Posted on 05/26/2006 8:08:09 AM PDT by Neville72
The rate of technological progress is about to shift into high gear, some futurists say. Are you ready to take advantage of the business opportunities?
If Ray Kurzweil is right, the business landscape - indeed, the entire human race - is about to be transformed beyond all recognition.
Kurzweil is a renowned computer scientist and inventor (he built the first flatbed scanner). And no less a figure than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has called Kurzweil the greatest thinker on artificial intelligence alive today. So when he talks, it's worth paying attention.
Here's the question Kurzweil is asking these days: What if the exponential growth shown in Moore's Law applies not just to etching transistors in silicon chips, but to all of human progress and innovation?
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
And FreeRepublic will be ruined, full of Bushbots exchanging talking points, or worse Gorebots continually signing up for the zot.
Actually it started off pretty rude with the whole "Luddite" thing. But thanks for the assist. It's amazing how many people think that because you don't buy into every prediction of future technology that means you fear it. I work in tech, I like tech, some days I even love tech, but I'm also a skeptical person by nature and know the difficulties of developing new tech well enough to know that just because somebody says it's going to happen doesn't mean it's actually going to happen.
"I believe the world is already reaching the point where it is changing faster than human beings can psycologically cope with it. We are in for interesting times."
Agreed. I didn't read the entire article and haven't read all the comments here, but so far people are overlooking one rather large problem. Once machines can do everything better than people, what is it, exactly, that people will do? And how can we be sure that the machines will even want to keep us around, ultimately?
"And FreeRepublic will be ruined, full of Bushbots exchanging talking points, or worse Gorebots continually signing up for the zot."
True. Sometimes I feel like we're already half way there.
I skipped the luddite comment. Being that we are all communicating over the internet the term just really doesn't apply. I figured it was meant as a joke.
bump for the singularity
To suggest human immortality or anything near it is folly. The nature of pollution might change as we shift from fossil fuels to nuclear power. Human nature will never change, and that is the biggest cause of hunger and poverty -- look at Zimbabwe, for example.
Actually, I see something similar happening now. Technology is becoming simpler and simpler. So much so that you don't need to know very much for it to function. However, to build, design and make new things, that's where the brain power will be needed. You will still need need scientists and engineers to come up with things, but fewer will be needed for any given concept. But with the diversity of technology, more will be required to cover an ever expanding scope of concepts. It may indicate a move to a technocracy, where those with the knowledge of how to come up with new things will be in a separate class, maybe even have more power, than the consumers of the latest technology. It will mean a bigger gap between the skilled and unskilled.
And a cheeseburger will cost $1,646,318,920,731,950,000,000 in the future.
The problem is that the Federal Reserve will have inflated the currency much more than your 5% interest rate.
It's called negative real interest rates, and is responsible for an America that no longer saves.
BUMP
"Is that the same Dr Robert Prehoda that was in the crowd in the late 60s predicting life expectancy would be over 100 today?"
Don't know. But from the looks of things, he would have been pretty accurate.
No from the looks of things that group blew it outright. This is one of the things that irritates me the most about futurists (specifically the "huge advance" futurists, the doom and gloomers are a completely different breed of idiot), with their outlandish claims they make our actually good progress look minimal. The projections from these futurists would have required the average life expectancy to grow at around 18 months every year inbetween when they made the projections and the year 2000 when they were expecting people to regularly live to 100 or even 120 (remember this is AVERAGE life expectancy they were talking about, not a few exceptional people). Now in the intervening years medical science has improved our life expectancy by a little over 6 months every year, which is a pretty phenomenal advancement of technology. But thanks to the hair brained futurists basically making numbers up out of thin air the amazing progress we've made pales in comparison with what we were told to expect.
One of the major manifestations of the human condition is our expectation that anything easy to obtain and/or operate should be "free."
I remember reading somewhere that people who live to the age of 70 have a pretty good chance of living well into their 80s -- mainly because they've passed the points in their lives where they'd be most susceptible to the things that tend to kill people off at younger ages (accidents, disease, etc.). A person who is genetically "programmed" to have a heart attack will usually get it before they reach the age of 70.
Is this what you're looking for?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.jpg
Early stages of life is a big part of it. But also better diagnostic tools catching problems earlier helps. As with any machine the earlier you find the problem the easier it is to fix, and that's big in medicine because because as medical problems get bigger the fix tends to get more invasive and have more potential side effects and occasionally even do damage that shortens your life (just not as much as whatever they're trying to cure).
That's right. And at some point even if you manage to cure every known ailment, people are still going to die of "old age" -- and it ain't going to be at an average age of 120, either.
Counterexample: Linux and open source software in general. The money will be in adapting tools to specific purposes, not selling copies of tools which can be duplicated essentially for free.
I think eventually they will be able to cure old age. They're starting to figure out what happens in old age, why the celular reproductions drop in quality eventually leading to various health problems. That will lead to being able to make it stop. But I picture that as a long way off, like 20 years after they cure the hardest form of cancer.
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