Okay so does Trump believe that planes which are invisible to radar are also impossible to see with the naked eye?

President Trump to members of the US Coast Guard: "You never know about an ally, an ally can turn." pic.twitter.com/wb4NhuGQeY

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 23, 2017

Yeah, it appears that he does.

Did you see the guy's face over Trump's right shoulder?

He looks like he simply cannot believe what he he is hearing.

#fightingtokeepastraightface.

Driverless cars are almost here.

Courtesy of Ars Technica:

Real driverless cars could come to the Phoenix area this year, according to a Monday report from The Information's Amir Efrati. Two anonymous sources have told Efrati that Google's self-driving car unit, Waymo, is preparing to launch "a commercial ride-sharing service powered by self-driving vehicles with no human 'safety' drivers as soon as this fall." 

Obviously, there's no guarantee that Waymo will hit this ambitious target. But it's a sign that Waymo believes its technology is very close to being ready for commercial use. And it suggests that Waymo is likely to introduce a fully driverless car network in 2018 if it doesn't do so in the remaining months of 2017.

......

According to Efrati, Waymo's service is likely to launch first in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb where Waymo has done extensive testing. Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and the relative lack of pedestrians. Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles. 

"Arizona’s oversight group has met just twice in the last year, and found no reason to suggest any new rules or restrictions on autonomous vehicles, so long as they follow traffic laws," the Arizona Republic reported in June. "The group found no need to suggest legislation to help the deployment."

This of course is still in its infancy, and I imagine that even when these cars start showing up all around the lower 48 that here in my home state of Alaska we will be among the last to have access, due to our inclimate weather and treacherous driving conditions.

I just hope that it finally arrives while I am still around to participate in this amazing breakthrough.

This is without a doubt when of my all time favorite technological advances.

Gryphen posts a somewhat negative article about autonomous cars.

Courtesy of The Guardian:

Driverless vehicles could build a “gold mine” of personal data for private companies and would make it easier for them to target people as consumers, an Australian law professor has warned. 

Des Butler, of the Queensland University of Technology, said the privacy risks involved in driverless vehicles were a “sleeper issue” that regulators were yet to fully consider, even though car manufacturers say the technology could be on roads in Australia by 2020. 

“These vehicles will know where you like to frequent, which businesses, and may very well build a profile of you,” Butler said. “People will go into these things not realising just how much data the vehicle will be generating about them and not knowing the extent to which the data can be used.”

As even the most casual IM visitor has probably surmised I am essentially all in for driverless cars.

However in the interest of being fair I wanted to share a least a few articles which point out potential hazards or concerns.

Trust me it's not going to keep me from purchasing one at some point, but yes there could be issues with privacy, hackers, and occasional technological malfunctions.

In the meantime around 3,287 people are dying each day due to car accidents with an additional 20 to 50 million injured or disabled each year. (Source.)

Just to keep things in perspective.

Robert Mueller investigators are very interested in whether Jared Kushner helped the Russians locate and target certain Americans as vulnerable to social media propaganda.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.” 

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Yeah Kushner essentially could not wait to brag about how he had used technology to target likely Trump voters, of course this was before all the talk about Russian interference made the front page.

Now he does not seem quite so anxious to toot his own horn about how he used technology to identify these potential Trump supporters.

If I were a betting man I would bet that Kushner knew all along that his data was being used by the Russians to flood the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of certain poorly educated Americans in order to influence their vote.

And I really hope that will be proven someday soon.

There is a new drone with a gun on it. Oh, that can't be good.

Courtesy of BBC: 

A US technology firm has developed a drone that is able to aim and fire at enemies while flying in mid-air. 

The Tikad drone, developed by Duke Robotics, is armed with a machine-gun and a grenade launcher. 

The gun can be fired only by remote control, and is designed to reduce military casualties by cutting the number of ground troops required. 

But campaigners warn that in the wrong hands, it will make it easier to kill innocent people. 

The Tikad drone, available for private sale at an undisclosed price, has won a security innovation award from the US Department of Defense, and there is interest from several military forces around the world, including Israel, reports Defense One.

You know this would concern me if Barack Obama were still in the White House, but with Donald Trump in the Oval Office this is nothing less than terrifying. 

I have seen both the Terminator movies and the Robocop films so clearly I am an expert on this kind of thing.

Spoiler alert, things go really, really, really bad.

Okay I think we can all agree, the Girl Scouts are pretty awesome.

Courtesy of CNN Money: 

The organization on Tuesday announced it is adding 23 new badges related to science, technology, engineering, math and the outdoors. 

Girl Scouts can now earn badges through activities like programming robots, designing model race cars, writing code and going on environmentally conscious camping trips. 

The Girl Scouts of the USA, founded in 1912, has created badges with the help of organizations like Code.org, SciStarter, GoldieBlox and the Society of Women Engineers.

The new experiences are meant to address "the lack of exposure many girls have to STEM," Girl Scouts CEO Sylvia Acevedo told CNN Tech in an email. 

The new STEM badges come a month after the organization added cybersecurity badges. Those badges will be available to girls in kindergarten through 12th grade over the next two years.

Gee support for young girls to pursue their interests in science and technology without all of that religious baggage that the Boy Scouts are burdened by.

And here we thought they were just a front for a cookie selling operation.

Elon Musk predicts that in 20 years new cars will no longer include a steering wheel.

Courtesy of Axios:

Elon Musk predicted that within 10 years nearly all new cars made in the U.S. will be autonomous, and half of those will be fully electric vehicles. "China is probably going to be ahead of that," the Tesla and SpaceX chief said Saturday, speaking at the National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Within 20 years, he said driving a car will be like having a horse (i.e. rare and totally optional). "There will not be a steering wheel."

This piggybacks well with my post from yesterday morning that predicted that all new cars in Europe will be electric by the year 2035.

I know a lot of you poo poo'd that prediction so I imagine this one will also receive some blowback from the those who fear and mistrust change as well.

But whether you like it or not the future is one where cars run on batteries and people are merely the passengers.

Remember, there was a time not so very long ago when research required a trip to the library, phones were attached to the wall, and computers took up several rooms of space.

We cannot imagine having to live without the conveniences we now take for granted, and soon the same will be true for manual driving.

Musk also had this to say about the future of energy: 

Musk noted that it would only take about 100 square miles of solar panels to power the entire United States and the batteries needed to store the energy would only need to take about a square mile. That said, he imagines the energy shifting to a large dose of rooftop solar, some power plant solar, along with wind, hydro and nuclear power. 

"It's inevitable," Musk said, speaking of shifting to sustainable energy. "But it matters if it happens sooner or later."

Personally I am very excited about the future. Well at least the future of technology.

I am still not at all confident that human beings are evolving as quickly as out technical advances. 

Trump's tweets are a goldmine for spies, and they can use them to anticipate his next move or even determine what they will be.

Mexico was just ranked the second deadliest country in the world, after only Syria. Drug trade is largely the cause. We will BUILD THE WALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Trump’s Twitter feed is a gold mine for every foreign intelligence agency. Usually, intelligence officers’ efforts to collect information on world leaders are methodical, painstaking and often covert. CIA operatives have risked their lives to learn about foreign leaders so the United States could devise strategies to counter our adversaries. With Trump, though, secret operations are not necessary to understand what’s on his mind: The president’s unfiltered thoughts are available night and day, broadcast to his 32.7 million Twitter followers immediately and without much obvious mediation by diplomats, strategists or handlers. 

Intelligence agencies try to answer these main questions when looking at a rival head of state: Who is he as a person? What type of leader is he? How does that compare to what he strives to be or presents himself as? What can we expect from him? And how can we use this insight to our advantage? 

At the CIA, I tracked and analyzed terrorists and other U.S. enemies, including North Korea. But we never had such a rich source of raw intelligence about a world leader, and we certainly never had the opportunity that our adversaries (and our allies) have now — to get a real-time glimpse of a major world leader’s preoccupations, personality quirks and habits of mind. If we had, it would have given us significant advantages in our dealings with them. 

Trump’s tweets offer plenty of material for analysis. His frequent strong statements in reaction to news coverage or events make it appear as if he lacks impulse control. In building a profile of Trump, an analyst would offer suggestions on how foreign nations could instigate stress or deescalate situations, depending on what type of influence they may want to have over the president.

Great, so not only is Trump embarrassing the country with his constant tweeting, but he is also allowing foreign spies to monitor and perhaps manipulate him like no other president before him.

A little further down in the article are these two paragraphs: 

What Trump doesn’t say can be very revealing, too. For instance, the lapse of time between when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off the coast of Japan (12:30 p.m. on June 16, in Washington) and when the president tweeted about the incident (10:08 a.m. the next day) was nearly 23 hours. The tragedy marked the U.S. Navy’s most significant loss of life aboard a vessel since terrorists bombed the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. 

Typically, a president would quickly make public remarks about a significant military loss. With Trump, intelligence analysts would note the inconsistency compared with previous administrations and search for similar patterns. Is Trump so hands-off that he waited for his secretary of defense to speak? Did something else capture his attention during those hours that he found to be a higher priority? Between the crash and his first public statement about it, Trump tweeted a video of his remarks on a new Cuba policy, a picture of himself signing the Cuba memorandum and a reference to his campaign promise about Cuba; he also retweeted Sean Hannity, a Fox News personality, promoting an upcoming show on the “Deep State’s allies in the media” working to undermine Trump. 

Fairly easy to determine from his tweets that Trump does not know how to respond to a national crisis or emergency until he receives instruction from his aides, but has a knee jerk reaction to every perceived slight which inspires a quick and most often inappropriate off the cuff response.

At the end of the article there is this observation:

Even deleted tweets would be of interest. Trump mostly appears to delete tweets because of spelling errors, later replacing them with a correction. For an intelligence analyst, this would confirm that Trump’s Twitter feed really is a raw insight into his thought process, without much input from aides. 

Analysts would also be likely to use technology to perform content analysis on the president’s tweets in the aggregate. Intelligence agencies can employ a more robust version than the open-source projects that news organizations have used, because they can marry Trump’s tweets with information they collect through intercepts and other means. Software could look for patterns in speech or word categories representing confidence related to policy, whether Trump is considering opposing points of view and if he harbors uncertainty toward any subject. Computers can perform metadata analysis to build timelines and compare Trump’s Twitter feed with his known public schedule, creating a database of when and where he tweets and what else he’s doing at the time. Anything that provides a digital footprint adds context to the analysis. 

Trump says it’s the press’s fault that he uses Twitter as much as he does. His aides clearly want him to stop, but the president just as clearly wants and needs to be heard unfiltered. Fortunately for him, the platform lets him speak directly to his supporters whenever he chooses. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they aren’t the only ones listening.

So there you have it, yet another reason to be mortified, and possibly even terrified, by this presidency.

You know when I pictured a Trump presidency I quite literally pictured an apocalyptic landscape where the entire country was in various stages of decay and self destruction.

I actually think I might have underestimated how bad it was going to be.

We're not even half way through the first year yet.

And so marks the beginning of the end of the truck driver.

Courtesy of Teslarti:  

Elon Musk’s announcement that a Tesla Semi will be arriving as early as September is the first step to what will eventually be a reinvention of an entire industry. We’ve discussed before what, exactly, that means, but given that the man in charge of the Tesla truck program is Jerome Guillen who has a history with Daimler (specifically Freightliner) and large Class 8 semi-trucks, it’s not hard to see where Tesla plans to go with this. That leaves only the question of how far, literally, they plan to take it. In tractor-trailer operations, there are two basic types of freight moving: short-haul and long-haul.

Currently, the trucking industry is seeing a lot of change, internally, as technology improves the way that freight hauling operates. The Internet and faster communications, for example, has begun to erode the traditional consignee-broker-hauler paradigm in which someone with goods to haul contacted a freight broker who then contracted a freight hauler to move the goods, skimming a percentage off the top for the connection. The middleman is often cut out in today’s trucking, with many trucking companies having load brokers on staff.

Electronics and global positioning have also changed how trucks operate, with computers more efficiently organizing load and truck movements to minimize empty movement. The USDOT says that about 29 percent of all truck movement is pulling an empty trailer to or from a freight drop-off point, costing about $30 billion annually. That number, while high, has been dropping for some time and drops exponentially as networks of computers get more efficient at organizing trucking and trucking companies consolidate into larger and larger fleets.

Technology comes to trucking.

Soon the roads will be filled with self driving big rigs with only a token human on board to troubleshoot if something goes awry, but even that job will be short lived as the technology continues to improve.

I believe many of us will live to see the day when trucks transport goods across the country, that are loaded and unloaded by autonomous forklifts, and then distributed to various markets by smaller self driving vehicles.

If the machines themselves became the consumers of the goods, man's usefulness in this enterprise would disappear altogether.

As somebody whose father was a truck driver, and who was forced to listen to truck driving songs like  "Convoy," Eastbound and Down," and "On the Road Again," until my ears bled, I can barely wait.

Just another subset of jobs that Donald Trump can do nothing to save.

I appears that driverless cars may not be good news for everybody. Especially those on the organ donor list.

Courtesy of Slate: 

Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless cars to change the way we live—remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and roads. 

They will also change the way we die. As technology takes the wheel, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ donation. 

It’s morbid, but the truth is that due to limitations on who can contribute transplants, among the most reliable sources for healthy organs and tissues are the more than 35,000 people killed each year on American roads (a number that, after years of falling mortality rates, has recently been trending upward). Currently, 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident. That’s why departments of motor vehicles ask drivers whether they want to be donors. 

It’s not difficult to do the math on how driverless cars could change the equation. An estimated 94 percent of motor-vehicle accidents involve some kind of a driver error. As the number of vehicles with human operators falls, so too will the preventable fatalities. In June, Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, “Driverless cars could save many if not most of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways.” Even if self-driving cars only realize a fraction of their projected safety benefits, a decline in the number of available organs could begin as soon as the first wave of autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles hits the road—threatening to compound our nation’s already serious shortages.

Damn, talk about unforeseen circumstances. I certainly did not see this one coming. 

However what advances in science taketh away, it cannot also giveth back.

In this case the solution to this problem may be organs grown in a laboratory for the express purpose of providing transplants to patients in need.

Of course that technology is still in its beginning stages, but desperate need has a tendency to expedite the scientific process.

It's either that or we build flaws into the autonomous car manufacturing so that every so often a car simply veers off into oncoming traffic and voila, new organs are instantly made available.

I'm not necessarily an ethicist but that does seem slightly wrong to me.

Michigan signs bill to allow driverless cars on their public roadways.

Courtesy of Computerland:  

The governor of Michigan today signed into law a series of bills that allows fully autonomous vehicles, including those without drivers and steering wheels, to begin using public roadways. 

Flanked by a Ford Model T and a self-driving Ford Fusion, Gov. Rick Snyder signed four bills as part of the autonomous vehicles legislative package that allows the operation of autonomous vehicles on Michigan public roads. Before, only testing of the vehicles by manufacturers was permitted. 

"As far as I know, Michigan is the first state to make it official that these types of vehicles can be used on public roads," said Brandon Schoettle, a project manager with the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. 

"California is also planning to enact similar legislation soon. Obviously, the general act of vehicles driving around like this on any public roads is somewhat unprecedented anywhere, given the very recent introduction of such technology," Schoettle said.

Here it comes folks, that future thing that everybody is always talking about.

My daughter and I have been arguing about autonomous cars for a while now.

She is against them, likes to drive herself, and I am all for them.

I'm getting older and I like the idea that technology will allow me to be independent and able to get around on my own even after my reflexes are shot and my eyesight dims.

Hell I already have a machine that cleans my clothes, a robot that vacuums my house, and several technological devices that allow me to converse with people from all over the world from the comfort of my office in Alaska.

So why wouldn't I be willing to trust a machine to get me around town on its own?

Well great. Space is all gay now too.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Now there’s a new reason to seriously start investigating the possibility of civilian space travel: one of our favorite non-profit organizations just declared the universe LGBT-friendly. 

Planting Peace’s latest display of solidarity with the queer community involves a Pride flag, a high altitude balloon and a GoPro camera. The group, which regularly launches social activism campaigns to raise awareness about issues like LGBT rights and deworming children in developing countries, used the balloon to elevate a rainbow flag up through the Earth’s atmosphere. It eventually reached its peak altitude approximately 21.1 miles above the planet. 

The flag remained airborne, floating in outer space for just over three hours before making its descent back to Earth, in what Planting Peace says is a symbolic declaration of the universe as an LGBT-friendly space.

In all seriousness it has been one of the great joys of my life to watch the progress we have made as a people in these last eight years now. 

In 2000 George W. Bush ran on conservative "morality" issues and in 2004 supported an amendment to ban gay marriage. Today we see wide acceptance of the LGBTQ community, and same sex marriage is legal in all states.

We see gay couples in advertisements, on TV shows, and quite frequently in our own families.

So why not alert the universe to how far we have come?

Maybe an alien race will decide that we are finally evolved enough to deserve a visit.

And wouldn't THAT put a lot of things into a different perspective? 

President Obama unveils plan to spend 4 billion dollars to promote development of self driving cars. Future, here we come!

Source

Courtesy of NBC News:

The White House unveiled a plan on Thursday to spend nearly $4 billion over 10 years to accelerate the development of self-driving cars. 

"Automated vehicles open up possibilities for saving lives, saving time and saving fuel," said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx at a press conference at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. 

It's part of a broader initiative announced by President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address on Tuesday to build a "21st century transportation system." Within six months, the federal government hopes to unveil a "model state policy" on self-driving cars that would offer "a path to consistent national policy," according to a government press release.

Look I already think this President is perhaps the greatest of my life time, but if he helps to make self driving cars a reality before I kick the bucket then he becomes one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

I also recently saw an interview with Elon Musk where he explained that in the future autonomous cars will seem as indispensable to us as home computers and dishwashers.

Interestingly enough my daughter and I are on totally different sides of this issue.

She likes to drive and does not want some car doing it for her, but I explained that is all well and good at her age but for elderly people, handicapped people, and others incapable or unwilling to drive this will be an incredibly important breakthrough. 

Personally I am looking forward to the next advances in technology with bated breath.

I think I may have a new hero.

Do I love that quote or what?

Yes if we worked harder at helping each other rather than killing each other, there is no end to the amount of good we could do in this world.

To learn more about R. Buckminster Fuller just click here.

Time magazine cover featuring inventor of the Oculus Rift gets roundly mocked.

So this Time magazine cover is representing an article within its pages discussing virtual reality and more specifically the Oculus Rift.

Now if you have not heard of virtual reality or the Oculus Rift, you can thank me now, because I have been suppressing an almost overwhelming urge to talk about nothing else.

In fact I have talked so much about with family and friends, that most of them are hesitant to engage me in conversation anymore.

'The next best thing since the internet," I say.

"It's going to revolutionize everything we do," I predict.

"Going to meetings in person will someday seem as primitive as sending a telegram," I say as family members attempt to sidle out of the room without being seen.

So yes I am very interested in what is to come. And I will leave it at that, because most of you did not come here to listen to me rant about how boring today is and how awesome tomorrow will be.

Anyhow as you can see that cover is rather.....different. And because it is so, it received quite a lot of internet mocking.

However I stumbled across one photoshopped picture that seemed somewhat prescient to me.

Poopy time will never be the same.

I'm very excited.

President Obama joins Twitter and damn near breaks it while setting new record for followers.

President Obama. In the Oval Office. Tweeting. #WelcomeToTwitter, @POTUS! http://t.co/SzWXltjNK0 pic.twitter.com/ce4DurwYXj

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 18, 2015

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

President Barack Obama broke the Guinness world record Monday for the "fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Twitter." Obama finally got his own Twitter account, which will feature tweets exclusively from the president. 

The account, @POTUS, reached 1 million followers within five hours of its launch, according to Guinness World Records. The account will be inherited by the next president in 2016.

Twitter also provided this graphic to show just how quickly folks signed up to follow the President. 

I don't want to brag but I'm pretty sure one of those blips from Anchorage was me jumping on the bandwagon. (You might also notice that there were more than a few coming from the Wasilla area. Hmmm.)

And by the way for that idiot who proclaimed that there is no way that Obama was writing his own tweets, how's that crow taste?

E.O. Wilson: "What's dragging us down is religious faith."

Courtesy of International Business Times:

Renowned biologist E. O. Wilson has said we should eliminate religions for the sake of human progress, as they are "dragging us down". 

In an interview with New Scientist, Wilson was speaking about his latest book The Meaning of Human Existence, in which he questions religion, how humanity looks for common cause, our behaviour and our impact on the environment. 

He said his next book, in which he plans to deal with where we are going as a species, looks at how we have been destroying Earth in a way that people have not fully realised "like the death of a thousand cuts". Wilson said we ignore cues from science about the damage we are doing because of our "tribal structure". 

"All the ideologies and religions have their own answers for the big questions, but these are usually bound as a dogma to some kind of tribe. Religions in particular feature supernatural elements that other tribes – other faiths – cannot accept ... And every tribe, no matter how generous, benign, loving and charitable, nonetheless looks down on all other tribes. What's dragging us down is religious faith." 

He said that he is not an atheist or agnostic, instead explains "I'm a scientist".

I would suggest that tribalism played a very important, and possibly necessary role in mankind's rise from prey to predator, and ultimately to becoming the dominant species on the planet.

However I would also argue that what served as a benefit during more primitive times has now become an impediment to our progress toward becoming more enlightened beings.

Today it is not so much our gender, or ethnicity, that builds walls between us but rather our religious faith. Or lack thereof.

Just the other day my daughter and I were musing on the fact that thousands of years ago Italy, Spain, and France, which are geographically only a handful of miles apart, could develop different languages and cultures, while today we are closer to becoming a global community then ever before.

In fact these very words will be read by visitors from as far away as Hong Kong, Belgium, and Germany, and they will both be able to understand what I say, as well as respond to what is written without ever having to leave their house, much less their continent.

In other words thanks to technology we now know more, and understand more, about each other than at any other time in the history of mankind.

The final hurdle to overcome, the wall that still stands in our way, is religion.

Eradicating it, and the antiquated ideas it promotes, should be priority one for all of us.

Well at least I cannot be accused of not doing my part.

Colorado teenager invents smart gun that only works after identifying owner's fingerprints. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Courtesy of Tech Crunch:  

Colorado has a history with gun violence so it’s only appropriate that 17-year-old Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder, would want to apply biometric user authentication to firearms. Kloepfer just won the $50,000 Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge for his smart gun prototype. 

Angel investor and gun reform advocate Ron Conway became the main backer of the $1 million Smart Tech prize to spur gun safety solutions earlier this year. “Let’s use innovation to bring about gun safety. Let’s not rely on Washington,” Conway told the SF Examiner in January. According to the Smart Tech Foundation, a total of 15 innovators will receive a part of that million dollar prize. Kloepfer is the first to get the award.

The gun works by recording the fingerprints of the user inside its self contained data base, which means no information is uploaded to any other server.  This makes the weapon's computer very hard to hack, and does not jeopardize the owner's  personal information.

Kloepfer came up with the idea two years ago when he needed something for his high school science project. “The idea came to me right as I was falling asleep. It was kinda in the back of my mind because of the shooting,” said Kloepfer, alluding to the Aurora, Colorado shooting that had been on everyone’s mind at the time. The shooting was just an hour’s drive from his home. “I scribbled it down before I went to bed and fell asleep and then in the morning I began my research,” He explained. 

Kloepfer’s parents helped him in monetary increments to get the parts needed for each improvement. It would eventually cost $3000 for the whole thing to come together. “At first it was just a concept on paper,” he tells me. The gun went from phase to phase with each science fair. “Right now it’s a prototype on a plastic model. Its not entirely there but it works,” he says.

There is NO reason why this kind of technology should not be embraced the NRA and gun owners around the world.

And if they did so it could dramatically reduce the number of accidental shootings, increase the safety of our loved ones, and do a great deal to qualm the fears of those calling for stricter gun laws.

Would you like to be inspired? Your wish is my command.

That gentleman is futurist Jason Silva. And he may be just about the most optimistic human on the planet. Well among the top three at least.

Rather than being concerned about where science and technology might be taking human beings, Silva is packing his things so he does not miss the first shuttle to the future.

Here is Silva from an interview with New Statesman in November of last year: 

“I think that technology has always been a double-edged sword,” Silva says. “If you look at the work of Steven Pinker, Better Angels Of Our Nature, the world has never been less violent than today. The chances of a man dying at the hands of another man have never been lower than today. If we can transcend our overactive amygdalas that are always focusing on the danger, you’ll find the world is getting better on a whole range of indicators.” 

“There’s always been a terror about new technology. The same was said about the radio and television. There’s a great book by Steven Johnson - it’s called Everything Bad Is Good For You - he talks about how video games, for example, engage our problem-solving and strategy skills in an immense way. There are all these counter-intuitive examples of tools that we were afraid of, but at the end of the day it’s just evolution, man. Minds like ours were made for merger.” 

Silva is also dismissive of the possibility that we’ll run out of resources, because “technology is a resource-liberating mechanism”. Nanotechnology will allow us to perform alchemy, reconfiguring materials on an atom-by-atom basis. Water wars are ridiculous because “we live on a water planet”, and advanced desalination technology “is going to give us more water than we ever could need”. Overpopulation is misdirection. Technology doesn’t hurt us, it brings us out of poverty and is our method of reaching a higher plane of existence. The little details don't matter when you realise that the big picture averages out as an overwhelming positive. 

“People say these new technologies are only for the rich, I say, ‘yeah, just like cellphones’. Everyone in Africa has better communications technology than the US president had 25 years ago.” If anything, Silva appears to be arguing for a post-scarcity future of the sort written about by a range of economists and science fiction authors for decades, if not centuries. “The capitalist underpinnings of society would be completely transcended - people would be liberated,” he explains.

Essentially Silva believes that our futures are only hampered by our imaginations and our fears of where they may lead.

I am a big fan of this kind of thinking, because in many ways it reflects my own.

Which is one of the main reasons that I am so hard on religion and work to reduce its influence on how we think, and how we perceive ourselves. So long as we see ourselves as subservient and beholden to a magic man in the sky, we undermine our ability to see ourselves as gods and the creators of magic that we live with everyday.

We can communicate across the world in an instant, see into the vastness of space, fly though the air at supersonic speeds, and enter virtual reality worlds almost as real as the one all around us.

When I think of the future I am always optimistic, but I am also very aware that there are people desperate, and I mean DESPERATE, to hold us back.

P.S. If you want to see a great Star talk episode featuring Silva and Neil deGrasse Tyson click here. 

Coolest video you will watch all day.

Pretty impressive wasn't it?

I'm a huge Superman fan so that kind of blew my mind.

If you want to destroy the fantasy and find out how they really pulled this off just click here.

That is the problem with possessing critical thinking skills, we can never simply accept that a man can fly.