singularity

by: Chris Holmes

The breakthrough innovation development of the year so far is the White House’s upcoming plan to map the entire human brain.

It's that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That's great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March.

Thanks to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and computer processing ability, machines are now evolving faster than humans. At some point within the next decade, according to proponents of the Singularity, machines will become so intelligent that they will start making decisions for us in ways that we could never imagine or understand.

About a month ago I was asked to supply an article for the Ukrainian «Business» magazine. In a short essay I had to reflect on the obscure topics of the Future of Marketing. Would there be brands in 2031? What instruments CMO’s would have at that time? And aren’t we all supposed to be dead in December 2012 how different will the consumer be? This is when I realized that I haven’t written anything like this for a while. The future that I was predicting in Top Ten Trends in Marketing Innovation was about to happen now. However, 2031 was still a longer shot, so I gathered that I can let my imagination fly free.

The new experimental "brain chips" developed by researchers at IBM and DARPA represent a fundamental breakthrough in computing power. If these brain chips are ever commercialized, they would make possible what are essentially thinking, artificial brains. Just as the human brain is capable of building and re-wiring synapses as part of an evolutionary learning process, these IBM brain chips are able to form, re-form and strengthen artificial synapses, giving them the ability to take on tasks related to sentient beings. Instead of being mere calculators, the new era of computers would be able to "sense, perceive, interact and recognize" in the same way that humans can.

Forget the mouse and keyboard, and even the swipe, pinch and touch - the next generation of human-computer interactions will be the gesture, the body movement and even thoughts from the human brain.

Now that computers have progressed to the point where they can challenge humans on Jeopardy! and defeat a Grandmaster in a game of chess, it's time for us to ask serious philosophical questions about what it means to be "human" during a time of accelerating technological change.

by: Idris Mootee

Remember what you've read about Singularity? The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. Remember Ray Kurzweil? Inventor. Entrepreneur. Artificial Intelligence. Futurist. Author: "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" and "The Singularity is Near."

by: Roger Dooley

Berkeley neuroscientists report that they have been able to identify images subjects looked at solely by analyzing fMRI scans of the subjects' brains. Jack Gallant and his team at the University of California Berkeley published their findings in Nature.