Just found this new site about the Cybersyn project. Stafford Beer was a giant of cybernetics. They have the intention to fund the construction of an interactive audio-visual documentary film, based on the cybernetics experience made in Chile by Stafford Beer called Cybersyn. They created a 3D visualization of the opsroom used in the Cybersyn project.

If it can be done, it will be done. Computer Programmer Clinton Curtis testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the Houe of Florida at the time, currently US Representative representing MY district ) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts. Via jwz [link]

I first met Stefan Richter at ECLM 2006 and we connected instantly. No need for a secret handshake. He prepared a special report about the Singularity Summit at Stanford University.

After visiting ECLM 2006 in Hamburg and having a nice talk with Markus at the Gastwerk hotel bar about AI, Lisp, Singularity and the Universe, I found the following announcement on the net:

"On June 13th the Singularity Institute (http://www.singinst.org) will organize a Singularity Summit at Stanford University, California.

Speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Nick Bostrom, Sebastian Thrun, Cory Doctorow, K. Eric Drexler, Max More, Christine Peterson, John Smart and Eliezer Yudkowsky."

This very interesting line-up of speakers must have caused a temporary brain damage in my head, because I decided to sign-up and fly to San Francisco over the weekend, arriving on friday and leaving on sunday. I was even able to convince a fellow hacker to join the trip. After signing up and mentioning, that we come over from Germany just to participate in this event, we even received some kind of special treatment with a personal mail confirmation from Tyler Emerson.

Friday we visited a friend at Google who also joined us on the Summit and had good food and coffee at the Googleplex, .

Saturday started early: We arrived a 0730 at the Memorial Auditorium and found a big, long queue of Summit-Visitors: There were more then 2000 registrations for this free-of-charge event! Okay, we are in San Francisco...

Ray Kurzweil's talk was more or less a summary of the first 200 pages of his new book "The singularity is near", but still very motivating.

I was very curious about Douglas R. Hofstadter. His talk invited the other speakers and the academic world to enter a discourse on the topic of singularity. He said, that he is "less sceptic now", but would be very surprised, if we reach Singularity in less then 100-200 years. He also pointed out, that Kurzweil is sometimes mixing science with science fiction and said: "How secure can I be of the sanity of this person?" (This was about the moment, when we took the picture ;-) ).

The other speakers didn't pick up on that. Everybody else had more or less his own agenda and topics. No discourse. But interesting. For more fotos, videos, audio and transcripts, you can visit the singinst.org Site (http://sss.stanford.edu/coverage/press/). Very nice are the self-made cartoons, that Hofstadter used in his presentation.

One of the best presentations came from science fiction writer, boingboing-blogger and EFF member Cory Doctorow, who talked about the evils of Digital Rights (or more precise: "Restrictions") Management (DRM). Maybe this has not so much todo with Singularity in the first place, but DRM is a danger to the freedom of information and culture, so it affects the matter we are writing programs for. EFF just published the nice animated film "The Corruptibles" about the real goals of DRM technology: http://www.eff.org/corrupt/

Think about it.

So let's hope, that in 2045 the first version of Seed-AI will not be sued from the media industry and put into custody because of copyright infringements, because she was consuming all books, music and films to better understand the human culture."

Sometimes things are connected in a strange way. While browsing through my copy of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, I came upon an old printout of a WIRED article. It was Bordering on Chaos by Peter Kartel. He mentioned Fernando Flores which lead me to a FastCompany article titled The Power of Words. Flores managed the Cybersyn project while working as a minister of economics in the cabinet of Salvador Allende. Cybersyn was the first documented attempt at using cybernetics in controlling the ecomony of a whole country. The brain behind Cybersyn was Stafford Beer. A bit of googling resulted in a paper by Beer describing the Cybersyn project and I was amazed. They used Bayesian statistics in a closed loop to create a self learning control system. This is some really cool stuff. And then I stumbled upon a recording of a lecture Stafford gave titled Forty Years of Cybernetics. That just blew me away!

Links:

• Fanfare for Effective Freedom, The Third Richard Goodman. Memorial Lecture, Brighton Polytechnic, 14. Februar 1973
• "Forty Years of Cybernetics" Lecture of Stafford Beer (WMA format)
• Lessons of Stafford Beer
• Stafford Beer memorial website

Understanding depletion is simple. Think of an Irish pub. The glass starts full and ends empty. There are only so many more drinks to closing time. It's the same with oil. We have to find the bar before we can drink what's in it. -- Colin Campbell

Update: Øystein Grøvlen posted a correction: The ClustRa Telecom Database: High Availability, High Throughput, and Real-Time Response is the correct Clustra paper.

All that said - cool! This is great. It's more fun toying with the real thing than watching a video of Alan Kay enjoying it all to himself :) I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.

Real Software Engineering is still in the future. There is nothing in current SE that is like the construction of the Empire State building in less than a year by less than 3000 people: they used powerful ideas and power tools that we don’t yet have in software development. If software does “engineering” at all, it is too often at the same level as the ancient Egyptians before the invention of the arch (literally before the making of arches: architecture), who made large structures with hundreds of thousands of slaves toiling for decades to pile stone upon stone: they used weak ideas and weak tools, pretty much like most software development today.

The real question is whether there exists a practice in between the two—stronger than just piling up messes—that can eventually lead us to real modern engineering processes for software.

One of the ways to characterize the current dilemma is that every project we do, even those with seemingly similar goals has a much larger learning curve than it should. This is partly because we don’t yet know what we really need to know about software. But as Butler Lampson has pointed out, this is also partly because Moore’s Law gives us a qualitatively different environment with new and larger requirements every few years, so that projects with similar goals are quite different.

Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in all aspects. The first system to really do this in an important way was LISP, and many of its great ideas were used in the invention of Squeak’s ancestor Smalltalk—the first dynamic completely object-oriented development and operating environment—in the early 70s at Xerox PARC.