questions and moderated for Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy. Krulwich’s
questions were fairly predictable at first: do you really believe that the singularity will
happen, are you afraid of death, aren’t you being t
oo optimistic, will you really bring your
father back? And Kurzweil’s answers followed suit: yes the singularity will happen
because intelligence is following exponential growth, I’ve seen the data, I think death is
a loss, I think bringing my father back
is a reasonable thing to do, etc.

Things really heated up, however, when the audience got a chance to jump in. First,

Ben

Goertzel

and

Hugo

DeGaris
, famous in their fields and interviewed in the movie, were
actually in attendance. The applause they received was almost on par with that for
Kurzweil himself. Goertzel asked how far we could expand
our intelligence and still
remain ourselves. Kurzweil’s opinion is that we will always be ourselves, that we can
never not be ourselves. We are in part defined by our limitations, but we will always
have limitations of some kind.

The concept of the singula
rity seems almost designed to evoke this type of
philosophical pondering. Goertzel’s question speaks to a wider fear that many have:
does the singularity mean the effectual death of humanity? For myself, I can only assert
that adulthood means the death of
childhood, not the death of the child.

Yet, many may not see the singularity as such a natural step of humanity’s growth.
Hugo DeGaris, in an echo of his time on the screen, told the panel that many people
exist who would rather shoot scientists than allow

them to build the machines that would
bring about the singularity. How can Kurzweil be certain that a war isn’t brewing
between technological acceptance and technological rejection?

Transcendent

Man

already raised this concern, highlighting the manner in
which fundamentalist
religions will respond to perceived threats.

Even while accepting the possibilities raised by DeGaris, Kurzweil is quick to point out
the problems with such a war. There can be no Us vs. Them over technology when we
are all using the s
ame technology. Already, cell phones and other modern day
necessities have become common place all over the world. Even if a war between the
technological haves and technological have
-
nots did occur, the haves would when
easily. Technology is power. In Kur
zweil’s words, “It would be like the U.S. fighting the
Amish.”

So the question begs itself, if there’s not going to be a war, and if Kurzweil is so
optimistic about the singularity, why does he even bother talking to us about it? Why
write a book? Why go o
n tours speaking at conventions as diverse as video gaming and
Brazilian business?

Perhaps Kurzweil realizes that so many of the promises of intelligence and technology
come with risks of tragedy. He was quick to point out during the panel discussion that
he is helping design the rapid response system for bio
-
technological terrorist attacks.
The dangers of our own technological process loom heavily in these years leading up to
the singularity. So Kurzweil is taking precautions, I think. He’s seeding us with

the hope
for a grander future.

If there is a choice to be made, a decision about whether or not we will use technology
to destroy us or to change us, I think Kurzweil is urging us to decide to change rather
than fall to calamity. In that way, Kurzweil is
no different than many other successful
modern day rainmakers. He’s asking us to move from fear to hope, to push beyond our
current childhood and embrace a greater destiny. In philosophy, at least, Ray Kurzweil
has already become the transcendent man.



HTTP://CROSSFITLISBE
TH.COM/2012/05/15/TH
E
-
WORLD
-
IS
-
BRUTAL
-
AND
-
YOU
-
MUST
-
BE
-
BRAVE/

THE WORLD IS BRUTAL
AND YOU MUST BE BRAV
E

MAY

15,

2012

BY

LISBETH


wish I could
tell you otherwise.

I wish I could fill your days with new barbells and kettlebells and
beautiful, inspiring PRs. I wish I could tell you that the path to success is shiny and bright and
sunshine will come out of your ass.

But that’s not going to happen.

And stop listening to the people who feed you that bullshit. The
world is a much darker place. There are no fucking unicorns. Just horses with pointy shit glued on
their noses. And yeah, the world can be a cold place. And vicious. And sometimes seemingly d
evoid
of any real meaning. You can lose yourself in the world, searching for soul.

But don’t.

There is soul and you know how to look for it.

You must look for it. You must find it. Just because
the world is brutal doesn’t mean that you get to hide yourself

off from it and live the life of the
complainer, the person who never gets a break, the suckass whiner with the perpetually doomed
viewpoint, certain that life’s suckerpunch is always headed for them. Don’t search for pity. Don’t
settle for consolation. F
ight for victory.

Salvation sits right at your feet.

It’s just a stupid barbell, but it’s one kick
-
ass weapon against the darkness. Against the brutality of
the world. Against the brutality of your own thoughts. Pick it up and the world gets better, at lea
st in
your own mind.

And that’s where everything starts, isn’t it?

Change is born of one person, one mind, one action.
Somebody who says

“Yeah, this shit sucks but I’m not going down. Take this, you fuckers!”

The world is brutal, and you must be brave.

But

you have a barbell. You can do something. And
then another thing. And another. You change. Things change. We change.


“
Get the fuck on it.
”



HTTP://ALCSTUDIES.OR
G/2012/08/17/SCIENCE
-
RELIGION
-
MAGIC/

Science, Religion &

Magic

We have a tendency to see science, religion and magic as mutually exclusive, rather than as related, even co
-
dependent, phenomena.

Science grew out of alchemy and the search

for the divine secret of matter for the purpose of transforming lead into
gold (much like


derivatives were used to package and turn worthless loans into profit on Wall Street) .

The discipline of empirical

thought added to

alchemy invented science.
Driven by the search for profit, science gave
rise to industrial and technological revolutions: iron,


steam,

electricity and the

age of the machine.

A recent

article

in

the

Atlantic

describes the depiction of technology in J.R.R. Tolkien’s

Lord of the Rings
. Men, elves,
dwarves and wizards allied themselves to defeat Sauron, Sarumon and the orcs. who sought to
subjugate the old
magic of Middle Earth with a newer, darker force:

“The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war

with the sword and the spear and the iron fist…”

In this world
, outside the realm of fiction, it’s not always clear which forces are enlightened and which are
more
Mephistophelian.

Sometimes they are a little of both.

Scientists and technologists are susceptible to whim, fancy and ego as the rest of us. We ass
ume their training in the
modern magic of engineering, computer science or medicine gives them more insight or a monopoly on truth. But
their discoveries are often

Faustian

in nature. Could
we have had antibiotics without genetic engineering? Central
heat without global warming? What bargains are we willing to make and have made for us? And by whom?

David

Noble

describes religious belief as an element of scientific and technological pursuit. Galileo and Copernicus
felt they were doing God’s work. Isaac Newton, who almost single
-
handedly invented physics, dabbled in alchemy
and was a
Mason. Robert K. Oppenheimer quoted the

Bhagavad
-
Gita

as he watched the atomic bomb explode.
Today

visionaries

such as Steve Jobs want to re
-
make the world ‘insanely great’ in their own images. Futurists such
as

Ray

Kurzweil

want to transcend it. Technological determinism, no less than religious zeal, tells us what must be
so. Do we have a choice?

We persist in the misapprehension that science is a thing, a collection of objective, immutable facts, rather
than a
process. Michael Polanyi argues in

Science,

Faith

&

Society

that this process owes as much to inspiration and
intuition as logic.

Perhaps it is
no

accident that at the same time we are overrun by devices that hold our thoughts, guide our steps,
and organize our love lives,

so many take refuge in the old magic of

sword and sorcery and vampire fantasies.

Are our iPhones and tablets that much differe
nt than

idolatrous fetishes and talismans carried as repositories of
power to attract luck or repel evil? What is Facebook but a virtual

altar to the graven image of ourselves?


HTTP://FIDONET.OZZMO
SIS.COM/ECHOMAIL.PHP
/EDGE_ONLINE/816BF89
FD90C46B1.HTML

From:

Jeff Snyder


To:

All


Date:

2009
-
05
-
24 21:30:00


Subject:

Image Of The Beast And Cybernetics


For years now, in my articles, I have speculated that the "image of
the

beast", described in the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, might

be directly related to computer technology, artificial intelligence and

robotics. The more I read about the current developments in these various

areas, the more I become
convinced that what the Apostle John may have seen

in his vision is some type of cybernetic entity which will

"miraculously" be

brought to life; or at the very least, it will be some type of large

computer monitor, which will work in conjunction with advan
ced artificial

intelligence. Revelation tells us:


"And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles

which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that

dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the
beast, which had

the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the

image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause

that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed."

Revelation
13:14
-
15, KJV


Naturally, such ideas are not limited to the realm of Bible
-
believing

Christians. Some very serious
-
minded individuals, including scientists and

writers alike, have contemplated these very same possibilities for decades,

as we see by the fol
lowing news article.



The Coming Superbrain


By JOHN MARKOFF
-

NYT


May 23, 2009



Mountain View, Calif.
--

It's summertime and the Terminator is back. A

sci
-
fi movie thrill ride, "Terminator Salvation" comes complete with a

malevolent artificial
intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project

that gained self
-
awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant
--

perhaps a bit like athlete's foot
--

to be dispatched forthwith.


The notion that a self
-
aware computing system would emerge spont
aneously

from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks

goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial F

for Frankenstein." A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it

foretold an ever
-
more
-
intercon
nected telephone network that spontaneously

acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over

financial, transportation and military systems.


Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers

and eccentric comp
uter prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious

attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as

a new round of start
-
ups that are designing everything from next
-
generation

search engines to machines that listen or that a
re capable of walking around

in the world. A.I.'s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the

question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously,

perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how

quickly.


The concept of ultrasmart computers
--

machines with "greater than human

intelligence"
--

was dubbed "The Singularity" in a 1993 paper by the

computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that

the acceleration of technological progr
ess had led to "the edge of change

comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." This thesis has long struck

a chord here in Silicon Valley.


Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human

functions with computer
-
driven machin
es. These machines can see and hear,

respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the

Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self
-
aware and

superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better com
puters

and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead

to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.


The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation

of computer hackers, engineers

and programmers have come to believe deeply

in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon

Moore, a co
-
founder of the chip maker Intel.


In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number

transistors on silicon
chips with each new technology generation, which led

to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then "Moore's Law"
--

which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of

industrial change
--

has come to personify an industry
that lives on

Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner.


Several years ago the artificial
-
intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took

the idea one step further in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near: When

Humans Transcend

Biology." He sought to expand Moore's Law to encompass more

than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great

precision the arrival of post
-
human evolution, which he said would occur in

2045.


In Dr. Kurzweil's telling, rapidly increasin
g computing power in concert

with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not

only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological

invention, with unpredictable consequences.


Profiled in the documentary "Tr
anscendent Man," which had its premier last

month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due

later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one
-
man marketing machine for the

concept of post
-
humanism. He is the co
-
founder of Singularit
y University, a

school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal
--

to

"assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand

and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and

apply, focus and

guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges."


Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil

envisions "uploading," or the idea that the contents of our brain and

thought processes can somehow be translated into a
computing environment,

making a form of immortality possible
--

within his lifetime.


That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard
-
nosed

technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the

Kurzweilian romance with supermac
hines as a new form of religion.


The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity

as "the Rapture of the nerds." Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine,

notes, "People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it
is

going to happen before they die."


However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where

communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own

book, "The Technium," forecasting the emergence of a global brain
--

t
he

idea that the planet's interconnected computers might someday act in a

coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn't certain

about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.


Others who have observed the increasing power of
computing technology are

even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and

venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in

Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves

with their

technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent

machines.


Mr. Joy, a co
-
founder of Sun Microsystems, still believes that. "I wasn't

saying we would be supplanted by something," he said. "I think a

catastrophe

is more likely."


Moreover, ther
e is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the

"machines of loving grace," of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far

darker, of the "Terminator" ilk.


"I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects

as becom
ing the dominant political question of the century," said Hugo de

Garis, an Australian artificial
-
intelligence researcher, who has written a

book, "The Artilect War," that argues that the debate is likely to end in

global war.


Concerned about the same pot
ential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S.

Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea

of "friendly artificial intelligence," an engineering discipline that would

seek to ensure that future machines would remain our serva
nts or equals

rather than our masters.


Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to

need to rush to the barricades. The artificial
-
intelligence industry has

advanced in fits and starts over the past half
-
century, since the
term

"artificial intelligence" was coined by the Stanford University computer

scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their

Pentagon backers that the
construction of an artificially intelligent

machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original

optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I.

start
-
up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as "the A.I. w
inter."


Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster

Paul Saffo to proclaim: "never mistake a clear view for a short distance."


Indeed, despite this high
-
technology heartland's deeply held consensus about

exponential progress,

the worst fate of all for the Valley's digerati would

be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the

singularity.


"Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before

the 'great dawn,' " said Gary Bradski, a Sil
icon Valley roboticist.



"Life's not fair."



http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/08/11/the
-
kurzwild
-
man
-
in
-
the
-
night/


The Kurzwild Man in the Night


“
It’s

as

if

you

took

a

lot

of

very

good

food

and

some

dog

excrement

and

blended

it

all

up

so

that

you

can’t

possibly

figure

out

what’s

good

or

bad.

It’s

an

intimate

mixture

of

rubbish

and

good

ideas,

and

it’s

very

hard

to

disentangle

the

two,

because

these

are

smar
t

people;

they’re

not

stupid.”

–

Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, on the books of Ray Kurzweil and
Hans Moravec. [See Ross, Greg. "
An

interview

with

Dougl
as

R.

Hofstadter
." American
Scientist. Retrieved 2011
-
08
-
10.]

It is not very often that I see something that simultaneously evokes sympathy, anger and
pity. I am a regular viewer of ABC’s “Nightline
”

program which airs beginning at 2330 in
most of the US.
It’s part of my ‘wind
-
down ritual’ at the end of the day. Often, I’m
reading, or otherwise engaged while the bits and bytes comprising the program make
their way from geosynchronous orbit and chatter out of the television. The introduction
to the 09 August

program caught my attention, because it was to feature Ray Kurzweil,
talking about practical immortality. Of course, I know who Kurzweil is
–

both of them.
There is the maverick Edisonian inventor who brought us the

Kurzweil

Reader

(and thus
the CCD flatbed scanner and the text
-
to
-
speech synthesizer) and the Kurzweil who
transformed digital musical instrumentation with his

Kurzweil

K250

mus
ic synthesizer.
And then, well then there is the Ray Kurzweil who brought us the idea of the Singularity,
and three books that expound scientifically bankrupt ideas for ‘do it yourself’
interventive gerontology:

The

10%

Solution

for

a

Healthy

Life

Fantastic

Voyage:

Live

Long

Enough

to

Live

Forever
,
TRANSCEND:

Nine

Steps

to

Living

Well

Forever
.

And last, but by no means least, there is the Ray Kurzweil who made one of the creepiest
movies I’ve ever seen, “The Singularity is Near,” which I viewed as a

rough cut in a
private screening in Europe. That film was the near perfect combination of suggested
transgendered autoerotic pedophilia with narcissism of cosmic proportions. I watched
it, immobilized as one is when witnessing a public beheading, or the t
orture of small
animals in an Egyptian souk. I was immobilized in a way that only disbelief and shock
immobilize you. An extended trailer of his latest documentary,

Transcendent

Man

is
available here: h
ttp://transcendentman.com/

The “
Nightline”

segment

on Kurzweil opened as follows:

“Ray

Kurzweil,

a

prominent

inventor

and

“futurist”

who

has

long

predicted

tha
t

mind

and

machine

will

one

day

merge,

has

been

making

arrangements

to

talk

to

his

dead

father

through

the

help

of

a

computer.

“I

will

be

able

to

talk

to

this

re
-
creation,”

he

explained.

“Ultimately,

it

will

be

so

realistic

it

will

be

like

talking

to

my

fa
ther.”

Kurzweil’s

father,

an

orchestra

conductor,

has

been

gone

for

more

than

40

years.

However,

the

63
-
year
-
old

inventor

has

been

gathering

boxes

of

letters,

documents

and

photos

in

his

Newton,

Mass.,

home

with

the

hopes

of

one

day

being

able

to

create

an

avatar,

or

a

virtual

computer

replica,

of

his

late

father.

The

avatar

will

be

programmed

to

know

everything

about

Kurzweil’s

father’s

past,

and

will

think

like

his

father

used

to,

if

all

goes

according

to

plan.

“You

can

certainly

argue

that,

philosophical
ly,

that

is

not

your

father,”

Kurzweil

said.

“That

is

a

replica,

but

I

can

actually

make

a

strong

case

that

it

would

be

more

like

my

father

than

my

father

would

be,

were

he

to

live.”

Said

to

look

and

sound

like

Woody

Allen’s

nerdier

younger

brother,

Kurzwe
il

has

been

working

on

predicting

the

future

for

decades.

At

age

17,

he

was

invited

to

appear

on

the

CBS

show

“I’ve

Got

a

Secret”

to

demonstrate

how

a

computer

program

he

invented

could

compose

music.

Kurzweil

went

on

to

invent

optical

scanners,

machines

t
hat

read

for

the

blind

and

synthesizers.

Still

inventing

today,

Kurzweil

has

developed

a

reputation

for

himself

from

just

making

predictions,

mostly

about

how

fast

our

technology

is

advancing.”

The

program

continued

to

document

Kurzweil’s

plan

to

recreate

his

father,

and

he

argues

that

this

can

be

done

by

using

documents,

photographs

and

his

own

memory

of

the

man.

At

one

point,

he

even

asserts

that

such

an

emulation

would

be

“more

like

my

father

than

my

father,

had

he

lived.”

Sympathy? Yes, I felt a great d
eal of sympathy because I too have lost those I have loved
to death, and also suffered, and suffer still, because I lack the power to bring them back
to life.

Anger? Yes, a fair bit of anger because what Kurzweil is proposing insults the
intelligence of
anyone who has even the sketchiest conception of what it is to be human.
The idea that a person can be inferred from boxes of paper documents and photographs
with technology, extant or foreseeable, let alone in Kurzweil’s possession now, is
ludicrous. That

Kurzweil’s insight into the nature of personhood, including his own, is
so shallow and uni
-
dimensional goes a long way towards explaining the cluelessness
with which he is pursuing his social engineering campaign to make radical life
extension, cryonics a
nd uploading socially acceptable.

The “Nightline” program was surprisingly respectful and matter of fact. Kurzwel has
superb public relations people and the “Nightline” editors were amply stocked with
photos, film clips and in short, a very impressive visu
al montage to accompany
Kurzweil’s modest proposal for resurrection of the dead from letters, news clippings, old
photos and presumably rent receipts and cancelled checks documenting visits to the
dentist or the haberdasher.

But as even most of the most un
reflective and superficial dullards understand, if only
emotionally, a person is not and cannot be reconstructed from the empty wrappers of a
life long ended. A few bars of melody, a scent, a fragment of a recorded voice, the taste of
something long forgot
ten, all of these can, and do from time to time evoke in reflective
and self aware people, streams of memories, and with those memories countless
connections, relationships, thoughts sounds, sensations and yes, and very
importantly,

feelings.

One of the th
ings I found so appalling and so narcissistically
selfish about the Kurzweil interview is that he is not really interested in having his father
live again, rather he is only interested in having his

personal

experience

of his father
available for his self
-
gratification again. It doesn’t matter what his father thinks or feels,
it only matters that the Avatar Father makes Kurzweil think and feel that he has been
returned to life. The equation of an avatar of the person with the person himself is an
utterly re
pellant thing, because at its root it is the penultimate in dehumanization; and I
think that on some level Kurzweil must know this, since he is trying to persuade the
rubes that it really

is

resurrection.


“And

as

soon

as

I

had

recognized

the

taste

of

the

piece

of

madeleine

soaked

in

her

decoction

of

lime
-
blossom

which

my

aunt

used

to

give

me

(although

I

did

not

yet

know

and

must

long

postpone

the

discovery

of

why

this

memory

made

me

so

happy)

immediately

the

old

grey

house

upon

the

street,

where

her

room

w
as,

rose

up

like

a

stage

set

to

attach

itself

to

the

little

pavilion

opening

on

to

the

garden

which

had

been

built

out

behind

it

for

my

parents

(the

isolated

segment

which

until

that

moment

had

been

all

that

I

could

see);

and

with

the

house

the

town,

from

morning

to

night

and

in

all

weathers,

the

Square

where

I

used

to

be

sent

before

lunch,

the

streets

along

which

I

used

to

run

errands,

the

country

roads

we

took

when

it

was

fine.”

That is the merest sampling of what a person is. And as beautiful and evocati
ve of the
complex tangle of memory, sensation, reaction and the recursion of all those things as
that passage is, even a hundred million, or a billion like it would not describe the mind
of the dullest human being who moves amongst us.

If you still have an
y doubts about the staggering volume of information, not to mention the
unique wetware on which it is processed, that comprises the human mind, consider the recent
scientific verification that people exist who have “superior autobiographical memory,” or
hy
perthymesia.[1
-
3] These individuals have essentially complete audiovisual recall of almost
every waking moment of their lives. They can “run the movie” of their life experience forward or
backward in their head and extract information from what they “re
-
ex
perience.” As actress
Marilu Hennner, one of those identified with this trait remarked on the CBS documentary
program “60 Minutes”:”It’s like putting in a DVD and it queues up to a certain place. I’m there
again, so I’m looking out from my eyes and seeing
things visually as I would have that day.”
These are otherwise normal individuals who have no profound cuts in normal cognitive function
which might be used to explain the extraordinary storage of such memory minutiae.



Given the flashes of such recall mo
st of us experience momentarily and erratically in our
lives, this phenomenon begs the question: are all of us recording and storing such a
broad bandwidth of information? Is it that we are not storing it, or that we cannot, and
for good reason, access it
with such fidelity at will? The individuals who possess this
capability all describe it as burdensome and at times traumatic
–

memories come
unbidden, constantly triggered by cues in the everyday world around them. And with
some of those memories come sear
ing emotions. If we need an evolutionary reason for
the stoppering
-
up of such a prodigious memory in dark, amber bottles, to be dispensed
only in needful draughts, these people are living examples.

Kurzweil seems to be suffering from an all too common synd
rome in highly successful
mavericks who have a history of repeatedly proving the experts (as well as their critics)
wrong. This course through life is much the same as fame
–

especially if it brings fortune
with it, and thus the ability to surround oneself

with people who either share your
worldview, or who will (or actually do) agree with any idea or obsession that takes
charge. Removed from the tempering focus that reality affords most people, it becomes
easy to slip into a world where the line between yo
ur dreams and desires, and what is
really possible, becomes blurred and then disappears altogether. Kurzweil appears to be
well on his way there, if he hasn’t reach that final destination already, and that, well,
that is just pitiful.

Many of Kurzweil’s id
eas are crazy
–

a mixture of wishful thinking, inappropriate
application of animal data to humans, and in the case of his resurrection scheme,
poisonous and dangerous to cryonics on at least two levels. First, it is wrong
–

people
are not scraps of paper,
or even whole heaps of them. That is a demeaning idea at best,
and a dangerous one at worst, if it is taken seriously. Second, while Kurzweil still
commands respect, at some point the men in the media with the butterfly nets will come
calling. Kurzweil’s a
nti
-
aging program is much more likely to shorten his lifespan and
deplete the pocketbook of the average person, upon whom he urges its use, than it is to
provide any medical benefit.

This kind of disconnected, narcissistic spiral carried out privately is a

thing that evokes
pity, and even shame in seeing it. Those of us who have been involved in life extension
for 20, 30, or 40 years have seen it before; increasingly desperate and delusion belief
that barely suggestively beneficial molecules in animal studi
es will confer decades of
added life, and finally, the decline into frailty and death. As I watched the “Nightline”
program, I realized that there is yet another advantage to cryonics that I had not
previously considered, and that is the extraordinary dign
ity and courage with which
most cryonicists confront the end of this life cycle. While many were ridiculed for their
lack of realism for a lifetime, most were men and women who did what they reasonably
could to live as long as possible now, made no exagger
ated or unreasonable claims about
cryonics
–

and in fact, regarded it and represented it as what it currently is
–

a long shot
experimental procedure that may well not work, but for them was infinitely better than
the alternative.

The extraordinarily accur
ate, generally matter of fact, and with few exceptions dignified
coverage of Bob Ettinger’s passing into cryopreservation is an example. It’s a worthy
example and the way we should strive to be seen. Kurzweil reportedly has cryonics
arrangements with Alcor
. I’m glad to hear that, because I think he is a fundamentally a
very good and very decent man who shares our core values. He has improved and
enriched the lives of countless people through his scientific and technological
innovations. However, as I can te
ll you from experience, while many disabilities are now
tolerated in our society, crazy and creepy are not amongst them.

http://www.cdbaby.com/m/cd/fredrickurzweil


Fredric Kurzweil 1912
-
1970


Cond
uctor, composer, author, educator, humanitarian, first chairman of the Department of Music at Queensborough
Community College of The City University of New York; former Dean of the New York College of Music; former
executive director of the Opera Workshop
at Chatham College, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; distinguished faculty
member of Fordham University, New York University, and Queens College; conductor for the New York City Center
Opera and the St. Louis Grand Opera; music director and conductor for The After

Dinner Opera Company and the
Mobile (Alabama) Opera with which he was affiliated for ten years and where he was honored with the presentation
of the key to the city.


Poem about

Fredric Kurzweil


By Aurelia Scott


The green hill, the white hill Has waves of students Pouring over it in bright colors;

Some find their way to A kind man with love in his face Who reaches out his hand To give them music.

They take what he gives, and through him They sense in the beat of

the time The eternal behind the time.

Sometimes on a formal occasion Between the speeches and the ceremonies Comes a pause and he plays,

And the lived experience of a great soul Screams out through his fingers.

Sometimes at a rollicking party His songs

bring a lift and a cheer As he waves around humor with light.

Or he sits alone and composes Music that moves and speaks;

Tentative, his hand strays over The keys, then strikes with firmness,

As his fingers obey what the heart tells. Oh heart, loving he
art that went out To all who had need of you
–


In us who loved and listened there lives In the beat of the times you blessed
, The eternal behind the time.

The dissonances, the gloom Of a strife
-
torn world were brightened

When he caught them and pounded t
hem Out till they shone like a band Of silver horns in the sun.

The hill remembers the music;

The hill will never forget.

The tenderness of the man Is what we remember, the smile,


And the heart that beat for us all.



HTTP://INFOMESH.NET/
2001/SWINTRO/

What Is The Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be
easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as

being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a
globally linked database.

The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners
-
Lee, inventor of the
WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the
World Wide Web c
onsortium (
W3C
) working to improve, extend and
standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on
have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still
very much in their infanci
es, and although the future of the project in general
appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely
direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

What's the rationale for such a system? Data that is geneally hidden aw
ay in
HTML files is often useful in some contexts, but not in others. The problem
with the majority of data on the Web that is in this form at the moment is that
it is difficult to use on a large scale, because there is no global system for
publishing data

in such a way as it can be easily processed by anyone. For
example, just think of information about local sports events, weather
information, plane times, Major League Baseball statistics, and television
guides... all of this information is presented by n
umerous sites, but all in
HTML. The problem with that is that, is some contexts, it is difficult to use this
data in the ways that one might want to do so.

So the Semantic Web can be seen as a huge engineering solution... but it is
more than that. We will
find that as it becomes easier to publish data in a
repurposable form, so more people will want to pubish data, and there will be
a knock
-
on or domino effect. We may find that a large number of Semantic
Web applications can be used for a variety of differe
nt tasks, increasing the
modularity of applications on the Web. But enough subjective reasoning...
onto how this will be accomplished.

The Semantic Web is generally built on syntaxes which use URIs to
represent data, usually in triples based structures: i.
e. many triples of URI
data that can be held in databases, or interchanged on the world Wide Web
using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the task. These
syntaxes are called "Resource Description Framework" syntaxes.

URI
-

Uniform
Resource Identifier

A URI is simply a Web identifier: like the strings starting with "http:" or "ftp:"
that you often find on the World Wide Web. Anyone can create a URI, and
the ownership of them is clearly delegated, so they form an ideal base
technology

with which to build a global Web on top of. In fact, the World Wide
Web is such a thing: anything that has a URI is considered to be "on the