Drowning in the Sea of Information

Too many bookmarks. Too many articles pocketed. Too many books to read. Too many lectures to attend.

I can already feel the rough seas of information starting to drag me down. The deep abyss underneath. The void of info-less dark. You can feel it pulling on your weary feet as wave after wave of information and data wash over you.

I can see the storm from here. Off in the distance. There it is. Do you see it? That rumbling. The clouds. And the lightening. We better start building a ship of some kind. Something to keep us afloat. At least something to keep us above the waters for the moment. Eventually we’ll need something bigger before the storm hits. Do you have anything in mind?

Human-Machine Symbiosis

My smartphone and laptop are a crucial part of me. My cognitive functions are not limited to my biological brain. They are distributed among the myriad of technologies we use every day and yet the way we interact with these technologies is, at the moment, very crude and archaic. We push buttons, touch, click, and type using our fingers. It’s served us well for the past few decades but it isn't going to cut it. I want a more intimate relationship with my technologies. A better human-machine interface. The world of biology and the world of information technology, the interface between two worlds, should become more intuitive and fast responding, more efficient, more intimate. A true human-machine symbiosis.

Personal Code of Life

Personal Code of Life

(ver.1)

Adhere to the Extropian Principles as they provide a good starting point.

1. Perpetual Progress
2. Self-Transformation
3. Practical Optimism
4. Intelligent Technology
5. Open Society
6. Self-Direction
7. Rational Thinking

In addition to the Extropian Principles listed above, the following guidelines should be taken into consideration.

1. Ideas and solutions deemed beneficial to humanity in general are to be free of all constraints and open to the public. 
2. Doing something solely for the purpose of fame and money is immensely distasteful. 
3. In order to break the system you must first step out of line and refuse to play the game. You must also make the current system obsolete by proposing a better alternative. 
4. You don't need anyone's approval or acknowledgement. You own will and reasoning is enough.
5. Keep in mind the well-being of all conscious entities.
6. From 2014-2030 you focus on the pursuit of enhancing human intelligence and cognition.
7. Advocate for the wide spread adoption of open source software/hardware and access transparency.
8. Boredom and familiarity are the two most dangerous evils. Avoid them at all costs.

Standing at the Edge of this World

"It’s not the end of this world but…" and she points to the horizon. 

I turn around and there it is. Off in the distance, I can see the unknown. A light so blindingly dark. 

"It’s beautiful." I say. 

"Do you think you’re ready?" she asks me. 

"No one should be." 

"Are you afraid?" 

"Should I be?"

Why Does Innovation Take Time?

For all the technological developments we humans are seeing every single day, and at an accelerated pace at that, too, I cannot help but feel… frustrated. I want it to happen faster. I want to be blown out of my mind constantly. Why does technological advancement take time and effort? Why doesn't it happen “automatically”?

According to Kirby Ferguson, creativity is the result of a combination of copying, transforming, and combining existing ideas. If this is to be true than perhaps we should approach innovation, technological and social advancement in a more systematic way. A systematic approach to innovation. Where new ideas are automatically birthed into reality by a machine, by a system that copies, transforms, and combines existing ideas.

Take arithmetic operations for an analogy. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We start out with 2 numbers. Let’s go with 2 and 3. We use this operation called addition, and we get a new number called 5. Cool. Let’s try subtracting. We could subtract 2 from 3 and get -1, or we could do it the other way around and get 1. We could try multiplying 2 and 3 to get 6. We could also try dividing; 2 divided by 3 would yield 2/3, 3 divided by 2 would net 3/2. With merely 4 types of mathematical operations we've expanded our group of numbers substantially. We started out with 2 and 3. One level deep and we already have 2, 3, 5, -1, 1, 6, 2/3, 3/2. On the way we've even discovered a new type of number, a number that seems to be quite different from what we originally started out with. Why stop at level one. We can do more operations this time with a bigger group of numbers at our disposal. We could do this for an infinite amount of time resulting in infinite amounts of new numbers. We can keep expanding our pool of numbers. Faster and faster our number pool would grow. Oh, how proud we would be.

Like arithmetic operations perhaps we can have operators for innovation. Innovative operations. Instead of numbers we start with ideas, memes. We “add, subtract, multiply, divide” ideas with these so called “innovation operators”. Oh, how fast our pool of ideas would grow! Imagine that. A systematic method to innovating. A system, a machine that churns out “ideas” at an unfathomable rate.

A Post-Gender Society

A post-gender society. A society where there is no concept of gender, nor is it on anyone’s radar. A society where gender plays no significant role in one’s life, nor is it any defining foundation of any human being. I wonder what a society would look like. Imagine a society where there is no differentiation between man and woman, or imagine a society where there are more than 2 genders. Perhaps 5 genders? Or an infinite amount of genders. A post-binary gender society. You can be a man one day, swap your body and rewire your brain the next day, becoming a woman with full feminine features, swap that personality for a tomboy the next, become asexual all together, and so on.

Freedom of choice. That’s it. That’s all it ever is about. Freedom of choice to choose between any gender, any physical body, any sexual orientation, any personality.