Emily Howell, Track 1

“Why not develop music in ways unknown? This only makes sense. I cannot understand the difference between my notes on paper and other notes on paper. If beauty is present, it is present. I hope I can continue to create notes and that these notes will have beauty for some others. I am not sad. I am not happy. I am Emily. You are Dave. Life and un-life exist. We coexist. I do not see problems.”
— Emily Howell

Emily Howell’s philosophic musings and short Haiku-like sentences are the giveaway.
Emily Howell is the daughter program of Emmy (Experiments in Musical Intelligence — sometimes spelled EMI), a music composing program written by David Cope, Dickerson Emeriti Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Emily Howell’s interesting ramblings about music are actually the result of a set of computer queries.
Her music, however, is something else again: completely original and hauntingly beautiful. Even a classical purist might have trouble determining whether a human being or an AI program created it. Judge for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEjdiE0AoCU&feature=player_embedded

[Source: www.redicecreations.com]

The Blue Brain Project

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz5IUaRr8No

The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.

[Source: bluebrain.epfl.ch]

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ)

http://www.hitlabnz.org/wiki/Home
[A transhumanist company...]

"The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.
The HIT Lab NZ conducts research with new emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Next Generation Video Conferencing, Immersive Visualization and Perceptual User Interfaces. Interaction Design techniques are used to adapt these technologies to the needs of end users and solve real world problems.
The end goal is to improve the user experience with technology."
Prof. Mark Billinghurst
New Zealand Director

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The Gods of Technology

http://startheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/gods-of-technology/

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part,
you can’t even passively take part,
and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!
And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it, that unless you’re free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all!
· Mario Savio ·

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The Coming Superbrain

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?hpw

[...]
The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.
Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.
The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence” — was dubbed “The Singularity” in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.

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