Future

Second Life has always been one the pioneering efforts for Virtual Reality, and its in-sim economy has always been really impressive. Now, it sounds like the folks at Linden Labs are getting ready to prep its platform for integration with gear such as the Oculus Rift.

Peter Watts serves up a two part article on RNA editing, and how it might impact the future of entire populations. It is frightening.

Elmo Keep’s interview with Mars One applicant Joseph Roche reveals that the program is deeply flawed. Indeed, some elements such as having applicants donate their speaking fees to the program in exchange for points even sounds like a scam.

This is a great Wired article by Warren Ellis on the current state of space travel and sums up my feelings as well. Some gems from the article: The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

Quite simply, I think this is one of the greatest advances in library science and computing in recent memory. This isn’t just a toy or a search engine, this is a knowledge processor that makes any factual data in its system instantly computable.

Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange.

Via grinding.be: Scientists at Osaka University in Japan have created a robot that learns in a similar manner to human infants. CB2 (Child-robot with Biometric body), uses it processor, eye cameras and touch sensors to learn from it’s designers similar to the way a child learns from its parents.

I like the fact that this article explains that the notion of the Singularity too often just gets lumped into whatever Kurzweil has been saying lately, which is not necessarily representative of a consensus among futurists.