I've edited and elaborated a post from a couple of days ago
The Futurological Fetish. If you ask me, it's the post I'm proudest of since last month's Geo-Engineering squabbles, which is not to say it will necessarily strike anyone's fancy, especially compared to posts in which I tear my hair out interminably and unoriginally about the likely looming low-turnout of Dems in the mid-terms. Blogging is weird.
The recent past of The Future. From a book review
ReplyDeletefound on a blog.
http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2010/08/well-have-ai-in-sky-when-we-die-part-1.html
http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2010/08/well-have-ai-in-sky-when-we-die-part-2.html
---------------------------------
As I read computer scientist Gregory J. E. Rawlins's
book _Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer
Technology_ (MIT Press, 1997) I often had the feeling
that I had been transported into the past, the past of
the 1939 World's Fair, the past of the Jetsons.
Rawlins plays the prophet with such gee-whiz gusto, in fact,
that I'm still not sure he isn't kidding. . .
Computers "twenty years from now will be vastly different...
and in 20 years they'll be as cheap as paper clips"
"[I]n the far future - which in the computer world means
one or two decades - we may make computers from light beams.
Sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? Well, in 1990
AT&T Bell Laboratories built one".
"In forty years, something bee-sized may carry more memory
and computing power than all today's computers put together"
"[O]ne day, what we call a computer may be something grown
in a vat that will clamber out clothed in flesh"
"[B]y 2045 you could have 8500 million 1997 dollars worth
of machine – four times the power of the entire world's
supply of supercomputers in 1997 - all in your designer
sunglasses".
I suppose there's no harm in this sort of thing, but. . .
you can find equally solid predictions for a lot less in the
checkout lane at your supermarket. . .
[In a] patronizing tone. . ., Rawlins is more interested in dazzling
than in explaining. _Slaves of the Machine_ is more like
an evangelical tract, full of promises and threats, than science writing.
(But I may be drawing a nonexistent distinction there.)
One of Rawlins's pronouncements, though, caught my fancy:
"Today, our fastest most complex computer, armed with our
most sophisticated software, is about as complex as a flatworm". . .
[W]e have in our studio a state-of-the-art supercomputer,
courtesy of BFD Technologies, which I shall proceed to split
down the middle with this fire axe. In the course of our program
today we'll return to see if this complex marvel of human ingenuity
can, like a flatworm, regenerate itself into **two complete
supercomputers**, each with the memory and software of the original
computer already installed! . . .
There's no reason why the public must pay the AI cult to
build whatever its members want while promising something else. . .
And on that somber note, [l]et's take one last look at our
computer flatworm experiment.... No, it appears that the
sundered parts of our BFD supercomputer have not regenerated
themselves. BFD promises us, however, that this problem will
be corrected in the next version of the operating system, which
will be released very soon.