As most of you know from personal experience or from reading or hearing about it, it’s been a deeply intense few weeks. For me, alone, there were deaths and conference presentations and more deaths, and then more conferences. The most recent of these deaths was my uncle– more like a brother to me– two weeks…
Theorizing the Web 2015 was originally published on A Future Worth Thinking About
Building A Future Worth Thinking About
This is a version of the starting principles for a project I’ve been working on, in a number of realms. Hello there, I’m Damien, or @Wolven in a lot of places on the internet. I make my living at writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, “artificial intelligence,” human physical and mental augmentation, pop culture, and how they all relate.…
Whatever it is you aren’t doing—whatever you’ve been putting off creating or saying or teaching others—do it now. RIGHT NOW. We can’t waste anymore time. We have to make a plan. Make it huge and wild and desperate. We have to tell the core, the goal, to everyone we can. We have to find the…
Life, Death, and the Present Future was originally published on A Future Worth Thinking About
+Excitation+
As I’ve been mentioning in the newsletter, there are a number of deeply complex, momentous things going on in the world, right now, and I’ve been meaning to take a little more time to talk about a few of them. There’s the fact that some chimps and monkeys have entered the stone age; that…
A Present Worth Thinking About was originally published on A Future Worth Thinking About
On what’s being dubbed “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time” (Originally posted on Patreon, on July 31, 2014) So, a couple of weekends back, there was a whole lot of stuff going around about “Roko’s Basilisk” and how terrifying people are finding it–reports of people having nervous breakdowns as a result of thinking…
“Laboring in the Liquid Light of Leviathan” was originally published on A Future Worth Thinking About
The second half of my conversation with the @conspiracystuff folks comes out the same day as “The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go” made its appearance on Wired. A day after i had some really important conversations about related ideas.
Something we didn’t get to talk about as much as I meant to, in this episode, is the idea of “Techne” as “Art” as well as “technology.” The idea of “The State of The Art” as that living, breathing crux between magick and science.
This was still an utterly fantastic conversation, though. Check it out.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about, lately, is the politicization of certain spaces within philosophy of mind, sociology, magic, and popular culture, specifically science fiction/fantasy. CHAPPiE comes out on Friday in the US, and Avengers: Age of Ultron in May, and while both of these films promise to be relatively unique explorations of the age-old story of what happens when humans create machine minds, I still find myself hoping for something a little… different. A little over a year ago, i made the declaration that the term to watch for the next little while thereafter was “Afrofuturism,” the reclaimed name for the anti-colonial current of science fiction and pop media as created by those of African descent. Or, as Sheree Renée Thomas puts it, “speculative fiction from the African diaspora.”
I cannot emphasize ENOUGH your need to be keeping an eye on the #Afrofuturism tag, in the coming days & weeks. http://t.co/cCD5Lj4TO9
— Damien (@Wolven) December 12, 2013
And while I certainly wasn’t wrong, I didn’t quite take into account the fact that my decree was going to do at least as much work on me as I’d hoped it would do on the wider world. I started looking into the great deal of overlap and interplay between race, sociology, technology, and visions of the future. That term–“visions”–carries both the shamanic connotations we tend to apply to those we call “visionaries,” and also a more literal sense: Different members of the same society will differently see, experience, and understand the potential futures available to them, based on the evidence of their present realities…
Was originally published on A Future Worth Thinking About
Automation likely to lead to a society that will rely on a basic income structure - Tests are underway
It was Groucho Marx who said, “While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.” Quite true, but what if there’s no money coming in from work because your job’s been taken over by a machine?
Low wage earners appear to be most at risk from automation. In February 2016, the Council of Economic Advisers (an agency within the Executive Office of the US President) issued an alarming report predicting that an 80% or greater chance exists for people on basic incomes of US$20 per hour or less to be made redundant by smart machines in the foreseeable future.
After them come the mid-range workers. Clearly, we need strategies to address any job losses arising though increases in automation.
Yeah, but we have to work fast and well to get as quickly as possible through the part where people just don’t have jobs and can’t buy houses or food.
Qubits successfully integrated in solid-state device allows for scalability of quantum networks and computers
Scientists have created a crystal structure that boosts the interaction between tiny bursts of light and individual electrons, an advance that could be a significant step toward establishing quantum networks in the future.
Today’s networks use electronic circuits to store information and optical fibers to carry it, and quantum networks may benefit from a similar framework. Such networks would transmit qubits – quantum versions of ordinary bits – from place to place and would offer unbreakable security for the transmitted information.
READ MORE ON JOINT QUANTUM INSTITUTE
Ref: A quantum phase switch between a single solid-state spin and a photon. Nature Nanotechnology (8 February 2016) | DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2015.334
ABSTRACT
Interactions between single spins and photons are essential for quantum networks and distributed quantum computation. Achieving spin–photon interactions in a solid-state device could enable compact chip-integrated quantum circuits operating at gigahertz bandwidths. Many theoretical works have suggested using spins embedded in nanophotonic structures to attain this high-speed interface. These proposals implement a quantum switch where the spin flips the state of the photon and a photon flips the spin state. However, such a switch has not yet been realized using a solid-state spin system. Here, we report an experimental realization of a spin–photon quantum switch using a single solid-state spin embedded in a nanophotonic cavity. We show that the spin state strongly modulates the polarization of a reflected photon, and a single reflected photon coherently rotates the spin state. These strong spin–photon interactions open up a promising direction for solid-state implementations of high-speed quantum networks and on-chip quantum information processors using nanophotonic devices.
…We cannot assume that the memory, the axiom, the structure, the experience, the reason, the whatever-else we want to call “the foundation” of knowledge simply “Exists,” apart from the interrelational choices we make to create those foundations. To mark them out as the boundary we can’t cross, the smallest unit of understanding, the thing that can’t be questioned. We have to question it. To understand its origin and disposition, we have to create new tools, and repurpose the old ones, and dismantle this house, and dig down and down past foundation, bedrock, through and into everything…
