Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. He is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development in the Faculty of Environment. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received his PhD from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
March 19, 2015
New tools for understanding a turbulent world - Thomas Homer-Dixon
Today's social sciences have difficulty providing conceptual, analytic and predictive tools that help policy-makers and the public address contemporary global problems such as financial crises, energy shocks, food price spikes and climate change. In his Big Thinking lecture at Congress 2012, Thomas Homer-Dixon provides some guideposts to understanding complexity science and its potential relevance to practical social science. He suggests that policy advice from the social sciences often assumes individual rationality, an aggregation of individual rational choice into group behavior, the progression of social systems towards equilibrium, and, ultimately, calculable risk. Homer-Dixon argues that humankind's most critical problems arise from emergent complex social and natural systems marked by deep uncertainty, positive and negative feedbacks and frequent instability.
Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. He is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development in the Faculty of Environment. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received his PhD from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.
Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. He is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development in the Faculty of Environment. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received his PhD from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.
July 22, 2010
Chalmers on The Singularity
The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
By David J. Chalmers
What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”.
The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”:The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines.Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards.
Read More (PDF): Here
July 19, 2010
Infecting Minds
From MicrobeWorld.Org:
Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New MediaLearn More: Here
On May 25th, 2010 science writer Carl Zimmer gave a keynote address at the American Society for Microbiology's General Meeting in San Diego, California. The presentation entitled “Newspapers, Blogs, and Other Vectors: Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New Media” was given at the President’s Forum, “Telling the Story of Science.” The entire presentation is below:MWV39 - Carl Zimmer: Newspapers, Blogs, and Other Vectors: Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New Media from microbeworld on Vimeo.
Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. In addition to writing books, Zimmer contributes articles to the New York Times, as well as magazines including National Geographic, Time, Scientific American,Science, and Popular Science. He also writes an award-winning blog, The Loom. From 1994 to 1998 Zimmer was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor and writes a monthly column about the brain. Zimmer also hosts "Meet the Scientist," a podcast from the American Society for Microbiology.
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