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What a nice coincidence: One year that this blog had not seen any fresh and spirited content. No longer! I have reclaimed a bit of my freedom by leaving my job at Nokia a week ago, and I’m now in a position that I can do whatever I like. What should that be, you ask me? A bit of traveling (the US is big, Europe is far), a bit of hacking here and there, and massive amount of meditation in a remote desert (I’m kidding).
It’s been a long time that I have not had a longer break than 3 weeks of vacation (I know that it’s forever for many here), and I’m really looking forward to getting bored. But then again, if you live in the Bay Area and you get bored, you’re not doing it right.

I’m actually leaving on a 10 day road trip tomorrow morning. I’ll be driving up along the coast of Northern California to Eureka, east towards Lassen Park and Mt Shasta, north again in Oregon territory, zigzagging among the forest park lands to Portland, Bend, then to Seattle. A good friend helped me make the plan, arguing among other things for the mandatory sight of large amount of solidified lava.
The route looks like this (Google maps) at the moment.

I then drop the rental in Seattle, and take the Coast Starlight train (wifi included, thank you Amtrak) all the way down to the Bay Area in one stretch of 22 hours.

Truth and lies and lives are leaking all over the Internet these days. Be it the Wikileaks reports, or the special report of a Duke student, the daily Facebook tales of misfortune… today’s confessions are done on the web, and very smart who can tell who the biggest sinner is. I would not be surprised Moms are telling their kids “be good, or the Internet will know about it, and you’ll be punished!”.

The days of an almighty power scaring the shit out of people are gone. Is anybody scared of God anymore? I am guessing those who have been on the Internet’s receiving end would take God punishment over the very special and very viral attention ‘It’ is giving them. There is no purgatory in the Internet, what gets there, stays there, and most likely for a long time. Enough time to embarrass you in all the decades of your life, and those of your kids and grand-kids. Internet’s memory is infinite and its ways are not that inscrutable.

It sucks, and it’s probably unfair for a lot of those unlucky bastards. There used to be a time when you could be stupid, foolish, and even dead mad, and get away with it. If human justice did not take care of you, certainly God’s would – once you’re dead. Today, not even the high ranking officials of the top military power on this planet are safe from Internet’s scrutiny. I suppose that’s what they call sousveillance.

Now I’m wondering: when will people switch to the Internet for their source of morality? If you start acting moral because you think the Internet is watching you, then that might be it!

The idea of the singularity starts with numbers. Numbers that get bigger and bigger over time, exponentially. As Ray Kurzweil showed it in his presentation, big numbers getting bigger are all over the technological world:

• Moore’s law
• Total bits shipped
• Magnetic data storage bits per dollar
• Internet data traffic
• Internet backbone bandwidth
• US nanotechnology-related patents

But also in biology, for instance the cost of sequencing DNA that is dropping exponentially.

Conjecturing what happens next when those numbers get really big is what this summit and the groups involved in the singularity are about. Something is bound to happen. Something special, something unforeseen, something beyond any of our wildest prediction. Will it be good (techno-optimist), bad (techno-pessimist), the same (techno-neutral) or good or bad depending on how we get there (techno-volatile)? What is going to happen, to people, to human intelligence, to artificial intelligence, to the biological world? When will the singularity point be past?

So, the singularity is where we’re going, but the work still needs to be done. And that’s what computer scientists, biologists, neuroscientists, writers, futurists, psychologists, historians and many other experts come together to discuss.

One main theme is understanding the human body and the brain better. Not just to cure diseases, repair the body, make us immortal, and more intelligent, but also to find principles that guide scientists to make smarter, more powerful technology, such as nano machines that writes and reads DNA, or computer systems that are generally intelligent.

With that many different angles and approaches to the singularity, there is no unified view of it and it is hard to even get a more precise idea about what it could be or mean. You get bits and pieces here and there, a glimpse over here. And as they say, one thing that is certain about the future is that you cannot predict it.

Besides the big ideas, was the conference good? Yes, it was nice to attend, listen to some of the guys whose blogs and articles I read from time to time. The distribution was as usual, 4-5 talks I really enjoyed and were thought-provoking to me, a few I could have slept through and the rest in the middle. I enjoyed it overall but I’m not sure experts would learn that much per se from their own field from the talks, unless you come to network.

The videos should get on the website sometime.
Read the day one and day two report articles from the h+ magazine.

Si vous venez visiter la Bay Area et San Francisco et que vous voulez gouter à l’esprit high-tech et entrepreneur de la Valley, c’est facile, il n’y a qu’à chercher un peu. Presque tous les jours, vous trouverez des meetings et meetups organisés par les nombreux groupes et associations de la région.
Quelques bonnes adresses pour commencer:

• Startup Digest: inscrivez-vous à la mailing list ou lisez leurs archives (cherchez SF Bay Area HackersDigest).
• Eventbrite: recherchez tech dans la Bay Area
• Women2.0 propose ses propres événements et tient  à jour son propre listing

La plupart des événements organisés sont soit gratuits soit peu cher ($10-$20).

This article is relatively old (from 2007) but nonetheless interesting. It basically says that a condition for higher productivity is access to intangible wealth. Whereas natural and built capital describe natural resources, pasture land, and machinery, equipment, infrastructure; intangible wealth include such things as trust in society, property rights, education, etc.  And the amount of intangible wealth is decisive for how productive and creative you will be.

Sounds intuitive enough.

Concretely, what does it mean for you? Well, if you were pondering whether you really need a new computer, a bigger screen, a lighter bike, the newest camera, you can help convince yourself that you’ll be definitely more productive, says the World Bank. Self-deception is a powerful mind trick.