Gods & Heroes: Singularity Institute – OWS – Twitter

23 Trillion Wrongs Don't Make a Right - OWS 10/15/11

Working Group Schedule - OWS 10/15/11

While NYU and NYC public school students joined Occupy Wall Street demonstrators downtown, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence met uptown at the 92nd St Y. Sunday Oct 16, I dropped by on behalf of Social Media News New York (@smnny) to hear the Singularists's view of economic trends and what to do next. Mind you, taken to its furthest reaches the Singularist way of coming together would put the 1% and 99% uncomfortably close in the same bucket by making all humans redundant.


‎"Working with stuff is easier than working with people..we’re spending a lot on Health Care and not getting good value”. " 

Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation

TFP Measures Production from New Ideas

Cowen's TFP chart shows how productivity measurements from new ideas have flattened to 1/6 of that in the 19th century!  What can be fixed with stuff has already been done through industrialization and technology. Now, it's those hard people problems, health care and education being prime examples, that have to be addressed.  Developers were encouraged to focus on mobile devices to help humans with their interactions. He gave the example of something that could tell you when you are talking too much on a date.

Balloon Challenge Response

"Our communication paradigms are broken...we need connections to solve hard problems...You are fighting economics of attention"

Riley Crane, Rethinking Communication

Riley Crane shows organizations, companies and government how to build adoption of products, services, ideas and causes by “getting to the communication cascade” His graphs of communication cascades in social media amid the “economics of attention” was timely in the context of the weekend’s escalation of OWS.  

Social Media Boards - OWS

Once again Twitter, Facebook and mobile text carried the message of dissent globally and minimized confrontation on the ground when students used social media to quickly re-gather on Wall St. from Washington Square to avoid riot squads forming closeby at Astor Place.  

David Ferrucci, Tech, Dan Cerutti, Bus.

"...there is value in human language versus curated data"

David Ferrucci and Dan Cerutti

IBM's Watson executives claimed to value human analysis and included scholarly journals and other human language publications in programming the Jeopardy star.  His new gig is helping Health Care companies improve the performance of caregiver teams. 

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, David Brin, Alex Wissner-Gross

" ....decendents of priests and rabbis, alphas should speak the adversary's language.."

David Brin

Futuristic writer and self-proclaimed contrarian, Brin proposed the “god creators” learn the language of the adversary.  Appealing flagrantly to the healthy ego in the room, he suggested their grasp of the Bible would be so impressive that even if the religious right is not converted, the caliber of debate would flatter and disarm the adversary.  In the heady atmosphere of the auditorium that morning, Brin’s tip made sense.  Forget the Crusades, 9/11 and the American abortion clinic’s daily toil, the super debater has entered!  Game imagery must be taking hold, even I thought yeah!

Badges, um, rewards go first to "god creators" gathering low-hanging quantifiable fruit, so our super bright humans aren’t likely to focus on the “hard” human stuff in the near term.  Brin’s got a point.  Better set one’s expectations closer to the ground.  Maybe they’d think it’s fun to pick up languages to show off. Minimally, those in desperate need of a lift could at least get a heady atmospheric fix - contact high, so to speak.

Must be great to be so smart.







Links

Occupy Wall Street: occupywallstreet.org


Social Media News NY: www.facebook.com/smnny


The Singularity Institute: www.singularityu.org


Twitter: www.twitter.com