Rights and Freedoms

On the issues of personal liberties, freedoms, universal rights much has been written, and we, as a race, have recorded into history cases of truly inspiring progress. All across the globe are people who share in the belief that we are all equal, that we all suffer, we all have the same requirements for life, and all have the potential to make this planet a better place to live, for ourselves, for our families; for all of us.

This is a pivotal step along the road of the cultural and social evolution of the human race. But the journey is far from over... Much pessimism exist and false rulers would steal the power from those who would do good.

It is a widely held belief that groups of people, towns, cities, nations, cannot be controlled through force forever, and I agree with it. There are countless instances that show up in our records, and more relevantly, in memory, that show this to be true. Even though many may be born and some may die under such regimes, such systems of governing will always crumble.

A true leader, a ruler of a people who's followers do not fear them, will lead only while he or she can shape the very thoughts of those over whom his or her power extends. Only by shaping ideas and focusing minds of those they are sworn to serve, can a leader hope to continue doing their work. Governing officials must understand and use this knowledge, balancing the people's desire for stability so they can continue living their lives, with the changing needs of the global economy, the local ecology, and with the laws passed down from our founding fathers.


There are, of course, rewards for these remarkable individuals who achieve power through ideas and not weapons or force. Men and women who strive to lead in this way will see more of their means accomplished. Their power will only increase, and their sphere of influence will grow with time. There will be a marked resistance to any attempt at control, this is positive. This resistance is what will push forward democracy and bring fresh ideas to power.

The results of all other approaches are not as favorable for the leaders. Their posterity? Being listed as corrupt, greedy, underhanded, untrustworthy, or worse could follow their legacy for as long as their story is told. Vile and despicable leaders of the past are surely remembered for their cruelty and indifference to the human condition, as well as those that may follow them, both genealogically and politically.

We are beings not just in space, but also in time. It is this author's opinion that the suffering you put on others will surely come back to you, just as the rain water flows steadily down the mountain river toward the ocean from whence it came.

Youth Education - Teaching Teachers Teaching in Two Thousand

During my time going through the Canadian education system, computers were antiquated machines designed primarily as advance type-writers with limited or no access to the 'net. Even when I could logon to Netscape, my options seemed limited because I was never really shown the immense possibilities of the Internet beyond the WWW. Webpages were all I knew, and for the most part, other than some download sites, chat pages, and early weblogs, most pages on the Web were novel but uninteresting.

It wasn't until much later that I would find out the Internet had been alive and strong well before Webbrowsers, and graphical pages displaying user-generated content. There was a whole digital world out there to be discovered. News groups, bulletin board (BBS), Usenet, IRC, and on and on.

Since the invention of the telephone in the late 1800's (largely credited to AGB) The ways that we have of communicating to one another have since grown exponentially.

With this unparralled growth in communication tech, comes a massive increase in information transmission rates. A piece of data that two hundred years ago may have taken months of travel, and thousands of dollars in expense (perhaps hundreds of thousands when adjusted for inflation) can now be accessed either instantaneously, or quite nearly so. A library in Australia? 3 minutes 27 seconds. Even if you assume the data you are looking for has never been digitized, we now have the means of contacting global experts on huge numbers of subjects, in order to flush that vital piece of information out. And that means has been granted to the majority for the first time in history.

It was my fault, perhaps for not subscribing to any formal education on computing at the time, but also the fault of my environment for not providing the immediate means to do so. Whatever the case may be, things are very different now. Even in the smallest communities children are growing up with access to the answer to any question they can postulate. Often times, many answers. This, I believe is a merit to a society because where before if a solution was presented to the masses, it was a singular voice, usually coming from a person in a position of authority, and no matter the ambiguity, that answer was definitive and effectively final.

We now can see that to any situation, there may be many truths, and not always in agreeance with the other... Amongst all these possible truths, there is the answer first sought out. The truth finally chosen by the seeker will be the one that most harmonizes with that chooser's current paradigm. We choose the nature of our own reality, according to how it relates with what we already perceive to be truth.

So what decides the truth for the next generation of curious, inquisitive young minds? Pagerank®? Wikipedia®? No one source stands above all the rest as the final and definitive source for information, and that is what makes the connected world so complex and truly wondrous.

So I'll leave you with this:
When computers can talk to our kids, listen and respond to their questions, customize their lesson plan to their personal profile, formulate their itenerary, and reward positive behaviors with leisure time, or extra snack credits, and punish them by restricting the same, what need will we have of our teachers other than mere guardians?

Her soft body beside me

You may have heard that Canada has recently become home to the World's First robosexual. Surely this a trend that will continue to grow as our culture becomes more communicative but less in contact with each other face-to-face. I'm waiting for the haptic feedback suits to come to market. You know like, smell-o-vision but for touch. Before then, virtual lovers and high-tech sex toys will certainly be quite capable of filling the void (so to speak). They will be our pets, our friends, counsellors, and yes, one day it will seem completely normal to talk about your future with a robot mate or a computer boss with whom you can speak. It doesn't take a clairvoyant to see these things coming. It's as plain to see on the horizon as electric cars. Already making a stir in science (no longer sci-fiction) magazines and periodicals, these things, artificial minds, will only garner more attention within the next 15 years. 

If you're sceptical, think about it this way. Imagine all the money spent on sex in the world today, and yesterday, and throughout our common history. You can then picture the sort of effort that we are capable of in search of a mate, at least from an instinctual perspective.
The one stumbling block engineers are running into presently is not so much how to make the mind, but also how to make the body neccesary to provide it with the learning it would otherwise be impossible to teach in time we've got left -by any estimate- on Earth.


Click here for a .pdf file with stats on the current sex industry worldwide, not including prostitution which is notorously difficut to even estimate. The faint of heart take note the document also tragically includes some stats about child abuses and exploitation on page 3 which you may find disturbing.

First Post

This corner of the Internetosphere (you heard it coined here first) is dedicated to exploring the interaction in between the most intellectually evolved life on earth (us) and our creation (technology) during times where it (our creation) threatens to outstrip us in ways not fully believed, very soon realized, and nearly ubiquitous. 

We're messing  around with really advanced machines in ways that seem modern, every-other-day ways, ways that are increasingly becoming normal because just around the corner is the next new thing to surprise us.

This is a log of this author's perspective on the societal change that is happening along with it, the best of my understanding of why it's all happening, how it's happening, and if there is anything we can do to stop the trend that might see the end of all intelligent life on this humble rock. 

I'm not anti-tech but I am an advocate for privacy, and like Orsen Wells in his classic novel 1984, I think that complacency will lead to our losing our freedoms, losing our privacy, and in doing so, losing our power to do anything about it. Though we disagree slightly on the date.

Also in this web log, you'll occasionally see the inner workings of my mind, trying to sort out the various conflicts between having had religious experiences, being a devote scientist, living the life of an christian turned atheist, struggling with Agnosticism, being 25, and living in 2009, as well as some of my more recent explorations of the tenants of Buddhism, Zen, meditation and Karma.

I hope you will at least find it entertaining, if not enlightening, and that you please comment with your questions, praise, complaints, desires, motives, arguments, rants, marriage proposals, death threats, and general revelry. 

Enjoy,

SP