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Woman Looking at Reflectionthis article discusses how unclassified sources are creating programs that are clones of us. It may be very similar to what we experience when they use programs that mimic people we know through v2k. They may create a digital clone profram that they created directly from monitoring the individual. 

Talking to your digital twin could one day be like looking in the mirror.

“When you and I die, our kids aren’t going to go to our tombstones, they’re going to fire up our digital twins and talk to them,” says John Smart, futurist and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. Smart uses many names for the technology he predicts — digital twin, cyber-self, personal agent — but the concept stays the same: a computer-based version of you. (Video)

 

Using various strategies for gathering and organizing your data, digital twins will mirror peoples’ interests and values. They’ll “input user writings and archived email, realtime wearable smartphones (lifelogs), and verbal feedback to allow increasingly intelligent and productive guidance of the user’s purchases, learning, communication, feedback, and even voting activities,” Smart writes. They’ll displace much of today’s information overload from regular people to their cyber-selves.

And one day, Smart theorizes, these digital twins will hold conversations and have faces that mimic human emotion. “They will become increasingly like us and extensions of us,” Smart says.

The concept might sound far-fetched. But consider that people often turn to a deceased friend or family member’s Facebook wall to grieve. People already form relationships with each other’s online presences. As computer science advances, the connection will only improve and strengthen — even with identities that aren’t real people.

“Where we’re headed is creating this world in which you feel you have this thing out there looking after your values,” Smart says.

For digital twins to reach their full potential, however, they require two important developments: “good conversational interfaces and semantic maps,” Smart explains.

Conversational Interfaces (CI)

Ron Kaplan, a data scientist in Silicon Valley, already chronicled the necessity of CI for Wired last year. In his words, simply scheduling a flight could require 18 different clicks or taps on 10 different screens. “What we need to do now is be able to talk with our devices,” he wrote.

Smart couldn’t agree more. “With technology, we want things that enable us to use as much of our brains as possible at one time,” he adds.

For example, with a single, spoken sentence, you could tell your personal agent you feel sick. It could reference your calendar or emails to determine when to make a doctor’s appointment. And when you arrive, you might not even need to fill out forms. Your personal agent would have looked at your hospital records and healthcare information for you — and then later relayed the outcome of any tests taken during your visit.

While no company boasts such comprehensive abilities yet, many have started to implement similar technologies. Right now, Apple has Siri. Microsoft has Cortana. And in the summer of 2014, a program named “Eugene Goostman,” imitating a Ukrainian teen, passed the Turing Test (with some healthy skepticism).

Smart, however, places great emphasis on an earlier cognitive machine: IBM’s Watson, which the company claims “literally gets smarter.” Watson’s performance on Jeopardy against champion Ken Jennings, shown below, convinced many skeptics of the emergence and optimization of CI

Vocal technologies like Siri, Cortana, and Watson already rely on semantic maps, tools that represent relationships in data, especially language. And companies constantly improve them. For example, a late 2013 Google update brought pronouns to the table — and Smart’s wife, for one, quickly noticed a difference.

Walking in downtown Mountain View, his wife pulled out her phone, and as a test, asked Google, “Who is the President of the United States?” Naturally, her phone responded: “Barack Obama.”

Next, Smart’s wife inquired: “Who is his wife?”

Phone: “Michelle Obama.”

Smart’s wife: “Where was she born?”

Phone: “Chicago, Illinois.”

Not only did Smart’s wife engage in conversation with her phone, it understood words like “he” and “she” — pronouns that refer to an antecedent earlier in the conversation. ”Now, you don’t have to specify every little detail,” Smart explains. “Because the computer has some memory of previous exchanges and uses that as context.”

Once we create “decent maps of human emotion,” Smart adds, digital twins will even have faces to help them communicate. They’ll smile or furrow their brows to show whether they understand or not.

“But the next step is something I call a ‘valuecosm,’” Smart explains.

The ‘Valuecosm’

A valuecosm doesn’t just, for example, analyze all your emails and formulate a record of your interests and values. It allows a personal agent to interact in your stead based on this information.

“You’re reaching for a can of tuna at a grocery store in 2030,” Smart envisions.  ”And your bracelet gives a green arrow to move your hand a few inches to the left, from Bumble Bee to Chicken of the Sea or whatever.”

You’d previously told your personal agent to watch for foods with high mercury levels or companies that over-fish the oceans. So this wearable piece of technology, imprinted with a digital version of your values, informed you which product to choose based on that.

“And then, back in your car, your digital twin directs you to the gas station that’s most in line with your environmental values,” Smart adds. A valuecosm not only uses information in a human way, it’s flexible, too. You can review your settings and change them manually.

“You’ll be having a conversation with your [personal] agent, and you say, ‘I want more of this or this plus something else,’” Smart explains. “You know, I care more about social justice so make that area bigger.”

To make this technology the most usable and effective though, your digital twin will have to pull your information from various places, with your permission — not push its functions onto you.

“People who have started using Google alerts, they’ve moved themselves toward a more pull-based view of the internet,” Smart says.

In truth, the concept started as a way to improve advertising. For example, internet cookies monitor your online activity, allowing companies to match their advertisements to your interests. But instead of a company “pushing” their products or ideas onto you and trying to create demand, with pull-based marketing, you give permission for access to your information, and the advertising follows.

“Instead of a filter, it’s more like a magnet,” Smart explains. That idea, however, could lead to even less online privacy.

The Future Of Privacy

The uncertain status of online privacy already bothers the general public. People criticize companies like Google and Amazon that only pull their information from what’s available. But with digital twins, we’ll have to give full permission for companies to access our online identities to optimize our use of the technology.

“You know, I’d like to have control of my healthcare or financial information in my own little internet locker,” Smart admits. “But that kind of thinking is first generation. You can’t accomplish much by having control of your own data.”

Big-name companies using algorithms and predictive analytics can probably best host our personal agents. As long as people feel they have strong control over the technology, privacy will come secondary, in Smart’s opinion.

“People who are thinking that you can control your own identity aren’t thinking about the problem right,” he says. “The future of personal control isn’t control of data. The future that we care about is control of an algorithmic interface of your identity.”

For comparison, Smart mentions domestication. Humanity didn’t engineer the brains of cats and dogs. We simply chose the ones more amenable to us and bred them. “We’ll do the same to our advanced AIs, whose brains we won’t be designing, but rather teaching, like a small child,” Smart explains.

And as Smart predicts, all these technologies, required to make fully functional personal agents possible, are only about five years away.

http://www.impactlab.net/2014/09/25/we-could-all-have-digital-twins-that-make-decisions-for-us-within-5-years/

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Question for everyone

There are many days when I wake up and I feel drugged. Completely drugged. I used to get up 3/4 times a night to go to the bathroom and now there are nights I don't get up at all and I wake up and feel sooo drugged. Can I tell if I'm truly being drugged or it's the mind crap?
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How to Make Positise Personal Change

This is an excerpt from the article; 

Three Ps

One of the most difficult aspects of change is the need to make a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute commitment to change (Every time you miss an opportunity for change, you further ingrain your old obstacles). A helpful reminder of this necessity is what I call the Three Ps.

The first P, patience, is a constant reminder that change takes time and that if you maintain your commitment, you have a good chance to make the changes you want long lasting.

The second P, persistence, means you must keep vigilant and, as the saying goes, "keep on keeping on" in your journey to change.

The third P, perseverance, refers to your ability to overcome setbacks and maintain your motivation and confidence in the face of periodic failures and disappointment

ersonal Growth: Five Steps to Positive Life Change (And the Big Payoff!)

Ready to take the five steps to positive life change?
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In my first post in this exploration of how we can produce meaningful and last life change, I described the four obstacles that prevent change. In my last post on this topic, I introduced you to the five building blocks of change. These steps I just described set the stage for change, but the real work lies ahead. Change can be scary, tiring, frustrating, and repetitious. And change takes time. How much?, you might ask. It depends on your ability to remove the four obstacles to change and embrace the five building blocks I discussed above. It also relies on your ability to commit to the minute-to-minute process of change. But I have found that when someone makes a deep commitment to change, they can expect to see a positive shift in 3-6 months.

With the foundation for positive life change now in place, it's time to take action. Here are the five steps you must take to turn possibility and hope into real change.

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Explore Your Inner World

Perhaps the most difficult part of changing your life involves exploring your inner world. True change cannot just occur on the surface or outside of you. Change means not only understanding who you are, but also why you are who you are, in other words, what makes you tick. The first step you must take is to identify the obstacles that are preventing you from changing. You need to "look in the mirror" and specify what the baggage, habits, emotions, and environment are that are keeping you from yourgoals. Understanding these obstacles takes the mystery out of who you are and what has been holding you back. It also gives you clarity on what you need to change and gives you an initial direction in your path of change.

These explorations of your inner world can enable you to finally understand why you have been the way you have been and done things you have done even when neither have worked for you ("So that's why I've been this way all of my life!"). This process will also help you to remove the obstacles that have stood in your path to change. These insights also, at a deep level, liberate you to move from your current path to another that will take you where you really want to go. Most importantly, truly understanding your inner world will allow you to finally put the past behind you-when most of your life you have been putting your past in front of you.

Change Goals

Once the path to your goals has been cleared, you still need to have a clear idea about your final destination. Think of its like GPS; you can't get directions unless you input where you want to go.

When you establish clear objectives of the changes you want to make, you are able to better focus your efforts and direct your energy toward those changes. These goals should identify what areas you want to change, how you will change them, and the ultimate outcome you want to achieve. Moreover, the goals should be specific, objective, and time defined.

Action Steps

So far, everything you have done to change has been talk. Now it's time to actually make change happen. Action steps describe the particular actions you will take to achieve your change goals. They may range from adhering to an exercise regimen to maintaining emotional control in a crisis situation to staying focused when surrounded by distractions. Action steps give you the specific tools you need to act on the world in the present and to give you alternative actions that counter your old baggage, habits, emotions, and environment.

Forks in the Road

Taking the action steps and achieving your change goals depends on recognizing important forks in the road. I make the distinction between the bad road and the good road (there can actually be multiple bad and good roads, but let's keep things simple). The bad road is the one that you've been on for so long driven by the four obstacles I described above; it's a "feel bad, do bad" road. In contrast, the good road is the one you want to be on; it's a "feel good, do good" road.

This fork in the road is simple, but not easy. It's simple because you would, of course, want to be on the good road. It's not easy because you have years of baggage, habits, emotions, and environment continuing to propel you down the bad road.

A key to the change process involves recognizing the forks in the road when they appear because without seeing the forks in the road, you obviously can't take the good road, that is, makes positive changes. This awareness isn't as easy as it seems because all those years of obstacles has created a myopia that can limit your field of vision causing you to miss the forks when you come upon them.

In all likelihood, you will initially only recognize the forks when you are long past them ("Darn it, I wish I had seen that fork earlier!"). But, with time and vigilance, you will see those forks earlier and earlier until one day an amazing thing will happen; you will see the fork when you arrive at it.

Unfortunately, because of the Sirens' call of the four obstacles, you will still probably take the bad road at first. But, one day, another amazing thing will happen. You will recognize that fork in the road as you approach it and, yes, you will take it! And you will never be the same person again.

Don't get me wrong; you don't have it made yet. You'll have setbacks and struggles because you will still go down the bad road sometimes; those obstacles take time to dismantle. But every time you take the good road, you'll see what a great road it is to be on and it will encourage you to continue to resist your baggage, habits, emotions, and environment and to take the good road at the many forks that lay ahead.

Three Ps

One of the most difficult aspects of change is the need to make a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute commitment to change (Every time you miss an opportunity for change, you further ingrain your old obstacles). A helpful reminder of this necessity is what I call the Three Ps.

The first P, patience, is a constant reminder that change takes time and that if you maintain your commitment, you have a good chance to make the changes you want long lasting.

The second P, persistence, means you must keep vigilant and, as the saying goes, "keep on keeping on" in your journey to change.

The third P, perseverance, refers to your ability to overcome setbacks and maintain your motivation and confidence in the face of periodic failures and disappointment.

The Payoff

There is an immense payoff for your commitment and efforts at change: A life-altering shift in who you are and how you think, feel, and behave. A new direction that your life will take. And finally moving toward achieving your life goals. As a former client told me so poignantly: "I realized that I would never have to go back to the way I used to live my life, and I have never been so happy!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201201/personal-growth-five-steps-positive-life-change-and-the-big-payoff

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LIFE INSURANCE AND TARGETED INDIVIDUALS !

I WONDER HOW MANY T.I.'S ARE MURDERED FOR LIFE OR CANCER INSURANCE POLICES THAT MAY HAVE BEEN BOUGHT ILLEGALLY ON THEM BUY THEIR DIRECT ENERGY WEAPON ATTACKS,MURDERS,SERIAL KILLERS, WHAT EVER YOU WANT TO LABEL THEM AS.  I THINK THE PEOPLE THAT ATTACK MY POSSIBLE MAY HAVE SOME ILLEGAL INSURANCE RACKET GOING ON. IS THERE ANY WAY TO STOP THIS COLLECTION,IF HAPPENING? WE NEED A MOVEMENT WITH TO STOP THEM FROM THIS.ANYBODY AGREE? GOT A GOOD IDEA,POST IT.

SCOTT FULBRIGHT

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FREEDOM FIGHTERS FOR AMERICA
                                     "FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY"     http://www.freedomfightersforamerica.com ;

    

FREEDOM FIGHTERS FOR AMERICA WORLD RADIO
PROJECT MK-ULTRA AND TODAY'S TARGETING, KILL PROGRAM OF CITIZENS BY U.S GOVERNMENT AND ORGANIZED CRIME WORKING TOGETHER- CHRIS ZUCKER HOSTS, SEPT 28TH 2014
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Catch perps in the act

here is a camera i found, bought one and it seems pretty straightforward. it's cheap and the shipping is free from this site. here it is http://www.dx.com/p/ultra-mini-screen-free-3-0-mega-pixels-cmos-motion-detection-video-camera-micro-sd-tf-slot-37478#.VCh5OaU9l0s

Theses are small and i mean small. no lcd screen to take up space, point and shoot.

I think their neat lol.

I hope this helps some people catch them in the act.

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I have had the most amazing privelage of meeting online, the worlds first fully lobotomized,  upper percentage mensa member,  right here on peacepink! !!

First, let me post some things about a lobotomy. Heres a few paragraphs from wkipedia:

The lobotomy procedure could have severe negative effects on a patient's personality and ability to function independently.[131] Lobotomy patients often show a marked reduction in initiative and inhibition.[132] They may also exhibit difficulty putting themselves in the position of others because of decreased cognition and detachment from society.[133]

Immediately following surgery patients were often stuporous, confused, and incontinent. Some developed an enormous appetite and gained considerable weight. Seizures were another common complication of surgery. Emphasis was put on the training of patients in the weeks and months following surgery.[134]

(Youll notice this next paragraph and how it points out the childish personality that a lobotomy creates in the patient)

Freeman coined the term "surgically induced childhood" and used it constantly to refer the results of lobotomy. The operation left people with an "infantile personality"; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir he described how the "personality of the patient was changed in some way in the hope of rendering him more amenable to the social pressures under which he is supposed to exist." He described one 29 year old woman as being, following lobotomy, a "smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster" who couldn't remember Freeman's name and endlessly poured coffee from an empty pot. When her parents had difficulty dealing with her behaviour, Freeman advised a system of rewards (ice-cream) and punishment (smacks)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

Interesting isnt it. Now lets look at what mensa is:

Membership requirementEdit

Mensa's requirement for membership is a score at or above the 98th percentile on certain standardised IQ or other approved intelligence tests, such as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. The minimum accepted score on the Stanford-Binet is 132, while for the Cattell it is 148.[11] Most IQ tests are designed to yield a mean score of 100 with a standard deviation of 15; the 98th-percentile score under these conditions is 131.

Mensa also has its own application exam, and some national groups offer alternative batteries of tests. These exams are proctored by Mensa and do not provide a quantified score; they serve only to qualify a person for membership. In some national groups, a person may take a Mensa offered test only once, although one may later submit an application with results from a different qualifying test.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International

When you look at the side effects of a lobotomy,  then compare that to the level of intelligence needed to be upper level mensa, you can truly see why we have a miracle in our midst!!! Yes, the first lobotomized upper percentage mensa member in the world! !! And hes right here on peacepink! !!

Heres a quote from our hero here:

"and the injury that sent me to the ottawa riverside hospital, which did not accept emergency cases btw, for the illegal and unnecessary lobotomy (for a "broken cheekbone"?!), was no accident,"

Heres another:

"but perhaps she was 'treated' at the same kind of facility that did my stealth lobotomy   or 'fixed' my brother  "

Sad isnt it?? A forced lobotomy! !

But, dont fear! Hes ok, in fact hes so well after such a horror, tgat he is now upper percentage mensa!!! Heres a quote from our hero:

"with my 'brain damage' i scored a 99 percentile in verbal reasoning aptitude (they don't award 100) and am in the upper percentages of mensa" https://peacepink.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2351430%3ABlogPost%3A519718&commentId=2351430%3AComment%3A519981

 This is a historical first friends!!!! Never before has Anyone Ever overcome a lobotomy to become a upper percentage mensa!! His name????

Mike LeBerge, better known as LaBrat! !! When you see hes online, you shoukd ask him about how he maintains upper percentage mensa while dealing dealing with such serious brain damage.  I mean, as you get to know him, his symptoms are apperant.  He cant use punctuation or capitolization,  and he gets fits where he calls names and such. But, usually,  hes a nice guy. Just dont disagree with his gangstalking theory, he will call you a perp troll.

Anyway, its a first, so enjoy it!

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"Whenever I talk about the future of AGI, someone starts talking about the possibility that AGI will “take over the world.”

One question is whether this would be a good or bad thing — and the answer to that is, of course, “it depends” … I’ll come back to that at the end of this post.Another relevant question is: If this were going to happen, how would it most likely come about.  How would an “AGI takeover” be likely to unfold, in practice?One option is what Eliezer Yudkowsky has called AI “FOOM” …  i.e. a “Hard Takeoff”  (a possibility which I analyzed a bit , some time ago…)

The basic idea of AI Foom or Hard Takeoff is that, sometime in the future, an advanced AGI may go from relatively innocuous subhuman-level intelligence all the way up to superhuman intelligence, superintelligence, in 5 minutes or some other remarkably short period of time…..  By rewriting its code over and over (each time learning better how to rewrite its code), or assimilating additional hardware into its infrastructure, or whatever….
A Hard Takeoff is a special case of the general notion of an Intelligence Explosion — a process via which AGI gets smarter and smarter via improving itself, and thus getting better and better and faster and faster at making itself smarter and smarter.   A Hard Takeoff is, basically,  a really really fast Intelligence Explosion!

Richard Loosemore and I have argued that an Intelligence Explosion is probable.   But this doesn’t mean a Hard Takeoff is probable.

Nick Bostrom’s nice illustration of the Hard Takeoff idea

What often seems to happen in discussions of the future of AI (among hardcore futurist geeks, anyway) is something like:

  • Someone presents the Foom / Hard Takeoff idea as a scary, and reasonably likely, option
  • Someone else points out that this is pretty unlikely, since someone watching the subhuman-level AGI system in question would probably notice if the AGI system were ordering a lot of new hardware for itself, or undertaking unusual network activity, or displaying highly novel RAM usage patterns, or whatever…

In spite of being a huge optimist about the power and future of AGI, I actually tend to agree with the anti-Foom arguments.   A hard AGI takeoff in 5 minutes seems pretty unlikely to me.

What I think is far more likely is an Intelligence Explosion manifested as a “semi-hard takeoff” — where an AGI takes a few years to get from slightly subhuman level general intelligence to massively superhuman intelligence, and involved various human beings, systems and institutions in the process.

A tasty semihard cheese — appropriate snack food  for those living through the semihard takeoff to come.  Semihard cheeses are generally good for melting; and are sometimes said to have the greatest complexity and balance.

After all, a cunning and power-hungry human-level AGI wouldn’t need to suddenly take over the world on its own, all at once, in order to gain power.  Unless it was massively superhuman, it would probably consider this too risky a course of action.   Rather, to take power, a human-level AGI would would simply need to accumulate a lot of money (e.g. on the financial markets, using the superior pattern recognition capability it could achieve via tightly integrating its mind with statistical and machine learning software and financial, economic and news databases) and then deploy this wealth to set up a stronghold in some easily-bought nation, where it could then pay and educate a host of humans to do its bidding, while doing research to improve its intelligence further…

Human society is complex and disorganized enough, and human motivations are complex and confused enough, and human judgment is erratic enough, that there would be plenty of opportunities for an early-stage AGI agent to embed itself in human society in such a way as to foster the simultaneous growth of its power and intelligence over a period of a few years.   In fact an early-stage AGI probably won’t even need to TRY for this to happen — once early-stage AGI systems can do really useful stuff, various governments, companies and other organizations will push pretty hard to use these systems as thoroughly as they can, because of the economic efficiency and scientific and media status this will bring.

Once an AGI is at human level and embedded in human society in judicious ways, it’s going to be infeasible for anyone to get rid of it — and it’s going to keep on growing in intelligence and power, aided by the human institutions it’s linked with.   Consider, e.g., a future in which:

  •  Azerbaijan’s leaders get bought off by a wildly successful AGI futures trader, and the nation becomes an AGI stronghold, complete with a nuclear arsenal and what-not (maybe the AGI has helped the country design and build nukes, or maybe it didn’t need the AGI for that…).
  • The nation the AGI has bought is not aggressive, not attacking anyone — it’s just sitting there using tech to raise itself out of poverty … doing profitable deals on the financial markets, making and selling software products/services, patenting inventions, … and creating a military apparatus for self-defense, like basically every other country.

What happens then?  The AGI keeps profiting and self-improving at its own pace, is what happens?  Is the US really gonna nuke a peaceful country just for being smart and getting rich, and risk massive retaliation and World War III?  I doubt it….  In its comfy Azerbaijani stronghold, the AGI can then develop from human-level to massively transhuman intelligence — and then a lot of things become possible…

I have spun out one scenario here but of course there are lots of others.  Let’s not allow the unrealism of the “hard takeoff in 5 minutes and the AGI takes over the world” aka “foom” scenario to blind our minds to the great variety of other possibilities….  Bear in mind that an AGI going from toddler-level to human-level in 5 years, and human-level to superhuman level in 5 more years, is a FOOM on the time-scale of human history, even if not as sudden as a 5 minute hard takeoff on the time-scale of an individual human life…

So how could we stop a semihard takeoff from happening?   We can’t really — not without some sort of 1984++ style fascist anti-AI world dictatorship, or a war destroying modern society projecting us back before the information age.   And anyway, I am not in favor of throttling AGI development personally; I doubt the hypothetical Azerbaijanian AGI would particularly want to annihilate humanity and I suspect transhuman AGIs will do more good than harm, on average over all possible worlds….  I’m not at all sure that “an AGI taking over the world” — with the fully or partly witting support of some group(s) of humans — would be a bad thing, compared to other viable alternatives for humanity’s future….

In terms of risks to humanity, this more realistic “semihard takeoff” development scenario highlights where the really onerous risks probably are.   SIAI/MIRI and the Future of Humanity Institute seem to spend a lot of energy thinking about the risk of a superhuman AGI annihilating humanity for its own reasons; but it seems to me a much more palpable and probable risk will occur at the stage where an AGI is around human-level but not yet dramatically more powerful and intelligent than humans, so that it still needs cooperation from human beings to get things done.  This stage of development will create a situation in which AGI systems will want to strike bargains with humans, wherein they do some things that certain humans want, in order to get some things that they want…

But obviously, some of the things that some humans want, are highly destructive to OTHER humans…

The point is, there is a clear and known risk of early-stage AGIs being manipulated by humans with nasty or selfish motives, because many humans are known to have nasty or selfish motives.   Whereas the propensity of advanced AGIs to annihilate lesser sentiences, remains a wild speculation (and one that I don’t really find all that credible)…..

I would personally trust a well-designed, self-improving AGI more than a national government that’s in possession of the world’s smartest near-human-level AGI; AGIs are somewhat of a wild card but can at least be designed with initially beneficent motivational systems, whereas national governments are known to generally be self-serving and prone to various sorts of faulty judgments….  This leads on to the notion of the AI Nanny, which I’ve written about before.   But my point here isn’t to argue the desirability or otherwise of the AI  Nanny — just to point out the kind of “semihard takeoff” that I think is actually plausible.

IMO what we’re likely to see is not a FOOM exactly, but still, a lot faster than AI skeptics would want to accept….   A Semihard Takeoff.  Which is still risky in various ways, but in many ways more exciting than a true Hard Takeoff — because it will happen slowly enough for us to watch and feel it happen…

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Smart Meter Companies Admit: We’re Spying On You

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Smart meters are spying devices. Not breaking news? Likely not for those of us who have researched the issue for quite a long while, but an admission by those who make the devices is rather shocking.

That is exactly what has happened, as SmartGridNews, a website supported by the high-tech meter industry, acknowledged that smart meters are gathering private information on homeowners.

Smart meters utilize wireless technology and instantly tell power companies how much electricity a home is using, and even can report on the power usage by individual appliances, as Smart Grid News said. Smart meters also can literally control newer household appliances that have the capability to communicate with the device.

“One of the next areas of value comes from taking smart meter data and ‘disaggregating’ it to tell us exactly how customers are using electricity,” reads a new story on the website. “Do external devices already do this? Sure. Just as progress in the smart phone world reduced the need for external devices (cameras, alarm clocks, radios, pedometers, navigation systems, etc.) the ability to get accurate, appliance level feedback, without the need to invest in external hardware, is the next step in the world of smart meters.”

The Stop Smart Meters website states that fire dangers are also a problem associated with smart meters. Fire calls after smart meter installations reportedly include the shorting-out of electronics of all varieties and the burning-out of appliances.

FREE Book Reveals Facts About How To Create A Self-Sufficient, Off-The-Grid Lifestyle Using Solar Power!

Cyber hacking of smart meters to possibly overload and garner control of significant portions of the power grid is also an often-voiced worry about the smart power initiative. In Connecticut, 30 percent of customers in a pilot program had higher bills after smart meters were installed.

According to the Stop Smart Meters group, the smart grid devices do not always emit less RF (radio frequency) exposure than a cell phone — as some utility companies allegedly state.

“People are becoming increasingly aware of the potential harm done by chronic exposure to RF radiation-emitting devices and are taking steps to change how they use them. Most people are not offered a wired smart meter and you can’t turn it off once it is installed,” the group contends.

Story continues below video

Smart grid opponents have long opposed the gathering of their personal usage information.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus once stated that WiFi-connected devices, such as appliances commonly found inside many homes, will “transform the art of spying.” Petraeus also said that spies will be capable of monitoring Americans without going inside the home or perhaps even acquiring a warrant. He went on to state that remote control radio frequency identification devices, “energy harvesters,” sensor networks, and small embedded severs all connected to an Internet network will be all that is necessary for clandestine intelligence gathering.

The Smart Grid News report said customers surveyed in a recent report supported smart meters.

“Customers were delighted with the initiative as it showed how their new smart meters could work for them,” the website said. “Utility companies wanting to meet their specific conservation targets to drive customer engagement should ensure they are making the most of their smart meter investment. They can now use the power of smart meter data disaggregation to identify the customers who are most likely to help them reach their specific targets and turn them into willing partners in the drive for energy conservation.”

Data disaggregation basically means the automatic collection of personal energy habits of the homes attached to smart meters. The more customers know that is the case, the more they will oppose smart meters.

How do you feel about smart meters and the creation of a smart grid? Let us know in the comments section below.

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