Yeah, they built a working physical representation of a "2001 A Space Odyssey" handheld tablet computer (or a Star Trek ALCARS handheld tablet, or any of a couple hundred tablet computers described in sci-fi stories over the last 50 years.) Then effectively under threat of law claimed that the tablet was their original idea and that anyone building one needs to pay them. This either makes them brazenly stupid or brashly assholerific. I'll let you pick, please, be my guest!
The proof is in frequency, average temperature, average rain fall and yes greenhouse effects mean heat is trapped at the surface and the stratosphere get's dramatically colder.
This is also the argument proposed by some scientists that suggest such huge differences in localize temperature, could themselves become a powerful heat engine, creating a scenario for a hyper-cane or some weird weather phenomenon like it. Such a storm would be much taller than normal and pull supercold air down through its eye, flash freezing whatever the storm tracked over. However models for these odd beasties don't look at all like the disaster movies, instead they are only a few tens of miles in diameter (more like supercells gone wild as opposed to normal hurricanes.) The real problem is that they would horribly chew up the remaining ozone, and it would take more than a few of these storms to to create a global ozone depletion problem.
Simple thermodynamics. Pour energy into a open system and it will take that energy up to a point then go into perturbation. We are now at the point of perturbation, the system rings, swinging wildly from colder to hotter with increased frequency (remembering higher frequency is another way energy can be expressed.) The average heat in the system rises, more heat and more water in the atmosphere mean harder rain, bigger storms and deeper snow. Same place gets floods and droughts and the weather switches up unpredictably. All of that is a sign of global climate change. Welcome to the future.
Let's be clear here, we are reaching space only now because we chose to dedicate ourselves to a truly epic vision in 1960, then once we achieved that goal said "Okay, been there done that, got the t-shirt, what's next, Oh yes, bombing brown people." We got bored with boldly going where no man had gone before and chose instead to disco. Sure we had the space shuttle, but we traded in building cities in space for watching pretty pictures of places far far away (because it was easier and much cheaper.)
As for the great man mythos, its always been bullsh!7. Edwin Hubble, one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century was a "Professional Scientist" only at the very end. The thought that amateur science is either small or in any way limited belies a poor grasp of science. Today children are building public biolabs (there's an amazing one in New York right now) and they're doing cutting edge research. There are internet sites galore allowing the least informed of lay-people to participate in world changing discoveries. Ground breaking work in robotics, astronomy, physics, meteorology and climate study, ecology and biodiversity, biology and biochemistry, and genetic engineering are taking place in garages around the country and the world. By purchasing used and auctioned equipment you can build any one of several kinds of laboratories for only a few hundred dollars. Read this months Discover Magazine or go visit their site if you want your eyes opened. Advances in technology have made exploration more accessible and democratized the search for knowledge more than ever before. Some of the most profound work in biology today is being done in Cuba, because Cuba at least to date has escaped having its wild habitats destroyed. The scientists there work for almost nothing save the knowledge they're advancing the cause for preserving healthy oceans and forests. Big men and Big money do not necessarily make science (and yes is takes global resources to build a super collider or an international space station.)
As for space, the government had space under lock and key for decades, and even the technology to build rockets was classified, allowing commercial interests only the ability to manufacture unrecognizable parts for NASA. Opening up space to commercial interests is not some recent scientific innovation, its a long over due social one.
There are only two meaningful frames of reference. Human beings exist in the present and are given by their immediate futures (you have a very different immediate future if you are faced on one hand by a hungry grizzly bear vs. an attractive lover... your immediate future informs your thoughts and actions.) The problem is that your immediate future is flavored by where you happen to be looking, your frame of reference. The two common frames of reference are forward facing and backward facing. If you go into the future backward facing, trying to hang onto some past mythical glory, you will be oblivious to the opportunities of the moment, and worse continually trying to force the future into a straight-jacket called "Making it look like the past." A backward facing frame of reference is doomed to prove the past is better than the present because it will continually sabotage the future and all you are left with is a self fulfilling prophecy. The folks that have hijacked our country over the last 30 years are for the most part backward facing. In fact the future terrifies them. In the hopes or reliving a glorious past, or avoid a threatening future, they have robbed everyone of any real future at all.
That isn't to say that we are doomed. On the contrary, the future is coming ready or not, and we need to stop lying to ourselves and repeating those lies to our children. Never before have we been faced with greater challenge or opportunity. We stand at the threshold of infinite possibility, all that it takes to grasp an unbridled future is the integrity to confront what is failed, the courage to address that and the inspiration to invent what it is possible for being human. Blaming fools for being foolish is a wasted effort, instead let's choose people to lead us who have vision, dedication and proven track records of hewing out bold futures. Most of all let's fix our collective eyes on a future worth living in and hold our administrative leader to account, either applauded or feet over the flames. Oh, and for the love of all that's holy, let's do a quick smell check on our representatives and please throw out the ones that have spoiled.
There you go, let's patent the process of removing urine or fecal matter from the bottom of an infant, then sue every parent in the country to cough up a little loose change. Call it the the potty toll. Tell America, they can pay the potty toll or squeeze their representatives into cleaning up the toilet that the patent system is. Use the money collected to lobby the ass off of the Representatives responsible for the current wreck that is the Patent System.
Ask to meet all their top executives of this cesspool, take them out on a rented yacht. Insure it to high hell. Take it off the coast of Mexico, and inform the local drug cartel that a bunch of wealthy gringos are meeting to figure out a way bomb them off the face of the earth, then over take their drug business. After the smoke, screaming and mutilation stop... go collect your insurance, pay off the boat owner, and pocket the remainder. Inform the U.S. justice system that Mexican Drug Lords have murdered American national. Let Karma play out and consider justice has been dispensed on all fronts. Building a better world one elimination at a time!
I've been wondering if being able to see magnetic fields was a direct visual sensing or if something else wasn't inducing some perceptual experience either in the visual cortex or the optic nerve of Tesla. There have been experiments where audio signals have been induced along the long nerves of the arm and subjects report hearing a sound (the brain receives the nerve impulse, recognizes it as an audio signal and processes it as such. I recall someone patenting an invention for people with profound damage to the ear using this technique to provide some sense of hearing (of course surrounding yourself with a strong electromagnetic field would almost certainly have its down side.)
There are two things happening in human UV perception. There are the limits of the cones in the retina, then there is the filtering that happens in the lens and cornea. Its almost certainly arguable that protecting the retina against UV has survival value (because high energy light would almost certainly over time damage the retina in a longer lived species.) So the lenses in human beings stop UV, of course this also means that over time the damage by UV will be in the lenses.
Replacing failed lenses with new lenses that pass UV, would suddenly make that color available to the retina, and some people (of both sexes) have significant UV sensitivity. I would also suggest that if these people are younger, it would be highly advised that they wear UV protection when outside.
This is absolutely correct. When photographed in ultraviolet, many flowers have color ques for insects to lead them to nectar (and obviously pollen) and are therefore much brighter and more vividly patterned in UV than the pigments in paint which may or may not have very narrow spectral content outside the visual spectrum we normally perceive.
I'm sorry but the magnetic field surrounding an MRI would launch that drive at significantly more than lethal velocities and probably destroy the MRI as well. MRIs for clinical use operate at between 0.2 and 0.3 Teslas, more than 5,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. There are laboratory devices though, running up to 12 Tesla, generating fields in excess of a quarter a million times as powerful as the earth's. That drive would shoot through the room, through a couple victims, then through the wall, and then through a few more victims. They won't sue you, but their survivors will.
Patent litigator harm society and remove incentive for innovation?!!! That goes against everything I've ever heard about the patent process!!! Why would our government allow such a thing to be?
I would suggest that the way your brain works is a combination of the society you grew up in and the personal decisions you made along the way. Other cultures has wildly different takes on morality and what was or wasn't acceptable. The Mayan culture thought nothing of slaughtering human beings and there have been a number of cannibalistic precolumbian societies in the South Pacific. The fact that your morality is profoundly different than yours doesn't invalidate theirs.
An entire nation is moved at the atrocity of a sociopath killing a pretty little white girl. While at the same time we don't even give a second thought to carpet bombing a capital city killing hundreds of innocent children in the name of some empty vendetta perpetrated by a rogue politician. Tell me that the morality of that behavior isn't broken.
The power of Christianity is in the message of Christ, that the power of embracing, accepting, forgiving and loving all people, is transformational. That is it the highest expression of whatever we mean by the Human Spirit. That something exists that is larger than the limited expression of a singular "I" and that the nature of what I am is a being, wrapped in a human identity. Religion speaks to the being part of us. The human part tries to understand the rest with science.
Actually we had a really sweet spot between 1972 and 1982, when most of the folks running around were still present to the disaster that Viet Nam was, but our first Alzheimer Patient decided he didn't feel like a man unless he was waging war on something, so we invaded 3 dogs and a wino on a tiny island in the Caribbean. Its pretty much been assholes and foxholes ever since.
Okay if we're going to tell the truth, let's tell all of it. The nearly exclusive source of radical Islam is Saudi Arabia. For the last several decades their 20 and 30 somethings have been getting religious degrees in ultra-orthodox schools of Muslim theology and using the trillions of petro-dollars supplied to them by the men in charge of Saudi Arabia to finance schools all over the world to spread their beliefs. Starting with, this world isn't large enough for Muslims and anybody else. We gave them trillions for their oil, which they invested in our weapons (which they gladly turn against us.) We used them as a blunt instrument to bludgeon the USSR then failed to clean up afterwards (see or read about Charlie's War) and now we are haunted by monsters and subsequent disasters of our own making.
The vast majority of Muslims in the world are good neighbors, peaceful and have no desire to do anyone a moments grief. We need to look at radical religious orthodoxies everywhere (including the Christian and Quasi-Christian knuckleheads in the U.S. and crazed Jewish sects in Israel.) Then begin dismantling them. They are one of the greatest threats to peace and a viable future for all people in the 21rst century. Also, America has always claimed to support a two state solution for the Middle-East, and when the time came to put up or shut up, as Palestine applied for statehood at the U.N. The U.S. folded like a house of cards to appease Jewish interests in America and Israel. The current situation is nothing better than slow motion genocide, further destabilizing the area and generating more anti-U.S. sentiment (its hard not to hate the U.S. when our name is on most of the munitions killing people) and we should be deeply ashamed for supporting it in any way. It is high time we all figured out how to get along with one another and get on with the business of living.
Again and again, it is made clearer by the day. Government must provide a healthy environment in which freedom, enterprise, and the liberty of all people may flourish. To do so, it must be free of influence from any source but people themselves. We need to implement separation between church and state, between corporation and state and between organized affiliation and state. Additionally, we need to ensure that our representatives, are able to run without the burden of excessive campaign cost. Campaigning should have free media access, and a limited budget (though people should be free to volunteer to their hearts delight.) By eliminating the barrier of campaign financing, we free potential legislators from being beholden to a contributor, and we open up the field to any potential candidates, not just the ones who are best at selling themselves to the highest bidder. Another benefit, is that we begin to take campaigning out of the realm of sound bites and Wallstreet marketing and place it back in the realm of two or more people explaining what they have to offer the American people.
Of course there are hundreds of individual issues to be addressed, from reinstating checks and balances, habeus corpus, the Geneva Convention, a free and independent media (that is able and willing to have public conversations about the issues of the day, and no "The Daily" show doesn't count!) to ensuring the Bill of Rights is maintained, enforced and expanded to include new technology as it arrives and that the drive to profit doesn't exceed the drive for human dignity and compassion.
Most of all, its time to address this century and its needs, stop living in the last century. Its time to address the critical threats to human existence, and civilization, and mindless dogma and magical beliefs will simply not carry the day.
Exactly! There are huge breakthroughs happening in the understanding of the neural wiring and structural compartmentalization brains and their constituent neural systems. For instance we've been able to identify dozens of visual subsystems that work together to produce the seamless experience called vision. Its only when you see something that works against the normal visual design (an optical illusion) that one or more subsystems become consciously apparent.
What call and experience as consciousness is a multitude of neural systems working in concert to provide us with a workable experience of reality. How long before synthetic minds have sufficient power and performance to have similar experience with comparable intelligence. Many people at the cut edge of the field would tell you sooner than later.
And tell me what happens when someone finally reduces the size of robots to molecular machines and we can fabricate anything from a car to a steak from raw atomic stock. Then you can manufacture anything anywhere, and the important thing now becomes the molecular recipe for the Lexus, not the Lexus itself. Those anyone can have for the cost of the raw atoms and the electricity required to assemble them. What does that do to the economy? Everything is now priced be how long it takes to make it and some arbitrary value associated with fashion of social desire.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, you cook boy bands too?!! How special for you!
I know what you mean... this is simply abominable!
Yeah, they built a working physical representation of a "2001 A Space Odyssey" handheld tablet computer (or a Star Trek ALCARS handheld tablet, or any of a couple hundred tablet computers described in sci-fi stories over the last 50 years.) Then effectively under threat of law claimed that the tablet was their original idea and that anyone building one needs to pay them. This either makes them brazenly stupid or brashly assholerific. I'll let you pick, please, be my guest!
The proof is in frequency, average temperature, average rain fall and yes greenhouse effects mean heat is trapped at the surface and the stratosphere get's dramatically colder.
This is also the argument proposed by some scientists that suggest such huge differences in localize temperature, could themselves become a powerful heat engine, creating a scenario for a hyper-cane or some weird weather phenomenon like it. Such a storm would be much taller than normal and pull supercold air down through its eye, flash freezing whatever the storm tracked over. However models for these odd beasties don't look at all like the disaster movies, instead they are only a few tens of miles in diameter (more like supercells gone wild as opposed to normal hurricanes.) The real problem is that they would horribly chew up the remaining ozone, and it would take more than a few of these storms to to create a global ozone depletion problem.
Simple thermodynamics. Pour energy into a open system and it will take that energy up to a point then go into perturbation. We are now at the point of perturbation, the system rings, swinging wildly from colder to hotter with increased frequency (remembering higher frequency is another way energy can be expressed.) The average heat in the system rises, more heat and more water in the atmosphere mean harder rain, bigger storms and deeper snow. Same place gets floods and droughts and the weather switches up unpredictably. All of that is a sign of global climate change. Welcome to the future.
Let's be clear here, we are reaching space only now because we chose to dedicate ourselves to a truly epic vision in 1960, then once we achieved that goal said "Okay, been there done that, got the t-shirt, what's next, Oh yes, bombing brown people." We got bored with boldly going where no man had gone before and chose instead to disco. Sure we had the space shuttle, but we traded in building cities in space for watching pretty pictures of places far far away (because it was easier and much cheaper.)
As for the great man mythos, its always been bullsh!7. Edwin Hubble, one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century was a "Professional Scientist" only at the very end. The thought that amateur science is either small or in any way limited belies a poor grasp of science. Today children are building public biolabs (there's an amazing one in New York right now) and they're doing cutting edge research. There are internet sites galore allowing the least informed of lay-people to participate in world changing discoveries. Ground breaking work in robotics, astronomy, physics, meteorology and climate study, ecology and biodiversity, biology and biochemistry, and genetic engineering are taking place in garages around the country and the world. By purchasing used and auctioned equipment you can build any one of several kinds of laboratories for only a few hundred dollars. Read this months Discover Magazine or go visit their site if you want your eyes opened. Advances in technology have made exploration more accessible and democratized the search for knowledge more than ever before. Some of the most profound work in biology today is being done in Cuba, because Cuba at least to date has escaped having its wild habitats destroyed. The scientists there work for almost nothing save the knowledge they're advancing the cause for preserving healthy oceans and forests. Big men and Big money do not necessarily make science (and yes is takes global resources to build a super collider or an international space station.)
As for space, the government had space under lock and key for decades, and even the technology to build rockets was classified, allowing commercial interests only the ability to manufacture unrecognizable parts for NASA. Opening up space to commercial interests is not some recent scientific innovation, its a long over due social one.
There are only two meaningful frames of reference. Human beings exist in the present and are given by their immediate futures (you have a very different immediate future if you are faced on one hand by a hungry grizzly bear vs. an attractive lover... your immediate future informs your thoughts and actions.) The problem is that your immediate future is flavored by where you happen to be looking, your frame of reference. The two common frames of reference are forward facing and backward facing. If you go into the future backward facing, trying to hang onto some past mythical glory, you will be oblivious to the opportunities of the moment, and worse continually trying to force the future into a straight-jacket called "Making it look like the past." A backward facing frame of reference is doomed to prove the past is better than the present because it will continually sabotage the future and all you are left with is a self fulfilling prophecy. The folks that have hijacked our country over the last 30 years are for the most part backward facing. In fact the future terrifies them. In the hopes or reliving a glorious past, or avoid a threatening future, they have robbed everyone of any real future at all.
That isn't to say that we are doomed. On the contrary, the future is coming ready or not, and we need to stop lying to ourselves and repeating those lies to our children. Never before have we been faced with greater challenge or opportunity. We stand at the threshold of infinite possibility, all that it takes to grasp an unbridled future is the integrity to confront what is failed, the courage to address that and the inspiration to invent what it is possible for being human. Blaming fools for being foolish is a wasted effort, instead let's choose people to lead us who have vision, dedication and proven track records of hewing out bold futures. Most of all let's fix our collective eyes on a future worth living in and hold our administrative leader to account, either applauded or feet over the flames. Oh, and for the love of all that's holy, let's do a quick smell check on our representatives and please throw out the ones that have spoiled.
There you go, let's patent the process of removing urine or fecal matter from the bottom of an infant, then sue every parent in the country to cough up a little loose change. Call it the the potty toll. Tell America, they can pay the potty toll or squeeze their representatives into cleaning up the toilet that the patent system is. Use the money collected to lobby the ass off of the Representatives responsible for the current wreck that is the Patent System.
That's a pork pie hat to you sir! ;-)
Ask to meet all their top executives of this cesspool, take them out on a rented yacht. Insure it to high hell. Take it off the coast of Mexico, and inform the local drug cartel that a bunch of wealthy gringos are meeting to figure out a way bomb them off the face of the earth, then over take their drug business. After the smoke, screaming and mutilation stop... go collect your insurance, pay off the boat owner, and pocket the remainder. Inform the U.S. justice system that Mexican Drug Lords have murdered American national. Let Karma play out and consider justice has been dispensed on all fronts. Building a better world one elimination at a time!
You do if you want to find more than 3 grams of collective brain tissue... Its a church of
I've been wondering if being able to see magnetic fields was a direct visual sensing or if something else wasn't inducing some perceptual experience either in the visual cortex or the optic nerve of Tesla. There have been experiments where audio signals have been induced along the long nerves of the arm and subjects report hearing a sound (the brain receives the nerve impulse, recognizes it as an audio signal and processes it as such. I recall someone patenting an invention for people with profound damage to the ear using this technique to provide some sense of hearing (of course surrounding yourself with a strong electromagnetic field would almost certainly have its down side.)
There are two things happening in human UV perception. There are the limits of the cones in the retina, then there is the filtering that happens in the lens and cornea. Its almost certainly arguable that protecting the retina against UV has survival value (because high energy light would almost certainly over time damage the retina in a longer lived species.) So the lenses in human beings stop UV, of course this also means that over time the damage by UV will be in the lenses.
Replacing failed lenses with new lenses that pass UV, would suddenly make that color available to the retina, and some people (of both sexes) have significant UV sensitivity. I would also suggest that if these people are younger, it would be highly advised that they wear UV protection when outside.
This is absolutely correct. When photographed in ultraviolet, many flowers have color ques for insects to lead them to nectar (and obviously pollen) and are therefore much brighter and more vividly patterned in UV than the pigments in paint which may or may not have very narrow spectral content outside the visual spectrum we normally perceive.
Ah... I see you are going for that "Abiguously Gay Duo" thing...
You silly git... because her wants to give it away after making 15,000 euros. What part of that isn't clear?
I'm sorry but the magnetic field surrounding an MRI would launch that drive at significantly more than lethal velocities and probably destroy the MRI as well. MRIs for clinical use operate at between 0.2 and 0.3 Teslas, more than 5,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. There are laboratory devices though, running up to 12 Tesla, generating fields in excess of a quarter a million times as powerful as the earth's. That drive would shoot through the room, through a couple victims, then through the wall, and then through a few more victims. They won't sue you, but their survivors will.
LOX + damn near anything... makes a hot pretty fire and after the dot clears from you vision you can be assured your drive has been slagged.
Patent litigator harm society and remove incentive for innovation?!!! That goes against everything I've ever heard about the patent process!!! Why would our government allow such a thing to be?
I would suggest that the way your brain works is a combination of the society you grew up in and the personal decisions you made along the way. Other cultures has wildly different takes on morality and what was or wasn't acceptable. The Mayan culture thought nothing of slaughtering human beings and there have been a number of cannibalistic precolumbian societies in the South Pacific. The fact that your morality is profoundly different than yours doesn't invalidate theirs.
An entire nation is moved at the atrocity of a sociopath killing a pretty little white girl. While at the same time we don't even give a second thought to carpet bombing a capital city killing hundreds of innocent children in the name of some empty vendetta perpetrated by a rogue politician. Tell me that the morality of that behavior isn't broken.
The power of Christianity is in the message of Christ, that the power of embracing, accepting, forgiving and loving all people, is transformational. That is it the highest expression of whatever we mean by the Human Spirit. That something exists that is larger than the limited expression of a singular "I" and that the nature of what I am is a being, wrapped in a human identity. Religion speaks to the being part of us. The human part tries to understand the rest with science.
Actually we had a really sweet spot between 1972 and 1982, when most of the folks running around were still present to the disaster that Viet Nam was, but our first Alzheimer Patient decided he didn't feel like a man unless he was waging war on something, so we invaded 3 dogs and a wino on a tiny island in the Caribbean. Its pretty much been assholes and foxholes ever since.
Okay if we're going to tell the truth, let's tell all of it. The nearly exclusive source of radical Islam is Saudi Arabia. For the last several decades their 20 and 30 somethings have been getting religious degrees in ultra-orthodox schools of Muslim theology and using the trillions of petro-dollars supplied to them by the men in charge of Saudi Arabia to finance schools all over the world to spread their beliefs. Starting with, this world isn't large enough for Muslims and anybody else. We gave them trillions for their oil, which they invested in our weapons (which they gladly turn against us.) We used them as a blunt instrument to bludgeon the USSR then failed to clean up afterwards (see or read about Charlie's War) and now we are haunted by monsters and subsequent disasters of our own making.
The vast majority of Muslims in the world are good neighbors, peaceful and have no desire to do anyone a moments grief. We need to look at radical religious orthodoxies everywhere (including the Christian and Quasi-Christian knuckleheads in the U.S. and crazed Jewish sects in Israel.) Then begin dismantling them. They are one of the greatest threats to peace and a viable future for all people in the 21rst century. Also, America has always claimed to support a two state solution for the Middle-East, and when the time came to put up or shut up, as Palestine applied for statehood at the U.N. The U.S. folded like a house of cards to appease Jewish interests in America and Israel. The current situation is nothing better than slow motion genocide, further destabilizing the area and generating more anti-U.S. sentiment (its hard not to hate the U.S. when our name is on most of the munitions killing people) and we should be deeply ashamed for supporting it in any way. It is high time we all figured out how to get along with one another and get on with the business of living.
Again and again, it is made clearer by the day. Government must provide a healthy environment in which freedom, enterprise, and the liberty of all people may flourish. To do so, it must be free of influence from any source but people themselves. We need to implement separation between church and state, between corporation and state and between organized affiliation and state. Additionally, we need to ensure that our representatives, are able to run without the burden of excessive campaign cost. Campaigning should have free media access, and a limited budget (though people should be free to volunteer to their hearts delight.) By eliminating the barrier of campaign financing, we free potential legislators from being beholden to a contributor, and we open up the field to any potential candidates, not just the ones who are best at selling themselves to the highest bidder. Another benefit, is that we begin to take campaigning out of the realm of sound bites and Wallstreet marketing and place it back in the realm of two or more people explaining what they have to offer the American people.
Of course there are hundreds of individual issues to be addressed, from reinstating checks and balances, habeus corpus, the Geneva Convention, a free and independent media (that is able and willing to have public conversations about the issues of the day, and no "The Daily" show doesn't count!) to ensuring the Bill of Rights is maintained, enforced and expanded to include new technology as it arrives and that the drive to profit doesn't exceed the drive for human dignity and compassion.
Most of all, its time to address this century and its needs, stop living in the last century. Its time to address the critical threats to human existence, and civilization, and mindless dogma and magical beliefs will simply not carry the day.
Exactly! There are huge breakthroughs happening in the understanding of the neural wiring and structural compartmentalization brains and their constituent neural systems. For instance we've been able to identify dozens of visual subsystems that work together to produce the seamless experience called vision. Its only when you see something that works against the normal visual design (an optical illusion) that one or more subsystems become consciously apparent.
What call and experience as consciousness is a multitude of neural systems working in concert to provide us with a workable experience of reality. How long before synthetic minds have sufficient power and performance to have similar experience with comparable intelligence. Many people at the cut edge of the field would tell you sooner than later.
And tell me what happens when someone finally reduces the size of robots to molecular machines and we can fabricate anything from a car to a steak from raw atomic stock. Then you can manufacture anything anywhere, and the important thing now becomes the molecular recipe for the Lexus, not the Lexus itself. Those anyone can have for the cost of the raw atoms and the electricity required to assemble them. What does that do to the economy? Everything is now priced be how long it takes to make it and some arbitrary value associated with fashion of social desire.