Author Archives: Martina Gulan

in news: “one small step for lego, a giant leap for womankind”

wow ladies

Charlotte Benjamin, 7 years old, in January 2014 wrote a letter to Lego company:

“..there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls.”…

“…all the girls did was sit at home, got to the beach, and shop, and had no jobs, while the boy figures went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs,…they even swam with sharks”.

 “make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun OK!?!  Thank you.”

Thanks to little Charlotte and her mum, Lego finally decided to launch female scientists series.

lp, as long post on singularity

clever

 

sometimes i wish i lived among robots. the stupidity of humans as a collective or as of an individual is often so overwhelming that it leaves one speechless. but then again, as an artist i find our stupidity to be very inspiring. i wonder what kind of art would i create if i would be living among robotic ‘gods’. would they perceive it at all cause it’s made by a plain human being – weak, prone to illness and death, the inferior one? i also wonder, would those ‘gods’ at least laugh at monty pythons’ jokes that mock our human behavior? or, would they even laugh at all?

Jon Stewart / Samantha Bee, Comedy Central, sketch with Ray Kurzweil

SB – …so we’ll have miniature robots in our bodies?

RK – That’s right.

SB – We’re gonna become perfect.

RK – Well, how would you define perfection?

SB – The ability to blowjob with your eyes.

RK – ?…

 

i’ve reread the book by ray kurzweil ‘the age of spiritual machines’ published in 1999. first time i read it i was inclined to the notion of ‘spiritual’ robots cause it went in line with my all time favorite movie blade runner. however, in 15 years since its publication the rapid exponential growth of information technology and the arrival of new technologies made me very skeptical towards A.I. i cannot help asking  myself is artificial intelligence going to turn us into zombies and lead us to the greatest catastrophe a human has ever experienced?

mr. kurzweil and rest of A.I. supporters talk about eventually transcending humanity. they view singularity as the point at which machine’s intelligence begins to amend itself, improve itself: 

“Anyone who is gonna be resisting this progress forward is gonna be resisting evolution and fundamentally they’ll die out.” Peter Diamandis

non worshipers of A.I. state the following:

“Machine’s intelligence improves, improves, improves until we get to a point where, well, it assumes control…The singularity is the point where humans lose control. ” Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics, University of Reading

A.I. fans refuse to accept the ‘imperfection’of our physical bodies. ray calls it ‘the tragedy of illness and death‘ and considers mortality to be a sickness:

“I have no great respect for biological body.”…“There’s nothing in our biological bodies or brain that we won’t be able to recreate and in fact enhance. We’ll create A.I. that are real people.”

 

ray’s book is provocatively backed up with scientific facts and poses a challenge to debate him.  few scientist made excellent remarks concerning this issue:

Dr. William B. Hurlbut, neuroscience professor, Stansford University

“There are no bad genes good genes, there is a balance in genetics. We can do a lot of foolish things, trying to alter human begins to improve them. Then the result of that might be tragedy. Ray is a very interesting person, entertaining, a kind of a visionary. He’s not biologist however. And, I think working as a biologist he would be more moderate in his extinctions of extrapolations  of the uses of our technology. Engineering a better human being is going to be a daunting task. We’ve had 5 millions years of field testing and that has filtered down the existence of an organism that is attuned to range of environments and range of talents and range of possibilities. To upset that balance by exaggerating some feature is going to cost us something too. We shouldn’t just arrogantly think we’ve transcended the wisdom of thousands of years of human experience. 

“Death is not conquered by physical. Death is conquered spirituality.”

 

Hugo de Garis, Professor, Xiamen University, China

“Where am I critical on Ray’s point of view? Well, I think he’s a bit naive in a sense that he doesn’t give enough consideration to the possible negative consequences of these developments. …his reason for living is to create inventions that help humanity. His reasons deft, so for him to hear somebody like me saying these inventions may end up causing the worst war the humanity has ever had, freaks him out. He doesn’t want to hear such things.

“I’m known for the concept of ARTILECT (artificial intellect).

ARTILECT WAR theory: These machines might for ever reason wipe out humanity. There’s always that risk. Consider the analogy of the way we as humans beings look toward ants or mosquitoes as pests. We killed them and we don’t give a damn. Because we feel we’re so superior to them, they are so inferior to us. So, who’s to say that the ARTILECT which than becomes trillions of trillions above of human capacities may look upon us in the same way. We could never be sure. I predict there will be a major war in late 21. century between two human groups…The one way to assure that the risk is zero is that they never build one in the first place…But the second group for them it’ll be a sort of religion to build these things cause they’ll be God like. So you got here the source of a bitter conflict between these two human groups. Then with late 21. century weapons, you’re talking about major war that will not kill millions of people but billions. As a brain builder myself, am I prepared to risk the extinction of the human species for the sake of building an ARTILECT? Because that’s what is coming down to. Yup.

 

Dean Kamen, inventor

“I think the biggest implications of the singularity is that we don’t know the implications of the singularity”… When and if we reach the place where machine’s are more capable of things we call thinking, the consequences of that is, who is leading the world and which way it will be taken and how do we relate to that is hard to really understand.”

 

i was writing this post on singularity for several weeks now and yesterday ran into text that perfectly summarizes everything i was writing about. the author of the text is none other than ‘(im)perfect’ human brain –  mr. stephen hawking.

mr. hawking, whose life relies on technology, states:  

“A.I. could be our worst mistake in history”. part of the text is here.

 

Human beings are champions in clinging, worshiping and repeating the same mistakes. Einstein described that kind of behavior as insanity. Tesla also made a great remark: “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

sane or insane, we should not be playing with the fire unless we first master it and know how to distinguish it.

 

i, as idiots

uf

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”   Aldous Huxley 

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” J.W. Goethe

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.” John Mardsen  

 

i was wishing them hell for 16 years

for that reason

i’m not writing down the name of the party

i’m not writing down the name of the party’s ex chief / croatia’s ex prime minister

i will state the obvious:

their supporters  should also be considered collectively responsible for enabling the biggest ‘legitimate’ heist in europe since ww2

i’m still crouching the numbers

i’m not giving in to pessimists

croatia, start seeing clearly

dance

dan žena, as 8th of march

IWD, as 8th of march

“I Want Her”, 100 x 70 cm, oil on canvas

“A ship is called a she because there is always a great deal of bustle around her; there is usually a gang of men about; she has a waist and stays; it takes a lot of paint to keep her good-looking; it is not the initial expense that breaks you, it is the upkeep; she can be all decked out; it takes an experienced man to handle her correctly; and without a man at the helm, she is absolutely uncontrollable. She shows her topsides, hiders her bottom and, when coming into port, always heads for the boys.”

que? as question

“Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.”

“Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.”

“All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction.” 

Dalai Lama XIV

an enigma question started to haunt me as if i’m the last woman standing and is usually posted by (married) men, rarely by married women:

– are you married?
– no
– why?
– i’m waiting to turn 60

i was on a dinner recently where a guy (over 40, married with children) hold me a lecture for an hour in front of everyone present about how i need to give birth to a child till i’m 42. otherwise i might regret it when i’m 50. then he went on explaining how not having a partner is not the issue cause ‘research has found‘ that one parent is enough to raise a child. instead of being in a mine field of potential embarrassment i genuinely laughed at his odysseus monologue cause this was one of those great monthy payton life situations. when he finished his presentation about my reproductive potential i kindly asked him to provide me with phone numbers of some of his married friends. why? he asked. well since i’ll be having a child and raising it by myself, the obligation and responsibility of a future mother is to choose the best sperm there is. ain’t it?

till next post on ray’s singularity,  few links:
– how to for dummies
– short history of marriage: 1 or 2

af, as aretha franklin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUDDuhS3E8E

on commercial lover’s day I admit my love for Aretha Franklin. I fell for her big time as a baby teenager and my three life’s wishes were to see Michelangelo’s David, hear Chick Corea and hear Aretha Franklin live. the first two wishes came true but I really don’t know how to get to Aretha Franklin. hm, I guess I must think of something pretty soon. this is not her song (sorry mr. Sam Cook) but heard it again today on a radio and thought, let’s make a simple post out of it.

hh, as high hopes

“Sometimes you have to be up really high to understand how small you are.”  Felix Baumgarten

The Moro reflex is considered to be the only unlearned fear in human newborns. The gravity is considered to be one of the four powerful forces that mediates human experiences while the quantum gravity is still a bit of a theory problem.

I remember perfectly my micro free fall and indescribable feeling of going ‘up’, similar to the feeling of a plane taking off. The basket of oranges fortunately break my fall and not my spine. Mum left it there at ‘landing point’ the previous evening. She said she wanted to move it but something ‘told her’ to leave it there. The moment I begun to free fall my fear vanished. I became aware that I’m now dying at the age of 7 and posted my last thoughts to someone:

  1. Oh fuck, already at 7
  2. How will my class buddies do without me?
  3. I’m off to happy hunting ground (saw it as written on a blackboard)
  4. See, I knew there’s no point in screaming (those movies’ scenes of falling really irritated me)

Kids have not yet developed a strong ego as adults have. I guess that’s why is simpler for most of them to accept the notion of dying. One of my friends who is a psychiatrist tried to convince me that kids at young age cannot be aware of or ‘know’ what death is. With all do respect I say most psychiatrists do not know much about conscious, brain and mysteries in general. I know that my mind and body were perfectly aware of its end. Period. The shock came after my body performed a back-lift and landed perfectly into oranges. For a half a minute I could not inhale properly and that was a bit scary, not the fall.

Since than I started to perform jumps to reach the feeling of that free fall. During summer I would jump off from high cliffs in sport shoes cause hitting the sea surface with bare feet is quite a burning sensation. In winter I would jump from first or even second floors/balconies to land into a sand. It these cases it was very important knowing how to land and how to use your knees as shock absorber. Otherwise, don’t try.

Somebody asked me once if I’m an adrenalin junkie. It was not about adrenalin but about that feeling of utter relaxation and the feeling of going up. It’s difficult to explain. Still today when I ‘free fall’ into sea I like to close my eyes to feel gravity pulling my physical body down while something else is pulling ‘me’ up at once. Quantum physics at its best. To express it poetically, the silent fall of a falling leaf.

As a person who had several near death experiences I tell you death is not to be feared. If anyone of you ‘get lucky’ to die via free fall, try to relax, get a sense of an adventure and enjoy it cause there’s actually nothing else you can do. I’m not being sarcastic, ironic or perverse. If you look at it a bit closer, life as we know it is hell for most parts of it. Death only comes as a salvation.