For whatever reason over the last couple months I find myself obsessed the future. Both short term and long term and not necessarily my own future. I catch my thoughts drifting off thinking about the physical and biological limits of human beings and our seemingly uncanny ability to shatter those limits.
Here are of few of those limits
No claws? Psssft whatevs I'll make spear and it's going to be awesome.
No Wings? No worries, ma homeboys O-Dub and Wil-Slice Wright gots some flying contraption up in there.
That moon thing? Been there, I'm pretty over it.
Communicating to everyone anytime? Yeah I twitter on the iphone when I poop.
Besides the limitations of our biology the human brain is this amazing product of nature, which seems to be driven towards constant self-improvement. Every year new incredible world records are broken and we seem to push the bar further. Every year the quarks and stars make more sense to us. What allot of people don't understand is that these things aren’t just happening gradually overtime, but in some cases, these changes that are happening exponentially. Quicker and more frequent.
Soooo blah blah fucking blah, I've been reading up on stuff like this allot recently. Anyway I've stumbled upon the work of
Ray Kurzweil. (Which makes perfect sense.) This dude is an inventor and a futurist who is very much involved in the study of progress. You maybe remember him from such inventions as "
text to speech" and "
speech recognition". He's also Google and Microsoft's goto guy for opinions on whether or not their products are good for mankind. Anyways his work is making allot of waves and one of his most interesting concepts is something which could affect my generation within our lifetime. Technological Singularity.
"So what the fuck is techmo-gumbeldy goo or what ever the fuck u just said?"
Technological Singularity is more or less the sum total of progress as we know it. We need to start with the some of the first inventions/discoveries like fire, simple stone tools, cooking and farming. These
innovations were hundreds to thousands of years apart from each other. With each successful innovation, the next innovation is discovered much closer than the previous. These changes in thought are called
paradigm shifts, this is shit like finding out we orbit the sun, that the earth is round and matter is made of quarks and atoms.
We are coming to a point in our near future where technology will advance to a point where these changes in common sense will happen on a daily basis and beyond.
WTF?? Yeah that’s allot to process. It seems pretty far fetched, but there are some pretty simple trends and numbers behind it.
Moore's Law is a good jump off point. Gordon Moore is one of the father of Intel circa 1968 and surmised that every two years the amount of transistors on an integrated circuit would double.
Hence a doubling in computer power every 2 years. So bro has kicked ass and it's been true so far. Computers get exponentially more powerful. Current computers will max out their capacity by 2020, but with developments of
quantum computers and
DNA computers, there really is no true limit. Even now I can jump on my blackberry, send a pic of my drunk self at bar to my cousin in Texas within seconds. During the 2010 Gold medal hockey game Canadians were all connected by web, phone and television within .5 seconds of each goal or drunk text.
This is just the beginning as we speak; energy companies trying to harness fusion, nano- machines which we will combine to our biology are
being produced, new kinds of computers are being designed and low-earth orbit
solar energy plants are being discussed. I'm really going to cut this all here as I could ramble on about this shit much longer, but take it or leave it, the future is going render our world so connected and different. It's going to be a Brave New World please make sure you are wearing
pants when it arrives.
