April 3, 2011 by Walter Schneider.

A little over eight years I came across a report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (pre-publication on-line version), June 2002, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce, pp. 164, 165 PDF File (4.7 MB), and wrote a commentary about it:

The Hive Mind: Rebirth or the End of Humanity?

Will the innovations brought by converging technologies for improving human performance augment or eliminate humans?

(Full Story)

This morning I listened to the radio and heard part of a discussion with Dr. Charles Higgins from the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Arizona.  He basically appears to be a proponent of much of what the commentary mentioned above targets, but he seems to have his feet a bit more firmly on the ground than the US National Science Foundation does.  I gathered from that discussion that we are still a long way off from creating an artificial intelligence that comes close to competing with human abilities, let alone equal or surpass them.

It appears that since the original report by the NSF and the DoC, the creation of artificial intelligence has not made much more inroads than to begin investigating the workings of the brain of the honey bee at a very rudimentary level, with an amount of equipment and a state of sophistication that is still a far cry from the lofty and ambitious goals set by the NSF  and the DoC, but it is a first step.  The amount of progress made towards creating the hive mind is comparable to  putting the stakes into the ground for a massive building, say, the Capitol Building in Washington DC, without the funding for the rest of it having yet been authorized, let alone secured — except that putting the stakes into the ground for a building that size today would require vastly less money than appears to have been consumed by Dr. Higgins in his efforts to investigate the workings of the brain of the honey bee and other insects that were the targets of his research.  However what does that matter?  The source of funding for both of those endeavors is inexhaustible taxpayer money.  There is no doubt in my mind that inexhaustible funding will be required and much of it consumed in the quest for the creation of the hive mind.

I will cover some of the impressions I gained by listening to the discussion involving Dr. Higgins, in this blog posting, which as of now is a place-holder and will be updated today and perhaps during a few more days before it is complete.

Posted in The New World Order, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

December 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

To all friends and visitors to Dads & Things and its related website Fathers for Life.

In the last few weeks I responded to very few of the about 300 e-mail messages a day received by Fathers for Life.  I still try to read all of those messages, but I had to forgo writing responses, so as to find much-needed time for completing a few neglected house-keeping chores for Fathers for Life:

• A little over a hundred web pages at Fathers for Life still needed to be converted to the standard web-page design that was first introduced in the beginning of 2005.  A good portion of those pages has now been updated.  I hope that over the holiday period I can update the remaining pages that need to be upgraded.
• During the last year it became increasingly apparent that the Table of Content pages for all of the subjects accessible through the index for those ToC pages deteriorated.  Those pages have been repaired and were replaced.  All ToC pages for the 35 major subjects or topics of interest discussed at Fathers for Life are once more fully functional.  I hope that from now on I can keep the ToC pages fully functional at all times.
• A site-specific search feature provided by Google.com has been installed and is accessible at all web pages at Fathers for Life that conform with the required standard format for the website.  The search entry field is at the upper right-hand corner of those web pages.  That search feature provides lists of search returns for Fathers for Life and for Dads & Things.  It makes navigating through Fathers for Life and through Dads & Things a lot more convenient and makes finding specific information much easier.

By the way, sometime around the new year, Fathers for Life will have its 5-millionth visitor.

Ruth and I are doing well and hope that you can say the same about yourself.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our life.  Every journey should have a goal and should begin with the first step into the right direction.  When setting a direction, one should not confuse the possession of goods with the good life.

All the best,

Walter and Ruth Schneider

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »