Kevin Kelly - The impact of future technology

Wired editor-at-large Kevin Kelly explores the nature of technology through technology’s eyes. He predicts that the collective intelligence of the internet will soon dwarf the collective intelligence mankind, and he presents his ideas that the internet is structured remarkbly similarly to a single human brain.

Facebook now has an advertising agency.

You know all that information you put onto Facebook. The little things like your age, sex, race, political persuasion, interests, hobbies, your address, your email, the names of all your friends and everything you do, see, say, think or feel? Well, this is the guy who's going to use it to sell you something. Here's the article. Here's the company blog.

The lending club is a lending community where you borrow and lend money to fellow Facebook members. While bank customers can get only 5.5% interest on savings accounts, and while banks charge their lending customers 12.32%* on average for personal loans, Lending Club lenders earn from 6.95% to 11.68%, and borrowers on Lending Club pay as little as 7.45% APR. Not a bad idea.

Steven Pinker online archive of lectures and talks

Steven Pinker at Freethought Radio

The Cognitive Niche

What is your dangerous idea?

Jews, Genes and Intelligence (lecture) pt 1

Jews, Genes and Intelligence (lecture) pt 2

IDEAS presentation

Human Nature

It's All In the Genes

The Blank Slate

Evolutionary Psychology

The Blank Slate

New Space Object

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature pt1

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature pt 2

A biological understanding of human nature

Nature, Nurture? Not!

Language of War

Evolving English

How the Mind Works

Der Digitale Planet (lecture) - Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, , Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker

Speech Gene

The Mind

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature

And if you'd like to visit Steven Pinker's Site at Harvard, go here.

This was all via the very, very complete freethought media site

Wicked cool flash animation body beat music video

Well, there's a tsunami of buzzwords for ya. Very cool video here though.

Humble Good Stuff - Ira Glass on creativity.

This is just lovely. Ira Glass, winner of the Peabody award for journalism talks about how to get from a passionate beginner to an artist.

The Media Revolution

Utopian. Dystopian. Either way, it's a well rendered view of the future.

Dr Patrick Dixon - Global trends

How the world witll change, which technologies will capture the imagination of people and why.

Dr Patrick Dixon - Future tech trends

Dr Patrick Dixon - Future customer trends

Dr Patrick Dixon talks about how to connect with costomers and why the future will be about emotion. DIxon was ranked one of the top 50 most important thinkers. Here's why.

Dr Patrick Dixon - The future of marketing

Speech by Dr Patrick Dixon for Finland Marketing Federation in Helsinki, audience of 500, in a relatively intimate setting. The future of marketing and consumer trends: direct mail, network, email, strategies, ideas, relationship marketing, market research, consumer reports, campaign slogans.

Dr Patrick Dixon - Why market research gives wrong results

Market research cannot predict the future accurately. Example is the rapid growth of blogging or web diaries which was not indicated by market research surveys a year or two before. Lecture by Dr Patrick Dixon for MTN global leadership team

100 year old predictions from 1900

"There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary" - just one of the predictions The Ladies Journal made in 1900 on what life would be like in the year 2000. Check out the rest here.

Understanding the mechanisms of the mind

Theodor Berger talks conservatively about how to replace parts of the brain with micrchips to bring functionality back to areas of the brain damaged by tumours. There are several other speakers in this video that discuss various points of view in the brain vs computers debate.

Steven Pinker - Evolutionary Psychology

Steven Pinker is interviewed by deadpan smart guy Robert Wright.He discusses his ideas of the limits of evolutionary psychology and his doubts about what evolutionary psychologists refer to as adaptive functions.

David Weinberger - Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger used to write for Woody Allen. He discusses his new book which argues that there is no right way of ordering the world. Every domain has it's own ordering pattern that works best for that particular domain. Weinberger beileves we have internalised the organisation of the physical (i.e the way books are ordered in Melville "I love ten" Dewey decimal system) and put them onto ideas. Watch it. Download it. Tell your friends.


More stuff from David Weinberger.

Pug Vader

For Michelle. via neatorama.com

Christof Koch - How the Mind Arises from the Brain

Chritoph Koch talks passionately on a very difficult subject, exceptionally well. There's a lot of brain fizz in this one. Good stuff. After the talk, the relentlessly talkative Charlie Rose chairs a panel discussion about the same subject. Also quite good.

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Gilles Laurent - The brain & our sense of smell

In a Watson lecture, Gilles Laurent, Hanson Professor of Biology and Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, summarized some of the recent advances in research on the sense of smell, and showed how old brain circuits may help us understand the neuronal nature of memories.

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Clay Shirky - Love, Internet Style

Noted Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky delivered one of the opening “provocations” at Supernova 2007. Using a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine as a metaphor, Clay explained how the New Network changes the basic dynamics of business and collective creativity. via conversationhub.com

Ray Kurzweil - Technology, the Brain, and the Future

Kurzweil was the first person to do serious speech recognition and to do reading for the blind. He has invented musical instruments [synthesizers] that are incredibly real in sound, so much so that people cannot tell which is the piano and which is Kurzweil. He has been involved in software that writes poetry, and education for physicians that allows them to work on virtual patients
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Marc Hauser - The Evolution of Our Moral Intuitions

How do we decide what is morally right and wrong? Historically, there have been two answers to this question. Either the human mind deliberates moral judgments based on a set of principles or the mind relies on intuitions mediated by emotions. Harvard Psychology professor Marc Hauser argues that morality, at some level, may be hard-wired into our brains, as an innate 'moral grammar' that has evolved with us over time. That intuitive mechanism may be more important in what shapes our moral decision than what we learn from school, church, or family.

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Steven Rose - The future of the brain

Brain repair, smart pills, mind-reading machines--modern neuroscience promises to deliver an array of treatments and diagnostic tools that sound like they are the stuff of science fiction, as well as profound insight into the nature of the brain over the next decade. But these breakthroughs raise troubling questions about what it means to be human, Steven Rose warns. How does our evolving understanding of the human brain affect our sense of the human mind and our sense of agency and humanity?

Dr Bruce Cohen - Magnetic Resonance Imaging

President and Psychiatrist in Chief at the McLean Hospital (Harvard Medical School), Dr Bruce Cohen talks about Functional Magnetic Imaging Machines, how they work and what they can tell us about the brain. It's a good overview of fMRI technology.

Sheryl Sandberg - Google and the future models of advertising.

Sheryl Sandberg, who leads Google’s advertising business, explains how Google revolutionized online advertising, and where she sees the market going in the future.