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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Sniffing Extropia

Libertopia smells like corpses and cyberspace smells like burning coal. It's "The Future" ...take a good whiff!

4 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I'm feeling I might have to retract my earlier comments about the Accelerating Change hype dying out. Just out of curiousity I went through the comments section of an article about the death of Moore's Law and say that 90% of the comments were rabidly in denial of it. People seem to be convinced that something that has stopped dead is in fact still moving. And they're convinced that technologies that aren't even in early stage development will be in the stores by Christmas.

So I'm coming around to your point about the Singularity Kool Aid. There's obviously a lot of people out there who don't want to let it go. I still think many of them will eventually but it's definitely doubleplus ungood.

jimf said...

> So I'm coming around to your point about the Singularity Kool Aid.
> There's obviously a lot of people out there who don't want to let
> it go. I still think many of them will eventually but it's definitely
> doubleplus ungood.

I no longer see the "Singularity Kool Aid" as an independent phenomenon.

I see as just another head of the hydra that also contains, for example,
Scientology and Mormonism, or (in earlier days) Objectivism and
Marxism (is that muffled screaming I hear from the Ayn Rand Institute
that somebody somewhere mentioned the two in the same sentence? ;-> ).

It's another feel-good belief system that dulls the fear of death,
promises untold rewards in a future existence, and (very conveniently)
provides a lever for power-seekers and power-holders to control
the kool-aid guzzling rubes.

It worked for me, for a little while. Seemed so "scientific", you
know.

(Ask Christopher Hitchens or Michael Shermer about the odds of this sort of
thing going away anytime soon.)

jimf said...

> Just out of curiousity I went through the comments section of
> an article about the death of Moore's Law. . .

Which article? This one, from this past Monday, perchance?
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/222704/death_of_moores_law_will_cause_economic_crisis.html

(I have Kaku's new book, but I haven't gotten around to reading
it yet.)

jimf said...

> Was it this one. . .?

Ah, more likely the Salon article referenced there.

http://www.salon.com/technology/computers/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/03/19/moores_law_ends_excerpt