Archive for October 2nd, 2012

October 2, 2012

Old Bay Seasoning

McCormick & Company

Old Bay Seasoning is a blend of herbs and spices that is currently marketed in the United States by McCormick & Company, and produced in Maryland.

It is produced in the Chesapeake Bay area where it was developed by German immigrant Gustav Brunn in the 1940s, and where the seasoning is very popular to this day. At that time, crabs were so plentiful that bars in Baltimore offered them free and seasonings like Old Bay were created to encourage patrons to purchase more beverages.

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October 2, 2012

The End of Work

Technological unemployment

The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era’ is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995.

Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural, and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees.

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October 2, 2012

Infomorph

T-1000 by Mark McCreery

An infomorph is a virtual body of information that can possess emergent features such as personality. The term was first described in Charles Platt’s 1991 novel ‘The Silicon Man,’ where it refers to a single biological consciousness transferred into a computer through a process of mind transfer. In the book, a character refers to an infomorph as ‘intelligence held in a computer memory,’ and an ‘information entity.’

Russian artificial intelligence theorist Alexander Chislenko uses the same word in his 1996 essay ‘Networking in the Mind Age,’ to refer to a software agent that possesses distributed intelligence. Whether the vision shared in Platt’s novel will ever be more than a theory is uncertain, but computing power is still increasing exponentially, and the ‘Future of Humanity Institute’ at Oxford University have considered the philosophical and technical feasibility of this theory at some point in the future.

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October 2, 2012

Mind Uploading

brain scan

digital immortality

Whole brain emulation or mind uploading (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device.

The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably. The simulated mind is assumed to be part of a virtual reality simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively, the simulated mind could be assumed to reside in a computer inside (or connected to) a humanoid robot or a biological body, replacing its brain.

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October 2, 2012

Posthuman

you robot by belle mellor

A posthuman is a concept originating notably in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy.

These multiple and interactive origins have contributed to profound confusion over the similarities and differences between the posthuman of ‘posthumanism’ (a line of philosophical reasoning) and the posthuman of ‘transhumanism’ (an intermediary form between the human and the hypothetical posthuman).

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October 2, 2012

Obsolescence

obsolescence

Obsolescence [ob-suh-les-uhns] is the state of being which occurs when an object, service or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order. Obsolescence frequently occurs because a replacement has become available that has advantages which outweigh the inconveniences related to purchasing the replacement. Obsolete refers to something that is already disused or discarded, or antiquated. Typically, obsolescence is preceded by a gradual decline in popularity.

Driven by rapid technological changes, new components are developed and launched on the market with increasing speed. The result is a dramatic change in production methods of all components and their market availability. A growing industry sector is facing issues where life cycles of products no longer fit together with life cycles of required components.

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