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How Would You Solve ISIS?

Today, as is often the case, I will write about a topic I do not understand. You don’t need to remind me of that fact in the comments. But I do enjoy learning, so educate me if you need to.

Now let’s get to it…

ISIS continues to gain ground and no one, including the United States military, has any practical option for stopping it. 

So what would you do if you were in charge of creating U.S. strategy?

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Robots Program People

It won’t be long before all new drugs are discovered by robots. This start-up is an example of that trend.

And it won’t be long before IBM’s Watson can diagnose and prescribe treatments better than any human doctor.

Put those two trends together and robots will be programming humans with drugs. Drugs are the user interface to our moistware.

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My Plan to Save Humanity (From the Technical Singularity)

As regular readers of this blog already know, when computers learn to program themselves (and that will happen) they will quickly acquire so much knowledge and capability that humanity will be threatened. Experts predict it could happen in a few decades. The official name for that situation is the Technical Singularity.

Another trend that is neck-and-neck with the Technical Singularity is our ability to move human minds into software. Someday, say the futurists, we will be able to scan a human mind’s architecture and reproduce it in ones and zeros.

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Robots Read News - About Human Consciousness

If your firewall is blocking the image, see it here on Twitter.

image

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Complexity-Induced Mental Illness

Unless you live in an unusual place, at least a third of your adult friends, coworkers, and neighbors have some sort of mental illness that is being treated by big pharma and/or big alcohol.

If that sounded high to you, just add together the folks with alcohol problems (about 10-20% of your neighbors) plus the folks on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and other prescribed meds. That gets you to 30% fairly quickly. 

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Robots Read News - About Alleged Chinese Hacking

If your firewall blocks the image, see it on Twitter here.

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The Time I Scared a Security Guard by Being an Old White Guy

The other day I was walking through a big hotel in San Diego, on my way to give a keynote speech for a corporate event. I was the only person at the conference without an ID badge and I wondered how hard it would be to talk my way past security.

I figured it would help that a life-size photo of me as the keynote presenter was sitting in the hallway by the entrance to the conference. My plan was to wait for security to stop me (if they even noticed) then point to the poster and breeze right in.

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Robots Read News - About Bankers

If your corporate firewall is blocking the image, see it on Twitter here. (I can’t see the more specific link for some reason.)

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Knowledge as a Financial Asset

If someone offered you $100,000 to take a class for a few weeks, would you do it? I believe most of you would, assuming there is nothing terrible about the class itself.

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Morally Acceptable Behavior

According to this poll, a majority of Americans now find physician-assisted dying to be morally acceptable behavior.

That doesn’t mean the practice should be legal, obviously. There are lots of practical considerations. But the majority no longer sees it as a moral failing.

On a related matter, I have been noodling on the question of how best to reduce the number of coerced physician-assisted deaths in places where it is legal. There is no perfect solution, but I think social media could someday be part of it.

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