Essentially, think of it as chemotherapy for fat (or a "molecular liposuction"): the drug cuts off the blood flow to fat cells, those tissues die and are reclaimed by macrophages, and the lysozomes in the macrophages evidently destroy the fatty acids.
Of course there's an element of danger in this approach, but it seems managable. Lot safer than being fat.
One thing no-one has mentioned yet is what will result if it all works. It seems at least plausible that mass produced micro turbines will become a reality, and that the power to weight ratio really will be ten times that of batteries.
SO....when you unplug your laptop from the wall, will you want to immediatly burn expensive butane cartriges? Of course not. Ergo : the hybrid laptop!
There would be a regular lithium ion battery that would last for about an hour in a high end laptop, and then the generator would be started. Also, 10 watts....you might have a battery for surges of power and for when running high power drawing applications such as games. Just like a hybrid using the battery for acceleration.
That's an easy engineering fix. Water cooling, heat pipes, heat sinks, or just careful air channel control and use of a very large fan so that it can spin more slowly.
The overall concept is great. If commercials were 'targetted' to the particular viewer, they would be more effective and hence could either raise more revenue for television networks or allow for shorter commercial breaks.
The catch is this : I don't see what role google can have in this. They might be able to develop the technology for delivering the video cheaply and reliably using google OS and commodity PC hardware, like the rest of their systems work. This would make the back end at the cable and telecom tv providers cheaper. They could also develop the mechanism for choosing commercials ('searches' based on a users demographics) and evaluating success.
However, the profit is still in owning the pipes. How can google make money when the ownership of the network is in the hands of other : the telephone and cable companies.
If there were a ridiculous number of these 'unexpected' objects, that could explain the 'dark matter' problem, right? I mean, we can't see a bunch of rocks out in space, only stars. Perhaps there are way more rocks than burning stars.
Quick question : does the machine's interface have the same star trek sound effects? And that sound the replicators make when they are dispensing stuff?
Well, the whole timescale would shift. At these speeds, and with exponential growth of the hardware, more could happen in another century after the first working AIs than in all the billions of years our solar system has looked like it has.
That's what I mean by over -> biological, flesh and blood humans would no longer be relevent.
Personally, I just watched about 6 episodes in a row of this show. I hadn't seen it before, I like it.
Your comment is nitpicking the absurd. Let us suppose a disaster destroyed our civilization as it stands today, and there was just pieces left, and you came along 10,000 years later. Let's suppose you find our ICBMs very handy (never mind that an ICBM wouldn't work in 10k years). Would your complaint be realistic to find that the equipment to build new ones wasn't just around? That the books detailing exactly how to make the warheads, guidance systems, and missile schemtics are not in the public library, even the university one? (and they are not. Yes, you can find books giving enough of the theory that if you were part of a whole team of scientists and engineers, you could build your own weapons with less resources than it took the first time)
The ZPM, supposedly containing a whole bubble universe that we are using as a sort of unlimited heat sink, could be the ancients equivalent of a nuke. Knowledge on how to make one would be carefully controlled.
Think about this. Picture the technology, world population, education and energy usage levels of 1906. Primitive times, compared to now.
Consider what another century or two of progress could bring. Allow for the idea that we can duplicate what happens in every one of our 6 billion skulls with electronic circuitry at least 10 million times faster. This is why AI or some other form of enhanced intelligence is so powerful...if we could replicate the processes going on in the heads of the brightest among us, but faster. 10 million times faster at least.
We have nothing to worry about. The human race will just have to last another couple centuries, tops, and it'll all be over.
The real cost here is not the bandwidth. The reason Microsoft is charging a fee is to greatly reduce the number of people who download the beta. Why do they want fewer beta testers? Because every bug report a beta tester sends in HAS TO BE LOOKED AT IN SOME WAY. Granted, there's automated tools so that if a particular bug leaves a certain memory signature, they can avoid looking at the thousands and thousands of identical reports of the same bug. And, Microsoft has one of the largest information worker staffs in the world.
Despite what we say about them, however, Microsoft is still a group of professionals. Before releasing a product, they have to make a list of every known bug and decide that every bug still in the program on release is not important enough to fix. They have to view every bug report. They are probably overwhelmed right now.
I see this as a legitimate product. It doesn't take a medical degree or a huge budget to see that if RSI is caused by using a particular joint, avoiding that joint avoids the problem. You do not need to move your wrist at all to use this mouse. A device built from a sound principle, no snake oil involved.
This update to the Daikatana story 5 years later has some interesting facts. I didn't know the game let Ion storm break even on it - who bought 200,000 copies of the darn thing? Were the console ports of this game playable? But an MMOG...no. Mr. Romero needs to learn from his past mistakes, and realize that while he might have talent, he's never successfully led a project that big. He might have the ego for it...but an MMOG is the most technically difficult type of game there is.
Taking risks is part of business, and success in life, but you need to make an effort to minimize those risks. Mr. Romero should instead work under a better designer, focusing on art and gameplay design.
I guess that trying to make a human competitive AI now seems to me like trying to build a jet engine when all you have is pig iron. You might have examples of jet engines, and know that they are quite possible, and know that if you could build one you could make it far, far faster and better. (the brain does run at effectively 1000 hz, it just has a ridiculous amount of memory and (possibly) quantum effects.)
Well excuse me. Because using when a computer scientist talks about the AI of a project, he means some type of algorithm that he plans to write in the near future. Few of them seem to be aware of the technical requirements to create a machine that actually works like our brains do. Turing didn't back in the 50s.
Are you intelligent? Or do you have the equivalent of tens of thousands of neural nets, similar to the one you created...integrated together in a skull full of meatware?
If you could duplicate through engineering the same network, (which first requires the supporting hardware...) would you have an intelligent being? Of course.
You might at first need vats full of neurons, 'brains' in a jar. The reason, you, as a supposed AI researcher cannot make a neural net as smart as you are is because you do not have all of the tools or resources required. You probably need much, much, faster computers. You need labs where we have masses of neurons, connected to 'stimuli' sources but with many, many sets of monitoring equipment so we can watch what actually happens when a brain develops, right there in the lab. This would require biotechnology we are decades from having.
And unfortunatly, even this wouldn't be enough. There's aspects of human behavoir that must be hard wired in. Somehow you'd need to put SIGNIFCANT amounts of equipment into the brains of living human to watch what happens and how the various hormones create 'goals' that in turn activates actual behavoir. Why is pain or hunger unpleasant. Why is pleasure...how does the brain on a microscale level actually create meaningful activity.
The scale of the problem is enormous. The rest of our bodies might be relatively simple to understand, but in the brain there's trillions of parts, and interactions between them somehow creates the behavoir we see.
I question why you don't appear to "know" this. AI as a computer science term and the AI that this article is about are two completely different concepts.
But what's the limit. IQ is a meaningless number for this sort of comparison. Instead, I'd compare the processing speed of one section of artificial neurons, to the equivalent in a human brain.
An AI that thinks 10 million times quicker, with the same number of 'synapses' and neurons as our brain is quite plausible.
And that's without further optimization. Most of the neurons in our brain aren't contributing anything useful most of the time. At a given time, usually only 10% of our brain is really active...the rest is for other tasks. (granted, AIs might have similar limits)
And resources? Uh...look outside. Notice that enormous chunk of rock over your head, the one with similar mineral composition to the chunk of rock it orbits around? Notice the blazing star it orbits, the one that a tiny tiny fraction of a percent of it's energy powers everything on earth? (the moon just can't hold an atmosphere, but machines don't need that...everything else is on the moon)
There is no limit to resources. There is, however, to resources that human beings can easily access.
I think the opposite is the case. Look outside sometime. Notice just how much energy and material lies out there, both on our planet and in space, completely unused by any sort of life. If the various SETI projects are correct, we sit in the cosmic equivalent of an empty petri dish, crammed to the brim with nutrients, only capable of nibbling at the crust of a tiny piece of it. Single celled organisms can't use material that requires too much energy to free from it's environment. The more complex organisms can't, either. It's about energy density and the inefficiencies associated with 'nanoscale' processing.
On a larger scale, though, our machines TODAY can "replicate" themselves using other energy sources. Nuclear energy, electricity, fossil fuels...no biological life uses these directly. While human operators are required to run mining equipment, processing plants, factories, and so forth...everything could easily be automated if the equipment were just SMART enough to do it by itself. We also have vast compilations of most human knowledge in readily accessible forms that almost any human being with a decent quality brain can understand, given enough time.
So the future direction is obvious, and inescapable.
I predict that when the singularity happens, not only will technological pace race to the 'finish'-effective knowledge of every significant possibility allowed within the limits of the physical world, but the 'beings' - whatever relation to humans they have - will embark on projects to use all of the materials we see for various purposes. Mostly, expansion.
Soon enough, AIs would have more processing power and spend more cycles 'thinking', just as efficiently as a human does, than every person who ever lived in their entire lives.
More energy would be "used" in a day than mankind will ever generate.
More materials...to make more machines, more creation, would be used in a day than all the biomass on earth.
There wouldn't just be "a few" interstellar probes...there would be fleets of them, hordes, massing a significant fraction of the mass of our moon, accelerated to near lightspeed, racing for all the star systems within a few hundred light years. Upon arrival, they would transform all the material there, as well. The Oort cloud? "Soon" to be no longer.
Whether we, as humans, would still exist or be 'inside' the AI as personalities or general goals, or permanently wired in to the equipment...is the question.
Nuclear weapons were a silver bullet.
They perhaps didn't "solve" the problems that pundits are looking for, but vaporizing all your enemies is a pretty certain way to ensure survival. A nuke is an ultimate weapon, legions above anything available at the time - or predictable. The Japanese government could not believe what had happened, because it was a weapon that couldn't be easily predicted.
You're using hindsight too freely. Sure, nukes didn't solve the problem for long, the "enemies" developed them, too. And as it turns out, the pollution "fallout" from using too many nukes could have ruined the future of the "friendly" nation that launched them. Also, MUCH more powerful nukes were soon developed....the first iteration actually sucked.
AI could be just as powerful, and as sudden. Just like any ordinary educated American in 1935 would have assumed it unlikely that a bomb capable of leveling a city in one shot was impractical, a few years before strong AI finally works you or I might think the same thing. I'm sure you've seen the estimates for the computing power needed to emulate a brain effectively...it'll probably be a while.
Sorry. I meant be a selfish asshole and make a ton of money to greedily get better life experiences for yourself. I know, actually, from experience that it is an empty feeling, spending money on nice stuff for yourself. I just wondered "aloud" what sort of totally new thing you can have happen if you are rich enough. I mean, you can explore the entire world for much less than millions, just plane tickets and basic equipment for the most part. Even buying a jeep, hiring guides, weapons ammo and water to explore Africa "on safarri" is readily available for tens of thousands. A submarine ride is a bit more, and I suppose it might be millions to go to the deeps of the oceans...but that sounds boring and not really unique enough. (simulation : hide in the closet and stick your head in a tank filled with murky water, wearing goggles)
A jet fighter only costs a few hundred k or so, factoring in the parts costs for a Mig-21 or something, and that aerial dogfighting in propellor driven stunt planes is "only" $1000 an hour. A millionaire x1 would get bored before he ran low on money.
What can a super car get you? It might get you more women, you can't drive it to the edge of the envelope except on special tracks without risking your life. If women is the goal, I would imagine personal training or some sort of date coaching service for us/.ers would be much more cost effective than buying a Ferrari.
I guess I question the whole race for the top part of this society. There doesn't really seem to be much purpose in trying to become as rich as possible at any cost. After you reach the 'middle class', the rewards vs. effort to make the money curve goes down sharply.
A trip to space is an outlier. Noone else can even experience long duration weightlessness (that has got to be the weirdest feeling ever, being able to float around) unless they are the rare astronaut, and a rocket ship ride is ridiculous. 20,000 gallons of fuel a second.
Well. I acknowledge that tremendous work is required. (note the caveat in my post the the biggest 'seeming' salary isn't really any higher than numerous other jobs)
But it is a game. There's a TREMENDOUS luck factor. (not a "little" like in your post). To name a couple dumb ones off the top of my head : who would have thought you could become a millionaire by preaching that the earth is only 6,000 years old? Or developing the video game "deer hunter", when thousands of other more sophisticated efforts failed?
And of course, it only applies to a limited part of the world. Start out in Africa, work your ass off 80 hours a week, and you might survive. Or not, get noticed by the warlord for being successful or get AIDs because you sleep around like successful American men sometimes do...you get the idea. Being born somewhere is the biggest luck element there is.
But yes, plenty of people have the opportunity to do much more in their lives, and they don't.
Is there any way for a person born into the 'middle class' of American society (access to education, minimal crime suburban living) to make 20 million, much less 35 million, before they are too old to go to space? Let's arbitrarily choose a cutoff age of 60.
I can think of ways that a person MIGHT be able to accumulate this much wealth (I am ommitting exceptional cases, like being one of an enormous number of computer scientists to invent an effective search engine, or doing whatever it takes to be selected as corporate CEO) , but markets change over a person's career fast enough that there's just no way to know.
For instance, the highest paying profession today that a person can take a known route to (there's no known route to becoming a corporate CEO or Donald Trump of real estate) that I can think of would be a specialty surgeon. But, that's in today's market : a surgeon is just a highly skilled technician, the reason salaries are so high is because of the extremely large workload and limited supply of surgeons. (for instance, if a surgeon made the average salary of $200,000 a year but worked 80 hours a week, they only make about 50 bucks an hour. Numerous other jobs make that much money, just noone works those hours)
It is doable : if the person finished their education at 30, they have 30 years to make 15 million dollars. TODAY in some specialties, like orthopedics, the average salary is several hundred thousand. Prudent investment, with decent interest rates, might mean a person would only need to invest about 5 million 15 years earlier, and receive the average overall historical rate of return for the stock market.
No guarantees...but it sounds doable.
Lawyers also have a good shot. If you cashed in on just one million dollar settlement every 2 years, making the 30-40% contingency, plus collecting fees for other smaller cases, a lawyer could make the money. Potentially, much sooner : represent the parents of a crippled child because some deep pocket entity made a preventable error, and 30% of the 10 million dollar settlement is yours. Invest it, and plan on going to space in 15 years. Only a tiny fraction of the lawyers in this country ever collect on something that big, I suspect, however. (I don't actually know if this is the case)
All of this assumes many things, 30 years ago (1976) no-one could have predicted that commercial space flight would be available for 15 million dollars. Most people would have probably assumed it would be much, much cheaper and more common, actually. Or un-available.
I wonder what other unique life experiences can be had for 15 million. I can't think of anything that costs more than a million, actually. An enormous mansion or private jet doesn't count, that isn't unique enough.
Hate to rain on the parade...but wouldn't an in ear bluetooth receiver like they have for cell phones be simpler? Just saying that there is no reason to do surgery unless it is for a feature you can't have without direct wiring.
I want to be involved in this kind of effort. Please God, help me get into med school. (applying this Febuary)
A far better approach, albeit more complex, would be to build a microchip - powered by induction like RFID circuitry - that could generate signals in the right voltage and frequency range to stimulate nerves. A surgeon would carefully place the chip along a nerve inside your hand somewhere, placing the electrode side parallel to the nerve. The chip would have signal processing abilities and could be used to :
1. detect the signal pattern for pain and cancel it out 2. interact with novel gadgets like a magnetic or radio field sensor, or a geiger counter 3. Pick up signals from one part of the body, and transmit them to another chip located in a damaged limb somewhere that the nerves have been cut from
All of this is basic signal processing, simpler than the state of the art in radio by a considerable margin (nerve signals are MUCH, MUCH slower)
I don't understand why this sort of thing isn't routinely done. I know there are implantable nerve stimulators to stop phantom limb pain, I know that surgeons don't need FDA approval to perform trials on gadets like this - they just need a researcher to create a prototype that is appropriately coated with bioneutral materials and sterile, and the surgeon can implant it into any consenting adult. Surgery is not a medical procedure that has to be specifically approved : this is how the variants of the gastic bypass were developed, such as the bands around the stomach approach. A particular surgeon decided to try it, and others adopted it.
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Actually, there IS a drug that could be made to work this year in humans if the regulations and safety requirments weren't so onerous. See : http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2004/10 /20049284.shtml
Essentially, think of it as chemotherapy for fat (or a "molecular liposuction"): the drug cuts off the blood flow to fat cells, those tissues die and are reclaimed by macrophages, and the lysozomes in the macrophages evidently destroy the fatty acids.
Of course there's an element of danger in this approach, but it seems managable. Lot safer than being fat.
One thing no-one has mentioned yet is what will result if it all works. It seems at least plausible that mass produced micro turbines will become a reality, and that the power to weight ratio really will be ten times that of batteries.
SO....when you unplug your laptop from the wall, will you want to immediatly burn expensive butane cartriges? Of course not. Ergo : the hybrid laptop!
There would be a regular lithium ion battery that would last for about an hour in a high end laptop, and then the generator would be started. Also, 10 watts....you might have a battery for surges of power and for when running high power drawing applications such as games. Just like a hybrid using the battery for acceleration.
That's an easy engineering fix. Water cooling, heat pipes, heat sinks, or just careful air channel control and use of a very large fan so that it can spin more slowly.
The overall concept is great. If commercials were 'targetted' to the particular viewer, they would be more effective and hence could either raise more revenue for television networks or allow for shorter commercial breaks.
The catch is this : I don't see what role google can have in this. They might be able to develop the technology for delivering the video cheaply and reliably using google OS and commodity PC hardware, like the rest of their systems work. This would make the back end at the cable and telecom tv providers cheaper. They could also develop the mechanism for choosing commercials ('searches' based on a users demographics) and evaluating success.
However, the profit is still in owning the pipes. How can google make money when the ownership of the network is in the hands of other : the telephone and cable companies.
The sniper's name was Carlos Hathcock, and his opponent happened to be a woman.
If there were a ridiculous number of these 'unexpected' objects, that could explain the 'dark matter' problem, right? I mean, we can't see a bunch of rocks out in space, only stars. Perhaps there are way more rocks than burning stars.
Quick question : does the machine's interface have the same star trek sound effects? And that sound the replicators make when they are dispensing stuff?
Well, the whole timescale would shift. At these speeds, and with exponential growth of the hardware, more could happen in another century after the first working AIs than in all the billions of years our solar system has looked like it has.
That's what I mean by over -> biological, flesh and blood humans would no longer be relevent.
Personally, I just watched about 6 episodes in a row of this show. I hadn't seen it before, I like it. Your comment is nitpicking the absurd. Let us suppose a disaster destroyed our civilization as it stands today, and there was just pieces left, and you came along 10,000 years later. Let's suppose you find our ICBMs very handy (never mind that an ICBM wouldn't work in 10k years). Would your complaint be realistic to find that the equipment to build new ones wasn't just around? That the books detailing exactly how to make the warheads, guidance systems, and missile schemtics are not in the public library, even the university one? (and they are not. Yes, you can find books giving enough of the theory that if you were part of a whole team of scientists and engineers, you could build your own weapons with less resources than it took the first time) The ZPM, supposedly containing a whole bubble universe that we are using as a sort of unlimited heat sink, could be the ancients equivalent of a nuke. Knowledge on how to make one would be carefully controlled.
Think about this. Picture the technology, world population, education and energy usage levels of 1906. Primitive times, compared to now.
Consider what another century or two of progress could bring. Allow for the idea that we can duplicate what happens in every one of our 6 billion skulls with electronic circuitry at least 10 million times faster. This is why AI or some other form of enhanced intelligence is so powerful...if we could replicate the processes going on in the heads of the brightest among us, but faster. 10 million times faster at least.
We have nothing to worry about. The human race will just have to last another couple centuries, tops, and it'll all be over.
The real cost here is not the bandwidth. The reason Microsoft is charging a fee is to greatly reduce the number of people who download the beta. Why do they want fewer beta testers? Because every bug report a beta tester sends in HAS TO BE LOOKED AT IN SOME WAY. Granted, there's automated tools so that if a particular bug leaves a certain memory signature, they can avoid looking at the thousands and thousands of identical reports of the same bug. And, Microsoft has one of the largest information worker staffs in the world.
Despite what we say about them, however, Microsoft is still a group of professionals. Before releasing a product, they have to make a list of every known bug and decide that every bug still in the program on release is not important enough to fix. They have to view every bug report. They are probably overwhelmed right now.
I see this as a legitimate product. It doesn't take a medical degree or a huge budget to see that if RSI is caused by using a particular joint, avoiding that joint avoids the problem. You do not need to move your wrist at all to use this mouse. A device built from a sound principle, no snake oil involved.
I say DLP, without a doubt. Crisp color reproduction, higher resolution than lcd or plasma.
2 E16889253029
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Dimensions : 18" deep. Unless your conference room is exceptionally crowded, a foot and a half shouldn't make any difference.
And best of all, plug in a high definition disk player and watch HD movies, or an Xbox 360.
Or, connect a PC up and the onscreen text readable since this is more of a monitor than a television.
This update to the Daikatana story 5 years later has some interesting facts. I didn't know the game let Ion storm break even on it - who bought 200,000 copies of the darn thing? Were the console ports of this game playable? But an MMOG...no. Mr. Romero needs to learn from his past mistakes, and realize that while he might have talent, he's never successfully led a project that big. He might have the ego for it...but an MMOG is the most technically difficult type of game there is.
Taking risks is part of business, and success in life, but you need to make an effort to minimize those risks. Mr. Romero should instead work under a better designer, focusing on art and gameplay design.
I guess that trying to make a human competitive AI now seems to me like trying to build a jet engine when all you have is pig iron. You might have examples of jet engines, and know that they are quite possible, and know that if you could build one you could make it far, far faster and better. (the brain does run at effectively 1000 hz, it just has a ridiculous amount of memory and (possibly) quantum effects.)
Well excuse me. Because using when a computer scientist talks about the AI of a project, he means some type of algorithm that he plans to write in the near future. Few of them seem to be aware of the technical requirements to create a machine that actually works like our brains do. Turing didn't back in the 50s.
Are you intelligent? Or do you have the equivalent of tens of thousands of neural nets, similar to the one you created...integrated together in a skull full of meatware?
If you could duplicate through engineering the same network, (which first requires the supporting hardware...) would you have an intelligent being? Of course.
You might at first need vats full of neurons, 'brains' in a jar. The reason, you, as a supposed AI researcher cannot make a neural net as smart as you are is because you do not have all of the tools or resources required. You probably need much, much, faster computers. You need labs where we have masses of neurons, connected to 'stimuli' sources but with many, many sets of monitoring equipment so we can watch what actually happens when a brain develops, right there in the lab. This would require biotechnology we are decades from having.
And unfortunatly, even this wouldn't be enough. There's aspects of human behavoir that must be hard wired in. Somehow you'd need to put SIGNIFCANT amounts of equipment into the brains of living human to watch what happens and how the various hormones create 'goals' that in turn activates actual behavoir. Why is pain or hunger unpleasant. Why is pleasure...how does the brain on a microscale level actually create meaningful activity.
The scale of the problem is enormous. The rest of our bodies might be relatively simple to understand, but in the brain there's trillions of parts, and interactions between them somehow creates the behavoir we see.
I question why you don't appear to "know" this. AI as a computer science term and the AI that this article is about are two completely different concepts.
Not "ever" smarter.
But what's the limit. IQ is a meaningless number for this sort of comparison. Instead, I'd compare the processing speed of one section of artificial neurons, to the equivalent in a human brain.
An AI that thinks 10 million times quicker, with the same number of 'synapses' and neurons as our brain is quite plausible.
And that's without further optimization. Most of the neurons in our brain aren't contributing anything useful most of the time. At a given time, usually only 10% of our brain is really active...the rest is for other tasks. (granted, AIs might have similar limits)
And resources? Uh...look outside. Notice that enormous chunk of rock over your head, the one with similar mineral composition to the chunk of rock it orbits around? Notice the blazing star it orbits, the one that a tiny tiny fraction of a percent of it's energy powers everything on earth? (the moon just can't hold an atmosphere, but machines don't need that...everything else is on the moon)
There is no limit to resources. There is, however, to resources that human beings can easily access.
I think the opposite is the case. Look outside sometime. Notice just how much energy and material lies out there, both on our planet and in space, completely unused by any sort of life. If the various SETI projects are correct, we sit in the cosmic equivalent of an empty petri dish, crammed to the brim with nutrients, only capable of nibbling at the crust of a tiny piece of it. Single celled organisms can't use material that requires too much energy to free from it's environment. The more complex organisms can't, either. It's about energy density and the inefficiencies associated with 'nanoscale' processing.
On a larger scale, though, our machines TODAY can "replicate" themselves using other energy sources. Nuclear energy, electricity, fossil fuels...no biological life uses these directly. While human operators are required to run mining equipment, processing plants, factories, and so forth...everything could easily be automated if the equipment were just SMART enough to do it by itself. We also have vast compilations of most human knowledge in readily accessible forms that almost any human being with a decent quality brain can understand, given enough time.
So the future direction is obvious, and inescapable.
I predict that when the singularity happens, not only will technological pace race to the 'finish'-effective knowledge of every significant possibility allowed within the limits of the physical world, but the 'beings' - whatever relation to humans they have - will embark on projects to use all of the materials we see for various purposes. Mostly, expansion.
Soon enough, AIs would have more processing power and spend more cycles 'thinking', just as efficiently as a human does, than every person who ever lived in their entire lives.
More energy would be "used" in a day than mankind will ever generate.
More materials...to make more machines, more creation, would be used in a day than all the biomass on earth.
There wouldn't just be "a few" interstellar probes...there would be fleets of them, hordes, massing a significant fraction of the mass of our moon, accelerated to near lightspeed, racing for all the star systems within a few hundred light years. Upon arrival, they would transform all the material there, as well. The Oort cloud? "Soon" to be no longer.
Whether we, as humans, would still exist or be 'inside' the AI as personalities or general goals, or permanently wired in to the equipment...is the question.
Nuclear weapons were a silver bullet. They perhaps didn't "solve" the problems that pundits are looking for, but vaporizing all your enemies is a pretty certain way to ensure survival. A nuke is an ultimate weapon, legions above anything available at the time - or predictable. The Japanese government could not believe what had happened, because it was a weapon that couldn't be easily predicted. You're using hindsight too freely. Sure, nukes didn't solve the problem for long, the "enemies" developed them, too. And as it turns out, the pollution "fallout" from using too many nukes could have ruined the future of the "friendly" nation that launched them. Also, MUCH more powerful nukes were soon developed....the first iteration actually sucked. AI could be just as powerful, and as sudden. Just like any ordinary educated American in 1935 would have assumed it unlikely that a bomb capable of leveling a city in one shot was impractical, a few years before strong AI finally works you or I might think the same thing. I'm sure you've seen the estimates for the computing power needed to emulate a brain effectively...it'll probably be a while.
Sorry. I meant be a selfish asshole and make a ton of money to greedily get better life experiences for yourself. I know, actually, from experience that it is an empty feeling, spending money on nice stuff for yourself. I just wondered "aloud" what sort of totally new thing you can have happen if you are rich enough. I mean, you can explore the entire world for much less than millions, just plane tickets and basic equipment for the most part. Even buying a jeep, hiring guides, weapons ammo and water to explore Africa "on safarri" is readily available for tens of thousands. A submarine ride is a bit more, and I suppose it might be millions to go to the deeps of the oceans...but that sounds boring and not really unique enough. (simulation : hide in the closet and stick your head in a tank filled with murky water, wearing goggles)
/.ers would be much more cost effective than buying a Ferrari.
A jet fighter only costs a few hundred k or so, factoring in the parts costs for a Mig-21 or something, and that aerial dogfighting in propellor driven stunt planes is "only" $1000 an hour. A millionaire x1 would get bored before he ran low on money.
What can a super car get you? It might get you more women, you can't drive it to the edge of the envelope except on special tracks without risking your life. If women is the goal, I would imagine personal training or some sort of date coaching service for us
I guess I question the whole race for the top part of this society. There doesn't really seem to be much purpose in trying to become as rich as possible at any cost. After you reach the 'middle class', the rewards vs. effort to make the money curve goes down sharply.
A trip to space is an outlier. Noone else can even experience long duration weightlessness (that has got to be the weirdest feeling ever, being able to float around) unless they are the rare astronaut, and a rocket ship ride is ridiculous. 20,000 gallons of fuel a second.
Well. I acknowledge that tremendous work is required. (note the caveat in my post the the biggest 'seeming' salary isn't really any higher than numerous other jobs)
But it is a game. There's a TREMENDOUS luck factor. (not a "little" like in your post). To name a couple dumb ones off the top of my head : who would have thought you could become a millionaire by preaching that the earth is only 6,000 years old? Or developing the video game "deer hunter", when thousands of other more sophisticated efforts failed?
And of course, it only applies to a limited part of the world. Start out in Africa, work your ass off 80 hours a week, and you might survive. Or not, get noticed by the warlord for being successful or get AIDs because you sleep around like successful American men sometimes do...you get the idea. Being born somewhere is the biggest luck element there is.
But yes, plenty of people have the opportunity to do much more in their lives, and they don't.
Is there any way for a person born into the 'middle class' of American society (access to education, minimal crime suburban living) to make 20 million, much less 35 million, before they are too old to go to space? Let's arbitrarily choose a cutoff age of 60.
I can think of ways that a person MIGHT be able to accumulate this much wealth (I am ommitting exceptional cases, like being one of an enormous number of computer scientists to invent an effective search engine, or doing whatever it takes to be selected as corporate CEO) , but markets change over a person's career fast enough that there's just no way to know.
For instance, the highest paying profession today that a person can take a known route to (there's no known route to becoming a corporate CEO or Donald Trump of real estate) that I can think of would be a specialty surgeon. But, that's in today's market : a surgeon is just a highly skilled technician, the reason salaries are so high is because of the extremely large workload and limited supply of surgeons. (for instance, if a surgeon made the average salary of $200,000 a year but worked 80 hours a week, they only make about 50 bucks an hour. Numerous other jobs make that much money, just noone works those hours)
It is doable : if the person finished their education at 30, they have 30 years to make 15 million dollars. TODAY in some specialties, like orthopedics, the average salary is several hundred thousand. Prudent investment, with decent interest rates, might mean a person would only need to invest about 5 million 15 years earlier, and receive the average overall historical rate of return for the stock market.
No guarantees...but it sounds doable.
Lawyers also have a good shot. If you cashed in on just one million dollar settlement every 2 years, making the 30-40% contingency, plus collecting fees for other smaller cases, a lawyer could make the money. Potentially, much sooner : represent the parents of a crippled child because some deep pocket entity made a preventable error, and 30% of the 10 million dollar settlement is yours. Invest it, and plan on going to space in 15 years. Only a tiny fraction of the lawyers in this country ever collect on something that big, I suspect, however. (I don't actually know if this is the case)
All of this assumes many things, 30 years ago (1976) no-one could have predicted that commercial space flight would be available for 15 million dollars. Most people would have probably assumed it would be much, much cheaper and more common, actually. Or un-available.
I wonder what other unique life experiences can be had for 15 million. I can't think of anything that costs more than a million, actually. An enormous mansion or private jet doesn't count, that isn't unique enough.
Hate to rain on the parade...but wouldn't an in ear bluetooth receiver like they have for cell phones be simpler? Just saying that there is no reason to do surgery unless it is for a feature you can't have without direct wiring.
I want to be involved in this kind of effort. Please God, help me get into med school. (applying this Febuary)
A far better approach, albeit more complex, would be to build a microchip - powered by induction like RFID circuitry - that could generate signals in the right voltage and frequency range to stimulate nerves. A surgeon would carefully place the chip along a nerve inside your hand somewhere, placing the electrode side parallel to the nerve. The chip would have signal processing abilities and could be used to :
1. detect the signal pattern for pain and cancel it out
2. interact with novel gadgets like a magnetic or radio field sensor, or a geiger counter
3. Pick up signals from one part of the body, and transmit them to another chip located in a damaged limb somewhere that the nerves have been cut from
All of this is basic signal processing, simpler than the state of the art in radio by a considerable margin (nerve signals are MUCH, MUCH slower)
I don't understand why this sort of thing isn't routinely done. I know there are implantable nerve stimulators to stop phantom limb pain, I know that surgeons don't need FDA approval to perform trials on gadets like this - they just need a researcher to create a prototype that is appropriately coated with bioneutral materials and sterile, and the surgeon can implant it into any consenting adult. Surgery is not a medical procedure that has to be specifically approved : this is how the variants of the gastic bypass were developed, such as the bands around the stomach approach. A particular surgeon decided to try it, and others adopted it.
Should be a whole thriving industry by now.