My mind. Enhanced.

Earlier this year, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla Motor's Elon Musk, and several other high profile investors capitalized on a secretive artificial intelligence lab named " Vicarious ". As a private company, details of its business remained appropriately classified, but sources noted that they were in the artificial neural networks arena with research focused on software emulating the human neocortex. They were a machine learning company. What is Machine Learning ? A quick drop in on Wikipedia will tell you that it is defined as "a branch of artificial intelligence, [concerned] with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data". Artificial intelligence has, at large, remained in the realm of science fiction novels and movies, the general public often scoffing its premise as nonsense and a study without realistic scientific substance. This has been true in the past, but academics and private enterprises alike are now realizing the i...

As living organisms, humans, among millions of species on Earth, are directed by constant stages of changes. From the early fetal stages of  our mother's womb, to adolescence, to the end stages of senescence on our deathbed; we are by our very nature constrained to a renewal and end of things. These are cycles that never end. We transition from one thing of sorts to the next. Thus, the laws of nature apply not just to our biological nature, but to our psychological / spiritual state of being. The soul changes over time. This continual transition happens throughout our life, challenges faced, battles fought, epiphanies realized, all contribute to the development and ultimately perfection of the soul. We change according to different stages in life. Soul in tow. To what end does change move toward? Generally speaking, changes taking place on Earth. This could mean evolution through specieation or the rate of technological progress, I have my theories, backed by a h...

Another year. Another birthday. Things have definitely scaled up a notch in the past year

It's been a thrilling seven days thus far. I spent my last weekend in a startup competition at UBC. I networked, pitched, and worked my way through the startup process. I met an awesome group of people and possible co-founders for a new venture. Only time will tell. Hint:  Google's Project Tango is where the future of the smartphone market is going. Monday kicked off the TED 2014 - The Next Chapter convention at Canada Place. It's freaking wild. From the interactive sculpture, to the speakers list, to all my favorite tech-icons of Silicon Valley and Boston, MA (Ray Kurzweil, Hugh Herr, Andrew McAfee, Sergey Brin, and the list goes on and on) all huddled around the city of Vancouver, my mind has gone through a dizzying array of fanboyiness excitement. Kurzweil spoke today and many people listened. The idea is out there now. It's mainstream. My twitter feed went nuts; people are now very aware of the Technological Singularity and are blown away by its core p...

What's on my mind? A lot of stuff. But if you're curious to know the specifics, here are a few things that take up about 90% of my brain power at the moment (the remainder 10% is useless dribble like celebrity gossip and cartoony things): Electrical Engineering or more specifically branches of electrical engineering. I wrote a post about this a few months ago, and within the past year I've been focused on Math, Physics, Robotics, and Computer Science to help accomplish my goal of becoming an engineer. Auditing some MOOC courses on edX, Coursera, and YouTube (MIT, Stanford, Yale lectures) I've built, and continue to build,  a core set of engineering knowledge. My end goal is to establish an expertise in the coming age of the Internet of Things (IoT) . IoT . You've heard of the term, right? The idea that over the next decade we will see more and more "things" (like cars , thermostats , shoes , etc) connected to the internet via sensors and advanced micr...

Last week, I saw "Her", a movie directed by Spike Jones. When the end credits rolled, I decided it must have a place in my top ten favourite movies of all time. So, what's it about? Its basic premise revolves around a man named Theodore, a writer, recently separated, who is having a tough time trying to get over the failure of his marriage. He goes out and buys an Artificial Intelligent Operating System named Samantha. Throughout the movie Samantha and Theodore develop a strange yet endearing boyfriend virtual-girlfriend relationship. He eventually admits to his circle of friends that he is dating the OS. In the end, and trying not spoiling too much for anyone, Theodore resolves his differences with his ex-wife, and realizes that the love spurred between man and machine is not without its consequences. I thought about this movie for days. I tried to piece together everything I liked about it. And in short form, here is what I came up with: The narrative sto...

So, I'd like to close of my GNR blog posts series with the topic I'm most interested in - the field of robotics. From childhood to adulthood I've always had a strong vested interest in the automation of things and machines that look and act like humans. It's only recently that I've taken interest in robots as a possible future career because I strongly believe that this coming decade will see the rise of the artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of labour will depend heavily on strong AI. Robotics will have a deep impact on society on all levels -if not already. I could talk about this stuff all day long, but I'll spare everyone superfluous digressions on the subject and maybe just focus on key things to keep an eye out for. In a recent TED Talk, economist and MIT professor Andrew Mcafee described a curious case of economic disruption taking place in America today. He noted that despite having recovered from the "Great Recession", the average...