Searching For The Question

I am at the NASA Ames Research Center, where I spent a week at Singularity University. It was a great opportunity to attend lectures, go on trips with the students, interact with the rest of the Advisors, and the staff. I have kept twittering my impressions, brief quotes from the lectures, and it was a wonderful experience.

Today, at 7PM PST, if you are in the Valley, and want to come to NASA, I will be holding a lecture about the Internet Of Things, followed by an interactive, fun Spime Design Workshop. Hey, we will even have a cheese and wine reception for you!

Please sign up for the lecture online. There are still a few open seats.

On the other hand if you are not here you can follow my lecture streamed online, which is a first for Singularity University.

Here are the slides of my presentation:

We are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the landing on the Moon, and it is a good to keep asking the right questions about the goals of space exploration.

Should we try and go back to the Moon?
Should we go to Mars instead?
Should we try and settle Mars?
How quickly can we get a Mars mission up and running?
Can we engineer an interstellar mission?
What is the current thinking about the Fermi paradox?
What are our chances of discovering extraterrestrial life?

These are the questions that I had the chance to ask to Giovanni Bignami, former Chairman of the Space Science Advisory Committee of the European Space Agency, and author of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-25 ten year planning document, on the video “Space Exploration: the Moon, Mars, and beyond“:

If you don’t have the eight minutes to watch the video, here are the answers* to the questions:

No
Yes
Maybe
Very
No
Fermi rulez!
Guaranteed within ten years!**

I want to thank Riccardo Luna, director of Wired Italy for making this encounter happen. Wired’s July issue dedicated entirely to the Moon, and Giovanni was the guest editor of the issue.

*It would be cool if somebody transcribed the video for subtitling…
**Is this a bombshell or what?

In many countries there is planned legislation imposing special limits on the freedom of expression online. Italy’s Alfano law equates all blogs to professional journalism, and requires the publishing of “corrections” notified by interested parties, under the penalty of heavy fines.

This law, if passed without any modification, will in practice silence free speech on the net in Italy, as special interests will inundate the blogosphere with requests that will be impossible to correctly follow by most of the new voices online.

Politicians tend to feel threatened by the net, and its powers, as it enables citizens to independently express their positions, and form an opinion without resorting to official sources.

The following video summarizes my opinion:

The group Diritto Alla Rete (Right to the Net) connects activists with the same passion for the net.

Tomorrow I will be with ONE at the U2′s 360 concert, together with my sons.

Image by One.org

ONE is a grassroots campaign and advocacy organization backed by more than 2 million people who are committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. Cofounded by Bono and other campaigners, ONE is nonpartisan and works closely with African policy makers and activists.

ONE is hitting the road with U2 this summer to launch a recruitment drive for new members and to raise awareness of the critical progress being made against extreme poverty and preventable disease in Africa. Thanks to the band’s support, ONE will be present at venues and featured in the show throughout the U2 360° tour, which will be seen by over 3 million people this year.

The G8 countries’ meeting is starting in Italy, and ONE is putting the pressure on them, and especially on the host country, to deliver on their promises to make funds available to fight poverty.

Sign the petition for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to deliver on his 2005 promises of aid.

There’s less then a week to go for Frontiers Of Interaction V, this time not in Turin, but in Rome. on June 8, next monday. If you are around, you must make sure to come! (Registration required)

As recently said, quite appropriately by Massimo Sgrelli,

“Finally in Italy there won’t be the need to pick a plane and traverse an ocean to attend  the nearest O’Reilly conference!”

Frontiers of Interaction is organized by my friend Leandro, and I have been lucky enough to go to two of the previous editions. They have been of a consistently high quality. My speech for this year is shaping up nicely, and I hope that it will be up to the expectations of the attendees!

With help from Google, and NASA, the Singularity University is being unveiled today. Founded by Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Diamandis, the objective of the Singularity University is that of preparing humanity to best face its challenges, using the tools that the accelerating technological change makes possible. These tools don’t emerge spontaneously from the background noise of economic or scientific activities: they have to be actively pursued, and sometimes are the application of the intersection of apparently distant fields. These interdisciplinary approaches characterize the curriculum of the Singularity University, which will start offering its nine week graduate program this summer.

On top of this extensive course, there will be also ten day, and three day intensive executive courses for industry managers and CxOs, who will be able to recognize the important trends analyzed during the lectures, and apply them to the planning, and execution of their companies’ strategies.

The opportunities that the Singularity University offers for getting a glimpse into what the leading developments are in a variety of advanced fields are unique, as well as the networking, and potential formation of startups ready to be funded by the institutions corporate sponsors.

See a brief video presentation of the Singularity University:

Learning is such a fundamental activity for today’s world, which changes fast around us! Adapting to these dynamic conditions cannot be just a question of biological, genetic evolution. That also happens, of course, but its ways are much too slow for us to wait and let them catch up. Our culture, and its technological applications, have an impact in the day to day activities of each of us, and we have to make sure that we are equipped to face the challenges that are posed by them. Even new ways of learning, and new ways of thinking can be necessary, and applying techniques that are adept in finding the right connections between different fields, and different methods, can lead to unexpectedly effective results.

The academic track includes an excitingly eclectic coverage of what are some of the most important fields in today’s world:Future Studies & Forecasting, Networks & Computing Systems, Biotechnology & Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology, Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement, AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing, Energy & Ecological Systems, Space & Physical Sciences, Policy, Law & Ethics, Finance & Entrepreneurship

It hasn’t been reported by the numerous articles covering the announcement of the Singularity University, but Ray confirmed to me, and it is rather important, that all the lectures, and the course materials that are going to be developed and delivered at its sessions are going to be made available online under a liberal license. This is going to be equivalent to or more liberal than the license applied to the Open Courseware Consortium‘s content, of which famously MIT‘s courses are also a part. This means that all the materials of the Singularity University are going to be published under Creative Commons Attribution license!

Full disclosure: I am a Singularity University Advisor.

Bruce Sterling and Bruno Argento are at it again, this time from the pages of SEED magazine, with an article entitled “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic“, spreading their peculiar mix of breathless future, whose well worn form is tinted with skepticism and where the Utopian views thread together with a reality where the probabilities turn into daily demonstrations of human nature’s unchangeable basics.

They list several new sources of dread which—after the original source of the global financial crisis, that hasn’t still boiled over, and taken a manageable form in new institutions and new rules—have the power of rattling the human soul and its confidence in the power of reason to command nature: climate, intellectual property, national currencies, insurance and building codes, the elderly, the Westphalian system, science.

By the way, I realize that I didn’t report on Bruno Argento’s performance. He spoke in Italian, but here is an English rendering of what he said by Bruce:

My Twin Brother, Bruno Argento

I am an optimist. It is a choice, since from the point of view of an objective analysis there is nothing to be optimistic about in the Universe. What you love, what you strive to achieve is going die, end, crumble, and likely be forgotten soon after, without anybody to remember why it was even worth caring for it, why it was even worth trying. So my choice of being an optimist is not based on this. It is based on looking around me, and realizing that I only have one way of living life, and it is a way of my own choosing. If I wanted I could live as a pessimist, and—at least for a little while, until I decided against it—even as a nihilist. But it won’t be fun. It won’t be constructive. So I believe, in a pragmatic, operational way, that it is better to found my outlook on positive values.

I am also an atheist. I have a naturalistic worldview, which does not include mystical, or supernatural elements. (This doesn’t mean a lot of things, for example that I am amoral, or that my view is exclusively mechanistic.) A few years ago a new movement has been started by Richard Dawkins, who felt it would be good to find a new way of describing people like me. We are the Brights! (The people who on the other hand feel that they have a need to include the supernatural, or the divine in their world are the Supers, not the Dims.)

The movement of the Brights includes some great people on top of Richard Dawkins, like Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, James Randi, and others. (Yes, of course you can buy the Bright merchandise, and 2009 Bright calendar.)

I often descibe myself as a missionary atheist. Yes, I am out to convert you too, so don’t be surprised if after dinner, contrary to many social conventions, I start to talk about religion, and the need to relinquish it!

So to a bright future, somewhat unreasonably so, but optimistically!

Tomorrow I will be speaking at the Parliament in Rome about Internet technologies, starting from the Obama victory, and how it as able to knit together a series of tools with very effective results. At La Sala Delle Colonne of the Chamber Of Deputies, there will be an open session, with a conversation between Marco Montemagno, Antonio Palmieri, Paolo Gentiloni, Enrico Menduni, Antonio Sofi, Edoardo Colombo, and me, with about 100 additional people in the audience, who will hopefully be very active too.

Since the founding meeting of the Open Government Working Group a year ago I was hopeful that an opportunity would arise to attempt at sharing my views with professional politicians. At this time there will be from both the right, and the left, and I really am looking forward to understand their views.

There were a couple of frightening news today:

• Italy is the only country among 30 surveyed by Eurostat, where Internet usage among families declined between 2007 and 2008 (from 43% penetration, already very low, to 42%)
• the Italian Prime Minister declared that he will propose at the next G8 meeting the adoption of an agenda item for the worldwide regulation of the Internet

Part of what I will try to communicate tomorrow, is that the Internet is not just an excellent electoral tool; it is not just an additional channel for parties and governments to communicate. It is also a fundamental new platform for citizens to participate in the acts of government, transparently, and efficiently.

We are just at the beginning of a long, but necessary road for the thorough adoption of  Internet technologies for government, politics, and civic life in general.

Have you been wondering what present to give me for coming festivities?
I want to help you: an iPhone 3G!

Well, not an entire iPhone really. That would either be too expensive, or if more than one person decided that, yes, actually they wanted to give me an iPhone as a gift, then I’d end up with more than one… So what I propose is that you choose a share of an iPhone!

I am going to use an unlocked one, with my current SIM (a pretty good contract from 3, which gives me plenty of talk time, but even more, 5GB of data traffic per week), which means that it is not going to be cheap, but I am dividing it in 20 parts, of €30.

What do you think?
If you like the idea, then click on the donation button below. (Hey, you can give me more than one share too…) You will be sent to a PayPal page, where you can confirm the amount, and tell me if you do not want to be openly recognized for this (the default is public…). You can use PayPal even if you are not a member, and you will not be forced to sign-up.

I will update this page, and obviously stop the button when the thirty pieces of the iPhone have been all taken.