Monday, October 31, 2005

How far away is the future?

Google employee: "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI."

Sun says: "Sun has been quietly applying resources toward building what it considers to be the most versatile and scalable MMOG middleware ever conceived. With the imaginative working title of Sun Gaming Server, the first SDK's will be delivered for free to developers in the first half of 2006."

Quotes from here.

The biggest businesses in the world are starting to think like us. The technophile meme is now entering the mainstream.

My 40th birthday party will be in zero gravity.

2 comments:

Patrick said...

I understand you follow the singularity meme a bit, if you listen to the noted transhumanists like Kurzwiel or Yudkowsky the emergence of a total phase transition in interaction between entities will happen between 2015 and 2025. Torpey's latest blog post suggests this century will be domintated by games, the internet and an X factor. That X factor is the emergence of greater than human intelligence, according to transhumanists/singularitarians. It might take quantum computing to crack the pattern recognition problem, it might take nanotransistor fueled brute force algorithms, but before too long big things are gonna happen, perhaps the biggest in the in the history of the universe.

I want to have my 40th birthday party in completely different physics.

Craig Perko said...

While I do believe there is something to the singularity theory and the transhumanists, I don't think the change is going to be as fast as they want it to be. 99% of humity will resist that kind of change, and even the most fantastically cool technologies still require less fantastic people to dig up resources, refine them, ship them to the factory, and distribute them. Not counting, of course, all the miscellaneous other requirements people have, such as food and shelter.

A brilliant breakthrough would be spectacular, but it'll take a generation to catch on...

WITH THE EXCEPTION of biomed. Biomed can cause transhumanism and/or singularity TOMORROW.

But it's unlikely to due to money and law issues.