As metrics go, we’re this epoch’s fad. We were a great metric once. Now we’re fading, yet the prospect magnitude of that fade can be so nonlinear that people have no idea. None. Even in the scope of our species temporal reference points, it’s outrageous change. And that’s only in the last handful of decades. I love the thought experiment…
As metrics go, we’re this epoch’s fad. We were a great metric once. Now we’re fading, yet the prospect magnitude of that fade can be so nonlinear that people have no idea. None. Even in the scope of our species temporal reference points, it’s outrageous change. And that’s only in the last handful of decades. I love the thought experiment in which you get to be a time traveler and so you go back in time to 1941 and give the German high command a DVD and tell them that every conceivable thing they need to know about how their history will unfold is on this one disc. It’s got some really bad news for them, but if they want to take the trouble to decipher it then they can prevail. Their top scientists won’t be able to decipher the little pits in any discernible way. Even if you break down and give them a cheat sheet and tell them it represents binary information to express something called a pixel which can contain 256 discrete colors, and that forms in a ray of 9000 x 1600 pixels in one frame of information, then they have the work cut out for them. Oh, and it flashes by at 24 to 30 frames per second. Oh, and in 50 years, the device that can read this will contain a small computer chip a data or compression algorithm, and a laser, and it will all cost about 60 bucks. oh and any seven-year-old can run it. Their opening question might be, “what’s a laser?”. my point is these tremendous advancements of only happened in the scope of our species over the scope of a couple of decades. Now we’re going to amp up our intelligence by orders of magnitude. That gives us a lot of unforeseen room to run. All of this will quickly transcend our imaginations, so if we only imagine things within the paradigm of what we conceptualize as limiting, then we’re not going to catch the prospects that yes, a machine can become as evolved as an organic being. It would be a bit like fully conceptualizing, the implications of a holographic being. We have no frame of reference for that except Star Trek. And those stories don’t really consider nonlinear combinatorial plot arcs. But in those imaginary universes, I would think that highly nonlinear developments are happening there all the time as well. Indeed, the Germans might think the DVDs are fantastical. But we don’t have the heart to tell them that we consider those ancient technologies. We’ve moved on in a new century that embraces the cloud, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And even those are so last decade. Truthfully, those most visionary Germans won’t be able to get their minds around this stuff, and neither can we, now.
As metrics go, we’re this epoch’s fad. We were a great metric once. Now we’re fading, yet the prospect magnitude of that fade can be so nonlinear that people have no idea. None. Even in the scope of our species temporal reference points, it’s outrageous change. And that’s only in the last handful of decades. I love the thought experiment in which you get to be a time traveler and so you go back in time to 1941 and give the German high command a DVD and tell them that every conceivable thing they need to know about how their history will unfold is on this one disc. It’s got some really bad news for them, but if they want to take the trouble to decipher it then they can prevail. Their top scientists won’t be able to decipher the little pits in any discernible way. Even if you break down and give them a cheat sheet and tell them it represents binary information to express something called a pixel which can contain 256 discrete colors, and that forms in a ray of 9000 x 1600 pixels in one frame of information, then they have the work cut out for them. Oh, and it flashes by at 24 to 30 frames per second. Oh, and in 50 years, the device that can read this will contain a small computer chip a data or compression algorithm, and a laser, and it will all cost about 60 bucks. oh and any seven-year-old can run it. Their opening question might be, “what’s a laser?”. my point is these tremendous advancements of only happened in the scope of our species over the scope of a couple of decades. Now we’re going to amp up our intelligence by orders of magnitude. That gives us a lot of unforeseen room to run. All of this will quickly transcend our imaginations, so if we only imagine things within the paradigm of what we conceptualize as limiting, then we’re not going to catch the prospects that yes, a machine can become as evolved as an organic being. It would be a bit like fully conceptualizing, the implications of a holographic being. We have no frame of reference for that except Star Trek. And those stories don’t really consider nonlinear combinatorial plot arcs. But in those imaginary universes, I would think that highly nonlinear developments are happening there all the time as well. Indeed, the Germans might think the DVDs are fantastical. But we don’t have the heart to tell them that we consider those ancient technologies. We’ve moved on in a new century that embraces the cloud, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And even those are so last decade. Truthfully, those most visionary Germans won’t be able to get their minds around this stuff, and neither can we, now.