Jacque Fresco (born March 13, 1916), is a self-educated structural designer, philosopher of science, concept artist, educator, and futurist. His interests span a wide range of disciplines including several in philosophy, science, and engineering.
Fresco writes and lectures extensively on his view of subjects ranging from the holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management, cybernated technology, advanced automation, and the role of science in society, focusing on the benefits he claims this will bring. With his colleague, Roxanne Meadows, he is the founder and director of an organization known as The Venus Project, located in Venus, Florida.
In contemporary culture he has been popularized by three documentaries, Future By Design, Zeitgeist Addendum, and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, His Venus Project has been inspirational worldwide, especially to activists.
When we physicists look in outer space for alien life we don't look for little green men. We look for type 1, type 2 and type 3 civilizations. A type one civilization has harnessed planetary power. They control earthquakes, the weather, volcanoes. They have cities on the ocean. Anything planetary they control, that's type one. A type two civilization is stellar. They've exhausted the power of a planet and they get their energy directly from their mother star. They don't just go and get a sun tan on a weekend, they use solar flares. They use the power of the sun itself to energize their huge machines. Eventually they exhaust the power of a star and they go galactic. They harness the power of billions of stars within a galaxy. Now, what are we on this scale? We are type zero. We don't even rate on this scale. We get our energy from -- not from stars or galaxies -- we get our energy from dead plants: oil and coal.
Historians will look back and say: "Holy shit! They were making materials, selling them for corporation profit over and over and over and over again with absolutely no reference to what the planet had and recycling protocols and everything else. They were burning fossil fuels at a million times the rate of their actual renewability." They're gonna laugh at us, wondering what the hell kind of a primitive dumb-ass species we actually were. If we even survive to reach that point.
From an extra-terrestial perspective our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet.
This transition is also the most important because it's not clear if we're gonna make it. When we look at outer space we see no evidence of type 1, 2 or 3 anywhere. No evidence whatsoever. The mathematics say that there should be thousands of type 1, 2 and 3 civilizations in the galaxy. We see no evidence of any whatsoever. And why is that? Because the transition from type zero to type one is the most dangerous of all transitions. We may not make it.
I hope everyone out there will understand that either we change or we die.
War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in the monetary system. That is, there'll be very little significant change. It's going to take the re-design of our culture and our values and it has to be related to the carrying capacity of the Earth. Not some human opinion or some politicians' notions of the way the world ought to be or some religious notions of the conduct of human affairs.
So again, the generation now alive and our grandchildren are the most important generations ever to walk the surface of the Earth. We are the generations that will determine whether we make the transition from type zero to type one or we destroy ourselves because of our arrogance and our weapons. Now, every time I read the newspaper I see evidence of this historic transition from type zero to type one and I am privileged to be alive in the most important era in the history of the human race: the transition from type zero to type one.
The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itsself is doomed. We are one planet.
At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun.
About Michael Pawlyn
Michael Pawlyn takes cues from nature to make new, sustainable architectural environments.
Michael Pawlyn established the architecture firm Exploration in 2007 to focus on environmentally sustainable projects that take their inspiration from nature.
Prior to setting up the company, Pawlyn worked with the firm Grimshaw for ten years and was central to the team that radically re-invented horticultural architecture for the Eden Project. He was responsible for leading the design of the Warm Temperate and Humid Tropics Biomes and the subsequent phases that included proposals for a third Biome for plants from dry tropical regions. In 1999 he was one of five winners in A Car-free London, an ideas competition for strategic solutions to the capital’s future transport needs and new possibilities for urban spaces. In September 2003 he joined an intensive course in nature-inspired design at Schumacher College, run by Amory Lovins and Janine Benyus. He has lectured widely on the subject of sustainable design in the UK and abroad.
Once upon a time..... products were made to last. Then, at the beginning of the 1920s, a group of businessmen were struck by the following insight: 'A product that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business' (1928). Thus Planned Obsolescence was born. Shortly after, the first worldwide cartel was set up expressly to reduce the life span of the incandescent light bulb, a symbol for innovation and bright new ideas, and the first official victim of Planned Obsolescence. During the 1950s, with the birth of the consumer society, the concept took on a whole new meaning, as explained by flamboyant designer Brooks Stevens: 'Planned Obsolescence, the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary...'. The growth society flourished, everybody had everything, the waste was piling up (preferably far away in illegal dumps in the Third World) - until consumers started rebelling... Can the modern growth society survive without Planned Obsolescence? Did the eternal light bulb ever exist? How can a tiny chip 'kill' a product? How did two artists from New York manage to extend the lives of millions of iPods? Is Planned Obsolescence itself becoming obsolete? Written by Cosima Dannoritzer
The Light Bulb Conspiracy (2010) This is the story of companies who engineered their products to fail. VIDEO DOCUMENTARY
Director: Cosima Dannoritzer Writer: Cosima Dannoritzer Stars: Mike Anane, Michael Braungart and Steve Bunn
Despite all the recent advances in robotics, one fundamental task has always been very difficult: robot programming. New Research in the field of robotic programming is moving towards more natural and exciting directions.
To be sure, robot programming in industrial settings has evolved significantly, from a series of mechanical switches to advanced programming languages and teach-pendant devices for trajectory planning. But getting robots to do their jobs still requires a great deal of human labor -- and human intelligence.
The situation is even worse when it comes to programming robots to do things in non-industrial environments. Homes, offices, and hospitals are unstructured spaces, where robots need to deal with more uncertainty and act more safely.
To overcome this programming bottleneck, engineers need to create robots that are more flexible and adaptable -- robots that, like humans, learn by doing.
That's what a team led by Dr. Jan Peters at the Robot Learning Lab, part of the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany, is trying to do. Peters wants to transform robot programming into robot learning. In other words, he wants to design robots that can learn tasks effortlessly instead of requiring people to painstakingly determine their every move.
In the video below, you can see his students taking their robot "by the hand" to teach it motor skills needed for three tasks: paddle a ball on a string, play the ball-in-a-cup game, and hit a ping pong ball.
Here's how Dr. Peters explained to Automaton his team's approach: "Take the example of a person learning tennis. The teacher takes the student by the hand and shows basic movements: This is a forehand, this is a backhand, this is a serve. Still, it will take hours and hours of training before the student even feels comfortable at performing these behaviors. Even more practice is needed for the student to be able to play an actual game with these elementary behaviors." But still, he adds, humans succeed at learning the task. Why can't robots do the same? "That's what we're trying to do: Make our robots mimic the way humans learn new behaviors."
In the first part of the video, graduate student Katharina Muelling shows the robot how to paddle a ball on a string by performing the action while holding the robot's "hand." The robot decomposes the movement into primitive motor behaviors -- a discrete motor primitive that modulates the rhythmic paddling with an increasing amplitude until it becomes a stable rhythmic behavior -- and quickly "learns" how to perform the task.
For comparison purposes, the researchers tried to manually program the robot's motors to perform the same task. It took them three months and the result wasn't as good as the imitation learning experiment, which took less than an hour, Dr. Peters says.
In the second part of the video, Muelling teaches the robot the ball-in-a-cup game. [See photo on the right; the robot has to swing the yellow ball, which is att ached to a string, and make it land into the blue cup.] This skill is significantly more difficult than paddling the ball on a string, and the robot doesn't have enough data to simply imitate what the human did. In fact, when the robot attempts to reproduce the human action, it can't match the accelerations of the human hand and the ball misses the cup by a large margin. Here, self-improvement becomes key, Dr. Peters says.
"For every new attempt, when the robot reduces the distance by which the ball misses the cup, the robot receives a 'reward,' " he says. "The robot subsequently self-improves on a trial-by-trial basis. It usually gets the ball in the cup for the first time after 40 to 45 trials and it succeeds all the time after about 90 to 95 trials."
How does the robot's learning ability compare to a human being? PhD student Jens Kober , who led this particular experiment, wanted to find out: He went home for a holiday last year and enjoyed the benefit of an extended, large family -- always good subjects for a scientific experiment. He showed his many cousins the ball-in-a-cup game and rewarded them with chocolate. It turned out that the younger ones (around 6 years old) would not learn the behavior at all, the ones in their early teens (10 to 12) would learn it within 30 to 35 trials, and the grownups would be much faster.
"His supervisor may be the only person in his lab who has not managed to learn this task," Dr. Peters quips.
In the last part of the video, the researchers tackle an ever harder task: ping pong. Again, Muelling teaches the robot by holding its "hand," this time to hit a ping pong ball sent by a ball gun. The challenge here is to use -- and modify -- previously learned basic motions and combine them with visual stimuli: The robot needs to keep track of the ball, which may come from different directions, and then execute the right set of motions.
Some of their work, part of GeRT consortium, a program that aims at generalizing robot manipulation tasks, is still preliminary, Dr. Peters notes. But he's confident they can teach their robot to become a good ping pong player. How good? Maybe not as good as Forrest Gump, but good enough to beat everyone in the lab.
LIKE IT OR NOT, OUR TIME AS A COUNTRY (United States of America) HAS RUN OUT!
This fellow is spelling out all the things which have taken place and explaining how they all fit together to destroy our FOOD SOURCE and who is behind it.
Claims that Pakistan is attempting to form an alliance with Saudi Arabia over the US after the US has invested billions in aid to Pakistan perfectly coincides with the timing of the death of bin Laden.
Press TV interviews Webster G. Tarpley, author, journalist and lecturer in Washington who describes anything to do with Osama bin Laden as unsubstantiated. He shares his assessment of how the US staged the death of bin Laden to implicate Pakistani authorities for reasons that go beyond the war on terror. Following is a transcript of his interview.
Press TV: What about the timing of this announcement that it has come at this point. How can we really be sure that he was killed then and not before? There are no remains, no pictures of his death, and we can mention the interview of Benazir Bhutto (2007) where she states that bin Laden was killed by Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh who was convicted of kidnapping and killing US journalist Daniel Pearle.
Webster Tarpley: I am an author on an exhaustive study on precisely this issue entitled '9/11 synthetic terror made in the USA'. As you have pointed out there are no pictures. When the US captured Saddam Hussein they had pictures and pictures of him dead. He (bin Laden) was shot in the face -- a mafia technique I'm told -- buried at sea quickly so no DNA evidence -- no proof, no substantiation; this is the story of bin Laden for the past ten years.
Everything attributed to him is essentially an unsubstantiated assertion by the US government -- his role in 9/11 never proven -- al-Qaeda in 9/11 never proven; asserted and repeated a million times, but never ever proven.
I think the most realistic hypothesis is that the biological individual known as bin Laden has been dead for a long time and what we've been seeing over the past ten years pretty much is a series of doubles -- a series of people maneuvered by US intelligence; we've seen a fat Bin Laden, a thin Bin Laden, Bin Laden the stout, Bin Laden the gaunt; we've seen him angry, scowling and of all types. And now he has been liquidated.
If he's been liquidated after the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to make this person an ego ideal and hero figure for the Arab and to some extent the Islamic world, why has that been done? I think it's extremely ominous. It indicates a flight forward by US imperialism and the very ominous part of this is war between the US and Pakistan.
Only last week we had the Washington Post and other papers conveniently helped along by Wikileaks -- that CIA limited hangout operation -- telling us that the centre of al-Qaeda was in Karachi, Pakistan -- that was the headline of the Washington Post a week ago. Now we have the story of bin Laden the fact that he was caught and the fact he was caught in Abbottabad, which is like a military reservation; it's like saying he was found at WestPoint or at an air force academy and the implication is that bin Laden was being shielded and protected by the Pakistani military and the Pakistani ISI (secret service). Given the way things are going that makes them a target.
The reason has nothing to do with the war on terror; it is about the fact that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have attempted to form an alliance to get off the US plantation or out of the US empire. And precisely at the time Prince Bandar had gone to Pakistan to set this up the attacks on Pakistan (by US drones) intensified.
Press TV: We have to look at the consequences of this announcement, why it was announced now and the significance of it. One such consequence is that it may increase the chance of a revenge attack. Is the US setting up the grounds for any type of military incursion or adventurism? Perhaps looking at the situation in Yemen for example -- Tell us whether this is a scenario for something to come by the US?
Webster Tarpley: I'm afraid that the door to a false flag terror operation staged by the US, British or the NATO intelligence community is now wide open. It could be something attributed to al-Qaeda, a revenge attack, but at the same time it will be explained as promoted by Pakistan or some other country that the US wishes to target. And people should realize that this is the dynamic of false flags.
What we're seeing now is why when the Spanish empire collapsed you had virtually a world war; the French empire, the British empire all of these collapses of empires led to world wars and we are now in the collapse phase of the US empire. As was discussed in Aspen Colorado last summer, we are now in a very acute danger of a world war.
Since we have Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (potentially) joining together to get out of the US empire with Russia and China backing them up, an attack on Pakistan could easily lead to a collision between the US and China and perhaps also between the US and Russia with the Russians being very displeased about what the US is doing in Libya. So this is all going on.
The other thing I should stress is that this now leaves the so-called al-Qaeda -- this gaggle of patsies and psychotics and fanatics -- the leader I'm guessing of that right now is Anwar al-awlaqi who is known in the trade as al-awlaqi the CIA lackie; in other words a fairly obvious double agent.
The irony right now is that the US is allied with al-Qaeda most obviously in Libya in the city of Darna, but also in Yemen, whereas in Afghanistan and Pakistan al-Qaeda is used as a target to be bombed.
Investigative Journalist and historian Webster Tarpley, author of Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate and 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA - Myth of the 21st Century . Tarpley discusses the CIA efforts to destabilize the Mediterranean/Arab world, as well as how we can pull out of the current depression, and why Wikileaks is a well orchestrated "striptease" by the CIA to reveal selected information. The overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as other unrest in the Middle East is part of a "post-modern coup,"-- destabilization techniques used by the US and the UK to further their agendas without direct military aggression, he argued. By breaking countries such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen into smaller squabbling states, they become easier to control, he explained.
With Tunisian refugees possibly going to Italy, "the CIA would say, 'well if we can submerge Southern Europe beneath a wave of two million refugees, good-- that makes the euro weaker, and makes the dollar more attractive-- we're saving our...imperialist system','' Tarpley continued. He further commented that the idea that there is an Arab youth movement demanding democracy is a fairy tale. WikiLeaks, he suggested, pretends to attack the US, but in reality, it's other countries that get slammed and look bad. He characterized WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as having an "MK Ultra pedigree" having grown up in Australia with the Hamilton-Byrne cult. Tarpley also talked about the breakdown of the world economic structure. To correct the system, he said huge "zombie banks" and derivatives have to wiped out, and Wall St. transactions should be subject to sales taxes.
Webster Tarpley : the most incisive critic of Anglo-American hegemony. As an activist historian he is best known for his book- George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), a masterpiece of research which is still a must read. He is a 9/11 Truth Scholar and activist; AB Princeton 1966, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa; Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin, Italy; and MA in humanities from Skidmore College. He is fluent in Italian, German, French, Latin and Russian. A decades-long expert on international terrorism, his 1978 study for the Italian parliament "Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro?"(Who Killed Aldo Moro?) broke open the ownership of the "Red Brigades" by NATO's clandestine "stay-behind" networks.
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