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Or, if you believe we're all about to have our personalities uploaded to the great singularity in the sky like Ray Kurzweil, you could have an instance of you uploaded to a tiny computer-starship, and live in a virtual environment for the entire journey.

For an interesting and entertaining take on this concept (and other singularity-related ideas) check out the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross.

It's a great book by a fellow Slashdot user, and you can download it free!

(Then go buy some of his other fine works)

I can envision a 3D world not unlike SecondLife...

Hopefully you're not picturing what I am.

I thought "improvise jazz" was taken off the AI wall years ago. See Kurzweil's cartoon or read about it.

I thought "improvise jazz" was taken off the AI wall years ago. See Kurzweil's cartoon or read about it.

Since there are already numerous posts invoking the applicability (or not) of Moore's Law, I thought I would start over. Although Gordon Moore certainly formulated his law based on silicon (original is here: http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/.) it can be applied clear back to 1890 with the Hollerith 'computer' that tabulated the 1890 census. When you graph it out, Moore's Law applies to electro-mechanical switches, then to relays, then to vacuum tubes, then transistors themselves (like in a six transistor radio of the 50's), then on to silicon. It's still the same exponential curve, in five separate states, only the last one of which is silicon. Kurzweil discusses this in depth here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1. People who claim Moore's Law doesn't apply because this isn't traditional silicon acreage are missing the point, which is that not only is Moore's Law more encompassing than the originally envisioned, it is not going away any time soon. The imminent death of Moore's Law, as always, has been greatly exaggerated.

Chris Anderson
has foreseen the most profound change since the age of reason. Man has
reached the point where his "understanding" can impede evolution. It is
time to concede that some processes may be beyond our
comprehension.

Research in the area of Artificial General Intelligence provides a
crystal clear demonstration of the problem. A half century of research
has led to "intelligent" data mining and voice response systems and
very little else.

However, Koza, Fogel
and many others have observed evolutionary computation machines
creating solutions to real world problems. In some cases these
are patentable solutions beyond previous human achievement, and some of
them defy understanding.

Unless you have unlimited funding and lots of time, it's not necessary
to understand why every complex solution works. It may not even be
possible.

A million MRI's of functioning brains are not likely to result in any
Lisp program for AGI, so the search for AGI seems to be coming full
circle back to the "baby bootstrap". Even Ben Goertzel
is looking to virtual babies to mine the clouds.

Like others who have managed to see beyond the horizon, Anderson will
be widely misunderstood. He is not rejecting scientific method, he is
simply showing us its limitations.

Here's an article on machine ethics.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0218.html?printable=1

Yes, the advancement of the Intergalactic Computer Network as described in 1963 by J.C.R. Licklider.

Displays in our eyeglasses sounds pretty tame compared to Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil.
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0518.html?printable=1
"Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality."

Hans Moravec was talking about "magic glasses" in the 1980s,
  http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/reviews/erin.htm
and you can buy variants of them today
    http://www.i-glassesstore.com/
(not quite heads-up, but it is not much of a stretch I've seen prototypes for those, likely even on Slashdot).

If magic glasses was "sci fi" I can imagine why Peter Norton left in disgust. Many people have a real difficulty understanding the nature of exponential growth in technological capacity. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
Or:
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

Displays in our eyeglasses sounds pretty tame compared to Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil.
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0518.html?printable=1
"Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality."

Hans Moravec was talking about "magic glasses" in the 1980s,
  http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/reviews/erin.htm
and you can buy variants of them today
    http://www.i-glassesstore.com/
(not quite heads-up, but it is not much of a stretch I've seen prototypes for those, likely even on Slashdot).

If magic glasses was "sci fi" I can imagine why Peter Norton left in disgust. Many people have a real difficulty understanding the nature of exponential growth in technological capacity. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
Or:
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves.


Some people have made a belief system(?) around that very notion.

Hint: If he's right (and so far it appears he is), it's going to get a whole lot better (worse?).

As a civilisation we are facing Peak Everything [amazon.com] a century of resource decline in the face of population expansion. It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly.

2045, bay-bee, 2045.

--Rob

The hopeful social outcome of all this increase in productivity was talked about as far back as 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
in a letter sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964 called "The Triple Revolution".

Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.

By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm )
See also:

Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.

I kinda agree and kinda disagree.

Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.

However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.

Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg

ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.

CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).

10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.

Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in .NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.

I kinda agree and kinda disagree.

Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.

However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.

Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg

ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.

CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).

10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.

Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in .NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per
price per decade. By the time any toddler of today is finishing
graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade)
multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about
a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are
about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at
constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!)
According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS
processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think
correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking
advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal
improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such).
(somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation).
Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by
cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit,
but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for
continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there,
producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages
per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often
now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple,
since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a
million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster,
though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million
processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and
processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet
in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say,

I would love to see the sales figures for both formats plotted on an exponential graph. Does anyone know where I could find this information in this form? Maybe it could provide additional insight. (a la Ray Kurzweil) http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1

Surely you have all read this?

Moore's Law is just the beginning... we have accelerating returns because we shift paradigms when an individual technology falls flat in growth. This is an example of just one possible future paradigm that may continue or even accelerate our exponential growth.

What will we do with all this computer power?

Eventually someone will implement an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) system (either by evolving or otherwise brute-force production, human brain simulation/reverse-engineering/uploading, or by actually understanding intelligence and developing a novel theoretical architecture). This piece of intelligent software will be capable of doing the high-level, common sensical, intelligent thinking and work that a human can do, and the computational resources that are cognitively available to this intelligence will grow extremely fast with its revenue and the continued acceleration of hardware development (not to mention its massively accelerating software architecture and data stores and optimizations thereof)- e.g. it will be able to do more and more work, more intelligently, and more quickly, as time goes on. If the efforts of the intelligence are focused on researching and developing more powerful hardware and software, it can self-improve in ways completely unimaginable by human intelligences, sending the growth of technology into a feedback loop with the growth of intelligence.

When this AGI exceeds the intelligence of any human (who run about 10^16 neural ops/sec, have mortal and error prone bodies, zero growth in computational resources, no access to source code or underlying machinery, no end-user-modifiable software-code (if it were accessed), etc etc), which may happen very quickly, it's called the Singularity.

Physics may or may not have some upper limit on the ability of a given computational process to control the Universe to its *desired* ends, but this is a quick way to find out.

We need to be sure we have a *Friendly* AI (check out Singularity Insitute)

An exponential increase on 0 is still 0.

Here is some background reading for you.

And yes it is severely misused by people like Ray Kurzweil KurzweilAI.net who extend it and use it to predict that by 2020 (that's only 13 years from now!) computers will be thinking for us. I'd be happy if computers run Vista smoothly by then instead.

Personally, I think Ray Kurzweil's view of technology is more to the point for most slashdotters.

"Moore's Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential Growth of Computing"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0134.html?

Sure, with the growth of computer tech and early dna sequencing nanotech, we are getting to the point where it will cost a couple of hundred bucks and take a day or so to sequence youor own geneome and find ou all the nasty things hiding there. But wait!!, the same advances will give us the ability to develop nanobots that can get inside our cells and manipulate the dna/rna and protien structures, essentially giving us the eventual ability to fix anything wrong in the cell, clean up the "gunk" that aging generates, replace old worn out dna, mitochondria etc, basiclly reverse and eliminate aging. (check out www.mprize.org www.sens.org www.longevitymeme.org http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 http://www.imminst.org/ also: MIT biobricks http://parts.mit.edu/registry/index.php/Main_Page

What we need is the ability to stop waging usless wars and reduce the worldwide spending of 1000 billion on war materials and take 100 million to 1 billion dollars and put it into the mprize to reverse aging in mice models and then human models (we need to finance what scientists are calling for is an mahatten sized project to cure aging and eliminate cancers, diseases by getting down to the dna level and letting loose the engineers to revers engineer the human animal and fix this thing called aging. We are now getting the tools to manipulate matter at the atomic lelvel (cpu chips are a good example), we now need to open up the dna universe to hacking (see also: MIT biobricks, its like making CAD logic designs (ttl/cmos) functions at atomic dna levels!)

You can download it here.

Pardon me while I direct your attention to what is really going on. I couldn't help bombing in and pointing out that the reality is that the super rich have decided that the rest of the human race is to be disposed of and they are working on the project. Please don't shoot the reporter. I just reported the truth. -- I know that is politically incorrect but truth has to be faced someday.

Unless we quit our arguments over the ideology and see what is really going on, we might well just be overtaken by reality.

There will be a lot of things in the future that we will use nanotech for. The future looks pretty damn cool with nanotech everywhere.

http://media.kurzweilai.net/kain/pub/RayKurzweilRe ader.pdf

Some of the coolest and interesting things to read come from Ray Kurzweil.

• The response of the system is faster than that of the controller. In this case, the mobility of money and information into and out of the tech investment market is faster than the overall response of the economy (and maybe the regulators). This allows the tech market subsystem to oscillate. If true, this bubble will be followed by another drop (if not a bust), and another bubble, etc.
  
• Tech is expanding the real economy, so it acts to some extent as an amplifier. In general, the overall economy absorbs energy from a tech bubble, acting as negative feedback and time shifting the growth, moderating the curve. In this case, perhaps the amplifier gain is large, making the net feedback positive. If so then this bubble will be bigger than the last, and the next one bigger yet. Otherwise, this one will be the same or smaller than the last, and the ripples will die out.
  

• The response of the system is faster than that of the controller. In this case, the mobility of money and information into and out of the tech investment market is faster than the overall response of the economy (and maybe the regulators). This allows the tech market subsystem to oscillate. If true, this bubble will be followed by another drop (if not a bust), and another bubble, etc.
  
• Tech is expanding the real economy, so it acts to some extent as an amplifier. In general, the overall economy absorbs energy from a tech bubble, acting as negative feedback and time shifting the growth, moderating the curve. In this case, perhaps the amplifier gain is large, making the net feedback positive. If so then this bubble will be bigger than the last, and the next one bigger yet. Otherwise, this one will be the same or smaller than the last, and the ripples will die out.
  

These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.

No. Diff is used for comparing different versions of at text-file. If you want to reconstruct a file from overlapping individual pieces, you need a different tool.

DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.

Well, it might be, and it might not be. Before the digital computers, people speculated that the function of the brain might be emulated by a giant switchboard (or gears and pulleys) (linky). While a switchboard is somewhat like a digital computer, it is not the same thing. And while a computer is somewhat like a brain, they may not be the same. Similarly, DNA has some aspects that look like programming (which we are used to), but it isn't therefore necessarily the same. It's just that it's a human tendency to look for similarities in operation, when we do not understand it.

I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.

This isn't exactly a very surprising prediction. According to modern evolutionary classification, birds are dinosaurs. Just like apes are mammals. I fail to see why you would expect "inactive dino-DNA" in birds. Why must it be inactive? After all, birds are dinosaurs. It would be like expecting to find "inactive mammal-DNA" in apes. We don't, apes are mammals!

Furthermore, in evolutionary theory, we don't speak about "cousins". Either one species is a descendant from some other species, or it is not. For convenience, we group animals that are descendants from the same species, together in groups; such as mammals, insects, etc... We do not call them siblings (you are a sibling of tuna-fish), since it conveys little meaning. In that case, it would be better to say explicitly which animal you both descend from, or lacking that information, to postulize that it exists, and come up with a name for the group (e.g. Chordata, although there are probably closer groups). In view of this, calling evolutionary groups "cousins" conveys no meaning at all.

This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.

No, it is not analogous. Stitching DNA together is analogous to solving a jigsaw puzzle (as you yourself suggested). Getting monkeys to write Shakespeare is analogous to throwing a dice and coming up with the right answer. The two ideas are clearly distinct.

Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.

No. Every cell is a copy of exactly one cell (with the exception of the fusion of an egg and sperm cell). That is why it is called cell division

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

Kurzweil has had a similar chatbot available for years - emotional response and all!
http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html

Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.

The closest real-world parallel to Hari Seldon's "Future History" would be Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a generalized "Moore's Law"), which makes the point that all evolutionary processes building on past progress accelerate exponentially, and it's only towards the knee-end of the curve -- like now -- that you notice the most change.

Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds. Take for example just one implication of advanced nanotech: The Molecular Manufacturing "replicator" in every home -- at the same time such a device creates vast "wealth without money" for the poorest of people, it also removes concentrated power from the former elite, which in of itself isn't a bad thing except that we're... only human, so the primitive-reaction could be bad.

It's my opinion that it's actually in our best interest to make sure that we either merge with AI, or that benevolent AI "take over" before our selfish monkey-brain fucks everything up with the increasingly powerful tech at our disposal.

Since when have futurists have gotten anything right? If we believe them we would all be enjoying our flying cars, that can interact with us using voice control.

Your mention of Stevie Wonder brings up what I think is an interesting little factoid: he's the link that got Kurzweil into music synthesis. He was an early user of Kurzweil's reading machines, and at some point complained to Kurzweil about the state of music synthesis technology, which inspired the whole Kurzweil line of music synthesizers.

More details here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/bio0005.html?printa ble=1

The reasoning behind this is straightforward. If you accept the idea of a technological singularity, and believe that our technology has brought us to the point where we are on the threshold of such an event, and that this is the natural evolution of a technological civilization, then in the blink of an eye, in astronomical terms, our footprint will be everywhere in this galaxy. (That's assuming of course that we can keep from destroying ourselves for a few more decades.) The same would be true for any other technological civilization.

It's the same idea that Enrico Fermi had in mind when he asked: if there are other intelligences in the universe then "where are they?" You wouldn't have to look for them. They'd already be here. Conclusion: don't bother listening. We've met the spacemen, and they is us.

Sorry, but I simply don't believe we're 5 to 10 years away from robotics being a "multibillion dollar industry".

Then you'd be wrong -- just as wrong as the naysayers were in 1995 when they proclaimed "this Internet thing is just a fad", because they hadn't internalized how exponential progress works in ALL evolutionary systems, and then projected forward based on the doubling rate of nodes being added to the net. And yes, past performance IS very indicative of future performance when it comes to evolutionary progress (not markets); tons of evidence backs this up.

Robotics, AI, molecular manufacturing (nanotech), and performance per $, is accelerating, and these advances will continue to arrive much sooner than you think. If you simply project into the future by going on your "gut feelings" then you're stuck in a insanely-conservative intuitively linear view (that luddites also happen to more comfortable with).

No, not Moore's Law - it's specific to transistor count.

If you want to a more generalized law of exponential progress (for future reference), I'd suggest you aquaint yourself with Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

Current "nanotech" is mostly just fancy materials science and top-down bulk-tech chemistry (with the nano buzzword thrown in to make getting funding easier). Bottom-up active nanotech & molecular manufacturing will make space elevators, and ever more "impossible" inventions, possible.

"Office computers won't survive, and they require too much power, and the power must be stable and good."

And laptop power supplies are less fragile? What color is the sky in your world?

Put it this way: a neighbor of mine started the East West Education Development Foundation. Know what they started giving out? Desktops. Desktops too fragile? He had incredible success distributing computers to people who had none and couldn't afford them.

This is the guy I grew up next door to:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/frame.html?main=/bi os/bio0252.html

--
BMO

The problem with this idea is that most people still haven't really internalized the implications of accelerating change, and are stuck in the old intuitive linear view that a year is a year is a year.

Close - it's like people who are so enthusiastic about the prospects of space travel, that they believe quantum warp megadrives may well be invented within a few months! And society isn't quite ready for that (perhaps in a couple of years?) - so we'd better call for a moratorium!

In another post you called them Luddites, I think they're just about the total opposite of that. These are the names you always see in the forefront of strong AI and nanotech speculation, the fringe that would be the lunatic fringe if they weren't so ridiculously intelligent. Does KurzweilAI.net look like a Luddite site to you?

relatively small ( 10Tbytes) file systems

Actually, 20 years isn't that far into the future when you factor in how far along the exponential progress curve we are. hint: your problem is an intuitively linear view of the future.

Kurzweil gives a pretty good argument against Searle's Chinese room in "Are We Spiritual Machines", with the chapter with this refutation available here.

This is just further proof that we are living in the Matrix. With each and every absurd observation, man is getting closer to the truth that we are the cat in the box.

Ray Kurzweil kind of suggested the same problem in his "Singularity is Near" book as an offtopic musing part of his book. He pointed out about the oddness of the fact that the universe conforms to rules similar to a computer simulation and given the Anthropomorphic Principal that the universe has to be conducive to (human) life in order for us to observe it, the changes are that we could indeed be in a simulation already.

However, to what end would another universe need to simulate ours? He proposes that maybe it is to solve a problem they could not solve in their own. I personally thinkg is that this could be reversing the second law of thermodynamics or preventing the end of their own universe or FTL.

Since you are limited to solving a problem in your own universe with limited matter and time, you could create an infinite (or almost infinite) amounts of mini-universe not tied to your own in a simulation and the root out the universes that do not give good results and mearly wait til one of the universes fails to not exist.

Then they will go about examining why that universe was able to overcome 2nd law of thermo-dynamics, heat death, or the big crunch... Which will most likley also have found out FTL.

This is just speculation because we may never know... Ray just joked that maybe life is really about some hacker in another universe trying to figure out Pi to the n'th number.

Hence the multiverse issue...

On a lighter note, the Star-Trek allusion at the end of the post makes me agree with the first poster. As our computers get faster and faster, we'll probably end up interfacing with them in more intimate ways - I don't mean to say that we'll all become like the Borg or anything, but even improvements like voice control (subvocalization? Or is that just a bad SF tech...?) or touchscreens, or heck, almost ANYTHING else. The Mouse + Keyboard can hardly be the most efficient way to interact with our computer, methinks.

The problem is that the current keyboard + mouse combination is pretty efficient as it is. See, in order to interact more with the computer, you have to be willing/able to impart more information to the computer. That information has to come from somewhere! Current estimates (A LA Ray Kurzweil, the total information bandwidth from brain to body is about a 1 Mb stream.

The human mind is certainly capable of lots of information in the form of memories and imagination, but precise, abstract thought is expensive. And that's the exact kind of thought that keyboard+mouse+monitor interfaces excel at carrying. The keyboard/mouse will last until neural interfaces are developed. And, when they scan my brain into the computer so that I become a sim, I only hope it's a *nix derivative system I get scanned into!

Would you want to be employed by a firm whose products were projected to be worthless by year's end?

Doesn't matter. We're approaching the singularity, and the closer we get the shorter the "idea/implementation/successor" cycle gets. So right now, companies can expect to profit from an idea for a year. A couple years from now, that cycle will only be 6 months, possibly less.

Ray Kurzweil has a graph (not on this page, but similar graphs appear and I'm too lazy to find what I saw a year ago), showing that while advances trend up and to the right, each individual advance is a bell curve and the bell gets shorter (and taller!) the closer we get to the singularity.

How would I behave with my money? As I have been for the last 10 years, irresponsibly: money won't matter beyond the singularity.

As to investing, I just do what VectorVest tells me to do for just one of their indicators, and made over 300% last year.

There will be tremendous societal upheaval in the next 20 or 30 years, as we approach, meet, and move past the singularity. Knowing how businesses will behave on our way there will help you cope, not hurt you. Whether you agree with this or not, you had better prepare for it.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0235.html?

After reading it, you'll clearly see that there is a fine line between genius and madness. And I can't say which side of the line he's on.