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with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we'll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy. So, if you can hang in there for another 10 years, (don't spend all of your time in the French Quarter!), this will be the increase in human life expectancy. We'll get ahead of the power curve and be adding more than a year every year, within a decade.

The accompanying graph is staggering but only shows five points of data. Its top point shows a life expectancy of 77 years in 1999 or so, which of course is not human life expectancy. Human life expectancy is about 65, ranging from about 43 in poor countries to 79 in the richest country. Kurzweil's statement only applies to the wealthy; in much of Africa, life expectancy fell dramatically during the 1990s.

And since he's clearly talking about life extension, the reader should be aware that there is no exponential curve at the top of the lifespan. His numbers gained mostly from improvements in child nutrition and antibiotics, and there aren't any continued improvements to be made in those (quite the opposite, actually). If we look at the average continued life expectancy for Americans aged 75, between 1980 and 1985 they gained 0.2 years; 1985-1990, 0.3 years; 1990-1995, 0.1 years; 1995-2000, 0.4 years; 1997-2002, 0.3 years. This is good. But it's not exponential lengthening of lifespan.

Oh, and the "decade" within which he promised we'd be ahead of the curve is now half over. The above quote is from 2000.

The main logical error Kurzweil makes is simply that he thinks computers will get smarter because they get faster. Readers who believe the one has anything to do with the other need to go back to Dreyfus' 1972 classic What Computers Can't Do. From there, start reading over the painful history of what is now called "strong A.I.", and what used to be just called "A.I.", to see how necessarily limited our efforts have become. Kurzweil elides over this distinction in the worst way. He starts by saying that computers are now as smart as an insect -- which is unrefutable because nobody can quantify what that means -- and proceeds to predicting that they will be as smart as people once they get n times faster. No, I'm sorry, all that means is that they will be as smart as n insects. Whatever the hell that means.

Mostly I wouldn't care. Fantasy is fun. Except that Pollyannaish predictions of paradise-yet-to-come persuade people that the problems we create for ourselves are irrelevant. If you think the Rapture or the Singularity is going to make all currently conceivable problems laughable, little things like massive extinction and global warming turn into somebody else's problem. They're not -- and our grandchildren, with their very fast and non-sentient computers, and their non-300-year lifespans, are going to be kind of ticked that you and I spoiled the planet.

He's got a very interesting website.

Try talking to the chatbot, and clicking on the link to "The Brain."

Right, most careful thinkers have had a more realistic estimate for smarter-than-human AI of between 2030 and 2050. Kurzweil, Moravec, Yudkowsky, et al haven't been your average AI pump'n'dumpers.

Extrapolating from our continuous, evolutionary exponential progress, we won't even have the raw artificial-neuron power to match the human meat-brain until ~2030, let alone the "software" (to be partly modeled after mapping our own brains in ever finer detail).

try www.mprize.org (The Methuselah Mouse Prize web site, which supports research into finding the causes and reversing of aging by offering prizes to researchers (you can contribute to the prizes too).
Theres also:
www.betterhumans.com a news site into longevity research and longevitymeme.org and http://www.kurzweilai.net/ (Ray Kurzweil's site devoted to longevity research).
The thing is, once people realize that we are able to tweak the biology right now to get it to manifest interesting effects, there is the possibility that massive funding (a manhattan styled project, could find and fix the causes of aging).
Since the slashdot crowd also undestands and is interested in complicated machines, this should be of some interest, remember that the cell is a form of evolved biological processing machine and that in the future, by developing the appropriate nano tools, we will be able to go into each of our cells, and repair/modify any part of the cellular machinery we want too(in the next decades), we will be able to slow/stop and reverse the aging process. Most of what is happening today in biotech would not have been possible without the development of computer technology in the last 50 years (and the vast ammount of people who can work with this tech) and now that we are getting to be able to manipulate atoms and molecular systems and have a better understanding of the human geneome, the growth of this field looks pretty cool for the future. The interesting thing is people have been looking for a fountain of youth for most of history and have been willing to spend vast ammounts of money on cosmetic creams/hair dyes/hair rugs etc, to look younger (things that have never worked), but it makes a lot more sense to do it the right way and go to the bilogical source insided of our cells and fix the aging process by whatever means (fixing, replacement of cell parts or re-engineering each of our cells by networked nanotech repair bots that float around our bodies).

I thought as much (despite the fact that the other is the more standard interpretation). In that case I suspect you're probably right. There are probably fewer than 10^100 bits available in the universe [http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0530.html%5 D, so we'd *better* be able to do with less than your number.

This is a very sad day indeed.

Bob's musical instruments not only helped create the electronic music genre but also subtly changed many other musical genres.

With the introduction of ever more powerful instruments you'd be hard pressed to turn on the radio and not hear a synthesizer of one form or another in the mix.

There's an interview with Bob here which is also mirrored here

Personal data storage into the terabyte, a vast global communications network, and the article is about the music industry's inability to deal with digital file sharing (?) I expected to look at the bottom and see it dated 1998. Seriously, in the '05, shouldn't a supercomputer guy be thinking about biological modeling (or something).

IMHO, Ray Kurzweil, master book/snake oil salesman that he is, is at least addressing some of the changes implied by the (what are we calling it now?) Information Explosion. If a GPS screen in your car and .16 c a song is what's happening then 'the man can't stop our music', but still ...

We need some futurists that aren't being outrun by the present. Links, anyone?

If technological progress starts to slow, it means we're going to advance through other means. Just as culture was a replacement of evolutionary progress as a means of inter-group competitiveness, and technology advancement became a replacement of cultural competition.

At least according to Kurzweil's law. (Which isn't really a cast in stone law, but more a theory that all progress follows an s-curve, and that when the curve of a mode of progress nears an end, it gets replaced by another mode. Just like when transistors started taking off when vacuum tubes started becoming a hard to improve technology.)

What is interesting is that the time it took to pass from condensed order into uncondensed and expanding chaos from which matter could form, on through today, has happenned along a seemingly reverse exponential curve. One could argue that we are at or slightly beyond the knee of this curve. This is the essense of the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the second law of increasing entropy in a closed system. Unless of course there is something feeding the universe from the outside of it, in which case all bets are off. We have no evidence of this case, though.

Assuming the universe is a closed system, and from order will ultimately come chaos - where does that leave us? Well - what about evolution and intelligence, particularly sentient consciousness? If we look at the system as a whole, we see the universe going from an "ordered" singularity to a chaos of atoms and such, while at the same time, at least in our neck of the woods, we see from this chaos arise life and intelligence. From the general chaos, local order and intelligence arises. This isn't in violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Life and intelligence seems to have arisen from the chaos of the general universe. We know of at least one case. Furthermore, given the immenseness of the universe, there is ample reason to believe that there are other intelligences "out there" as well.

What is further interesting is to look at the advancement of life on the one case we do have that we can look at, here on Earth. Particularly the development of intelligence and technology. Technology can be defined as "improvement of tools in a culture which utilizes tools, along with a record of those advancements". Some insects, birds, and other lesser primates utilise and build tools, but they do not have technology, because they do not keep a history or knowledge of what tools worked best in the past, and how to improve upon them. Only humans have done this (particularly homo sapiens neanderthalensis and homo sapiens sapiens - of which only the latter survived to become us - some have postulated that this may have occurred because of "violent conflicts" between the two groups, with our line winning the conflicts). In a very, very short span of time (compared to the age of the universe), our technology and intelligence has pushed us from hiding in caves to exploring other planets and beyond. Furthermore, our intelligence has enabled us to create machines which in theory, someday soon, could rival our intelligence, and beyond.

Indeed, if you follow the progression of intelligence, technology, and communications among humans (pick a point, say the approximate date of the development of the abacus, and move forward from there with other devices and technology to measure, calculate, and communicate - everything our brains can do) - you will find that if you graph "computing capacity/capability" against "date/time of advance" - that this curve follows on its own, an exponential curve. According to this curve, we are at (or once again, just beyond) the knee of this curve.

These two curves, that of the universe becoming more chaotic, and intelligence becoming more, well, "intelligent" (due to mainly convergence and synergy between technological advances, particularly those which utilize computational technology - a feedback loop of sorts) - have been coined "The Law of Time and Chaos" and "The Law of Accelerating Returns" by RayKurzweil, principally in his work The Age of Spiritual Machines. Interestingly, as the universe moves from order to chaos, life and intelligence seems to arise from this chaos, and from there, intelligence, and

So, no, IMNSHO, I think we're much more likely to end up ripping the planets apart (oh the humanity! how unromantic!) to make better use of the matter, than wasting space & energy by living on the limited surface area of a gravity well.

It's just you.

Technological advancement has been increasing at an exponential rate from the beginning; it's just that most of it is occurring at the micro- and nano-scale where you take it for granted. biotech, cloning, the Internet, Google, nano-materials, 133MHz (in 1995) to 3+ GHz today, etc.

Most large-scale tech is also progressing, but you don't notice it at the human-scale, and you won't, until we can build amazing things using bottom-up nanotech instead of top-down bulk-tech.

Consider a better, safer, cheaper and much faster way to get from NYC to Tokoyo with near-future tech: A maglev train via an underground tunnel, in vacuum for frictionless acceleration to ludicrious-speed at the midway point before decel. Currently, tunnel excavation is labor intensive and very EXPENSIVE; precise control over matter and robotic automation will change that.

Even geeks such as Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil have been decrying the scary nature of nanotechnology, especially where it dovetails with artificial intellenge and genetic engineering, for over five years. But the interesting part here is, how many geeks are going to be the ones to buy these pants? I mean, we're the ones who bought a prius, not just because it was envionmentally friendly, but because it was a gadget and a Good Idea. For those of us who live at (or at least are not afraid of) the command line, a pair of khakis that sheds coffee stains sounds like a dream come true.

I thought an infinite universe where we are alone is extreamly improbably as well; until I read this http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1

If life existed elsewhere in the universe (more advanced then us), it would likely be millions of years ahead of us. Imagine what we will be like in a million years at the current rate of progress, then take into account that the current rate of progress is growing at an exponential rate. If we survive for the next few thousand years we will colonize the galaxy and spread out into the universe at the speed of light (or faster?).

So either we are the most advanced species in our galaxy or they are delibirately hiding from us (or their civilization is outside our light-cone, eg. they are in a galaxy far, far away and the light from their early radio civilization hasn't even reached us yet). Either way it's not looking too good for finding ET any time soon.

Not sure they all qualify as blogs, but here are some great sources for news related to interests such as tranhumanist discussions...

Accelerating Times and their blog.
KurzweilAI (one of my favorites).
SL4
Yahoo Transhuman Group

Just to list a few...

• World Transhumanism Association
• Singularity Institute
• KurzweilAI.net
• Extropy Institute
• Transtopia
• Better Humans

• Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
• Transhumanism at del.icio.us

See, that's not entirely accurate. As Raymond Kurzweil has pointed out, technology advances at a very predictable rate. His paper "The Law of Accelerating Returns" does a good job documenting evidence of this fact spanning the entire last -century-.

The consistent exponential trend observed, when extrapolated, is what the claims of these futurologists stem from. They're not picking a wild fantasy and claiming they know when it will come to pass. They're making reasonable predictions based on consistent observed trends.

Also addressed in this paper, coincidentally, is the idea of uploading human consciousness, along with other common themes of futurism.

Its as if they were writing about "the future of Open Source" by quoting Stallmam, one recently-famous open source developer, and the Halloween documents. And entirely failed to interview or even mention the existance of Torvalds, Wall, Allman, Eric Raymond, or O'Reilly (website, books and conferences).

um, last i checked we DID learn to fly and breath underwater. i'll arguably thank da vinci, bernoulli, and the wright brothers for the former (aeroplane); i'll thank robert boyle (and edme mariotte) and joques cousteau for the latter (scuba).

what you probably really want to argue about are *externalities* and that we have only begun to purposefully *internalize* our technology through molecular biology (genetic engineering & nanotech).

1999 is calling you, it's ray kurzweil and he says he already wrote a book about this AND started a geek cult following. http://www.kurzweilai.net/

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?

By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.

I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall

A better system would be to provide a living wage (as opposed to the welfare dirty word) to those people whose jobs are increasingly replaced by automation and cheap labor. If you're one of the lucky few who still does USEFUL work in exchange for something, then you get extra incentive gravy for your WANTS, while those not so lucky/smart/quickly-adaptable get enough redistributed gravy to meet their NEEDS. Nobody should have to live in mortal fear of losing their job (unless you're one of those asshole sadists who believes that keeping the serfs suffering is a great motivator and makes it easier to keep control (and if so, fuck you)).

Robotics, IA/AI, nanotechnology, and other exponentially advancing technology will inevitably lead to this kind of world. "It's different this time". We can either choose a humane leisure society fed by intelligent automated production & fair redistribution, or we can choose to continue the greedy ratrace to the bottom as the wealth gap widens.

(I'm sure a lot of people who worship at the alter of dog-eat-dog hyper-capitalism and "globalism" will just write me off as some kind of idealistic-socialist-commie-hippie or whatever. Oh, and I am one of the "lucky" ones, but I've also got a conscience.)

Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.

Absolutely. Because under capitalism (at least the ideal form), the way to MAKE MORE MONEY is to produce goods and services that your customers want. Thus, your profits are a direct result of satisfying the desires of others. It's a good deal all around. Of course, some jackasses like the guy filing this suit would rather make profits by using government force to eliminate his competition, which helps nobody but him and harms everyone else.

At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state

I fail to see why. The only question is whether the economy will continue to grow at a similar rate as in the past, or if it will grow exponentially faster. See the Law of Acclerating Returns for more on the second possibility. Yes, space travel is expensive today; air travel was expensive 75 years ago. And computer hardware is approaching the computational power of the human brain today; once we get the software part down, look out.

"There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time."

Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.

Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.

One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.

Who's to say that neurons operate in the same way as a computer's multiple-add operations?

Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.

Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.

One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.

Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Hans Moravec, and many other credible thinkers put their conservative extrapolation to Singularity much earlier: About 2030.

our comparatively recent development of language, civilization, writing, and forrays into science, transportation, communications technologies ... along with the Drake equation and Kurzweil's Law, (aka "the law of accelerating returns")

it would seem most likely that we'd be holding down the extremely dim, low end of any communication with aliens within our foreseeable future

and any visibility & interaction with us likely would be moderated & non-disruptive so as to not invalidate observations under the Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall theory of LGM ;-) / :-(

Sure we can, if you've got a mind that's not easily shocked:

You see, advancing technology is an evolutionary process, and, as with any evolutionary progress, it proceeds exponentially.

So read up about the Law of Accelerating Returns & Singularity. Grandma ain't seen nothing yet (assuming she lives long enough to reach the crossover point).

Advancements like these

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Fundación Tecnohumano

World Transhumanist Association

KurzweilAI.net

www.BetterHumans.com

BG

Moore's law is pretty much an exception to normal law.

My sig is simply in reponse to Fermi's quote - "where are they?" - about ETs being MIA in the face of the numbers. It's just my opinion that every intelligent civilization evolves exponentially to the point of self-destruction, or singularity (at which point pre-singularity civilizations are as interesting as slime mold, and ignored, but still respected in a prime-directive kind of way).

Getting people to re-evaluate their core beliefs about such "sci-fi" ideas is HARD, but give Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns a read if you want to understand how incredibly fast progress is going to accelerate in the next few decades leading up to our potential[1] Singularity.

Immortality -- even if only biological -- is just ONE of the implications of exponentially evolving technology, but most people will just balk at even this possibility because they can't accept even that tiny bit of future shock.

[1] The odds are that the growing incompatibility between our primitive brains and advancing tech will kill us first.

Yes, it would be more accurate to refer to it as The Law of Accelerating Returns, as it's more general, but unfortunately most people are only aware of the popularized Moore's Law as it applies to transistor count, so it'll continue to get used in its stead. It makes the same point (unless you're a pedant).

But of course you're right - moore's law hasn't slowed one bit. As one computing "paradigm" begins to lose steam (and people start crowing about the supposed end of moores law yet again), another method picks up the exponential pace where it left off, resulting in a pretty graph of overlappying tech. That graph doesn't apply just to CPU's either, but to almost every other advancing area you can think of as well.

I really doubt that us humans will be able to survive alongside our exponentionally advancing technology unless we also rid ourselves of the greedy, self-destructive evolutionary baggage that no longer serves us. Either by (navel gazing) genetic engineering, or by transcendance, we have to change.

Moore's Law is just one small part of the greater Law of Accelerating Returns. All evolutionary progress is exponential - we build on the shoulders of progressively bigger giants.

I looked up this article: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine. It's a story about him I hadn't heard before - but it doesn't qualify him for a top 20 list of software or CS.

My assesment no way diminshes the man's contributions to science - I think he was perhaps the most influential theoretical physicist of the latter half the 20th centruy - and his passion for learning new things is something I admire and hope I can also do throughout my life.

Another major difference is that desktop nanotech will be within our grasp within a few decades at most, but not Star-Trek-style Replication.

I can't wait for the hilarity to ensue when the uber-capitalists start complaining about the first wave of people "copying" McDonalds burgers and Gilette blades, rather than vastly down-sizing their old-business models to adjust to a new world of abundance and cheap luxury. Just the death of Wal-Mart, and the actual elmination of world hunger is enough to make me giddy.

Anyway, here's to hoping we even survive a future of matter like data (followed closely by Singularity) with our primitive brains not synched to the increasing power of our tech...

--

Sure, money's still important TODAY, but only because there's a lot of physical scarcity in the world that people must trade for to earn their living.

But at some point in the not too distant future, we'll have the technology to lift billions of people out of poverty at very little cost. With a non-sci-fi device such as a self-sufficient molecular manufacturing "3D printer" in every home, money loses a lot of its traditional value because you don't need as much to live happily in luxury. Yeah, you still need to provide other value to earn some money if you want to trade up for actual scarcity, like prime realestate, but otherwise you can exit the rat race and cooperate instead of compete.

The vast majority of people are content to live within their means; it's a select few who are greedy enough to do ANYTHING to increase their relative wealth & power. It's an evolutionary psych thing that drives some people to want to be at the top of the pyramid at any cost.

I suppose you could say I've got a strange perspective though: All the evidence I've read points to a nearing technology singularity, which makes a lot of old world beliefs irrelevant, if you can manage to get past the cognitive dissonance first.

--

Enjoy. :-D

Read for more information:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0134.html

I can't help but think about all the political hurdles that'll delay the space elevator more than any technical setbacks. And then I get to thinking about how slow and unromantic a space elevator ascent would be compared to the exciting phallic-rocket launch. Still, the space elevator is about the only way to eventually get launch costs below a dollar per pound; chemical rockets are too energy-wasteful to ever reach that point.

--

I think if more people would just read Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns then they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss him out of hand. History shows that overall progress is exponential - which most people simply haven't considered (beyond the specialized Moore's Law component of the acceleration.)

The few who do understand the scientific reasoning for a Singularity in our lifetime usually object to it for emotional reasons. The cognitive dissonance is such that it is too frightening to take such a radical future seriously even if the evidence points that way.

--

website

A message has "meaning" if you can make special use of it.

Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."

What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.

It would be scary if the Semantic Web were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.

There are tools that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.

You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.

There's pretty much only two ways that the majority of the population will enter space:

1. The Space Elevator - which is slow, "unromantic" compared to blazing phallic rockets, and is still 10 to 15 years off.
2. Mind "Uploading" - that is, instead of physically moving our heavy meat-bags of the gravity well, we "scan" our brain and transmit the transcendant bits that make up our unique pattern of mind. This information that makes us US is then embodied (or virtualizied) by an offworld body manufactured bottom-up by a nano-factory seed we sent ahead to some asteroid. (30 years away).

I'm so late in commenting on your response to the Register's Service Pack 2 article that the discussion has been archived. Luckily you're repeating your message in more recent discussions.

You ended your previous comment with "[i]f you disagree, reply and let me know why you do." A few others did just that, so I won't repeat their comments (e.g., that being moderated as funny has no effect on your karma). Your comment failed to persuade me. With the exception of the Intel article, you offered broad generalizations of /.'s coverage of predictable, inflammatory subjects as evidence of a smear campaign. Add to that comments about liking /. in the 90's - when your is well over 700,000 - and I begin to question your credibility.

I started reading /. in 1997. Yes, it has changed over the years, but, obviously, I still find value in it. I think it's telling that you offer no alternatives for science or computer news. I will: KurzweilAI.net is a better science news site, in my opinion. However, I have yet to find any site that covers the breadth of topics on /. Do I have to filter what I read? Yes, of course. I don't read any of the articles and discussions some days (or I put them off for a long time, like the SP2 article in the Register). My point is that I tend to find nuggets in a lot of the articles that are posted (e.g., the recommended NetBIOS null session policy change in the Register article), making /. worth my time.

If you have other information to support your suspicions of a Microsoft smear campaign, however, I'd be interested in reading it.

Nope, he means METER. The concept would be that human beings would get rid of their bodies and become fully simulated. They would only exist as living "programs" in a vast virtual reality contained in the RAM of a post-singularity computer system.

Not necessarily the most popular view of what could happen after the singularity, but theoretically possible. See the writings of Ray Kurzweil for some more information.

They lived in an age of exponential progress, and it was exciting. ... Then things just stopped.

Exponential progress has by no means stopped! Sure, we don't have craft traveling at the speed of light, but just because outward 1950's expectations haven't been met doesn't mean that the overall trend isn't still exponential- it is. Most of the progress has simply been focused inward, on communication, chips, biotech, and the all important nanotech.

The future we have isn't so exciting, and certainly isn't worth writing much about.

The future's not exciting? It's terrifying! :)

--

Then why are you reading Vinge? He's well known, among a few others, for writing about the Technological Singularity, which is our "near term" future given exponential tech evolution.

--

In my honest opinion, Voyager was the most interesting of the three that I've seen (TOS, TNG, and Voyager). I know a lot of people seem to be blasting Voyager on the basis of its technology or something of the like. However, Voyager tackled some real issues.

A few that I can recall offhand:
- Throughout the entire series, a lot of time was spent discussing what is basically Artificial Intelligence in the form of the ship's doctor. Over the course of the show, this 'program' develops a personality and actually some creativity, and at least one Voyager episode is a court case that closely parallels a recent real mock trial (although here the AI is arguing for life instead of the ownership of its intellectual property) http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0594.html?pr intable=1
- Another aspect of the show is the characterization, which I felt is much better than previous Trek series. Capt. Janeway has to make some quite tough decisions, and the series finale is perhaps the most interesting episode for her as she encounters a future self and has to defend her decision to protect millions of strangers' lives at the risk of her own crew/family. This theme repeats throughout.
- The whole Borg thing was quite well explored, in my honest opinion (although it may be better so in DS9). Some people seem pissed that the Borg aren't all-powerful, but really, apart from the Species 8472, they don't face much real competition. The destruction of some of their collective at the end of Voyager is reflecting another long-lived Trek theme, individuality vs. the collective (and of course, individuality comes out ahead here - good or no, but that's what it was about).

It wasn't perfect, but overall I felt that the characters offered more to care about than previous Treks. I enjoyed the TNG crew, and was amused by the Western antics of the TOS crew, but Voyager actually had me caring about more than one character (I only found Picard interesting in TNG, and Spock was the main reason to watch TOS for me).

This is all quite personal, and I'm sure people quite disagree; however, I think that people might appreciate Voyager more if they paid more attention to the characters and less to the technology.