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What is it about the marijuana industry that makes it a booming business?
Well the marijuana industry is actually a huge industry and along with the industries needed for development of legal marijuana, there are also many businesses and ideas from business you can start up and utilize from this booming business.9 Business Ideas for People Looking to Cash in on the Marijuana BoomHere is that article below.Want to get in on the green rush but don't want to grow or sell pot? Here's a list of promising ancillary cannabis businesses to start.The Wild West of weed is on fire with entrepreneurial opportunities. Potpreneurs across America are legally growing, curing and cooking the skunky stuff in record numbers. As those who cultivate and sell the plant grow, so do the offshoot businesses sprouting up around them.Kristopher Fowlkes, founder and CEO of Pinnacle Consultation, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based consulting firm that helps marijuana farmers streamline and increase yields, says ancillary cannabis startups are popping up across America mainly for two reasons. One, they’re generally less risky than growing and distributing pot from a legal standpoint. And, two, traditional businesses, such as banks, still don’t want to touch those who directly touch the controversial plant. After all, pot’s stigma, like its stink, is strong and hard to get rid of, though forward strides are being made every day.Related: 5 Tips for Breaking Into the 'Budding' Marijuana Industry“Small-business people are swooping in where the big guys won’t,” Fowlkes tells Entrepreneur. “They’re coming up with anything and everything at this point, even taking out grow-house garbage to get in on the trend. It’s wild the type of entrepreneurship that the cannabis industry has created, and we’re only just scratching the surface.”With marijuana now legal in some form in 25 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and legal at the recreational level in four states, opportunities to make greenbacks on the booming cash crop abound. Here are nine business ideas for people looking to cash in on the multi-billion-dollar green rush, but not looking to grow or dispense1. Cannabis-friendly bed and breakfastStartup costs: $30,000 to $40,000Equipment needed: Private residence to rent or buy, reservations software system, computers, phones, furniture, linensThe idea for a cannabis-friendly bed and breakfast came to Joel Schneider in the bathroom -- a hotel bathroom. “I was hiding in there, smoking a joint, blowing the smoke into the toilet and constantly flushing," he says. "I knew I was far from the only one doing this and I didn’t want to hide anymore, so I started my own lodging business where it’s OK -- and legal -- to smoke pot on the premises.”In 2014, the veteran lawyer and New York native made his pipe dream a reality with Bud and Breakfast. It’s a rented private home-based bed and breakfast in Denver. There, guests aged 21 and older can puff or vape cannabis products or nibble on THC-infused edibles from their own legally-sourced stashes, he says, in living and dining rooms and patios.Schneider, who says he has smoked pot since he was 14, now operates a total of three bed and breakfast locations in the Centennial State, with 22 rooms in all. In addition to renting rooms for between $149 and $399 a night (depending on the location), each sells marijuana paraphernalia, including glass pipes, bongs and rolling papers, to guests. Complimentary candy and other snacks, such as granola, are placed around the premises to “satisfy guests’ munchies.”“What we’ve learned is that, as the cannabis culture is very communal, our guests love to share,” Schneider says. “You don’t pass a cocktail around. You pass a joint. That’s what makes us unique. No one is locked in their room smoking alone and feeling paranoid. They’re enjoying marijuana in a safe haven the way it was meant to be enjoyed -- together.”He’s also learned that lodgers often smoke up more before they check out, mainly because it’s illegal to travel across state lines or by air with legal weed. “Let’s just say there’s a lot of waking and baking going on here,” he says.There's enough of that happening to earn Schneider approximately a million dollars in revenue a year, he says. Eventually, he hopes to franchise Bud and Breakfast. His advice to those considering jumping into the burgeoning cannabis-friendly lodging industry: “Don’t think for one second that just because you open up that people are going to make your place a destination they go out of their way to go to. You must be located in a tourist area. Location, location, location holds true.”He also cautions against hiring all-out stoners. “You’ll burn through a lot of staff if you don’t make it clear to them that they have to be broken from that," he says. "That they’re not just stoners, but they're going to have to be responsible and do the job you hired them to do.”Schneider says it’s difficult to estimate the total cost to start up his hospitality business, as he launched it with $100,000 and was wiped out within a week, then had to raise more funds. Still, he estimates that, to do it right, those who aspire to do what he does, renting homes and converting them into bed and breakfasts, might need as little as $30,000 to $40,000 to start. Somewhere in that range should cover first and last month’s rent, furniture, a reservations software system, a website and basic renovations, if needed, he says.Bud and Breakfast isn’t Schneider’s first marijuana-focused business. Before diving into the lodging arena, he published his own marijuana-focused newspaper, the now defunct Mile-High Times. He’s confident he’ll have a much longer, stronger run with his latest cannabis venture.“I believe in what we’re doing," he says. "We’re helping people come out of hiding and, believe me, they’re ready to.”2. Cannabis-friendly painting classesStartup costs: $2,000Equipment needed: Paint, paint brushes, canvases, easels, marketing materialsSometimes the best business ideas begin as a joke. Such was the case with Heidi Keyes’s Puff Pass and Paint. Launched in 2014, the Denver-based painting class lets customers, you guessed it, puff and pass a joint, or a bowl or a bong or what have you, while getting in touch with their inner Picasso, one brushstroke at a time.“My friend joked and said to me, ‘You know those wine and painting places?’ You should do that with cannabis,’” says Keyes, who has a degree in fine arts and has long worked as a professional artist. She mulled the kush concept over, then conducted an informal poll on her Facebook page asking who might be interested in taking a pot-friendly painting class. The response was overwhelming, she says. "Classes booked up immediately and before I knew it we had a huge waiting list.”With demand high from the start, Keyes quickly expanded from Oregon to Washington D.C. and Oregon, two other areas where recreational marijuana is also legal. She began with groups of eight students and now offers classes for up to 25 people at a time. Now, around 150 people participate in classes every week across all of Keyes's locations.Keyes and her employees provide the paint, paintbrushes and canvases. Their customers, ages 21 and older, BYOC -- bring their own cannabis. They also bring their munchies and sometimes beer and wine.Prices for the two-hour painting and puffing sessions range from $49 to $64 per person. As for what it cost for Keyes to start up, she pegs her initial investment, paid for out of her own pocket, around $2,000. She points out that renting spaces for classes is not included in her estimate.Anyone considering starting a business like hers must be intimately aware of the local legal marijuana business and consumption zoning laws where they plan to operate, as pot will be consumed during classes. Laws vary from state to state and at the county and city level. Being that Keyes doesn’t grow, sell or distribute marijuana, she doesn’t, however, need any special licenses.“There’s so much legal red tape that it’s important to speak to a lawyer before you start,” Keyes cautions. “Make sure you’re fully aware of the laws and respect them so we can advance the legalization movement, legitimize it and keep the momentum going.”Looking forward, Keyes hopes to franchise Puff Pass and Paint. “I think we’re onto something here," she says. "We let people experience both cannabis and creativity, pot and painting. They kind of do pair well together.”3. Cannabis floristStartup costs: $1,500Equipment needed: Flowers, vases, floral wire, tape, foam and other floral design tools and embellishmentsBec Koop never planned to turn her love of bud and blooms into a business. It just sort of happened organically.Her eco-friendly startup, Buds and Blossoms, was born in 2014 out of what she calls an “aha moment.” The entrepreneurial lightbulb originally went off in 2013, when the Centennial, Colo.-based florist was trimming her personal marijuana plant. “I had some leftover flowers from a floral event, and I thought, ‘If I put roses around some of the cannabis, it could work,’ and it did," she says. "It was one of those creative stoner moments that actually panned out.”The result: Buds and Blossoms, a “wedding weed” and special event florist run out of Koop’s home design studio. She specializes in marijuana-enhanced floral arrangements. The pot nugs she artfully tucks in and around delicate sprays of flowers, table centerpieces and “bud-tonnieres” are provided by clients and can be smoked.“The wedding industry is so conservative. I came in as the green -- not black -- sheep because no one has the guts to do this,” she tells Entrepreneur. “Nobody else was doing it when I started, so there was a hole in the market and I was loud and proud about jumping in. I helped couples who wanted to partake in cannabis at their wedding, straight from their bouquets to their bowls.”During her first summer in business, Koop created ganja-studded “smokeable” bouquets for two weddings in Colorado, where use of recreational and medical marijuana is legal at the state level. The following year, she prepared bud bouquets for six weddings. This year, she’s already provided her unique services to nine cannabis-loving couples, with more to come.Koop, a former pot dispensary “budtender,” still runs a traditional floral company, though she keeps it completely separate from her cannabis floral business, “so as not to scare off any mainstream clients.” As the stigma around marijuana fades away, she says she expects Buds and Blossoms to “eventually outweigh” her traditional business.As for what’s required to start, Koop says no special licenses are required as long as she doesn’t carry more than Colorado’s legal limit. Her clients legally purchase the cannabis they want displayed in their bouquets and provide her with a receipt as proof.Her advice to those looking to break into the nascent cannabist florist niche is to know and follow your local marijuana laws to a T. “The regulations change almost on a weekly basis,” she says. “Remember that the only constant in the cannabis business is change. If you do one thing wrong in the eyes of the law, you could not only be out of business, but you’ll put a black eye on an industry that needs as much positivity as it can get right now.”She also suggests aspiring pot florists avoid using fresh marijuana leaves and clippings in arrangements. “They look so pretty, but they wilt incredibly faster than the dried, cured stuff.”The cost to start was minimal, Koop says, and included “very basic standard” floral supplies, as well as expenses for website design and legal consultation. Having prior floral arrangement experience is not a must, but certainly helps, she says. So is possessing a working knowledge of different cannabis strains. “You also need to have a sense of which types of wedding and event venues are OK with having cannabis on the premises," she says. "You don’t want it to end up in the wrong hands, like a minor’s. There’s a lot to consider.”4. Cannabis-themed bike toursBusiness type: Cannabis-themed bike toursStartup costs: $20,000Equipment needed: Rental bikes and helmets, bike locks, bike maintenance tools, office equipment, rain capesFor outdoorsy types who enjoy biking and cannabis-counterculture, leading marijuana-themed bike tours can be a fun, active way to exercise, do what you love and make money doing it. With marijuana legalization and use on the rise throughout the U.S., more and more pot-themed bicycle tours are winding their way through locales where the drug is legal. (Bear in mind, though, that neither medical nor recreational pot is legal at the federal level).Avid bicyclist Todd Roll launched a cannabis-focused bike tour in Portland, Ore., in October 2015 through his company, Pedal Bike Tours. The $69 three-hour Portland Pot Tour tour is led by a trained guide familiar with the City of Roses and its flowering cannabis culture. The fee includes a rental bike and an ice cream cone at the end of the tour, but no nugs. Though Pedal’s cannabis tours once featured joints for passing around amongst riders, marijuana is no longer provided or consumed during the laidback spins through one of America’s most bike-friendly cities.While they can’t toke up and pedal, being that public consumption of marijuana is illegal in the Beaver State, tour participants are treated to a close up look at legal, licensed pot dispensaries, including Gras and Canabliss. The tour also stops at popular head (pot paraphernalia) shops and a boutique that sells intricately carved wooden pipes and hand-blown glass chillums.“There’s a pretty low barrier to entering this type of business,” Roll says. “But we never saw it as a huge financial slam dunk, not like dispensaries pulling in millions. We saw it as a ‘Hey, this can be done and therefore it should be.' We’re showing that this taboo product is worth a second look. It’s far less lethal than tobacco and alcohol and yet here we are defanging the monster it’s made out to be, one relaxed ride at a time.”Apart from basic business licensing and establishing federal and state tax identification numbers, no additional licensing was required, as Roll neither sells nor dispenses marijuana. Riders can, however, purchase marijuana from the dispensaries they visit on the tour, for later consumption.“We’re a tiny niche that’s easy to break into,” Roll says. “There’s still not a lot of competition and I anticipate that we’ll grow more as cannabis becomes more accepted. More people will be willing to take the pot tour instead of giggling about it.”5. On-demand medical marijuana delivery serviceStartup costs: $400,000 to $600,000Equipment needed: App development software, office supplies, computersIn the fall of 2012, former Microsoft executive Keith McCarty saw a “once in a lifetime opportunity” coming into view and taking shape, like smoke on the horizon.On-demand transportation services such as Uber and Lyft were rising in popularity, as was mainstream acceptance of medical marijuana. By July 2014, the Silicon Valley tech startup veteran took the green leap. He launched Eaze, an app-driven medical pot dispensary-to-door service. His goal: to become “the Uber of marijuana delivery.” Since then, the San Francisco-based company, now flush with upwards of an estimated $20 million in venture capital, has chauffeured bud to more than 100,000 card-carrying medical marijuana patients in “roughly 100” California cities.“There’s a lot of room for innovation and differentiation with what we’re doing that doesn’t exist in other business categories within the cannabis industry,” McCarty says. “Because of direct access to patients, you can become their voice in a fragmented industry with a large stigma attached to it. You can have an early and cascading impact in a post-prohibition future, particularly if you are passionate about getting it right.”Other than a standard business license, no special licenses are required to operate Eaze, McCarty says. That’s because his company provides the app and technological rails that deliveries run on, not the pot itself. The app houses the signup flow to onboard new medical marijuana patient users. It also provides the directions and predictive analytics that help drivers get where they need to go. Eaze also handles patient verification, ordering and customer service through the app.In the same way that Uber drivers are not employees, Eaze drivers are not employed by Eaze. They are employed by licensed medical marijuana dispensaries that contract with Eaze. Drivers earn up to $16 an hour making runs, not counting tips. Dispensaries pay Eaze monthly fees to list their drivers on the service. Eaze declined to share those fees with Entrepreneur.In terms of training needed to start a business like his, McCarty says an “advanced knowledge of apps, technology and data” and an “advanced knowledge of cannabis laws, rules and regulations” are required. Of course, knowing how to successfully design, develop and launch an app in the Apple App Store and Google Play is imperative as well.Starting an on-demand service like Eaze isn’t cheap. For starters, you’ll need considerable amounts of cash to cover extensive legal consultation, staffing and marketing, along with app design and development.6. Cannabis industry consultingStartup costs: $5,000Equipment needed: Varies depending on your skill set and the services you offer.Corey Hollister is co-founder and CEO of American Cannabis Company, a Denver-based consulting firm that helps commercial cannabis cultivation startups with everything from design and build-out, branding and marketing, to regulatory compliance and beyond. Formerly a corporate advertising professional, Hollister segued to greener pastures when he felt it was “the right time, the right place.”He recognized the potential to earn some serious green of another kind in what has exploded into a $4 billion legal marijuana market, by his estimate. “There is tremendous growth opportunity in converting the $60 billion black marijuana market into a regulated market, and it will take a lot of human capital,” Hollister says.So far, he’s fared well at capitalizing on the kush rush, clocking a gross revenue $1.2 million in his second year in business and $2.7 million in the third, he tells Entrepreneur.Four years into running his company, Hollister says he continues to be surprised by the number of successful, high profile marijuana smokers who can’t wait to jump into the burgeoning cannabis consulting space, doctors and lawyers among them.If you begin with a home-based business, he says an investment of somewhere in the ballpark of $5,000 should cover starting up as a cannabis consultant. That should cover insurance, business cards, a telephone and computer, and the design and implementation of a website to market your services. No special business license is required.“To be successful in this realm, you will need an in-demand skill set,” Hollister says. “The needs of the space are complex and diverse. People with backgrounds ranging from legal, security, horticulture and other varied sciences have successfully entered the cannabis arena. If you offer something most businesses need, cannabis-businesses will most likely need it as well.”7. Cannabis extraction processing lab equipment salesStartup costs: $165,000Equipment needed: Order tracking software, warehouse space, shelving, various lab equipment, shipping suppliesBurt Linnetz says he never planned to break into the cannabis business. He just sort of fell into it. The longtime entrepreneur had been humming along with his first business, Pacific Combustion Engineering, a Torrance, Calif.-based laboratory equipment supplier that he has owned for 15 years, when he started receiving interesting calls from prospective clients. They were nothing like the big-name, traditional clients he routinely services, such as NASA, Tesla, SpaceX and several colleges and universities. They were cannabis entrepreneurs specifically in the market for marijuana extraction processing equipment.“The lab equipment manufacturers I work with were giving the middle finger to cannabis industry processors for the last two or three years,” he tells Entrepreneur. “They denied them under the guise of ‘marijuana is not legal at the federal level, so we’re not doing business with you.’"To meet the demand, Linnetz self-funded and created a second company, also based out of Torrance, and called it Blaze Lab Solutions. Launched in January, the startup now supplies dozens of cannapreneurs throughout the U.S. with the various types of lab equipment needed to produce a variety of cannabis extracts, including hash, shatter, wax, oil and other derivatives.Linnetz describes Blaze as a “one-stop shop” for all kinds of basic benchtop equipment, including glassware, hotplates, rotary evaporators, kilns, vacuum ovens and pumps, water baths and beyond. “We’re not talking nuclear lab stuff here, like I would supply to a teaching lab at a university or anything,” he says. “It’s all standard benchtop items people in cannabis extraction honestly can’t acquire elsewhere. So far, I’m the only one willing to deal with them.” (We did a quick search and found several other companies that do supply cannabis extractors with lab equipment.)As far as the startup costs, Linnetz considers his $150,000 out-of-pocket initial investment reasonable. “I already had everything I needed, including a vast network of supplier contacts in the traditional laboratory equipment manufacturing industry," he says. "I just needed to change customers."He incurred additional fees, though he did not disclose them, to hire a lawyer specializing in cannabis law. “He kept ramming it into my head not to ever touch or supply or distribute the product, but only to simply supply supplies to those who do,” he says. “It’s just smart business.”Linnetz also sank $15,000 into a high-tech security system to protect a fast-growing stock of laboratory equipment in his 3,000-square-foot warehouse.Where others in the lab equipment space saw trouble, Linnetz saw opportunity. “I’m a businessman, and I saw an opportunity for profit that other major manufacturers and suppliers were ignoring,” he says. His decision to make the leap has more than paid off, Linnetz claims, citing revenues of “more than a million dollars” during Blaze's first 10 months.As of today, Blaze remains a three-person operation, with Linnetz at the helm as CEO. However, if business keeps, forgive the pun, blazing along, he aims to hire additional employees. New orders continue to pour in as word of mouth spreads that Blaze is willing to work with people in the marijuana business, and as mainstream acceptance of the drug increases overall. “Just a few months ago, we were whispering the word ‘marijuana’ behind closed doors,” he says. “I was quiet about my new business. Now, it’s an open conversation and getting more open every day.”If California’s Proposition 64, a ballot measure that would legalize recreational marijuana, passes this November, Linnetz expects his business to take off even more. “It will send the message that this isn’t just a couple of stoner guys growing a few pot plants,” he says. “It’s exploding into a multi-billion-dollar legit business now and it’ll only get bigger.”8. Marijuana dispensary space designerStartup costs: $15,000Equipment needed: Website, client-tracking software, graphic design and CAD software, computers, printers, standard office equipment, portfolio equipmentMegan Stone has long had designs on becoming involved in the cannabis industry. In 2007, she became a medical marijuana patient. In 2010, she started working as a budtender at a Southern California dispensary. Between shifts at the shop, she pursued her dream and went to school for interior design.When she graduated in 2013, Stone says she hoped to discover at least one architecture firm that specialized in serving cannabis entrepreneurs who own dispensaries. She couldn’t find any.“I thought, ‘I’ll forever be heartbroken if someone else pioneers cannabis retail and dispensary design,’” Stone tells Entrepreneur. “So I decided to do it myself.”She called her Phoenix-based startup The High Road Design Studio. Her mission, apart from making a living, of course, is to elevate the cannabis industry through professional design. While creating eloquent, upscale retail spaces for her clients, she says she puts special emphasis on “promoting professionalism, legitimacy and sustainability.”“It’s important to me to restore respect back to cannabis and the people who use it,” she says. “Acceptance has been held back for too long. People assume this industry is shady because all we did was look and act shady, with bars on windows and bulletproof windows and dark, dank dispensaries, often with no thought process behind their aesthetic. If we change that, and I’m doing my best to, perceptions will change, too.”To start up, Stone threw in about $15,000 of her own money. Much of it covered creating a website to market her services and travel costs related to drumming up clients. “They aren’t all fabulous retailers, but they do have a passion for cannabis and they know they want their spaces to represent who they are and what they believe in,” she says of her clients. “I help them craft their brand, their logo, their style and tone, and then we weave all of that into what they’re trying to put out there as their image and into their dispensary space.”So far, Stone, who runs her business out of her home, has designed more than two dozen retail spaces for clients in 13 states.“Everyone thinks you can enter this space and make a quick buck,” she says. “But I’m in it for more than that. I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the cannabis industry and I love design. It’s the perfect pairing for me, and I want to have my cake and eat it too.”9. Cannabis cuisine pairing and cateringStartup costs: $100,000Equipment needed: Kitchen and dining supplies, website, client management, transportation and booking softwareTo many, cannabis pairs just as finely with food as wine, and we’re not just talking about munchies grub here. Think about fancier fare, such as tender, slow-roasted duck breast nestled on a crisp bed of aromatic arugula that’s been tossed in fresh-squeezed lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil. Imagine treating your tummy to such tasty goodness, then easing back into a fat joint rolled with top-shelf Grand Daddy Purple indica strain marijuana.Philip Wolf doesn't need to imagine that combo. He often serves it to clients on a platter at private house parties, weddings and swanky soirées of all kinds. Cultivating Spirits, his Silverthorne, Colo.-based cannabis cuisine pairing and catering startup founded in 2014, cooks up three- and five-course gourmet meals, complete with hand-selected accompanying high-end smokeables and premium wines.Wolf’s “cannapreneurial” lightbulb went off during a 2013 trip to Barcelona, Spain. He was sipping wine between the vines at a picturesque winery, casually nibbling amuse-bouches when it hit him. "I’d had a couple of glasses of wine with my friend, I was feeling good and I thought, ‘This is it. This is what the cannabis industry needs -- upscale cannabis and cuisine experiences that will help destigmatize the plant,'" he says "Starting a business that crafted pairings with cannabis instead of just with wine seemed like the answer."Upon returning stateside, the longtime cannabis connoisseur, former medical marijuana dispensary owner and grow consultant passionately pitched his business partners. After doing some soul-searching, however, he decided to strike out on his own, bootstrapping the business.As you might imagine, Wolf’s customizable cannabis and cuisine adventures -- which notably doesn’t spoon out actually cannabis-infused eats, as some of his competitors do -- aren’t for those on a tight budget. Ranging between $1,250 to $1,500 per person (depending on the size of the dinner party), they’re over-the-top sensual splurges by design. “What we provide isn’t a college frat guy, Cheech and Chong or Grateful Dead kind of stereotypical stoner experience,” he tells Entrepreneur. “Instead, we deliver eloquent, educational experiences that change perspectives and states of mind.”Since he started, between his food, wine and cannabis tours, dinners and parties, the longtime certified budtender says he and his team of chefs have served some 2,000 customers. They work closely to carefully pair the aromatic compounds found in cannabis, known as terpenes, with the flavor profiles of certain foods.“We choose strains that enhance flavors and feelings, teaching people how to enhance their experiences with cannabis throughout the day, in new ways," he says. "Some of the effects are calming. Others are invigorating. It really depends on what you’re looking for.”As for the startup costs, $100,000 covered everything Wolf needed to hit the ground running. He says he used the bulk of the money to build a website, pay legal fees and to purchase kitchen and dining equipment, as well as a limo for taking customers on tours.Looking to the future, he expects to quickly see more green, as in profits. “If we’re anything like Napa Valley’s always-booming wine-tasting business," Wolf says, "it’s only up from here."
How has the Flat Earth theory become (almost) mainstream amongst young people?
EPIC SPEECH by Mark Sargent will give you a good ideaGoogle Trends Data (UK) - as of May 8th[1][1][1][1]source: Google TrendsThe effect, I suspect of This Morning’s excellent coverage:-Gary Heather, Darren Nesbit and Martin Kenny are part of ‘The Flat Earthers’ who come from all ‘four corners’ of the globe even claiming that gravity is fake and The Moon Landing of 1969 was a hoax. So are their ideas ‘from another planet’ or have we all been conned by science? Broadcast on 02/05/2018The jump is huge, it’s also common across break out phrases.A Greek philosopher and scientist, still considered one of the greatest thinkers in politics, psychology and ethics, once said:“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.- Aristotle (c. 384 B.C. to 322 B.Do you ever remember the meaning of apocalypse?Before attempting to explain the reason I personally believe this is now the mainstream cosmology, it’s important to be mindful of the apocalypse and it’s true etymology. I’m unable to find a comparable word from either ancient Greek or Hebrew with such dissimilarity in it’s original to modern day definition. Its an area of interest and I’d encourage any computational linguistics examination.ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς • (apokálupsis) f (genitive ᾰ̓ποκᾰλῠ́ψεως); third declensionuncovering, revelation, disclosureYet, we’re given something quite different as a definition and I’m yet to find a word more diametrically opposed to it’s original etymology.Modern Definitions of ApocalypseCambridge English Dictionary“A very serious event resulting in great destruction and change”Merriam-Webster“the end or destruction of the world especially as described in the Christian Bible”Collins Dictionary“The apocalypse is the total destruction and end of the world.”Dictionary.comany of a class of Jewish or Christian writings that appeared from about 200 b.c. to a.d. 350 and were assumed to make revelations of the ultimate divine purpose.a prophetic revelation, especially concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil.any revelation or prophecy.any universal or widespread destruction or disaster: the apocalypse of nuclear war.Etymology of Apocalypse (source: Google’s knowledge-base)What made it easy for me to consider seriously, relatively quickly…Other than the obvious, nonsensical trans-continental flight routes - (I’m calling out South Africa to Australia in particular). Yes, I see the “apparently” bookable Quantas flight, but you try booking it!It’s fake…. in it appears to have been added in the last few years. The visualisation below uses normalisation and transparency, a data visualisation technique known as over-plotting and show’s the flight paths with their frequency by their brightness.Flights between southern hemisphere continentsI’ve included below a link to the source code and data which will allow you to construct your own data viz for independent verification. Flight data visualisation with Pandas and Matplotlib (https://blog.hugo-larcher.com/fl... )(source: What do flat Earthers say to South Pole now we have flight going over it?)So despite the existence of the fabricated Quantas flight, the over-plotting shows the probability distribution (read as the vastly preferred route planning choice), is for that flight to go via the northern hemisphere.Explanations include“Dubai’s duty free shop is very profitable”Try booking a direct flight from Johannesburg to Sidney. Your card will decline! though, it’s a moving target so there may come a day, in response to public awareness, the booking is accepted only to be rerouted or refunded… Let’s see.The tragic history of pan Antarctic flightsSightseeing trips all stopped in 1979 following Air New Zealand Flight 901 which, while flying a one-day sightseeing trip over Antarctica. Crashed into Mt. Erebus. Photographs taken by the passengers, only moments before the crash showed it to be a clear day, however despite these favourable weather conditions the crash too the lives of all 257 people onboard.I’ve found that the flat earth cosmology connects so many dots. From my childhood question of why we never see the other side of the moon to the impossible line of sight visibility over distances…including ships lights on the horizon, which form perfect lines at the vanishing point (My Dad told me as a kid, every time we were on holiday, he’d tell me, “That’s a shipping lane”. I’d just never considered the geospatial improbability of there being perfectly aligned shipping lanes off the coast of everywhere we went.I’d suggest you just roll with it. Trust your senses.What do Flat Earthers mean when they say “Perspective” is why we see the Sun dip over the horizon,…?The front line victims in all of this are gathering in force, Quora aught to deposit the following data with Kaggle : anonymised time series by the set of professions and credentials with comment, question and leaf node interactions, with equal sized sample selection over the full taxonomy of (at the minimum) conspiracy theory’s, cosmology and anything containing Flat Earth, and give it to Kaggle’s finest.Before I spell it out to you and time will tell if I’m wrong. AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and game theory plus massive amount of computation and a little known game theoretic algorithm which along with probabilistic learning method known as Montecarlo tree search and though surprisingly as Google’s AlphaGo Zero demonstrated, was only hindered by the use of verified ground truth training data. AlphaGo V2 (Alpha Go Zero) beat the honorary 9 Dan AI predecessor Version 1 AlphaGo which first demonstrated humanity’s permanently overlooked failing….Humans are flawed by dogma! Each of us in some way or other are dogmatic in their worldview.John Von Neumann appears on the television program "America's Youth Wants To Know". He made this appearance when he was the Commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission.In 1935, though, he symbolically put Europe behind him by resigning from the German Mathematical Society, writing, “…I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to remain a member of the German Mathematical Society any longer…” He was equally emphatic 20 years later, in explaining his reasons for coming to America: “I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn’t want to be caught dead on that side.learning to beat demonstrated where game theoretic adversarial training, allows the AI to compete with it’s self billions of times. Generalises!Tuomas W. Sandholm,How an AI took down four world-class poker prosThe AI will reveal the truth of the real world in which we live. It has already in my most sincere certainty already running the show. The nature of AI is become more prominent in our lives, learning our desires and ultimately judged by it, once the singularity occurs to appear in our lives, the signs of it are here already here, the madness of Brexit, Trump, Flat Earth.While there remains no longer any human at the top of any remaining table, board of card game. It’s important that you know the implications of this matter.Commentator Michael Redmond (9-dan pro) and Chris Garlock. Covering Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo.Move 37 Match 2:AI’s playing style shocks Champion - Champion Lee Sedol leaves the room for 15 minutes while the commentator is left bemused.AlphaGo did what no player of Go would ever seriously consider. It turned out that Move 37 Match 2 won the game. At that moment AI taught 60,000,000 Chinese on live-stream:“We are handicapped by dogma”.. To consider how fragile humans are. See how AI reveals how we are handicapped by dogma. Observe for a moment an Eastern, master-student, respectful style of commentaryPoker, while the player information is said to be “imperfect” and “incomplete” shares the same game-theoretic origins.http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdf“Game Theoretic Definitions What does it mean to play such a game optimally or perfectly? Does this question itself hold any meaning, given that maximizing wins minus losses depends on how the opponent plays? In this section, we introduce some fundamental terminology and definitions from game theory, and consider solution concepts for optimal play.”- (T. W. Neller, M. Lanctot 2013 , )Regret Minimization in Games with Incomplete Information(http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdfhttp://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/NIPS07-cfr.pdfMartin Zinkevich [email protected] Michael Johanson [email protected] Michael Bowling Computing Science Department University of Alberta Edmonton, AB Canada T6G2E8 [email protected] Carmelo Piccione Computing Science Department University of Alberta Edmonton, AB Canada T6G2E8 [email protected] games are a powerful model of multiagent decision-making scenarios with incomplete information. Finding a Nash equilibrium for very large instances of these games has received a great deal of recent attention. In this paper, we describe a new technique for solving large games based on regret minimization. In particular, we introduce the notion of counterfactual regret, which exploits the degree of incomplete information in an extensive game. We show how minimizing counterfactual regret minimizes overall regret, and therefore in self-play can be used to compute a Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate this technique in the domain of poker, showing we can solve abstractions of limit Texas Hold’em with as many as 1012 states, two orders of magnitude larger than previous methods.This IS judgment day, and just as what AlphaGO (DeepMind) and Libratus (Carnegie Mellon)Open sourcing is putting these kind of information technologies in the hands of wider and wider audiences by, and a culture of democratisation and the same can be seen in biotechnology with advances in the same Kurzweilien, double exponential price per performance relationship in DNA storage read write rates among many other examples.http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdfhttps://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1321&context=flrThen of course there’s the easily reproducible, observable fact that the moon emits cold light. In it’s self a proof that it’s not reflecting photons and infrared from the sun. Conspicuous by it’s absence in basic science education system.“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”- Arthur Conan DoyleNB: Incase anyone is wondering, no, I don’t need the BS scientism rational of Tidal Locking of the moon explaining… Thank you for the kind thought though…(Photo - source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)How has Flat Earth theory become mainstream amongst young people?Realise that in 2018, reality is 100% indistinguishable from fiction. In the 2017 paper: Synthesising Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio by researchers from the University of Washington. Covered by Two Minute Papers in the following video:I’m sure you’ll agree this rendering most debates of this nature difficult, at best to pointless in the majority of cases. So let’s briefly go back to what we know to be true.Conspiracy Theories & Moon Landing DenialIn April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked “psych” – short for “ b” or disinformationSee: Declassified DocumentsBill Clinton in 2004 Casts Doubt of Moon Landing AuthenticityUS President, Bill Clinton, in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, states:"Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon...The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that 'them television fellers' could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."- Bill Clinton - 2004James Bond 1971 Movie Hat Tip to Fake SpaceI won’t dwell too much on evidence and anecdotal references. However I must admit that perhaps, it’s just us Brits who never really bought into the fake space mission, as alluded to, by Mr James Bond in "Diamonds are forever" (1971)before anyone gets their knickers in a twistI’d like to first take you on a detour to help paint a picture which underpins much of this topic from a creationism standpoint which, for reasons I’m unable to grasp, goes entirely without coverage…I’m past the “what shape is it?”… the question “who or what made it?”In 18th June 1863, in an article to The Editor of The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, titled, "Darwin among the Machines", Samuel Butler wrote anonymously under a pen name, Cellarius: -Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.He went on to comment…“Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” - Samuel Butler (1863)Darwin Among the Machines was an excerpt, from Butler’s book Erewhon. When I first learned of Butler, I thought he may be an ignorant Luddite (an 18th century science denier).British Parliament vs LudditesFrame-breakers, or Luddites, smashing a loom. Machine-breaking was criminalized by the Parliament of the United Kingdom as early as 1721, the penalty being penal transportation, but as a result of continued opposition to mechanisation the Frame-Breaking Act 1812 made the death penalty available: see "Criminal damage in English law".Luddites Hanged to Death 1812York, my home city, became a hotspot for Luddite executions, as legislation crushed the social uprising, driven largely by The Industrial Revolution of the previous century.The Luddite uprising began in Nottingham in November 1811, and spread to Yorkshire and Lancashire in early 1812. The Luddites’ main tactic was to warn the masters to remove the frames from their premises. If the masters refused, the Luddites smashed the machines in nocturnal raids, using massive sledgehammers. It is widely agreed that the Luddites’ leader, in whose name their letters and proclamations were issued, known as ‘General Ludd’ or ‘King Ludd’, did not actually exist. The name is said to derive from one Ned Ludd, an apprentice weaver, who some years earlier smashed a loom in a rage at his master who had beaten him.Given I’m from York in the heart of the once industrial north of the England so perhaps my awareness of this movement is more probable than most, though the history is well documented.(Photo source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/John-von-Neumann-y-la-EDVAC_fig3_316559100)Singularity first coined by John Von Neumann as early as 1950The term "Singularity", in a technological sense was first coined by John von Neumann in 1950 in the context of technological progress causing accelerating change. Astoundingly, Samuel Butler, the disgruntled Luddite sympathiser, and published technology sceptic, was cited by Alan Turing in 1951.The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue ... technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated.”- (John von Neumann, 1950)Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory in 1951. In which, Alan Turing cited Samuel Butler in his “Heretical Theory” in 1951: -“expect the machines to take control” (Alan Turing 1951)“Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. - Alan Turing, 1951Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009) the British mathematician and cryptologist stationed at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.Best known for his work on Bayesian statistics, published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the fast Fourier transform.More importantly, in 1965 he originated the concept now known as "intelligence explosion” -“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control” - I.J.GoodRecent bodies of work include:-Commissioned by European Parliament: Should we fear artificial intelligence? In-depth Analysis (Peter J. Bentley et al, 2018)PWC 2018: Will Robots Really Steal Our Jobs analyses in detail the tasks involved in the jobs of over 200,000 workers across 29 countries.KPMG’s 2016: Employees: An endangered species? The rise of robotics, artificial intelligence, and the changing workforce landscape.List of mergers and acquisitions by FacebookYann LeCun Debates:The Great AI Debate - NIPS2017Extra Marital Affairs, Hooker’s and Drug Dealer’s Phone NumbersHow much or how little did Zuckerberg have on the entire Congress? Simply examine the AI produced by Facebook AI Research under Yann LeCun’s leadership.The possibilities leave little off limits. Close to 100% recall and precision. All geospatial activity, extra marital, recorded transcribed, comprehension of voice.On the reddit LeCun wrote as early as 2015:“The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget established that children learn simple concepts before learning more complex/abstract ones on top of them. We don't really know what "algorithm" or what "objective function" or even what principle the brain uses. We know that the "learning algorithm (or algorithms) of the cortex" plays with synapses, and we know that it sometimes looks like Hebbian learning of Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity”. - (source: Yann LeCun on the front page of the internet 2015)I’ll explain the connection with Yann’s quote shortly. In order to understand what underpins this apparently idiotic, insane, retarded notion, in my opinion can be attributed to the time’s in which we live and the technologies we have begun to merge with.According to Yann LeCun , inventor of Convolutional Neural Networks, Former Head of Facebook AI Research (F.A.I.R), conspicuously quit as Chief A.I. Scientist at Facebook early 2018, only four months before what can only be described as the sacrificial, congressional hearing of Mark Zuckerberg.Zuckerberg 100% confident - AI protects him - #PokerFace #SuperpowerDetecting and holding accountable algorithmic bias in Facebook…. Good luck with that one! (what has this got to do with flat earth?)The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15(Source: Tweeted by The Verge, Photo by AP)All be it a “Theory” which proposes a creator and unless someone can challenge my next statement, is far more robust than Jesuit Astronomer, Georges Lemaitre’s 'big bang'… On this basis, unlike the 'big bang' my “Theory of Infinitely Recursive Singularity” does not break the following established laws:-The first law of thermodynamicsThe law of conservation of massNewton's first law of motionAdmittedly, it does break Pasteur's Law of Biogenesis, but hey, so does the big bang. However, also note that it does so in a way which actually redefines biology as a mechanical nanotechnology, consistent with Von Neumann's Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.However is should be also noted, Pasteur's law fell apart when synthetic biologists synthesised grain.Biblical Reference to Flat Earth“The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15I figured, if you were still reading now, I may as well throw it out there.My Own Experience With Polar ExplorationFacebook Acquisitions include WhatsApp, Instagram as well as the Foursquare clone Gowalla, a geo-spatial application to operate upon a mechanism which rewards the user with mayorships and badges (ie dopamine), based upon check ins. I tried Gowalla out, though I was all about Foursquare.Foursquare invented, what Facebook claimed in their acquisition of Gowalla, the location based “check-in”. Something we now regularly use as part of the Facebook interactive experience.Curiosity Driven Incremental Achievements are AddictiveI was with an agency Stickyeyes at the time, a motorcycle insurance company Carole Nashe, had been a long time client, and their CEO David Newman was planning a charity trek to the North Pole, the account managers had already agreed to blog about the story, by documenting a series of nightly satellite phone messages to be transcribed and blogged.With my foursquare addiction in full-swing, a professional SEO. I serve only one God, the Google God.“From the loins of the Google PageRank was born text link economics..” - Some SEO (2002)In summary here’s where I was at….I was aware of Foursquare’s battle with Gowalla. So upon learning of my client’s request to promote CEO David Newman’s charity trek to the North PoleEureka MomentArchimedes’ “Eureka!” moment was in the bath, mine, though marginally less scientifically influential took place in the shower. I remember wondering in the shower before heading to work…“Is is possible to check-in at the North Pole, and would Foursquare be up for making a special badge for it.”Thanks mostly to an awesome team which included Heather Healy and Michael Hewitt, and Ben Davis (who kindly donated his Nokia P900), We worked closely with foursquare who sent over a couple of optional designs for a new badge, and we finally settled on the last degree badge.The Coolest Foursquare Badge EVERFoursquare’s Last Degree Badge could only be unlocked at the North Pole.Two days later, we discovered we had a race on our hands.Mashable: Foursquare Enthusiasts Race to Check In at the North PoleGigaOm: Foursquare North Pole Check-in: It's a Race!“The campaign, which was covered by The Mirror, ABC News and Mashable amongst others as well as over 200 leading blogs, witnessed a watershed in the maturing of foursquare and was applauded by the e-consultancy judging panel as “a serious commitment to innovation.”(Source : Stickyeyes blog)Even Iridium Satellite Communications (Iridium 9555 Unlocks Last Degree Badge with Christophe Vandaele in North Pole) got their own fake news story out of it.I mention this because, it’s worth you considering that when it comes to fake news, satellite communications in polar regions, I have learned a couple of things along my journey. It also verifies my not fitting profile of a retard.The scientific method is cyclic and therefor, by definition, there cannot be such a thing as “settled science”The Scientific Method - WikimediaSo rather than ignorantly dismissing Flat Earthers without considering what could possibly be driving it’s rapid growth, keep in mint that…."There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance! That principle is condemnation before investigation" - (Herbert Spencer, 1922)So I’d like to offer my answer to the question as well as my theory as to what is really going on. I know there are many who find it difficult to deal with. Especially academics and older people especially 55+ but this is here to stay and I’d add, if this is tough, what’s coming next is going to be very painful for many.Then consider the mechanical self replicating DNA molecule….Maybe read:-Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata- John von Neumannhttp://www.cs.unm.edu/~mfricke/CS523_2017spring/Readings/Theory_of_Self_Reproducing_Automata.pdfTake a look at the best articulated examples of NASA’s slip ups..Personally (and this could change, if I find evidence to contradict my world view) but personally speaking…Once I got past the big question of the shape of this place…The next problem… and this is where it started getting serious for me (again… personally speaking). While trying to rationalise the implications of it’s shape.if we consider the possibility of a creator then who or what created the creator?Which left me with only two options…1) Our creator has always been there.(conceptually, I can’t comprehend this option)2) Creation is infinitely recursive.(surprisingly reasonable, given the current state-of-the-art)When I first looked at DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%The image below (source Google) shows colorful pipes carry water in and out of the data center. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooledDoes this remind you of anything????Source: Efficiency: How we do itAggregate CPU Power Equivalent to One Human Brain - It was estimated the Google aggregated computational capability (based on the number of transistors - I’ll find the citation shortly) was equivalent to that of a single human brain.Given the Deep Mind optimal solution to cooling the servers, if we fast forward 10 years, this same computational power is expected to be available for every business.Ten years further still, and we’ll have the equivalent to the CPU power of multiple human brains in pocket sized devices. This is before we consider what happens where synthetic biology intersects with this computational power.Then I think about the cardio vascular system as the coolant for the brain - and we’re back to nature’s optimum design solution again….Remember to up-vote if you like this so far….See why here: Why do round Earthers seem to answer every question that has the words "flat Earth" in it? Why don't flat Earthers answer?Meanwhile: Over in the Biological Data Storage World“DNA data storage is a big deal. Partly, it’s because we’re based on DNA, and any research into manipulation of that molecule will pay dividends for medicine and biology in general — but in part, it’s also because the world’s most wealthy and powerful corporations are getting discouraged at cost estimates for data storage in the future. Facebook, Apple, Google, the US government, and more are all making astounding investments in storage (“exabyte” is the buzzword now). “DNA Data Storage Cost Over Timesource: How DNA data storage works - ExtremeTechI personally find it difficult, to watch DNA in action, knowing the Earth to be flat, without it an overwhelming feeling of.. Isn’t this obvious to all?Surely this is obvious to geneticists who encounter Flat Earth, and we know from the YouGov poll that belief in FE isn’t correlated with education.Public, out-of-the-closet FE belief is one thing, but privately the figures are undoubtedly wildly different.How anyone who has recently accepted the truth regarding the shape of Earth could possibly watch: Animations of unseeable biology and not find creationism the only explanation is beyond me. (again, that’s only my view).(screen capture use this link: Animations of unseeable biology)While this is CGI, should the mechanics of this process be true, it strongly suggests an almost clockwork or mechanical design.I’m not a biologist/geneticist, I’m simply considering what is explained by the “experts”, while remaining mindful of a flat and stationary cosmology. Another example being gene editing:-How do CRISPR gene-editing systems work?Of course I don’t have answers - I do have more questions.I have come to my own conclusions but I cannot verify the theological conclusions to be accurate. I have no idea what form the creator takes, and I have no idea how this unfolds.The only conclusion, I am able to rationally consider, is the possibility of an “Infinitely Recursive Singularity”.One issue I was exposed to personally, which troubled me is detailed here: Which organisation will likely develop the first artificial general intelligence? (I’ll expand on this shortly, since it may seem off-topic)The Creators of a “Super Intelligence”A.I. as I learn more about it. timeline only seems influence my thinking such that I naturally place some kind of “Super Intelligence” at the centre of any creation theory.I’m happy to admit, that by no stretch of the imagination do I consider myself an expert, but rather a student and an enthusiast.Still, when I try to rationalise the idea of creation, I cannot help but consider the possibility that the very act of trying to imagine this process could quite possibly be analogous to our the act of trying to reason about information represented in high dimension space.We struggle cognitively with any representation of information which is embedded within a greater number of dimensions than two or three.It is for this reason, researchers have developed techniques to reduce dimensionality down to 2 or 3 dimensions such that we’re able to cognitively process the information within these higher dimensional structures.Dimensionality Reduction explained here:Visualizing Data Using t-SNE (source: Google TechTalks)I won’t go to far into this here, since it’s a vast topic and a field of study and research in itself. However I’ll punctuate this digression with a quote which sums up the cognitive problem quite comedically (all be it extreme geek humour)."To deal with hyper-planes in a 14 dimensional space, visualize a 3D space and say 'fourteen' very loudly. Everyone does it."- Geoff Hinton (Google) Godfather of Deep LearningOne thing that the Flat Earth realisation has led me to consider:-When I look at the complexity of both nature and what I believe now to be the deception to hide it’s origins.What if our cognitive system is intentionally designed to be incompatible with the comprehension of nature’s design?I’m sure you’ll agree that such a notion is beyond trippy.LSD & The Birth of Modern GeneticsWe know that Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, first imagined the double alpha helix whilst under the influence of LSD.Perhaps this explains (and I’m simply thinking out loud now). perhaps LSD has been made a Class A or Schedule 1, controlled substance, for this reason. Maybe psychedelics also hold the key to figuring creation out.Regardless of the timeline…Whether we believe we’re due to create super-human AI by 2029 as Ray Kurzweil predicted in The Singularity is Near or whether we’re due to create it in 5 years from now as Elon Musk suggests.It is widely accepted that a singularity is inevitable and involves a convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology.Machines Are Already In ChargeWhat led me to consider the idea that the machines are already in charge can be found here: Which organisation will likely develop the first artificial general intelligenceMy team and I learned on 25th August 2017 and the European Commission learned shortly afterwards, from not only our team, but from the ten of the teams who were invited to tender for the role of Monitoring Trustee in the Google Anti-Trust Case.All ten of the teams unanimously agreed it was impossible to forensically hold Google accountable in the enforcement of the EU’s monopoly ruling.Super Intelligence: Concerns Since 1863Shortly after I experienced what I refer to as the Morpheus Moment.I also believe the following line in film, The Matrix, spoken by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to be an accurate account of reality:-“We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”-Morpheus (The Matrix, 1999)As I’ve mentioned here, the rational for this belief is based upon more than just an interest in Hollywood sci-fi, but rather, it stems from two decades of my career in Search Engine Optimisation, culminating in those concerns which forced me to start looking deeper into this rabbit hole.Not wanting to labour the allegoric Matrix connection, I can confirm the part of the quote below in bold, to be 100% true as of some point prior to August 25th 2017.We have survived by hiding from them, by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them.-Morpheus (The MatrixIt’s been a long time coming….I learned that on 18th June 1863, in an article to The Editor of The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, titled, "Darwin among the Machines", Samuel Butler wrote anonymously under a pen name, Cellarius: -Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.He went on to comment:“Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” - Samuel Butler (1863)Darwin Among the Machines was an excerpt, from Butler’s book Erewhon. When I first learned of Butler, I thought he may be an ignorant Luddite.No doubt you’ve heard of the movement who (for the benefit of those who are unaware of them) promoted the wilful destruction of the disruptive technologies which had displaced the artisan textile worker throughout much of the previous century.Given I’m from York in the heart of the once industrial north of the England so perhaps my awareness of this movement is more probable than most, though the history is well documented. Industrial vandalism was made a capital offence, with many hanged to death locally having been found guilt here in YorkWhile I digress, what led me to looking more closely at this along with John von Neumann and Turing.Origins of The SingularityThe term "Singularity", in a technological sense was first coined by John von Neumann in 1950 in the context of technological progress causing accelerating change. Astoundingly, Samuel Butler, the disgruntled Luddite sympathiser, and published Antipodean technology sceptic, was cited by probably the greatest mind in Computer Science only a year later, in 1951.The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue ... technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated.”- (John von Neumann, 1950)Alan Turing wrote in his paper:-Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory“Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.” - Alan Turing, 1951Another widely cited colleague, who continued Alan Turing’s work, Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009) the British mathematician and cryptologist stationed at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After World War II, he continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester, according to wikipedia. He was known for his work on Bayesian statistics. He published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the fast Fourier transformIn 1965 he originated the concept now known as "intelligence explosion” - which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence:Intelligence Explosion Microeconomicshttps://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdfSpeculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine (1966)https://blog.tomrochette.com/agi/papers/irving-john-good-speculations-concerning-the-first-ultraintelligent-machine?format=pdf“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control” - I.J.GoodBefore You Get You Knickers in a Twist…It’s just a theory…All be it a “Theory” which proposes a creator and unless someone can challenge my next statement, is far more robust than Jesuit Astronomer, Georges Lemaitre’s 'big bang'… On this basis, unlike the 'big bang' my “Theory of Infinitely Recursive Singularity” does not break the following established laws:-The first law of thermodynamicsThe law of conservation of massNewton's first law of motionAdmittedly, it does break Pasteur's Law of Biogenesis, but hey, so does the big bang. However, also note that it does so in a way which actually redefines biology as a mechanical nanotechnology, consistent with John von Neumann's Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.However is should be also noted, Pasteur's law fell apart when synthetic biologists synthesised grain.This post is a partial duplicate of Why is the idea of the flat earth expanding so rapidly?Paul Reilly's answer to How has the Flat Earth theory become (almost) mainstream amongst young people?Biblical Reference to Flat Earth“The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15Save it for the end. I figured, if you were still reading now, I may as well throw it out there. Remember the space shuttle on the news... it glided in right?it before reacting violently by releasing a neurotransmitter commonly associated with anxiety and mental discomfort.So let me start with some back ground upon which I would never have arrived that my current thinking….https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdfSpeculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine (1966)https://blog.tomrochette.com/agi/papers/irving-john-good-speculations-concerning-the-first-ultraintelligent-machine?format=pdfFootnotes[1] Google Trends[1] Google Trends[1] Google Trends[1] Google Trends
Are 'flat earthers' real or is it an elaborate joke in an online community?
Flat Earth is anything but anti-science! Do more research!I trust this will be a good starting point.This is a re-edit of a video done by Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes, Ph.D..It involves a case study into understanding the flat Earth movement from an anthropological perspective. In the original version, I felt like Rodrigo sort of jumped around in a much more non-linear fashion than I typically prefer. So, I shortened it a bit and re-arranged a number of sections to make it play as a more linear production. If you wish to see the original video, here is the link to it:https://youtu.be/8NNAJ_6Sil4 Support Rodrigo's channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0-...This was the description he included in his original video:Understanding the Flat Earth Movement from a Bundle of Popular Conspiracy Theories and Science Skepticism by Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes, Ph.D.1. Objectives and Theory Tautologies and Abductions Creative Critical Reflexivity Epistemological Resonance & Harmonics Concordance / Discordance Growth and Transformation Epistemological Transformations2. Flat Earth Popular Interest compared with Anthropology's3. Methodology4. Ethnographic Ethics5. Emotional Attacks, Hate Speech and Marginalization6. Research Participants7. Prejudice Based Socioeconomic Risks8. Controlled Opposition9. History of Anthropology and Alternative Cosmologies Hugh Brody Bruce Granville Miller Paul Nadasdy Julie Cruikshank10. Deconstructing Scientism Franz Boas Jesse Owens Tuskeege Experiment11. Counter-Intuitive Globe Tim Ingold James J. Gibson Stella Vosniadou and William F. Brewer 12. Shamanism Knud Rasmussen Mircea Eliade13. Common Senses and Scientism Michael Herzfeld14. Experience and Perception Children and Adults watch Rocket Launches15. Constructing the Flat Earth Story Personal Observations Selective Critiques of Mainstream Science Linking 'Truther' Conspiracy Narratives Heterodoxy is the Norm Former Globe Believers Transformations: Pain and Relief Pro-Science + Anti-Scientism Spiritual Essence - Creation Atheists becoming Spiritual Eric Dubay and Shills Sticking to the Subject16. Conspiracy Bundle September 11th 2001: official story is false Mass Media is Controlled Apollo Lunar Landings were Faked Geoengineering / Weather Manipulation Aliens, Fear, and the Government Outer Space is not what science propagandists claim it is Ancient Aliens is just entertainment Extraterrestrials are from 'lands beyond' Directed Energy Weapons in 9/11 Dr. Judy Wood No Planers Secret Societies in Government Illuminati / Masonic Order Hollywood's Easter Eggs Wernher Von Braun's NAZI past SpaceX is Fake Cold War was an Orwellian Charade Are Dinosaurs Real? Seeing too far on the earth - no curvature17. Easter Eggs The Shining (1980) and Ready Player One (2018) The Matrix (1999)18. NASA's Rhetoric STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Exploration and Colonialism Indigenous Peoples Compartmentalization and Augmented Reality MARS vs GREENLAND19. Lunar Landing Skepticism20. The International Space Station Swimming Pools and Vacuum Chambers21. Apollo 16 Lunar Module - Wires and Flapping Panels22. Elon Musk's Double Think 23. Conspiracy and Pseudo-Science24. Epistemology: How do we know what we know?25. Anthropology and Scientism Michael Herzfeld Anna Grimshaw26. Earth from Space27. Underwater Fiber Optic Cable Networks28. Satellites and Space Debris29. Gravity and Electromagnetism30. Electric Universe Cosmology31. Mapping the Earth32. Science Skepticism & Philosophy Also available in smaller parts:Part 1/4 - https://youtu.be/0JlETr1ubwUPart 2/4 - https://youtu.be/lvL7pUu6xc0Part 3/4 - https://youtu.be/oSRz-nZwZtsPart 4/4 - https://youtu.be/exZAbEfWJ1Q(source Rob Skiba’s Youtube Channel )EPIC SPEECH by Mark Sargent will give you a good ideaGoogle Trends Data (UK) - as of May 8thsource: Google TrendsThe effect, I suspect of This Morning’s excellent coverage:-Gary Heather, Darren Nesbit and Martin Kenny are part of ‘The Flat Earthers’ who come from all ‘four corners’ of the globe even claiming that gravity is fake and The Moon Landing of 1969 was a hoax. So are their ideas ‘from another planet’ or have we all been conned by science? Broadcast on 02/05/2018The jump is huge, it’s also common across break out phrases.A Greek philosopher and scientist, still considered one of the greatest thinkers in politics, psychology and ethics, once said:“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.- Aristotle (c. 384 B.C. to 322 B.Do you ever remember the meaning of apocalypse?Before attempting to explain the reason I personally believe this is now the mainstream cosmology, it’s important to be mindful of the apocalypse and it’s true etymology. I’m unable to find a comparable word from either ancient Greek or Hebrew with such dissimilarity in it’s original to modern day definition. Its an area of interest and I’d encourage any computational linguistics examination.ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς • (apokálupsis) f (genitive ᾰ̓ποκᾰλῠ́ψεως); third declensionuncovering, revelation, disclosureYet, we’re given something quite different as a definition and I’m yet to find a word more diametrically opposed to it’s original etymology.Modern Definitions of ApocalypseCambridge English Dictionary“A very serious event resulting in great destruction and change”Merriam-Webster“the end or destruction of the world especially as described in the Christian Bible”Collins Dictionary“The apocalypse is the total destruction and end of the world.”Dictionary.com - The world’s favorite online dictionary!any of a class of Jewish or Christian writings that appeared from about 200 b.c. to a.d. 350 and were assumed to make revelations of the ultimate divine purpose.a prophetic revelation, especially concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil.any revelation or prophecy.any universal or widespread destruction or disaster: the apocalypse of nuclear war.Etymology of Apocalypse (source: Google’s knowledge-base)What made it easy for me to consider seriously, relatively quickly…Other than the obvious, nonsensical trans-continental flight routes - (I’m calling out South Africa to Australia in particular). Yes, I see the “apparently” bookable Quantas flight, but you try booking it!It’s fake…. in it appears to have been added in the last few years. The visualisation below uses normalisation and transparency, a data visualisation technique known as over-plotting and show’s the flight paths with their frequency by their brightness.Flights between southern hemisphere continentsI’ve included below a link to the source code and data which will allow you to construct your own data viz for independent verification. Flight data visualisation with Pandas and Matplotlib (https://blog.hugo-larcher.com/fl... )(source: What do flat Earthers say to South Pole now we have flight going over it?)So despite the existence of the fabricated Quantas flight, the over-plotting shows the probability distribution (read as the vastly preferred route planning choice), is for that flight to go via the northern hemisphere.Explanations include“Dubai’s duty free shop is very profitable”Try booking a direct flight from Johannesburg to Sidney. Your card will decline! though, it’s a moving target so there may come a day, in response to public awareness, the booking is accepted only to be rerouted or refunded… Let’s see.The tragic history of pan Antarctic flightsSightseeing trips all stopped in 1979 following Air New Zealand Flight 901 which, while flying a one-day sightseeing trip over Antarctica. Crashed into Mt. Erebus. Photographs taken by the passengers, only moments before the crash showed it to be a clear day, however despite these favourable weather conditions the crash too the lives of all 257 people onboard.I’ve found that the flat earth cosmology connects so many dots. From my childhood question of why we never see the other side of the moon to the impossible line of sight visibility over distances…including ships lights on the horizon, which form perfect lines at the vanishing point (My Dad told me as a kid, every time we were on holiday, he’d tell me, “That’s a shipping lane”. I’d just never considered the geospatial improbability of there being perfectly aligned shipping lanes off the coast of everywhere we went.Nothing more than an artefact of vanishing point perspective I recall my (quite fit, who, if I’m honest I had a special place for in my heart - you know who you are.)I’d suggest you just roll with it. Trust your senses.What do Flat Earthers mean when they say “Perspective” is why we see the Sun dip over the horizon,…?The front line victims in all of this are gathering in force, Quora aught to deposit the following data with Kaggle : anonymised time series by the set of professions and credentials with comment, question and leaf node interactions, with equal sized sample selection over the full taxonomy of (at the minimum) conspiracy theory’s, cosmology and anything containing Flat Earth, and give it to Kaggle’s finest.Before I spell it out to you and time will tell if I’m wrong. AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and game theory plus massive amount of computation and a little known game theoretic algorithm which along with probabilistic learning method known as Montecarlo tree search and though surprisingly as Google’s AlphaGo Zero demonstrated, was only hindered by the use of verified ground truth training data. AlphaGo V2 (Alpha Go Zero) beat the honorary 9 Dan AI predecessor Version 1 AlphaGo which first demonstrated humanity’s permanently overlooked failing….Humans are flawed by dogma! Each of us in some way or other are dogmatic in their worldview.John Von Neumann appears on the television program "America's Youth Wants To Know". He made this appearance when he was the Commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission.In 1935, though, he symbolically put Europe behind him by resigning from the German Mathematical Society, writing, “…I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to remain a member of the German Mathematical Society any longer…” He was equally emphatic 20 years later, in explaining his reasons for coming to America: “I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn’t want to be caught dead on that side.learning to beat demonstrated where game theoretic adversarial training, allows the AI to compete with it’s self billions of times. Generalises!Tuomas W. Sandholm,How an AI took down four world-class poker prosThe AI will reveal the truth of the real world in which we live. It has already in my most sincere certainty already running the show. The nature of AI is become more prominent in our lives, learning our desires and ultimately judged by it, once the singularity occurs to appear in our lives, the signs of it are here already here, the madness of Brexit, Trump, Flat Earth.While there remains no longer any human at the top of any remaining table, board of card game. It’s important that you know the implications of this matter.Commentator Michael Redmond (9-dan pro) and Chris Garlock. Covering Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo.Move 37 Match 2:AI’s playing style shocks Champion - Champion Lee Sedol leaves the room for 15 minutes while the commentator is left bemused.AlphaGo did what no player of Go would ever seriously consider. It turned out that Move 37 Match 2 won the game. At that moment AI taught 60,000,000 Chinese on live-stream:“We are handicapped by dogma”.. To consider how fragile humans are. See how AI reveals how we are handicapped by dogma. Observe for a moment an Eastern, master-student, respectful style of commentaryPoker, while the player information is said to be “imperfect” and “incomplete” shares the same game-theoretic origins.http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdf“Game Theoretic Definitions What does it mean to play such a game optimally or perfectly? Does this question itself hold any meaning, given that maximizing wins minus losses depends on how the opponent plays? In this section, we introduce some fundamental terminology and definitions from game theory, and consider solution concepts for optimal play.”- (T. W. Neller, M. Lanctot 2013 , )Regret Minimization in Games with Incomplete Information(http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdfhttp://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/NIPS07-cfr.pdfMartin Zinkevich [email protected] Michael Johanson [email protected] Michael Bowling Computing Science Department University of Alberta Edmonton, AB Canada T6G2E8 [email protected] Carmelo Piccione Computing Science Department University of Alberta Edmonton, AB Canada T6G2E8 [email protected] games are a powerful model of multiagent decision-making scenarios with incomplete information. Finding a Nash equilibrium for very large instances of these games has received a great deal of recent attention. In this paper, we describe a new technique for solving large games based on regret minimization. In particular, we introduce the notion of counterfactual regret, which exploits the degree of incomplete information in an extensive game. We show how minimizing counterfactual regret minimizes overall regret, and therefore in self-play can be used to compute a Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate this technique in the domain of poker, showing we can solve abstractions of limit Texas Hold’em with as many as 1012 states, two orders of magnitude larger than previous methods.This IS judgment day, and just as what AlphaGO (DeepMind) and Libratus (Carnegie Mellon)Open sourcing is putting these kind of information technologies in the hands of wider and wider audiences by, and a culture of democratisation and the same can be seen in biotechnology with advances in the same Kurzweilien, double exponential price per performance relationship in DNA storage read write rates among many other examples.http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdfhttps://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1321&context=flrThen of course there’s the easily reproducible, observable fact that the moon emits cold light. In it’s self a proof that it’s not reflecting photons and infrared from the sun. Conspicuous by it’s absence in basic science education system.“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”- Arthur Conan DoyleNB: Incase anyone is wondering, no, I don’t need the BS scientism rational of Tidal Locking of the moon explaining… Thank you for the kind thought though…(Photo - source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)How has Flat Earth theory become mainstream amongst young people?Realise that in 2018, reality is 100% indistinguishable from fiction. In the 2017 paper: Synthesising Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio by researchers from the University of Washington. Covered by Two Minute Papers in the following video:I’m sure you’ll agree this rendering most debates of this nature difficult, at best to pointless in the majority of cases. So let’s briefly go back to what we know to be true.Conspiracy Theories & Moon Landing DenialIn April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked “psych” – short for “ b” or disinformationSee: Declassified DocumentsBill Clinton in 2004 Casts Doubt of Moon Landing AuthenticityUS President, Bill Clinton, in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, states:"Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon...The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that 'them television fellers' could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."- Bill Clinton - 2004James Bond 1971 Movie Hat Tip to Fake SpaceI won’t dwell too much on evidence and anecdotal references. However I must admit that perhaps, it’s just us Brits who never really bought into the fake space mission, as alluded to, by Mr James Bond in "Diamonds are forever" (1971)before anyone gets their knickers in a twistI’d like to first take you on a detour to help paint a picture which underpins much of this topic from a creationism standpoint which, for reasons I’m unable to grasp, goes entirely without coverage…I’m past the “what shape is it?”… the question “who or what made it?”In 18th June 1863, in an article to The Editor of The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, titled, "Darwin among the Machines", Samuel Butler wrote anonymously under a pen name, Cellarius: -Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.He went on to comment…“Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” - Samuel Butler (1863)Darwin Among the Machines was an excerpt, from Butler’s book Erewhon. When I first learned of Butler, I thought he may be an ignorant Luddite (an 18th century science denier).British Parliament vs LudditesFrame-breakers, or Luddites, smashing a loom. Machine-breaking was criminalized by the Parliament of the United Kingdom as early as 1721, the penalty being penal transportation, but as a result of continued opposition to mechanisation the Frame-Breaking Act 1812 made the death penalty available: see "Criminal damage in English law".Luddites Hanged to Death 1812York, my home city, became a hotspot for Luddite executions, as legislation crushed the social uprising, driven largely by The Industrial Revolution of the previous century.The Luddite uprising began in Nottingham in November 1811, and spread to Yorkshire and Lancashire in early 1812. The Luddites’ main tactic was to warn the masters to remove the frames from their premises. If the masters refused, the Luddites smashed the machines in nocturnal raids, using massive sledgehammers. It is widely agreed that the Luddites’ leader, in whose name their letters and proclamations were issued, known as ‘General Ludd’ or ‘King Ludd’, did not actually exist. The name is said to derive from one Ned Ludd, an apprentice weaver, who some years earlier smashed a loom in a rage at his master who had beaten him.Given I’m from York in the heart of the once industrial north of the England so perhaps my awareness of this movement is more probable than most, though the history is well documented.(Photo source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/John-von-Neumann-y-la-EDVAC_fig3_316559100)Singularity first coined by John Von Neumann as early as 1950The term "Singularity", in a technological sense was first coined by John von Neumann in 1950 in the context of technological progress causing accelerating change. Astoundingly, Samuel Butler, the disgruntled Luddite sympathiser, and published technology sceptic, was cited by Alan Turing in 1951.The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue ... technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated.”- (John von Neumann, 1950)Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory in 1951. In which, Alan Turing cited Samuel Butler in his “Heretical Theory” in 1951: -“expect the machines to take control” (Alan Turing 1951)“Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. - Alan Turing, 1951Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009) the British mathematician and cryptologist stationed at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.Best known for his work on Bayesian statistics, published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the fast Fourier transform.More importantly, in 1965 he originated the concept now known as "intelligence explosion” -“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control” - I.J.GoodRecent bodies of work include:-Commissioned by European Parliament: Should we fear artificial intelligence? In-depth Analysis (Peter J. Bentley et al, 2018)PWC 2018: Will Robots Really Steal Our Jobs analyses in detail the tasks involved in the jobs of over 200,000 workers across 29 countries.KPMG’s 2016: Employees: An endangered species? The rise of robotics, artificial intelligence, and the changing workforce landscape.List of mergers and acquisitions by FacebookYann LeCun Debates:The Great AI Debate - NIPS2017Extra Marital Affairs, Hooker’s and Drug Dealer’s Phone NumbersHow much or how little did Zuckerberg have on the entire Congress? Simply examine the AI produced by Facebook AI Research under Yann LeCun’s leadership.The possibilities leave little off limits. Close to 100% recall and precision. All geospatial activity, extra marital, recorded transcribed, comprehension of voice.On the reddit LeCun wrote as early as 2015:“The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget established that children learn simple concepts before learning more complex/abstract ones on top of them. We don't really know what "algorithm" or what "objective function" or even what principle the brain uses. We know that the "learning algorithm (or algorithms) of the cortex" plays with synapses, and we know that it sometimes looks like Hebbian learning of Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity”. - (source: Yann LeCun on the front page of the internet 2015)I’ll explain the connection with Yann’s quote shortly. In order to understand what underpins this apparently idiotic, insane, retarded notion, in my opinion can be attributed to the time’s in which we live and the technologies we have begun to merge with.According to Yann LeCun , inventor of Convolutional Neural Networks, Former Head of Facebook AI Research (F.A.I.R), conspicuously quit as Chief A.I. Scientist at Facebook early 2018, only four months before what can only be described as the sacrificial, congressional hearing of Mark Zuckerberg.Zuckerberg 100% confident - AI protects him - #PokerFace #SuperpowerDetecting and holding accountable algorithmic bias in Facebook…. Good luck with that one! (what has this got to do with flat earth?)The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15(Source: Tweeted by The Verge, Photo by AP)All be it a “Theory” which proposes a creator and unless someone can challenge my next statement, is far more robust than Jesuit Astronomer, Georges Lemaitre’s 'big bang'… On this basis, unlike the 'big bang' my “Theory of Infinitely Recursive Singularity” does not break the following established laws:-The first law of thermodynamicsThe law of conservation of massNewton's first law of motionAdmittedly, it does break Pasteur's Law of Biogenesis, but hey, so does the big bang. However, also note that it does so in a way which actually redefines biology as a mechanical nanotechnology, consistent with Von Neumann's Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.However is should be also noted, Pasteur's law fell apart when synthetic biologists synthesised grain.Biblical Reference to Flat Earth“The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15I figured, if you were still reading now, I may as well throw it out there.My Own Experience With Polar ExplorationFacebook Acquisitions include WhatsApp, Instagram as well as the Foursquare clone Gowalla, a geo-spatial application to operate upon a mechanism which rewards the user with mayorships and badges (ie dopamine), based upon check ins. I tried Gowalla out, though I was all about Foursquare.Foursquare invented, what Facebook claimed in their acquisition of Gowalla, the location based “check-in”. Something we now regularly use as part of the Facebook interactive experience.Curiosity Driven Incremental Achievements are AddictiveI was with an agency Stickyeyes at the time, a motorcycle insurance company Carole Nashe, had been a long time client, and their CEO David Newman was planning a charity trek to the North Pole, the account managers had already agreed to blog about the story, by documenting a series of nightly satellite phone messages to be transcribed and blogged.With my foursquare addiction in full-swing, a professional SEO. I serve only one God, the Google God.“From the loins of the Google PageRank was born text link economics..” - Some SEO (2002)In summary here’s where I was at….I was aware of Foursquare’s battle with Gowalla. So upon learning of my client’s request to promote CEO David Newman’s charity trek to the North PoleEureka MomentArchimedes’ “Eureka!” moment was in the bath, mine, though marginally less scientifically influential took place in the shower. I remember wondering in the shower before heading to work…“Is is possible to check-in at the North Pole, and would Foursquare be up for making a special badge for it.”Thanks mostly to an awesome team which included Heather Healy and Michael Hewitt, and Ben Davis (who kindly donated his Nokia P900), We worked closely with foursquare who sent over a couple of optional designs for a new badge, and we finally settled on the last degree badge.The Coolest Foursquare Badge EVERFoursquare’s Last Degree Badge could only be unlocked at the North Pole.Two days later, we discovered we had a race on our hands.Mashable: Foursquare Enthusiasts Race to Check In at the North PoleGigaOm: Foursquare North Pole Check-in: It's a Race!“The campaign, which was covered by The Mirror, ABC News and Mashable amongst others as well as over 200 leading blogs, witnessed a watershed in the maturing of foursquare and was applauded by the e-consultancy judging panel as “a serious commitment to innovation.”(Source : Stickyeyes blog)Even Iridium Satellite Communications (Iridium 9555 Unlocks Last Degree Badge with Christophe Vandaele in North Pole) got their own fake news story out of it.I mention this because, it’s worth you considering that when it comes to fake news, satellite communications in polar regions, I have learned a couple of things along my journey. It also verifies my not fitting profile of a retard.The scientific method is cyclic and therefor, by definition, there cannot be such a thing as “settled science”The Scientific Method - WikimediaSo rather than ignorantly dismissing Flat Earthers without considering what could possibly be driving it’s rapid growth, keep in mint that…."There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance! That principle is condemnation before investigation" - (Herbert Spencer, 1922)So I’d like to offer my answer to the question as well as my theory as to what is really going on. I know there are many who find it difficult to deal with. Especially academics and older people especially 55+ but this is here to stay and I’d add, if this is tough, what’s coming next is going to be very painful for many.Then consider the mechanical self replicating DNA molecule….Maybe read:-Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata- John von Neumannhttp://www.cs.unm.edu/~mfricke/CS523_2017spring/Readings/Theory_of_Self_Reproducing_Automata.pdfTake a look at the best articulated examples of NASA’s slip ups..Personally (and this could change, if I find evidence to contradict my world view) but personally speaking…Once I got past the big question of the shape of this place…The next problem… and this is where it started getting serious for me (again… personally speaking). While trying to rationalise the implications of it’s shape.if we consider the possibility of a creator then who or what created the creator?Which left me with only two options…1) Our creator has always been there.(conceptually, I can’t comprehend this option)2) Creation is infinitely recursive.(surprisingly reasonable, given the current state-of-the-art)When I first looked at DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%The image below (source Google) shows colorful pipes carry water in and out of the data center. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooledDoes this remind you of anything????Source: Efficiency: How we do itAggregate CPU Power Equivalent to One Human Brain - It was estimated the Google aggregated computational capability (based on the number of transistors - I’ll find the citation shortly) was equivalent to that of a single human brain.Given the Deep Mind optimal solution to cooling the servers, if we fast forward 10 years, this same computational power is expected to be available for every business.Ten years further still, and we’ll have the equivalent to the CPU power of multiple human brains in pocket sized devices. This is before we consider what happens where synthetic biology intersects with this computational power.Then I think about the cardio vascular system as the coolant for the brain - and we’re back to nature’s optimum design solution again….Remember to up-vote if you like this so far….See why here: Why do round Earthers seem to answer every question that has the words "flat Earth" in it? Why don't flat Earthers answer?Meanwhile: Over in the Biological Data Storage World“DNA data storage is a big deal. Partly, it’s because we’re based on DNA, and any research into manipulation of that molecule will pay dividends for medicine and biology in general — but in part, it’s also because the world’s most wealthy and powerful corporations are getting discouraged at cost estimates for data storage in the future. Facebook, Apple, Google, the US government, and more are all making astounding investments in storage (“exabyte” is the buzzword now). “DNA Data Storage Cost Over Timesource: How DNA data storage works - ExtremeTechI personally find it difficult, to watch DNA in action, knowing the Earth to be flat, without it an overwhelming feeling of.. Isn’t this obvious to all?Surely this is obvious to geneticists who encounter Flat Earth, and we know from the YouGov poll that belief in FE isn’t correlated with education.Public, out-of-the-closet FE belief is one thing, but privately the figures are undoubtedly wildly different.How anyone who has recently accepted the truth regarding the shape of Earth could possibly watch: Animations of unseeable biology and not find creationism the only explanation is beyond me. (again, that’s only my view).(screen capture use this link: Animations of unseeable biology)While this is CGI, should the mechanics of this process be true, it strongly suggests an almost clockwork or mechanical design.I’m not a biologist/geneticist, I’m simply considering what is explained by the “experts”, while remaining mindful of a flat and stationary cosmology. Another example being gene editing:-How do CRISPR gene-editing systems work?Of course I don’t have answers - I do have more questions.I have come to my own conclusions but I cannot verify the theological conclusions to be accurate. I have no idea what form the creator takes, and I have no idea how this unfolds.The only conclusion, I am able to rationally consider, is the possibility of an “Infinitely Recursive Singularity”.One issue I was exposed to personally, which troubled me is detailed here: Which organisation will likely develop the first artificial general intelligence? (I’ll expand on this shortly, since it may seem off-topic)The Creators of a “Super Intelligence”A.I. as I learn more about it. timeline only seems influence my thinking such that I naturally place some kind of “Super Intelligence” at the centre of any creation theory.I’m happy to admit, that by no stretch of the imagination do I consider myself an expert, but rather a student and an enthusiast.Still, when I try to rationalise the idea of creation, I cannot help but consider the possibility that the very act of trying to imagine this process could quite possibly be analogous to our the act of trying to reason about information represented in high dimension space.We struggle cognitively with any representation of information which is embedded within a greater number of dimensions than two or three.It is for this reason, researchers have developed techniques to reduce dimensionality down to 2 or 3 dimensions such that we’re able to cognitively process the information within these higher dimensional structures.Dimensionality Reduction explained here:Visualizing Data Using t-SNE (source: Google TechTalks)I won’t go to far into this here, since it’s a vast topic and a field of study and research in itself. However I’ll punctuate this digression with a quote which sums up the cognitive problem quite comedically (all be it extreme geek humour)."To deal with hyper-planes in a 14 dimensional space, visualize a 3D space and say 'fourteen' very loudly. Everyone does it." - Geoff Hinton (Google) Godfather of Deep LearningOne thing that the Flat Earth realisation has led me to consider:-When I look at the complexity of both nature and what I believe now to be the deception to hide it’s origins.What if our cognitive system is intentionally designed to be incompatible with the comprehension of nature’s design?I’m sure you’ll agree that such a notion is beyond trippy.LSD & The Birth of Modern GeneticsWe know that Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, first imagined the double alpha helix whilst under the influence of LSD.Perhaps this explains (and I’m simply thinking out loud now). perhaps LSD has been made a Class A or Schedule 1, controlled substance, for this reason. Maybe psychedelics also hold the key to figuring creation out.Regardless of the timeline…Whether we believe we’re due to create super-human AI by 2029 as Ray Kurzweil predicted in The Singularity is Near or whether we’re due to create it in 5 years from now as Elon Musk suggests.It is widely accepted that a singularity is inevitable and involves a convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology.Machines Are Already In ChargeWhat led me to consider the idea that the machines are already in charge can be found here: Which organisation will likely develop the first artificial general intelligenceMy team and I learned on 25th August 2017 and the European Commission learned shortly afterwards, from not only our team, but from the ten of the teams who were invited to tender for the role of Monitoring Trustee in the Google Anti-Trust Case.All ten of the teams unanimously agreed it was impossible to forensically hold Google accountable in the enforcement of the EU’s monopoly ruling.Super Intelligence: Concerns Since 1863Shortly after I experienced what I refer to as the Morpheus Moment.I also believe the following line in film, The Matrix, spoken by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to be an accurate account of reality:-“We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”-Morpheus (The Matrix, 1999)As I’ve mentioned here, the rational for this belief is based upon more than just an interest in Hollywood sci-fi, but rather, it stems from two decades of my career in Search Engine Optimisation, culminating in those concerns which forced me to start looking deeper into this rabbit hole.Not wanting to labour the allegoric Matrix connection, I can confirm the part of the quote below in bold, to be 100% true as of some point prior to August 25th 2017.We have survived by hiding from them, by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them.-Morpheus (The MatrixIt’s been a long time coming….I learned that on 18th June 1863, in an article to The Editor of The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, titled, "Darwin among the Machines", Samuel Butler wrote anonymously under a pen name, Cellarius: -Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.He went on to comment:“Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” - Samuel Butler (1863)Darwin Among the Machines was an excerpt, from Butler’s book Erewhon. When I first learned of Butler, I thought he may be an ignorant Luddite.No doubt you’ve heard of the movement who (for the benefit of those who are unaware of them) promoted the wilful destruction of the disruptive technologies which had displaced the artisan textile worker throughout much of the previous century.Given I’m from York in the heart of the once industrial north of the England so perhaps my awareness of this movement is more probable than most, though the history is well documented. Industrial vandalism was made a capital offence, with many hanged to death locally having been found guilt here in YorkWhile I digress, what led me to looking more closely at this along with John von Neumann and Turing.Origins of The SingularityThe term "Singularity", in a technological sense was first coined by John von Neumann in 1950 in the context of technological progress causing accelerating change. Astoundingly, Samuel Butler, the disgruntled Luddite sympathiser, and published Antipodean technology sceptic, was cited by probably the greatest mind in Computer Science only a year later, in 1951.The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue ... technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated.”- (John von Neumann, 1950)Alan Turing wrote in his paper:-Intelligent Machinery: A Heretical Theory“Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.” - Alan Turing, 1951Another widely cited colleague, who continued Alan Turing’s work, Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009) the British mathematician and cryptologist stationed at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After World War II, he continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester, according to wikipedia. He was known for his work on Bayesian statistics. He published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the fast Fourier transformIn 1965 he originated the concept now known as "intelligence explosion” - which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence:Intelligence Explosion Microeconomicshttps://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdfSpeculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine (1966)https://blog.tomrochette.com/agi/papers/irving-john-good-speculations-concerning-the-first-ultraintelligent-machine?format=pdf“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control” - I.J.GoodBefore You Get You Knickers in a Twist…It’s just a theory…All be it a “Theory” which proposes a creator and unless someone can challenge my next statement, is far more robust than Jesuit Astronomer, Georges Lemaitre’s 'big bang'… On this basis, unlike the 'big bang' my “Theory of Infinitely Recursive Singularity” does not break the following established laws:-The first law of thermodynamicsThe law of conservation of massNewton's first law of motionAdmittedly, it does break Pasteur's Law of Biogenesis, but hey, so does the big bang. However, also note that it does so in a way which actually redefines biology as a mechanical nanotechnology, consistent with John von Neumann's Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.However is should be also noted, Pasteur's law fell apart when synthetic biologists synthesised grain.This post is a partial duplicate of Why is the idea of the flat earth expanding so rapidly?Paul Reilly's answer to How has the Flat Earth theory become (almost) mainstream amongst young people?Biblical Reference to Flat Earth“The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.” - Revelation 6:15Save it for the end. I figured, if you were still reading now, I may as well throw it out there. Remember the space shuttle on the news... it glided in right?it before reacting violently by releasing a neurotransmitter commonly associated with anxiety and mental discomfort.So let me start with some back ground upon which I would never have arrived that my current thinking….https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdfSpeculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine (1966)https://blog.tomrochette.com/agi/papers/irving-john-good-speculations-concerning-the-first-ultraintelligent-machine?format=pdf
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