They are working so hard in the dark, since they don’t know what intelligence is, how it is done, or how it is mashed up with purpose, consciousness and experience. They are working with an essentially Platonic understanding of reality i.e. there is a non socially constructed truth and meaning out there – which is more than 2000 years out of date.
There were real technology breakthroughs in the 1970s, when computers made all text searchable using Boolean AND, OR, NOT ‘operators’, automatic sorting became possible and relational databases were invented. Since then, it has served the interests of computer companies to pretend to put what they call ‘intelligence’ into their machines, rather than enable people to use the real technology breakthroughs of the 1970s more intelligently.
I am afraid that this is yet another profit-driven tragedy wasting billions which could have been invested in enhancing the intelligent use of the technology on what is essentially a chimera based on a misunderstanding about the nature of human intelligence. More than 30 years have been wasted.
Luckily, some of us who had the privilege of working with real masters of database development, are still around who believe that the real opportunities around these technologies lie in the development of the collaborative intelligence of users.
The application of this human intelligence is why I obtain so much more useful information from Amplify, than from Google. It is why Amplify is so important as an early form of collaborative intelligence.
| An overgrown, disused ride becomes a new Avenue which will, in a few years time, be lined by great trees. It’s a lucky thing, too, since we will be able to use Ford Dexter to pull the charcoal wood out now. In future, the Avenue will make it possible to pull out the harvests of thousands of hazel spar gads and poles. |
Andrew and billhook take a break |
There is no doubt that it’s hard work. Trunks of the felled trees have to be sawn in half, and all the side branches chopped off with the billhook. The side branches or ‘brash’ must be picked up off the ground and laid in lines called, ‘wind rows’, while the trunks have to be dragged and piled up next to the rides. |
Bend, lift, saw, chop over and over and over again without the help of any machinery, just as our ancestors did for hundreds of years. |
The result is a new landscape with straight young oak and ash trees planted by the previous owner which in 50 years time will make the high canopy to be then further thinned for timber. During this time, it will be possible to cut approximately 10 hazel crops of thousands of gads and poles each. |
Cherry and oak trunks with wind rows behind them |
Imagine your community in sync with its own sustainable creative commerce.
Imagine feeling reconnected to your labor and your surrounding neighbors.
Many residents of Philadelphia have imagined, and now, they’re implementing.
Could your city be next? If so let me know, and please RT generously.
Paul Glover, author of “Hometown Money”, is helping spread the vision. Look at our wasted talent: thousands of eager youths and experienced neighbors. With money enough, we could be busy insulating homes, manufacturing useful goods, growing food, healing, cleaning, playing. And look at our idle wealth: vacant factories and land, empty stores and offices. |
| When a large city depends on one kind of money, it’s like depending on one kind of vehicle - cars only or one bridge. Community currencies aren’t Monopoly money - they’re anti-monopoly money. |
| Printing our own cash is all-American. During the Great Depression, 400 U.S. cities and towns issued scrip. More recently, in Ithaca, N.Y., thousands of residents and 500 businesses have traded millions of dollars of colorful local paper money featuring children, waterfalls and animals. |
| These currencies are real money - backed by real people, real goods and real services. By contrast, dollars are funny money - no longer backed by gold, silver or commodities but by less than nothingRead more at www.philly.com |
Truly inspiring, even for a hard bitten old cynic. Add complementary currencies and stir. Or perhaps, it is the uncounted reciprocity that makes it work. | On a typical working day, most “normal” neighborhoods are empty, their residents off working to pay for all the stuff in their fine homes. My neighborhood, on the other hand, is full of life. People are in the streets, walking and biking |
| Weeds growing up through the cracks in the pavement is a fractal assertion of life revealing itself through the cracks of civilization. |
| The blighted areas of Springfield, Illinois, are a microcosm of the ruins of cities like Detroit. The neglect and abandonment of our neighborhoods by those to whom we pay taxes is evident. |
| The people who remain here are here for the long haul. Poor people are well aware of the economy of the community |
| When you have not money to purchase the assistance and care you need, you use the time you have to assist and care for others, and they reciprocate. It’s security that life in civilization cannot buy, especially now that we are in the horribly depressed phase of our bipolar economy.Read more at energybulletin.net |
| What I question is not consumption in the abstract but consumerism and overconsumption. While consumption means acquiring and using goods and services to meet one’s needs, consumerism is the particular relationship to consumption in which we seek to meet our emotional and social needs through shopping, and we define and demonstrate our self-worth through the Stuff we own. And overconsumption is when we take far more resources than we need and than the planet can sustain, as is the case in most of the United States as well as a growing number of other countries. Consumerism is about excess, about losing sight of what’s important in the quest for Stuff. |
| Lots of our favorite characters and cultural icons surround themselves with signature cool Stuff. |
| What would the Oscars be without the gowns? |
| We’re attached to these characters’ possessions and obsessions as much as to their personalities; it’s all part of our national mythology. It only makes sense that we’d get attached to our own Stuff.Read more at www.alternet.org |
Anyone care to speculate why babies are predisposed to boogie to musical beats and not to spoken blabber? Evolutionary links…?
| Babies may be born with a predisposition to dance and find music - specifically, rhythm and tempo - more engaging than speech, according to a study of infants aged between five months and two years old. |
| While predisposition towards music may be innate, researchers are unsure why it developed in humans. |
| Infants’ rhythmic movements were assessed by multiple methods |
| Babies in the study engaged in more rhythmic movement to music than to speech and exhibited tempo flexibility to some extent. Results also revealed that “children were able to synchronize their movements with the music the more they smiled,” said Dr Marcel Zentner, from the University of York’s Department of Psychology.Read more at www.scientificblogging.com |
Scientists show how inactivating one gene, the “p21″, could potentially give humans the salamander-like ability of accelerated healing.
Improved human regeneration may be one day enabled by this discovery, Heber-Katz said. The gene could conceivably be temporarily inactivated to improve the healing process. |
| The super-healing mice form a “blastema”, a clump of immature cells that behave like stem cells, at the injury site. |
In fact, ever since the bursting of Japan’s 1980s bubble, there has been an inverse relationship between the debt to GDP ratio and bond yields – the more bonds the Japanese government sells, the easier the terms it gets. |
The buyers of these bonds – deleveraging corporates, de-risking financial institutions, individuals turning their backs on equities and real estate – are hardly speculators. They have sound reasons for the choices they made. Not least is the fact that deflation – which is understated by Japan’s outmoded CPI calculations - generates an invisible tax-free gain to holders of cash and bonds. |
| Japan’s cellar-dwelling bond yields are a product of the deflationary disease that has been gnawing away at the economy’s vital organs. While deflation, persists the debt to GDP ratio is destined to go ever higher. Read more at www.ft.com |
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Soap box - Pity the intelligent robot makers
