License: Creative Commons By Attribution/Share-Alike/Noncommercial v4.0
I do not speak for my employers or clients, past or present.
Some of the things I'm going to talk about I work on in some capacity. Some of them I don't work on, but think are great ideas that could use more attention.
Name: Bryce A. Lynch
E-mail: drwho at virtadpt dot net
PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1
WWW: http://drwho.virtadpt.net/
Twitter: @virtadpt
I do stuff: https://about.me/drwho
These are all things I think we should be working to bring into everyday life.
The potential benefits of any of these technologies could improve the human condition immensely.. assuming that it gets into the hands of enough people.
These lofty goals will probably not come to pass explosively. They are being built step by step, advance by advance.
Some of these advances fly under our collective radar because they come from directions or communities that don't get much press.
Maybe some of these projects aren't as advanced as they could be for this reason.
Perhaps other projects aren't being used optimally relative to their problem spaces.
First described by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970).
Recently revisited by Rick Falkvinge in Swarmwise (2013) from a practical perspective.
How to assemble, motivate, and guide adhocracies to achieve specific goals. primary secondary
Best implemented as a brain trust of highly motivated people with diverse backgrounds and skillsets.
A subset of that brain trust comes together to solve specific problems and diperses back into the brain trust afterward.
The individuals in question gather and process information, draw conclusions, and implement solutions to the problems at hand.
Highly fluid structure, no central control mechanism.
An unobstructed communications platform so that participants can collaborate.
Information sharing platforms to store and analyze information.
A motivated group of individuals committed to carrying out tasks and achieving goals before everything else (like playing around online).
Access to good educational materials can be difficult. Many schools cannot afford to update their curricula.
General quality of STEM education in this country is sub-standard.
Teachers are overworked, badly underpaid, get no respect and little support.
We need to get our hands dirty.
We are all intelligent people with our eyes on our goals. We can step up to help.
All of us can teach something.
Libraries can always use people willing to help.
Hackerspaces regularly hold classes and are looking for instructors.
Community education programs seek both students and teachers.
KA Lite - Software which allows you to download parts of the Khan Academy archive, take the materials offline, organize the materials into classes, and go through the courses at your own pace. Or use them to hold class.
OSINT - Open Source INTelligence
Intelligence information collected from publically available sources. source source
Depending on whom you talk to in the intelligence community it is said to be more accurate than classified sources because people don't treat it the same way they treat classified material. They speak frankly about it, critique it.
It tends not to have an agenda or support a party line.
How do we make sense of it?
Information management tool for archiving and analyzing OSINT, principally for human rights defenders.
Has potential applications in other fields that use OSINT, even if it's not called that by practitioners.
Supports eleven languages.
Written in Java, designed to be as cross-platform as possible.
Used for collecting and analyzing reports, imagery, and evidence of human rights violations.
Data is entered into the application, stored as separate XML documents, indexed and then encrypted prior to storage.
Data is taggable and searchable.
Presents a GeoAPI so that data can be plotted on maps so that patterns can be found, events can be charted, and predictions can be made.
Not polished chrome cyberpunk limbs, but usable replacement limbs.
Originally conceived for children born with limb defects.
Later, people who have lost limbs due to accidents, misadventures and combat.
Normal prosthetic limbs are incredibly expensive.
Often between $5kus and $50kus. Many insurance companies won't cover them, some will partly cover on a case by case basis. source
Getting them repaired is expensive.
They don't grow as the wearer does, so they have to be replaced.
HacDC's Open Source Biosignal Amplifier
Open source: GPLv3
Can be configured as an EEG, EKG, or EMG.
Modular hardware architecture designed with safety as a primary goal.
Analog and USB 2.0 outputs.
Uses feedback AC coupling, active electrodes, driven shield, driven right leg circuit, and RF suppression to achieve noise levels of 1µV across 3kHz.
Bill of materials: Approximately $190us
Its low cost, low barrier to entry, and relatively small size would make it ideal for experimenting with myoelectric control of open source prosthetic limbs and potentially other devices.
Many of these things require a functioning communication network.
It's now blatantly obvious that everything that can possibly be used as a communications network is being monitored by somebody.
Two things about network surveillance equipment:
Today, information on birth control, sex education, information security, and activism get blocked.
Information on...
...could be filtered by the ISP you're connected to.
Maybe by accident. Maybe not.
Maybe somebody will compromise the network surveillance equipment and flip that switch for their own reasons.
There are people who spend incredible amounts of time and money forcing textbook publishers to water down science textbooks. source source
There are people who are protesting because Cosmos is back on the air.
(Fun fact: Carl Sagan received death threats for the original Cosmos.) source source
It's trivial to send a DMCA takedown request and get something you don't like removed. Like any of the above topics or criticisms thereof. source example example example example example example
Google reported that the number of DMCA takedown notices it receives has increased 711,887% in the last four years. source source
It's only a matter of time before somebody gets the bright idea to apply these tactics to stuff they don't like.
These are all things that exist or are happening right now.
We can build, modify, and use these things right now.
We can advance the state of the art in all of these fields.
We can use them to further our respective goals and use them as stepping stones toward the grand transhuman future that we talk so much about.
We can use a combination of one or more as part of an an X-threat mitigation or remediation programme.
The future does not come to us easily. It is built day by day, person by person, and technological advance by advance.
Those advances have to leave the lab and hit the streets.
These are technologies that we can use to make the world a better place right now.
Globally speaking, transhumanists are in the minority.
We are in a unique position to make a global contribution.
That contribution can be helping the human race advance toward the next step in its evolution by raising the quality of life and access to technological advances for as many as possible.
The future is up to us, and if we don't step out of the lab and get our boots on the ground where it really matters, we will not get the future we dream of.
We'll get someone else's, and it's anybody's guess as to how much say we'll have in it.
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