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Certain elements of the blogosphere are abuzz with news that Austin, TX’s Cycorp is about to release an AI, “Cyc,” on the Internet. With a mission to learn and build its knowledge, it will accelerate its new knowledge acquisition by interacting with netizens and siphoning multimedia information on the Web.

In a New Scientist article on the release, Justin Mullins writes, “one of Cyc’s most impressive features is the quality of the deductions it can make about things it has never learned about directly. For example, it can tell whether two animals are related without having been programmed with the explicit relationship between each animal we know of.” At the moment, Cyc does not contain the knowledge base to provide answers to interact with others in a meaningful manner. In three to five years, however, its creators predict that it will.

Here is a book to watch out for: The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil, to be released in September, 2005.

The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com’s description of the volume:

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005)
• ISBN: 0670033847

Book Description

The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest, thrilling foray into the future, he envisions an event—the “singularity”—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.

The Singularity is near portrays what life will be like after this event—a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed, world hunger will be solved, and our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death.

We will be able to create virtually any physical product just from information, resulting in radical wealth creation. In addition to outlining these fantastic changes, Kurzweil also considers their social and philosophical ramifications. With its radical but optimistic view of the course of human development, The singularity is near is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.

Order from Amazon.com

Shamelessly cut-and-pasted from Slashdot: eaglemoon writes “Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of ”lead users,” who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends. Von Hippel shows the trend already is more advanced than is generally known, and users often freely reveal their innovations for the common good. The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others…..he also notes that the transition to user-centered innovation is hard for some companies to swallow. The online version of the book is available under a Creative Commons license.”

Can this same principle be applied to the creation of knowledge in universities, where individual members of the university community use technology to diffuse new knowledge generated; thus propelling innovation and continuous, new context creation for knowledge production and innovation?

Squeak is based on the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language developed by Xerox in the 1980s. Today, it is used as a “media authoring tool” to create virtual, educational toys in the classroom. Using a constructivist framework, “some students work with media created in Squeak by their teachers; others are creating their own simulations and models to test their theories and deepen their understanding of math and science.”

See Squeakland for more information.