Saying I have a hard-drive full of mp3s just sounds shady, even though they're all legal.
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school.
Not that I'm gonna stop you, though;). Also IANAL, so I might be wrong.
I can reguraly beat CM8000 and I'm a tentative ~1500+ rated player.
Are you sure about this? My ELO is around 2200 and has been so for a few years. For you non-chessplayers, that means that statistically I should score about twice as well against a 1500-player than Kasparov should score against me (although admittedly the system tends to break down when the difference is that large, but you get the picture). When playing against CM6000 on the championship-level (full power, no takebacks, etc) on my K6-II 450 Mhz, I almost always get the snot kicked out of me. I've managed a few draws but that's it.
I am not saying that you're lying, though. Some people are really good at playing closed positions (Stonewall as white and such) and specialize in beating computers. It just seems unlikely. The CM-engine was even rated #1 at one point (in 1999, I believe) on the SSDF-list (SSDF is the voluntary organization that rates chess programs).
Of course they will. It will most likely be available in the standard PGN-format and a few of the commercial formats. Just use xboard (or winboard, if that's your cup of tea).
But all the internet chess clubs also support interfaces, so that you can watch the games live on a chessboard with standard diagram pieces. win/xboard can be used for this as well.
Chess computers are pretty boring. Every single one uses the standard alpha-beta algorithm, used in most games, with modifications for hashing. The difference comes in the evaluation of the leave positions, which position to "extend" (extensions mean that the position is deemed unstable, so you calculate a bit further), in which order the different moves in a position is evaluated, etc.
Usually they do compete.
Chessmaster is not an engine per se. It uses "the King", which was written by König. If the King is not in the competition it is probably because it is a bit old and not up to the challenge of beating Fritz, Deep Junior, Shredder, Chess Tiger/Gambit Tiger, Ferret and the other really strong programs.
No need for apologies, the guy who chided you was basically wrong. Deep Thought was what IBM called the first version of Deep Blue. It was later changed (possibly for copyright reasons?) to the much worse name Deep Blue.
Kasparov played his first match against Deep Thought and his second against Deep Blue.
People will destroy and/or urinate in anything that is remotely "public" if they are not being watched (and sometimes even then). For you see, most of us are complete assholes, especially when drunk.
Won't the maintainance cost be huge on these things?
Nope. It is often misquoted as saying something about double speed in 18 months. The CPU-speed is actually somewhat closer to 12 months nowadays (or, so I've read from at least two independent researchers). What's holding the computers back is bus-speed, which doubles approx. every 3 years.
Antihydrogen would be completely useless as fuel anyway. Unlike the hydrogen atom, antihydrogen is _very_ unstable. Your space trip would have to last for fractions of a second, before all fuel breaks up into positrons and antiprotons;) (those particles could, of course, be used anyway, but what would the point be of the antihydrogen?).
Gee... Always nice with an ad hominem attack. What are you so bitter about?
We've barely placed any thought to the inner workings of the universe, of life, how it all works.
Correct. If the universe works very differently from what is currently thought, the argument certainly fall. This is of course implicit in just about every argument that anyone has ever given for anything.
as for your possible escape routes.. a borg mind is the best you could come up with?!?!
Under the assumption that the model is correct, that is one of the few ways that I can see. That does certainly not mean that I think it is the only out.
heres a little twist on your example. given that we exist now, is there not a good possibility that someone else exists somewhere? in the future or past? or even the present? with the billions upon billions of stars in our known universe, what are the odds that we are THAT much of a fluke?
Neat twist... You did read the title, right? The argument obviously allows civilizations to get to our population level. Just as long as they do not have significantly higher population and/or are aware of a significant number of other civilization (which would arguably follow advanced technology). If you have a million spots with equal probability that you exist in any of them, you will end up on one of them. Big deal. The quotation from the website refers to this scenario.
now couldn't we take that and notice that we are still here =) and that every day we are still here, the probability goes up that this loophole in the doomsday scenario is valid...
You missed the point completely and got "5: interesting"... It's OK though;)
The keyword here is observational bias. If there are 100 slots for the agents to exist in, it is unlikely that an agent would find itself being among the 10 first by pure chance, when there is a another explanation that says that there are only 10 slots in the first place.
This is a simple and undebatable fact, and hardly the part of the argument that lends itself to attack.
//Consider this simple program:
int sum=0;
for(int i=0, int nr;i<N;i++){
if(rand()<0.5) nr=10;
else nr=100;
int you=random(nr);
Agent.Tell(you);
sum += (Agent.Guess() == nr);
}
Write Agent so that sum (# correct guesses) is maximized. (obvious solution: if(you>10) return 100; else return 10;)
With large probability, no civilization exists (nor will ever exist) which is significantly more technically advanced than we are right now.
This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias .
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.
How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
My wishlist basically contains one thing:
Busspeed!
CPU isn't the bottle neck for any of the normal uses (not for the freaky ones either;).
I want my RAM lightning fast, trying to program with the CPU-cache in mind is just awful. All RAM should be that fast. What we need is busspeed that fulfills Moore's Law (they don't, I have seen estimations of doubling every 3 years or so).
You are wrong in so many ways. First of all, a statement about the properties of a program need not be empirical science. If one really wants to, these properties can be proven, for example by lambda-calculus. Thus programming is like mathematics; and just like maths you can of course make mistakes in your proof (the most common being perhaps mistaken assumptions). However, mathematical theorems are generally regarded to be proven (not just "not YET disproven") when enough people have seen it.
One of the true achievements of the 20th century was the philosophical understanding that the meaning of a word (in this case "proven") is not definable by anything else than the sum of its usage. To say that we cannot have absolute knowledge on the workings of our programs is to take the first step towards a solipsistic view of the world (we cannot know anything with certainty, thus I assert nothing more than that I exist).
I am willing to debate any solipsists on slashdot on this subject. I am also quite willing to debate those who have not understood the lessons of Wittgenstein, thus making uneducated statements on epistemology to the effect of "software cannot be theoretically unbreakable".
I find it strange that while most people have some knowledge on what the new findings in physics since the 17th century are, virtually no one knows in what way philosophy have progressed.
Perhaps someone should do it to the MPAA website then? Oh, wait... Better not. Think of the poor admin that has to remove the URL from the logs. He might accidentally memorize it and then they'll have to surgically remove his brain.
Hmmmm... This gives me an idea... I ought to memorize code for strong crypto and then walk numerous times through US customs. Chicks dig outlaws!
If Tekken 3 or Master of Orion (1) had been among the events, I would have been several thousand dollars richer, for sure;)
Ogre rocks! (not that wuss "real ogre", though, it always annoys me that the outstanding ogre's "prize" for winning the arcade mode is turning into the slow and worthless real ogre)
Why preset?
Just use a random subject from the victims mailtrash. Or perhaps better yet, the virus could just reply to the mail in the trash (or sent mail or whatever), instead of using the contact list. This would mean sensible subjects and probably better infection rate, since there are usually more addresses in the trash than in the contact list.
"In every Segway there are 10 microprocessors cranking out three PCs' worth of juice. Also a cluster of aviation-grade gyros, an accelerometer, a bevy of sensors, two batteries and software so sophisticated it puts Microsoft to shame."
With large probability, no civilization exists (nor will ever exist) which is significantly more technically advanced than we are right now.
This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias.
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.
How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
nrsecs= 11000 x 3600 x 24 x 365.25 = 3.47 * 10^11
10^12 / nrsecs = 2.88 Hz
Sounds very doable (with a good lightswitch and a bit of training I think that even double that would be feasible), providing you can keep it up for more than a couple of minutes and that the switch does not break...
If you connect a second switch to your left hand you could probably get a respectable bus speed as well.;)
Arthur C. Clarke - The geosynchronous communication satellite [Don't know the title...]
Heinlein - Nanotech [in his short story 'Waldo', that also explores a few other foresighted inventions]
Heinlein - CAD/CAM ['The door into summer']
Karel Capek - Robots [in his play R.U.R, the word is derived from the Czech word 'robota', meaning 'work' or possibly 'forced workers / slaves']
Jules Verne - Helicopter ['Propellor Island']
Jules Verne - Submarine ['20000 leagues under the sea']
H.G Wells - Suspended animation ['The sleeper awakes']... hrrm perhaps reanimation is not feasible yet, but at least some people have done the suspend part.
Lucian of Samosata - Moon travel ['True history' 2000 years ago!]
William Gibson - Cyberspace, wetware, etc ['Neuromancer']
Asimov - Did not really invent anything that I am aware of, but his 'I, robot' inspires AI-researchers to this day.
It is a shame that my favourite SF author, Greg Egan, wrote all his stuff so recently, so that none of it have had the chance to come true yet. If Egan's or Vernor Vinge's fantasies ever become reality, things will be very different... far out...;)
I don't think that 3D is the way to go at all. We humans like 2D and have huge prolems thinking in 3D. Also the monitor is a 2D surface (in case you forgot;) and the mouse/trackball navigates in 2D, so there are huge obstacles to overcome.
However, the file-cabinet view of the desktop have lots of nice alternatives. I really want a system that treats my desktop like a giant mind-map. Every project that I work on, and all the little notes that I find myself writing all the time would fit great in a mindmap structure. Also having the entire map in a zoomable format would be a better way to use the background than just putting the standard Manga/Astronomy/Softcore/Whatever-floats-your-boat pic there.
Furthermore such a desktop would interface nicely with remembrance agents. Imagine having an interactive system (perhaps integrated in emacs, like the one in MIT) that monitors what you write and suggests related nodes, that you have written before.
And it doesn't stop there! If you have a little checkbox for 'public' on each node/note, a mindmap maps well to a html-site (like MindMan does), so you could easily transform a set of loose thoughts on a subject to something that the entire world can benefit from. The RA could perhaps also interface with something like Everything
and the mindmap desktop could have an easy function for uploading nodes/groups of nodes to the community. The entire hivemind of such a network would have an enormous potential.
Got interesting incoming mail? Tag it with a few keywords and give it a place in the hierarchy and the RA will pop it up when you need it again. The mindmap structure is immensely powerful. Got a whole slew of files in a programming project? Using the same system as you do for all the rest of your documents, you could easily arrange them so as to get a nice visual overview of their interdependence.
Can you tell that I've been thinking about implementing a desktop (probably in scheme for that schweet scriptability) that does something like this, for a while?;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say he is the (objectively ;) best scifi writer currently active. Man... To come up with a novel like "Permutation City" - plain genius.
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school. ;). Also IANAL, so I might be wrong.
Not that I'm gonna stop you, though
Are you sure about this? My ELO is around 2200 and has been so for a few years. For you non-chessplayers, that means that statistically I should score about twice as well against a 1500-player than Kasparov should score against me (although admittedly the system tends to break down when the difference is that large, but you get the picture). When playing against CM6000 on the championship-level (full power, no takebacks, etc) on my K6-II 450 Mhz, I almost always get the snot kicked out of me. I've managed a few draws but that's it.
I am not saying that you're lying, though. Some people are really good at playing closed positions (Stonewall as white and such) and specialize in beating computers. It just seems unlikely. The CM-engine was even rated #1 at one point (in 1999, I believe) on the SSDF-list (SSDF is the voluntary organization that rates chess programs).
Of course they will. It will most likely be available in the standard PGN-format and a few of the commercial formats. Just use xboard (or winboard, if that's your cup of tea).
But all the internet chess clubs also support interfaces, so that you can watch the games live on a chessboard with standard diagram pieces. win/xboard can be used for this as well.
Chess computers are pretty boring. Every single one uses the standard alpha-beta algorithm, used in most games, with modifications for hashing. The difference comes in the evaluation of the leave positions, which position to "extend" (extensions mean that the position is deemed unstable, so you calculate a bit further), in which order the different moves in a position is evaluated, etc.
Usually they do compete.
Chessmaster is not an engine per se. It uses "the King", which was written by König. If the King is not in the competition it is probably because it is a bit old and not up to the challenge of beating Fritz, Deep Junior, Shredder, Chess Tiger/Gambit Tiger, Ferret and the other really strong programs.
No need for apologies, the guy who chided you was basically wrong. Deep Thought was what IBM called the first version of Deep Blue. It was later changed (possibly for copyright reasons?) to the much worse name Deep Blue.
Kasparov played his first match against Deep Thought and his second against Deep Blue.
People will destroy and/or urinate in anything that is remotely "public" if they are not being watched (and sometimes even then). For you see, most of us are complete assholes, especially when drunk.
Won't the maintainance cost be huge on these things?
Huh? I never said that.
Why would ultraviolet lithography make silicone obsolete :-)
I won't go into the details, but it is somehow related to computer generated porn.
Nope.
It is often misquoted as saying something about double speed in 18 months. The CPU-speed is actually somewhat closer to 12 months nowadays (or, so I've read from at least two independent researchers). What's holding the computers back is bus-speed, which doubles approx. every 3 years.
Antihydrogen would be completely useless as fuel anyway. Unlike the hydrogen atom, antihydrogen is _very_ unstable. Your space trip would have to last for fractions of a second, before all fuel breaks up into positrons and antiprotons ;) (those particles could, of course, be used anyway, but what would the point be of the antihydrogen?).
welcome to your existance. you naive little fool.
Gee... Always nice with an ad hominem attack. What are you so bitter about?
We've barely placed any thought to the inner workings of the universe, of life, how it all works.
Correct. If the universe works very differently from what is currently thought, the argument certainly fall. This is of course implicit in just about every argument that anyone has ever given for anything.
as for your possible escape routes.. a borg mind is the best you could come up with?!?!
Under the assumption that the model is correct, that is one of the few ways that I can see. That does certainly not mean that I think it is the only out.
heres a little twist on your example. given that we exist now, is there not a good possibility that someone else exists somewhere? in the future or past? or even the present? with the billions upon billions of stars in our known universe, what are the odds that we are THAT much of a fluke?
Neat twist... You did read the title, right? The argument obviously allows civilizations to get to our population level. Just as long as they do not have significantly higher population and/or are aware of a significant number of other civilization (which would arguably follow advanced technology). If you have a million spots with equal probability that you exist in any of them, you will end up on one of them. Big deal. The quotation from the website refers to this scenario.
now couldn't we take that and notice that we are still here =) and that every day we are still here, the probability goes up that this loophole in the doomsday scenario is valid...
That's simply invalid logic.
The keyword here is observational bias. If there are 100 slots for the agents to exist in, it is unlikely that an agent would find itself being among the 10 first by pure chance, when there is a another explanation that says that there are only 10 slots in the first place. This is a simple and undebatable fact, and hardly the part of the argument that lends itself to attack.
int sum=0;
for(int i=0, int nr;i<N;i++){
if(rand()<0.5) nr=10;
else nr=100;
int you=random(nr);
Agent.Tell(you);
sum += (Agent.Guess() == nr);
}
Write Agent so that sum (# correct guesses) is maximized. (obvious solution: if(you>10) return 100; else return 10;)
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number. How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
My wishlist basically contains one thing: ;).
Busspeed!
CPU isn't the bottle neck for any of the normal uses (not for the freaky ones either
I want my RAM lightning fast, trying to program with the CPU-cache in mind is just awful. All RAM should be that fast. What we need is busspeed that fulfills Moore's Law (they don't, I have seen estimations of doubling every 3 years or so).
You are wrong in so many ways. First of all, a statement about the properties of a program need not be empirical science. If one really wants to, these properties can be proven, for example by lambda-calculus. Thus programming is like mathematics; and just like maths you can of course make mistakes in your proof (the most common being perhaps mistaken assumptions). However, mathematical theorems are generally regarded to be proven (not just "not YET disproven") when enough people have seen it.
One of the true achievements of the 20th century was the philosophical understanding that the meaning of a word (in this case "proven") is not definable by anything else than the sum of its usage. To say that we cannot have absolute knowledge on the workings of our programs is to take the first step towards a solipsistic view of the world (we cannot know anything with certainty, thus I assert nothing more than that I exist).
I am willing to debate any solipsists on slashdot on this subject. I am also quite willing to debate those who have not understood the lessons of Wittgenstein, thus making uneducated statements on epistemology to the effect of "software cannot be theoretically unbreakable".
I find it strange that while most people have some knowledge on what the new findings in physics since the 17th century are, virtually no one knows in what way philosophy have progressed.
Perhaps someone should do it to the MPAA website then? Oh, wait... Better not. Think of the poor admin that has to remove the URL from the logs. He might accidentally memorize it and then they'll have to surgically remove his brain.
Hmmmm... This gives me an idea... I ought to memorize code for strong crypto and then walk numerous times through US customs. Chicks dig outlaws!
If Tekken 3 or Master of Orion (1) had been among the events, I would have been several thousand dollars richer, for sure ;)
Ogre rocks! (not that wuss "real ogre", though, it always annoys me that the outstanding ogre's "prize" for winning the arcade mode is turning into the slow and worthless real ogre)
Why preset?
Just use a random subject from the victims mailtrash. Or perhaps better yet, the virus could just reply to the mail in the trash (or sent mail or whatever), instead of using the contact list. This would mean sensible subjects and probably better infection rate, since there are usually more addresses in the trash than in the contact list.
So... It runs pacman?
This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias.
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.
How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
nrsecs= 11000 x 3600 x 24 x 365.25 = 3.47 * 10^11 ;)
10^12 / nrsecs = 2.88 Hz
Sounds very doable (with a good lightswitch and a bit of training I think that even double that would be feasible), providing you can keep it up for more than a couple of minutes and that the switch does not break...
If you connect a second switch to your left hand you could probably get a respectable bus speed as well.
Arthur C. Clarke - The geosynchronous communication satellite [Don't know the title...]
;)
Heinlein - Nanotech [in his short story 'Waldo', that also explores a few other foresighted inventions]
Heinlein - CAD/CAM ['The door into summer']
Karel Capek - Robots [in his play R.U.R, the word is derived from the Czech word 'robota', meaning 'work' or possibly 'forced workers / slaves']
Jules Verne - Helicopter ['Propellor Island']
Jules Verne - Submarine ['20000 leagues under the sea']
H.G Wells - Suspended animation ['The sleeper awakes']... hrrm perhaps reanimation is not feasible yet, but at least some people have done the suspend part.
Lucian of Samosata - Moon travel ['True history' 2000 years ago!]
William Gibson - Cyberspace, wetware, etc ['Neuromancer']
Asimov - Did not really invent anything that I am aware of, but his 'I, robot' inspires AI-researchers to this day.
It is a shame that my favourite SF author, Greg Egan, wrote all his stuff so recently, so that none of it have had the chance to come true yet. If Egan's or Vernor Vinge's fantasies ever become reality, things will be very different... far out...
However, the file-cabinet view of the desktop have lots of nice alternatives. I really want a system that treats my desktop like a giant mind-map. Every project that I work on, and all the little notes that I find myself writing all the time would fit great in a mindmap structure. Also having the entire map in a zoomable format would be a better way to use the background than just putting the standard Manga/Astronomy/Softcore/Whatever-floats-your-boat pic there.
Furthermore such a desktop would interface nicely with remembrance agents. Imagine having an interactive system (perhaps integrated in emacs, like the one in MIT) that monitors what you write and suggests related nodes, that you have written before.
And it doesn't stop there! If you have a little checkbox for 'public' on each node/note, a mindmap maps well to a html-site (like MindMan does), so you could easily transform a set of loose thoughts on a subject to something that the entire world can benefit from. The RA could perhaps also interface with something like Everything and the mindmap desktop could have an easy function for uploading nodes/groups of nodes to the community. The entire hivemind of such a network would have an enormous potential.
Got interesting incoming mail? Tag it with a few keywords and give it a place in the hierarchy and the RA will pop it up when you need it again. The mindmap structure is immensely powerful. Got a whole slew of files in a programming project? Using the same system as you do for all the rest of your documents, you could easily arrange them so as to get a nice visual overview of their interdependence.
Can you tell that I've been thinking about implementing a desktop (probably in scheme for that schweet scriptability) that does something like this, for a while? ;)