Category: progress

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progress voluntary cooperation

The Real Randy Travis

Randy Travis, music, AI

In 2013, Randy Travis had a stroke so severe that doctors thought he was not long for this world.

Yet his life wasn’t over. And although he remains partly incapacitated, his career, amazingly, wasn’t over either: his wife Mary tours with him, and voice-​cloning technology is helping him create songs with a Randy Travis timbre.

When things were at their worst, Mary rejected the doctors’ prognosis because, as she says, her husband was still fighting.

“There was never a doubt in Randy’s mind that he could make it through it. It was that magical moment that I went to his bedside when they said, ‘We need to pull the plug. He’s got too many things going against him at that point.’ He had gotten a staph infection and three other hospital-​born bacterial viruses … one thing after another. And the doctors were just saying, ‘He just doesn’t have the strength to get through this.’…

“That’s when I went to him. That was the moment that I knew that Randy Travis was gonna make it because he squeezed my hand and a tear went down his face. And I said, ‘He’s still fighting.’”

Mary Travis praises artificial intelligence. 

Along with musician friends, AI is helping her husband complete lyrics and is simulating his voice so that he can, indirectly, sing again. 

The technology is guided by a human attention to nuance, and Randy himself obviously feels that what is being created conveys his spirit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
government transparency progress responsibility

UFOs and Other Foes

invisible, invisibility cloak, UFO, defense, disclosure

Frivolous federal spending: you don’t approve; I don’t approve. Which is why I’m usually on Reason magazine’s side when it comes to government prodigality. But complaining about the money spent by the Pentagon to make sense of the UFO phenomenon misses the bigger story.

In “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon,” Fiona Harrigan sets up the problem: “The 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act included $10 million for the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act allotted $12 million, amounting to $22 million over five years. It is unclear how much of that money went toward researching UFOs and how much went toward invisibility cloaks, because how the money was used has been shrouded in secrecy.”

If when I’ve talked about these programs before I didn’t much discuss invisibility cloaks or spintronics and other ancillary aspects of UFO disclosure, it’s because I knew little about them … and neither, I gather, does Ms. Harrigan.

What they all show is the first teensy bit of transparency … on the apparently non-​dismissible persistence of aerial phenomena that were dubbed UFOs* by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in his 1956 study, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The military has apparently known about the puzzling reality of this phenomena for a long time. If we are to believe current reports, or past leaked documents like the Twining Memo, the objects observed by the military are (contrary to official statements) real objects intelligently controlled that do not behave according to the laws of physics that we were taught in school.

Ms. Harrigan warns us of a very different irregularity: how the research was contracted under the authorizing legislation.

That sure seems like the lesser story. 

The biggest story? Cover-​up. Investigation into UFOs couldn’t be done in-​house because of the layers of secrecy already in place. Non-​disclosure agreements’ and top-​level secrecy compartmentalization required outsourcing. We may have to accept some irregularities … the regular methods having led to secrecy of extreme sorts. 

The kind that makes the Deep State deep.

And as for invisibility cloaks: they are associated with UFOs, and would obviously be very useful for the military. Besides, cloaking technology is now in use, no longer a mere sci-​fi dream.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ruppelt thought the initials should be pronounced as one word: YOU-​foe!

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individual achievement progress

The Power of Man’s Mind

brain reader, text, binary, analog

Can you communicate with your mind alone, without moving a muscle?

Setting aside fantasy and wishful thinking, my answer is, at least presumptively, “No.”

But the paralyzed man known as T5 was not alone when the sentences he imagined appeared on screen at a rate of 18 words per minute with an accuracy of about 94 percent.

He had the help of inventive scientists. And, by some definitions, I suppose T5 did move a muscle: his brain. 

Normally, though, we must also move other muscles to get what’s on our mind out into the world and communicate it to others.

After suffering a spinal cord injury in 2007, T5 became almost entirely paralyzed. Several years later, he enrolled in a clinical trial called BrainGate2 to research brain-​computer interfaces.

Two small microchips were implanted in his brain.

Scientist Frank Willett of Stanford University and his colleagues asked T5 to imagine that he was writing individual letters and punctuation marks. They found that the patterns of neural activity they recorded were distinct for each letter, period, and comma.

Now all they had to do — a trifle! — is train an algorithm to predict, based on T5’s neural patterns, what letter or punctuation mark he was writing in his imagination.

It worked. Initial accuracy: 94 percent. With autocorrect that percentage went up to 99.

As yet, the technology is said to be too rudimentary to be practically applied. But the basic approach has been shown to be viable. The work also communicates the power of human ingenuity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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art credit: binary

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