[extropy-chat] Sterling, Wired, and the Singularity

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "Vinge put it this way: "For me, the superhumanity is the essence of
> the Singularity. Without that, we would get a glut of tech-nical
> riches, never properly absorbed." Remove the magic threat of
> artificial intelligence from Vinge's prognostication, and you get a
> brilliant description of the present day: a glut of technical riches,
> never properly absorbed. Instead of spiritual supercomputers for
> brains, we've got a spam-choked Internet."
> 
> yes, the internet is sooooo 1999. Hardly.

Yeah. While he has a point that a lot of our exponents are being wasted
on non-productive activity like spam, viruses/worms, bloatware, etc.
there are still plenty of areas of advancement. My new cellular Treo
600 smartphone runs a processor many times more powerful than my first
desktop PC (that was a TI-99), has 8 times more memory than my first
office PC (386/4MRAM) had (with four times more expandability, and
there is far more software available for its Palm5 OS than was
available for my Windows 3.1 / 386mhz system in 1992. Beyond that the
Treo fits in my shirt pocket, and was of indispensable use in the past
week, as I was left flying the company solo up here.

I'm not concerned about old operating systems dying off from bloat. New
ones like Palm, QNX, and others will always crop up to supplant them.
(I'm predicting that Palm will be the Microsoft of this decade).

I'm incredibly happy with this little tool, and am looking forward to
the day when I can have its decendant embedded in my brain, which I'm
now predicting will happen within this decade.

> 
> "The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but
> that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an
> astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the
> edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate
> destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied,
> squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of
> progress and no sense of direction. "
> 
> Where is this guy living, camp xray?

Watts?  Elko, Nevada?  Guy needs to wake up and smell the gigaflops.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Chairman, Free Town Land Development
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                         -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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