The Singularity:Technologies To Change the World
Jun 25, 2011 19:50:07 GMT -5
Post by PrisonerOfHope on Jun 25, 2011 19:50:07 GMT -5
avatar
The Singularity: Five Technologies That Will Change the World (and One That Won't)
Posted 06/21/2011 at 5:19pm | by David Gerrold
Imagine a printer that operates in three dimensions, building up solid objects a layer at a time. Such printers exist and are used for making prototypes and models. Depending on what kind of material can be layered and the resolution of the printer, it might be possible to print up objects as mundane as toasters or as rare as star sapphires. (We might not have to wait for Robby the Robot to crystallize the gems.)
But even more important, we’re on the threshold of being able to fabricate living tissue. Researchers have already demonstrated that they can print living cells onto a collagen framework to create specific tissues and even whole functioning organs. We might eventually be able to grow our own replacement organs in the lab—skin, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, ears, hands, feet, arms, legs—and not have to wait for some unfortunate motorcyclist to lose an encounter with an SUV. We could see this happening within ten years. Could we grow whole new bodies…? We won’t know until we get there, but once upon a time a heart transplant was unthinkable too.
Beyond that, being able to print living tissue could revolutionize agriculture. Why breed a whole cow when you can grow a steak in a bio-fab factory? Once the process is perfected and the product is approved safe for human consumption, a bio-engineered filet could be cheaper, safer, and healthier than meat produced the old-fashioned way. And a lot more humane. But why stop at steak? We could grow any cut of meat we wanted, and probably far more economically than raising a whole animal. Want some fresh dolphin or whale meat? Elephant? Panda? (Even cannibals might be able to legally … never mind.)
Of course, we’d still maintain herds of all kinds for genetic diversity, but we wouldn’t need to destroy the rain forests of the world to create more pasture for more cattle to feed the world’s growing appetite for meat. This one is a no-brainer. It’s not just a growth industry, it’s a growth industry. As the world’s population continues to grow, factory farms may be our only hope for avoiding a food crisis. We might see this before 2020.
Universal Smart-Tech
internet st
Internet Protocol Version 6 is already here. We’re switching over now. Prior to IPV6, internet addresses were limited to 32 bits. Under IPV6, internet addresses are 128 bits. This means that there are now 2128 possible internet addresses (340 undecillion), or in more understandable terms “umpty hella-gazillion”—enough so that every living human being on the planet could have 5*1028 separate and specific domains.
What this means in practice is that every thing on the planet worth anything at all, manufactured, grown, discovered, studied, observed, or born, can have its own web address and associated locater-chip. Can’t find your car keys? Just ask your phone where they are. Want to know where your steak came from, what lab it was grown in, what nutrients were in the tank, and who inspected it? That’s available too, ask your phone.
Your car will be able to drive itself so you can talk on the phone, read a book, or watch TV—it will converse with the vehicles around it, informing them when it needs to change lanes, and all the cars will adjust to maintain safe distances. Want to know where your teenager is at 12:30am? You’ll be able to track his location easily—and if he’s out street-racing, you’ll have evidence of that too.
Want to know how much cash is in your wallet? Ask your phone. Why is there a twenty missing? Your phone will tell you that one of the twenties was removed from your wallet while you were in the shower and is currently in the pocket of your sixteen year-old son. Want him to come home now? Tell the car to bring him home safely.
Had your purse stolen? Ask your phone to alert the police. The thief will be picked up momentarily. Had your car stolen and taken to a chop shop? The police will know where every single piece of it went.
Just bought insurance and need to inventory your physical property for a rate adjustment? Ask your phone. You can print out a list of everything you own, when you bought it, how much you paid, what it’s worth now, and what the replacement cost would be in case of fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, or asteroid impact.
Can’t find your phone? Ask the refrigerator.
But wait, it gets better. Humans will be chipped too, just like dogs, cats, and cattle. Can’t remember the name of that little restaurant you liked in New York? No problem, your personal life history is stored in the cloud. We can remember it for you wholesale. Sign up for Apple’s iMemory service.
Catching rapists, muggers, thieves, and murderers will be a lot easier. The cloud will maintain a location-tracking service of everyone, chipped or not. There will be cameras everywhere. Court trials will have a whole new level of evidentiary standards.
Here’s how The Singularity will happen.
time 2045
There’s this thing called “emergent behavior.” It means that complex patterns and events can arise out of relatively simple interactions. One ant is one ant, but a whole colony of ants behaves like a gigantic multi-cellular organism—that’s emergent behavior. One car slows down at a curve in the highway at five in the morning, it’s one car—but twelve hours later, when there are hundreds of cars on the same highway, you get a standing wave in the traffic flow, a wave that actually travels backward from the source—that’s emergent behavior. One person goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet, no problem—but in the early days of television, when I Love Lucy broke for a commercial and a million New Yorkers all went to the bathroom all at the same time, the reservoir levels visibly lowered—that’s emergent behavior.
When the whole world is linked in a massive network of chairs and trash cans and lawn mowers and refrigerators and cars and streetlights and smartphones and supermarket packages and pants and skirts and underwear and even shoes and socks (no more lost socks?!)—when the whole world is totally immersed in a global web of interconnections, when even dollar bills are monitored for their travels through the economy, there will be emergent behavior.
All of these separate chips will have software-specific functions. Your shirts will tell the wash machine how they want to be washed. Your frozen dinner will tell the microwave how long it needs to be cooked. Your shoes will tell you when they need to be re-soled. Your internal monitors will warn you of diabetes and gout and heart disease. The menu at the restaurant will advise you on your healthiest choices.
All of this data—not just yours, everyone’s—will get sucked into the cloud, massaged, shared, digested, fiddled and diddled, jiggled and juggled, sorted and ported, creating the most accurate real-time census possible. Trends of all kinds—social, political, economic, cultural, biological—will be recognized first by the cloud and responded to even before humans are aware. The buying habits of millions will tell industry just how many boxes of Cheerios to produce and how many Kinects to manufacture. A super-intelligent cloud will advise producers whether or not it’s cost-effective to produce. Before you go shopping for a car or a house or even a new TV, your phone will let you know if you can really afford it. And even more personal, your health-care will be automatically triaged based on the availability of doctors and based on your previous record of cooperation with preventive medicine.
The super-intelligent cloud won’t have consciousness as we understand it. But if Marvin Minsky’s theory (Society Of Mind, by Marvin Minsky) is correct—that sentience occurs as a product of multiple interrelated subroutines—then eventually the super-intelligent cloud will begin to function not just as a monitor of all the data flowing through it, but as a mentor as well.
The Singularity—as I see it—will inherit all the best and all the worst traits of the species that produces it. It will come into existence as an assemblage of software mechanisms designed to serve our fundamental wants and needs, but it will evolve. And because the essential goal of life is to survive, it will most likely evolve into a symbiotic consciousness with humanity. And if that happens, then it will have a built-in bias to keep us functioning at our best.
We’ll see. It will happen in our lifetimes.
Rest of article at URL:
rr-bb.com/showthread.php?162867-The-Singularity
The Singularity: Five Technologies That Will Change the World (and One That Won't)
Posted 06/21/2011 at 5:19pm | by David Gerrold
Imagine a printer that operates in three dimensions, building up solid objects a layer at a time. Such printers exist and are used for making prototypes and models. Depending on what kind of material can be layered and the resolution of the printer, it might be possible to print up objects as mundane as toasters or as rare as star sapphires. (We might not have to wait for Robby the Robot to crystallize the gems.)
But even more important, we’re on the threshold of being able to fabricate living tissue. Researchers have already demonstrated that they can print living cells onto a collagen framework to create specific tissues and even whole functioning organs. We might eventually be able to grow our own replacement organs in the lab—skin, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, ears, hands, feet, arms, legs—and not have to wait for some unfortunate motorcyclist to lose an encounter with an SUV. We could see this happening within ten years. Could we grow whole new bodies…? We won’t know until we get there, but once upon a time a heart transplant was unthinkable too.
Beyond that, being able to print living tissue could revolutionize agriculture. Why breed a whole cow when you can grow a steak in a bio-fab factory? Once the process is perfected and the product is approved safe for human consumption, a bio-engineered filet could be cheaper, safer, and healthier than meat produced the old-fashioned way. And a lot more humane. But why stop at steak? We could grow any cut of meat we wanted, and probably far more economically than raising a whole animal. Want some fresh dolphin or whale meat? Elephant? Panda? (Even cannibals might be able to legally … never mind.)
Of course, we’d still maintain herds of all kinds for genetic diversity, but we wouldn’t need to destroy the rain forests of the world to create more pasture for more cattle to feed the world’s growing appetite for meat. This one is a no-brainer. It’s not just a growth industry, it’s a growth industry. As the world’s population continues to grow, factory farms may be our only hope for avoiding a food crisis. We might see this before 2020.
Universal Smart-Tech
internet st
Internet Protocol Version 6 is already here. We’re switching over now. Prior to IPV6, internet addresses were limited to 32 bits. Under IPV6, internet addresses are 128 bits. This means that there are now 2128 possible internet addresses (340 undecillion), or in more understandable terms “umpty hella-gazillion”—enough so that every living human being on the planet could have 5*1028 separate and specific domains.
What this means in practice is that every thing on the planet worth anything at all, manufactured, grown, discovered, studied, observed, or born, can have its own web address and associated locater-chip. Can’t find your car keys? Just ask your phone where they are. Want to know where your steak came from, what lab it was grown in, what nutrients were in the tank, and who inspected it? That’s available too, ask your phone.
Your car will be able to drive itself so you can talk on the phone, read a book, or watch TV—it will converse with the vehicles around it, informing them when it needs to change lanes, and all the cars will adjust to maintain safe distances. Want to know where your teenager is at 12:30am? You’ll be able to track his location easily—and if he’s out street-racing, you’ll have evidence of that too.
Want to know how much cash is in your wallet? Ask your phone. Why is there a twenty missing? Your phone will tell you that one of the twenties was removed from your wallet while you were in the shower and is currently in the pocket of your sixteen year-old son. Want him to come home now? Tell the car to bring him home safely.
Had your purse stolen? Ask your phone to alert the police. The thief will be picked up momentarily. Had your car stolen and taken to a chop shop? The police will know where every single piece of it went.
Just bought insurance and need to inventory your physical property for a rate adjustment? Ask your phone. You can print out a list of everything you own, when you bought it, how much you paid, what it’s worth now, and what the replacement cost would be in case of fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, or asteroid impact.
Can’t find your phone? Ask the refrigerator.
But wait, it gets better. Humans will be chipped too, just like dogs, cats, and cattle. Can’t remember the name of that little restaurant you liked in New York? No problem, your personal life history is stored in the cloud. We can remember it for you wholesale. Sign up for Apple’s iMemory service.
Catching rapists, muggers, thieves, and murderers will be a lot easier. The cloud will maintain a location-tracking service of everyone, chipped or not. There will be cameras everywhere. Court trials will have a whole new level of evidentiary standards.
Here’s how The Singularity will happen.
time 2045
There’s this thing called “emergent behavior.” It means that complex patterns and events can arise out of relatively simple interactions. One ant is one ant, but a whole colony of ants behaves like a gigantic multi-cellular organism—that’s emergent behavior. One car slows down at a curve in the highway at five in the morning, it’s one car—but twelve hours later, when there are hundreds of cars on the same highway, you get a standing wave in the traffic flow, a wave that actually travels backward from the source—that’s emergent behavior. One person goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet, no problem—but in the early days of television, when I Love Lucy broke for a commercial and a million New Yorkers all went to the bathroom all at the same time, the reservoir levels visibly lowered—that’s emergent behavior.
When the whole world is linked in a massive network of chairs and trash cans and lawn mowers and refrigerators and cars and streetlights and smartphones and supermarket packages and pants and skirts and underwear and even shoes and socks (no more lost socks?!)—when the whole world is totally immersed in a global web of interconnections, when even dollar bills are monitored for their travels through the economy, there will be emergent behavior.
All of these separate chips will have software-specific functions. Your shirts will tell the wash machine how they want to be washed. Your frozen dinner will tell the microwave how long it needs to be cooked. Your shoes will tell you when they need to be re-soled. Your internal monitors will warn you of diabetes and gout and heart disease. The menu at the restaurant will advise you on your healthiest choices.
All of this data—not just yours, everyone’s—will get sucked into the cloud, massaged, shared, digested, fiddled and diddled, jiggled and juggled, sorted and ported, creating the most accurate real-time census possible. Trends of all kinds—social, political, economic, cultural, biological—will be recognized first by the cloud and responded to even before humans are aware. The buying habits of millions will tell industry just how many boxes of Cheerios to produce and how many Kinects to manufacture. A super-intelligent cloud will advise producers whether or not it’s cost-effective to produce. Before you go shopping for a car or a house or even a new TV, your phone will let you know if you can really afford it. And even more personal, your health-care will be automatically triaged based on the availability of doctors and based on your previous record of cooperation with preventive medicine.
The super-intelligent cloud won’t have consciousness as we understand it. But if Marvin Minsky’s theory (Society Of Mind, by Marvin Minsky) is correct—that sentience occurs as a product of multiple interrelated subroutines—then eventually the super-intelligent cloud will begin to function not just as a monitor of all the data flowing through it, but as a mentor as well.
The Singularity—as I see it—will inherit all the best and all the worst traits of the species that produces it. It will come into existence as an assemblage of software mechanisms designed to serve our fundamental wants and needs, but it will evolve. And because the essential goal of life is to survive, it will most likely evolve into a symbiotic consciousness with humanity. And if that happens, then it will have a built-in bias to keep us functioning at our best.
We’ll see. It will happen in our lifetimes.
Rest of article at URL:
rr-bb.com/showthread.php?162867-The-Singularity