Assuming Control

There are many moments in our life when we just don’t feel like doing something, and we start making excuses. I’m tired today, I’m busy, I’m not motivated enough. I’ll do it tomorrow. We make tons of excuses. There are times when we are objective, calculative, and logical. We know that working out is good for us. We know that eating healthy is good for us. And yet when the time for us to execute those thoughts has come, we just don’t feel like doing it. Making new habits is hard. Sometimes it works, many times it doesn't. Why do some efforts work out, and some efforts just fail miserably? What is the difference? Did I not work hard enough? Why? Why didn't I work hard enough? This is a scenario you can also come across in Sam Harris’s book called Free Will(2012), where he argues that our traditional concept of free will just doesn't make sense, and I find myself agreeing with his ideas.

If only our primal parts of the brain that rebel against our logical reasoning could be kept under control of our logical part of the brain. What if our prefrontal cortex could exert certain power over our primal parts of the brain such as the amygdala? What if our conscious mind could control the degree of our motivation, emotion, happiness, and such? Now you won’t have to make excuses as to why you didn't do your workout today. Why? Because you will have done your workout, just like you had planned. What if you don’t have to be lonely, or sad, or depressed, or angry, when you don’t want to, as you have made the conscious decision that being in any of these emotionally unstable states is not a preferable state to be in?

Perhaps certain brain implants in the future will enable me to have conscious control over my emotions, motivations, and primal thinking.

Simply put, I want more control over myself. Full control over my body and mind. Or as much control as possible.

Non-Humanoid Limbs for Humans

I’d like to see non-humanoid prosthetic limbs. We see a lot of progress from places like Carnegie Mellon’s Experimental Biomechatronics Lab and the Biomechatronics Group from MIT Media Labs headed by Hugh Herr. They do a lot of work related to mimicking the biological limbs. No doubt that our humanoid limbs are quite well designed and at the moment they are ahead of their artificial cousins. Most of all the environment we work and live in - they are all designed for humanoid users.

Nevertheless, I think it’d be interesting and novel to see prosthetics that don’t try to be human, but try to be something entirely different. If they can get the job done much better than humanoid limbs, I don’t see why we shouldn't try. I also wonder how our brain would adapt to the new non-humanoid limbs.

Ever imagine having 4 arms? Our brains have never come up against such a task. How would they handle it?

A Tool Full of Questions

Questions are very important. In order to solve problems, find answers, and roll around ideas, you have to make sure that you are asking the right questions. Asking questions, I would say, is the single most important thing we can do as conscience thinking creatures.

Everyone seems to look for answers. Always. They want answers. They never seem to bother asking if the question is correct. Me? I go for the questions first. I ask myself more questions about the questions and problems that I try to solve in the first place. There are numerous secondary questions that must be asked in order to answer a single question. Questions expand the horizon of our knowledge. It makes us think more about a subject. It makes us curious. It leads us to new places. Questions allow us to get started on things, they provide a starting point, and they help you snowball your group of ideas. The more you ask questions about a particular idea the bigger it grows and the larger and more specific it gets.

I've never seen anyone attempt to make an AI question things. A questioning AI. Wouldn't that be awesome? An AI, a program, or a simple algorithm that asks questions based on the things you say or ask. A tool that can work alongside with the thinker, giving feedback, leading his thoughts, giving him something to ponder on. I've only ever seen AI’s that try to provide answers. I may be wrong but I've never seen or heard of an AI that questions things. I don’t necessarily mean a genuine strong AI that really is curious and questions things in the sense that we question ourselves. I mean a program that at least can ask questions using a given statement or question. It doesn't have to “know” the meaning of anything. All it needs is some basic language parsing skills and it's good to go.

Basically a simple tool that helps someone with an idea can get the ball rolling, someone who wants a brainstorming sessions to start picking up pace, a tool that works in tandem with the thinker. This program is not built to supply you with answers, nor does it “know” anything it asks. It is simply a tool that you use to build a foundation of a particular idea, and it allows you to grow and develop on top of that foundation. You feed it a statement or a question, and based on the supplied sentence the program will spit out a number of questions that are related to it. It is primarily for people who have a hard time defining or starting work on a problem, or someone who finds it hard to grow and expand on existing ideas.

For example, say I feed it the statement:

“I want to lose weight.”

It then spits out a couple of sentences based on what I just said.

Who is I?
What does it mean to lose weight?
Why would you want to lose weight?
How do you lose weight?
When will you lose weight?”
......

By asking these questions to the thinker who posed the original statement, it allows the thinker to expand on his plan of losing weight. It gives him something specific to think about.

I’d love something like this. A questioning tool. A questioning … friend. A tool full of questions.

Standing at the Edge of Today

Standing at the edge of today, slowly I fade away. I do not know what awaits me on the other side, but boy am I ready for another day.

I thought it had a nice ring to it. Wanted to archive it.

Power to Our Environment

I was in the car with my dad, and he was talking about the Internet of Things. He pointed to a tree and said “Imagine what it would be like to have that tree try to contact it’s caretaker through the internet. Imagine what it would be like to receive a message from your building saying it had a leak in the lower basement. How weird and novel would that be?”

And what he said opened the floodgates to new ideas. Basically what he said led me to think about things like, “What if everything was smarter? What if our environment was smarter? What if it could respond and ask for help in dire situations? What if the environment could express its wants and needs?”

Imagine equipping the world’s trees with the internet and some basic AI and sensory devices so that it could monitor its own health, and make decisions based on its situation, and it could communicate through the internet with its other fellow trees. Share information, spread new data, and ask for help to its neighboring trees for some more water. A global network of smart trees. They’d be able to cooperate and maximize their oxygen production, basically becoming super trees.

Let’s not stop with trees. Basically we could make our environment smarter, more capable, and more effective, by giving them tools to think, coordinate, and cooperate with one another.

We’d be giving the environment and all the other species suffering under our reign the means to rebel against human tyranny. How awesome is that?

Words, Languages, Ideas and Concepts

There is no doubt that language has played a very significant role in the general advancement of the human race. It’s allowed us to convey our thoughts and information through time and space, allowing the preservation of information and knowledge through centuries and millenniums.

However, that is not to say that words and sentences, language in general, is flawless. Languages and words, they are not perfect. They get the job done, but they are far from perfect information relay mechanisms. We can say one thing, and mean another, someone listening may get the wrong idea, sometimes we can’t find the appropriate words to wrap our ideas in… there is plenty of room for misinterpretation. Language; while it is a wonderful communication system and helps the proliferation of ideas, at the same time, it hampers and restricts the growth of intellectual conversation.

Simply put, we start to put too much emphasize on the words and sentences themselves instead of tackling the ideas and concepts behind these superficial tools of communication. We try to figure out what this particular word means to that particular speaker, we spend tremendous energy in trying to define things, trying to restrict things.

Come on people. Let’s not obsess and trip over the words themselves. Words are only vessels in which we try to convey meanings, thoughts, and ideas. They are what is truly important. Let’s not fight turf wars over definitions themselves. We should be focusing on the idea and concept behind the words and not the words themselves.

Nanotechnology, Meet Biomechatronics.

Nanotechnology will play a big role in almost every conceivable field of science and technology. I think. Especially in human augmentation and the field of medicine. A while back I said that I’d like to focus on biomechatronics, aerospace engineering, and neuroengineering. I think nanotechology will enable novel things. Things that we have never been able to conceive of before the advent of molecular manufacturing.

Imagine if we could coat artificial limbs with special nanobots that can sense miniscule force and send the data to our brains where we can interpret them, giving us unprecedented precision sensory limbs and apparatuses.

Feel that soft wind blow against your brand new artificial and superior arms.