Author: Keith Evans
Date: 19:28:11 10/17/03
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This will take a little while to read. Sounds like it may have been partly inspired by "Disappearing through the Skylight." It is amazing how rapidly technology has been developing. Just take a look at the lowly cellphone. If I remember correctly they were still fairly rare 10 years ago. (Remember pagers?) Now you have cellphones with Arm9 or better processors which can run downloaded code, GPS that works indoors, links to the internet, high resolution cameras, color TFT displays, fit in the little coin pocket of your jeans,... Extropians could view cellphones as the sensory organs of the net. But if you search on the web then you can also find things like this that argue that the singularity has already occurred, and that we're living in an "ancester simulation." Of course if enough people start to believe that theory, then they might turn away from technology towards spirituality and then the singularity won't happen. Or perhaps enough people believe the Kurzweil argument and it disgusts them. They form Earth First like groups and start commiting terrorist acts against those few corporations that are vital to the expontential technology curve. Perhaps you remember when a factory in Japan had a problem and all of the sudden chip prices shot up because the die couldn't be packaged. There are some weaks links in the chain - poor biodiversity. And there's the Kurt Vonnegut argument that humans are merely vessels for virii and bacteria. They evolve far more quickly than we do. If technology starts to pose a serious threat to them then ??? These are just some ideas off the top of my head. My point is that nobody can predict the future. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." 1. faster, faster, faster, bigger, bigger, bigger 2. ??? 3. sentient AI
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