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This two-hour edition of Disinformation: The Podcast is the final episode of the series. Join Raymond Wiley, Joe McFall, Austin Gandy, and Joe Nolan for one last journey into the bizarre undercurrents of the human psyche. Raymond talks about the recent release of his first book, The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument. Austin Gandy’s Invisible College returns with a new take on the infamous Knights Templar, and the Oslo shootings they are said to have inspired. Joe Nolan’s Insomnia delves into the undying myths of Carlos Castaneda, and the New Age subculture they have inspired. Finally, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall present a retrospective discussion of their podcast careers, along with impressions of the occult mysteries, conspiracy theories, and obscure realms of belief featured in their seminal broadcasts. After 7 years, 80 podcasts, and more than a million downloads, these two friends say thank you and goodbye to the audience … For now.

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In this episode we speak with Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall about Jesus, Rocks, and Bigfoot.  Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall are the former co-hosts of Out There Radio, a 50-episode podcast of interviews and discussions covering topics related to the occult, conspiracy theory and the paranormal.

Raymond and Joe have been in podcasting since 2005, having started Out There Radio shortly after they met and realized their shared interest in fringe topics.  The are currently the hosts of Disinformation: The Podcast and Disinformation World News.

Almost 'throwing some horns', which would be handy at metal shows

This week, Italian scientists announced that in a month-long experiment conducted last year, an amputee’s nervous system was attached to a mechanical hand disconnected from his body. The man, Pierpaolo Petruzziello, was not only able to move the robotic appendage, but was apparently able to receive feedback and feel sensations from the hand. From the Baltimore Sun:

This story is not unlike last year’s story of mechanical-arm-moving monkeys, in which electrodes were wired directly into the brains of monkeys, allowing them to learn how to move remote robotic arms to reach and grab for tasty treats. The main difference, here, of course, is the proof-of-concept that we can do the same thing with the human nervous system. This reminds me of my favorite Marshall McLuhan quotes (from Understanding Media, 1964):

• The human subject need not be an amputee in order to be a cyborg. Any person can be jacked into a robotic appendage and be trained to move it around at will.
• The appendage need not be a robotic hand, or even analogous to an existing biological appendage. There no reason, theoretically, that a human can’t be jacked into a robotic car, or a robotic plane or a robotic space cruiser, and learn to control it. Forget the dangers of embodied artificially intelligent brains, we are now able to embody human consciousness into any arbitrary robotic form with appropriate sensory feedback.
• All of this can be done at a distance. A robot can be embodied with human consciousness remotely across any arbitrary distance.

Joe McFall received his undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Emory University in 1998, and went on to receive two Masters degrees, in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Georgia in 2005 and 2007. He holds a lifetime interest in culture and counterculture, fringe science, paranormal, alternate history and conspiracy theory. He works as a software developer and lives in Atlanta, GA. He is also, alongside our buddies Raymond Wiley and Austin Gandy, one of the hosts of Disinformation the Podcast, Disinformation World News, and OutThere Radio.

This week, IBM scientists and their university partners announced a breakthrough in cognitive computing research: the simulation of a brain the size of a cat’s. Using 144 terabytes of RAM and almost 150,000 processors, scientists were able to model a neural cortex with 1 billion simulated neurons and 10 billion synaptic connections. The researchers have subsequently been awarded $16.1 million for completion of phase 0 of DARPA’s SYNAPSE project. The goal of SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), according to DARPA, is “to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” In layman’s terms, their goal is to put simulated brains onto microchips.

Sleep easy tonight dogs, for tomorrow...

While a disembodied brain on a microchip is itself interesting as an object of study, the real question is: what happens when this brain is embodied? The unstated intention of the SYNAPSE project is the embodiment of simulated mammalian brains into robots. Before we lose ourselves to rapturous visions of snuggly pet purrbots, we should consider the possible range of behaviors of not only the feline brain, but of mammalian-size brains in general. Cats are predators, as well, after all. The brain controls an animal’s body and behavior, and much of its function would be superfluous to a robotic replica (presumably, for example, these robots would not able to mate and multiply). If individual behaviors can be added and removed willy-nilly, then any given mammalian behavior could be isolated and reproduced onto a microchip. Feline predation is just one possibility, and a scary one at that. Imagine hordes of 14ft-tall steel tigers rampaging through your suburban neighborhood, programmed with insatiable hunger and an instinctual urge to maul and devour bipeds (did I mention that robots can be carnivorous?).

The presentation of this cortical simulation as the equivalent of a feline brain lends an aspect of cutesyness to the project, but this cutesyness, of course, is just a facade. It allows us to envision it as something benign. Right now, there’s no harm in a disembodied brain with no behaviors sitting on a hard drive in Livermore, CA, being trained to distinguish images of corporate logos to the awe of of fawning scientists. But what happens when they let the cat out of the bag (sorry)? Such a virtual brain could be trained with any given set of potentially distasteful behaviors and embodied in a machine of practically limitless size and strength. This is a DARPA project, after all, and as much as we might want snuggly purrbots, we should be aware that what we might get is marauding swarms of giant predatory killbots.

Joe McFall

Joe McFall received his undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Emory University in 1998, and went on to receive two Masters degrees, in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Georgia in 2005 and 2007. He holds a lifetime interest in culture and counterculture, fringe science, paranormal, alternate history and conspiracy theory. He works as a software developer and lives in Atlanta, GA. He is also, alongside our buddies Raymond Wiley and Austin Gandy, one of the hosts of Disinformation: The Podcast, Disinformation World News, and Out There Radio.