Today, slashdot is running an artcle about how the U.S. army has developed power suits, which give the wearer super-human strength. When this technology comes down in price, it could have lots of practical applications. Imagine how useful it would be to wear one of these while working in a lumber yard or moving hay bails.
Even more interesting, Japan has developed something similar, and they plan on making it commercially available within four years. The price range is expected to be between $4,500 and $9k.
If you haven’t already heard of REAL IDs, you will know about them soon. An act was passed in 2005 requiring all citizens to have them. The REAL ID will be required to board airplanes, open bank accounts, and to enter any federal building. The video below believes that these ID cards are the end goal of an elite ruling class. It also mentions RFID chips that can be used to track our movements. Fortunately these chips are not part of the legislation, but they are still a real possibility.
The events that have lead to REAL IDs may not be the conspiracy this video makes them out to be. But, REAL IDs will give the government a more effective way of controlling what you can and cannot do. Such IDs shouldn’t exist in a “land of the free”. The government doesn’t need to know where you are, and you shouldn’t need their permission to open a bank account. The more control we give to the government, the less control we have over our lives.
Dan Gilbert on how we rarely manage to accurately forecast how happy we will be in the future:
Even if you are not a hedonic utilitarian, you’d probably agree that genuine human happiness is a significant good. Any discussion of a future action, event, or technology carries at least an implicit judgment about its effect of people’s wellbeing. The biases Gilbert indicates suggest that we are overly cautious about negative events and overly optimistic about positive ones.
Futurist reactions to technology provide a clear example of this tendency to exaggerate benefits and harms. Futurists tend to be Luddites or technophiles. A publication bias might be assisting this phenomenon — opinions expressing indifference aren’t as viable for publication — but both biases play a part in shaping the landscape of thought. Numerous anecdotes chronicle how individuals have underestimated the impact of technologies like cars, computers, or microwaves on the way we conduct our life. Despite this mistake, we often overestimate how the change created by a specific technology will alter our wellbeing.
Even though this argument mirrors what Gilbert had to say about technology, he is still too negative about technology in general. I agree that there is no one device that allows us to spend more time with our families, but technologies that increase worker productivity also increase the overall level of wealth, which gives individuals the chance to consume more leisure time. Occupants of wealthier countries report higher levels of satisfaction, (2), and individuals rate themselves about 1 point higher on a 10 point scale for each doubling of wealth. If technology continues to develop at the rate it has over the past 150 years, happiness levels will rise, particularly in poorer nations.
In the case of specific technologies, two cases are worth considering. First of all, gadgets of the type usually featured in magazines like Popular Science do not significantly change our state of wellbeing. As cool as they might initially seem, we become accustomed to them and soon return to our level of happiness prior to having them. On the other hand, more mundane innovations that alleviate chronic problems are more likely to improve our lives. Even though we quickly adapt to one-time events like winning the lottery, losing a limb, or purchasing a home theatre system, we don’t adapt to long commutes, continual noise, or long bouts of bad weather. Given this, flush toilets and air-conditioning have probably done more to improve our wellbeing than consumer electronics ever have.
Hat tip to Will Wilkinson, who has done some wonderful research on the significance of happiness research, for the video.
——————————————– blejkrajli is currently shopping for a laptop, despite the knowledge that brand-new circuits and transistors do not bring happiness.
The U.S. military is working on creating a chip that mimics the human brain.
The key to achieving the vision of the SyNAPSE program will be an unprecedented multidisciplinary approach that coordinates aggressive technology development in the following technical areas: 1) Hardware; 2) Architecture; 3) Simulation; and 4) Environment. Hardware includes neuromorphic electronics with novel, high density, plastic, synaptic components; Architecture includes neuromorphic design from microcircuits to complete system; Simulation includes large-scale digital simulation of neuromorphic circuits and functional neuromorphic systems; and Environment includes virtual training, testing and benchmarking for neuromorphic systems.
It will be interesting to see how this research develops. One potential problem is that the human brain is very much built to function in a human body. A chip modeled after the human brain might need a human-like environment to manifest its intelligence. DARPA mentions virtual reality, while I’m sure we’ll get there, virtual reality still falls very short of replicating the human-body experience.
I found out about this through brain stimulant, and I have practically plagiarized the article. Brain Stimulant is a little known but very interesting blog that focuses on new developments in neuroscience.
