travel

Joining SIAI and participating in the Singularity Summit

Image by David Trowbridge This spring I joined the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). After having followed Ray Kurzweil‘s, Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s, and Ben Goertzel‘s work for some time, it is my opinion that the institute that they are directing, together with Tyler Emerson, Bruce Klein, and others, is one of the most important today,

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The ghosts of space

Remembering the heroism of our space explorers – 1 Originally uploaded by david.orban. The space museum is closed. Not just closed, but in ruin, and abandon. Russia is a leader in the commercialization of its space infrastructure, as well as everything else it has, but in the meantime it forgot to keep an eye on

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Pirates’ market

Pirates’ market Originally uploaded by david.orban. Inside this market all types of software can be found on conveniently assembled CDs or DVDs. A typical price for a CD is 100 rubles ( about 4 dollars, or 3 euro), independently of the content. You can find the latest releases of Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007,

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New apartment buildings

New apartment buildings Originally uploaded by david.orban. I am told these sell for five thousand dollars per square meter. No local with a normal job can afford them of course. Even if a lot of the local salaries come from unofficial sources. The real estate market with come back to earth, but it will be

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Signs of the past

Signs of the past Originally uploaded by david.orban. The lingering signs of the communist era express the physical difficulty of parting with the past: be it monuments that praise principles not shared anymore, crumbling public housing, now sold at astronomical prices which make Moscow one of the most expensive cities in the world to the

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