Life is a Soccer Game – Not Over Until the Whistle Blows

Two events over the last few weeks have reinforced one thing for me – it is not over until it’s over.

First Event
The 2014 Champions League Final at Lisbon had two teams from Madrid. It couldn’t have been better for any city – head or tail you win. Athletico Madrid was the underdog and had everyone rooting for them (why do people always root for the underdog?). Game on! They had a lead up till the very last moment then they cracked and Real Madrid scored. Game went to extra time where Athletic got the spanking of their lives.

Second Event
USA vs Portugal at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. It is another underdog versus a mid-size dog. It is amazing how the USA could be called an underdog with a straight face; it isn’t often that you have them right under. First they conceded then they matched up and then lead the game. 30 seconds to go, a crack appeared somewhere and Portugal scored.

Lesson Learned
Lessons from these events for me? You hold on till the referee or life blows the final whistle because a moment of laxity can undo everything. Just like running against an escalator – it doesn’t make any difference how long you ran, once you stop, you go back to square one. In fact you could be worse off since you already expended some energy.

I Can Search for Anything

Wearable technology is pretty hot and in fact so hot that Amazon set-up a dedicated shop front for it. Now you can enhance your life, or whatever is left of it, with all types of thingamajigs but the long-term usefulness is a subject of debate.

It’s time we upend that argument with wearable technology that can actually do something important such as searching while you amble about.

Wearable technologies are pieces of items, clothing or some random stuff we put on ourselves but with embedded smart that can interact with us or the environment.

For example, all those fitness bands that count the number of steps (and make you feel guilty for sitting on your fat backside all day) or your pulse (if you are still alive) are wearable tech. Nike and Apple have been on this for over a century.

Google got in the game and made Google Glass which is the most popular or maybe the most obnoxious and controversial. In fact, it is getting banned left right and center. That is by the way.

What’s more interesting has been Google’s attempt to open the SDK/GDK/API of the Glass such that guys could write apps to leverage on its capabilities. Stuffs like navigations apps have been done and they are quite awesome.

What if I can look at anything and then Glass can search for its name, its price and all that sh*t. Imagine hanging out at the local supermarket and I can Glass (new verb) a grocery barcode and it tells me it is a dollar cheaper at a store just few minutes away (location awareness)? That would be a breath-taking app!

Or I’m out there camping (you actually believe I camp?) and I look at an insect and it gives me the Wikipedia entry that tells me the furry 8-legged dude is a tarantula and I should sprint as fast as my stubby legs could carry my body with love handles and midsection jiggling along.

I’m not a healthy living freak but I have whipped up a sufficient amount of guilt to help me in divorcing my rapidly bulging mid-section which is glued to me like stuck on you. So with this All Seeing Glass I could wink at a bowl of food, it IDs the stuff and tells me how many pounds of fat is going to join its brothers in my pot belly. That would be fantastic!

Maybe law enforcement could see some nice looking well-dressed fella and using facial recognition our Olopa will know he’s the badass leader of Boko Haram coming to scope the next bomb site. Ok, this wouldn’t work. One, almost every one of the top companies are running away from facial recognition because of the privacy issues and two I doubt if the Nigerian Police or military know any of the would be bombers even if he’s a local newscaster.

I could also use it to pass my GMAT exam – that is what some of my younger friends would want. Too bad fellow, that ain’t gonna happen!

The end is nigh. Artificial Intelligence

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Like an errant kid the world is surely bent on killing itself. This time around even the cockroaches won’t be spared.

If you think that someone is going to throw a nuclear bomb, think about it, who wants to die when MAD (mutually assured destruction) is a known consequence? Not even a super power wants to be an overlord of a nuclear wasteland.

Technology is advancing at such a rapid clip that one day we are going to reach what is called Singularity – that point when the line between man and machine is blurred beyond recognition. Or worse still when machine blurs out the memory of men.

Think about it, once you do a machine that can make itself better, the end is nigh. And this is possible. While at the university my project was on genetic algorithm and I coded a simple program that increasingly makes itself increasingly better. So imagine smart guys coding a software that can recode itself better and better each day. One day it would be smarter than human and we are all going to have new overlords.

Watch Transcendence and see what is possible. It is not a joke. Trust me, Terminator would be a Mickey Mouse to what could happen. Time travel is another thing though.

Some scientists are already talking about this and for the first time top minds are calling attention of the world leaders on what could be humanity’s last invention. You never know maybe we human are some inventions that went awry in the past. For Christians, even the bible pointed to it at Genesis 6:6.

Truth is a smart machines first move would be to wipe humanity off. We are bad and mean to each other. We destroy the environment. We waste resources.

Sometimes I can’t argue if we don’t really deserve this fate?
Along the line, a smart benevolent machine could dig up our DNA and restore memories. Would they invent emotions? Will they end up organic? Will they have aspirations? Will they study the past?

Just wondering what I could ask this machine when it finally takes over – what is your purpose? It’s probably going to make a nasty grunt, twitch its digital nose and reach for CRTL-ALT-DEL.
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Fermi Paradox, Time Travel and my Non-Visiting Grand Children

Recently bored, I found myself reading about Fermi Paradox. You see, quite a lot of scientists believe that there are intelligent beings outside planet earth – we just need to fly out there and shake their hands, if they actually have hands that can be shaken. In fact, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence can trace its roots to 1896 when Nikola Tesla thought radio waves could be used to communicate with badass aliens but then Fermi posited, quite surprisingly, that if aliens really exist then we should have seen them hanging around at the local pub.

By the way, same paradox applies to time travel – if it actually works then I should have seen my grand-children come visiting from the future. Unless they hate me so much, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. So, I better changed my lifestyle and be a better dad!

My take is entirely off-tangent. There could be extra-terrestrial intelligence and there might not be. We simply don’t have enough science and technology muscle to lift the lid off the bottle of life.

But what if other lives exist in forms that are so completely different from ours that it is practically impossible to know about them or interact? What if they don’t exists in biological or organic form? What if they are like radio waves? What if they are in a completely different dimension without matter or time? What if the whole universe itself is a life? What if we are not real but just a bunch of random simulations? Where do we go when we die? What is our consciousness made of? Is our mind and personality made from interactions of neurons or the neurons is just an interface to a life-form beyond what we know?

Sounds implausible? Of course not!

Has anyone seen a radio wave before? We didn’t even know about Electromagnetic waves until just a few hundred years ago and yet today all our lives and livelihood depend on it. If we could wake up a dude from the time of Moses, he wouldn’t recognize any of the stuff that makes our daily life – how could Zuckerberg be worth billions without a single cow!

Time I get back to some serious work.