We are living in exponential times

reply to post by Karlhungis

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Great find S&F, I must say though, that at the end when the statistic for downloading songs came up I was waiting for the "Copyright theft" commercial to follow and scare the crap out of me. I am sheeple or paranoid bah bah

When would you say the present became futuristic?

Maybe around 1990?

reply to post by Donnie Darko

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Why 1990?

Explain to me please.

Well I just feel the 21st century actually began in 1990. When the info revolution began and the Soviet Empire crumbled. And people started to get postmodern attitudes and listen to alternative music.

20th century: 1914-1989
21st century: 1990-today

[edit on 10-6-2009 by Donnie Darko]

This same theory applies to the Mayan Calendar and why each "age" and cycle becomes shorter as you approach the end date. Many civilizations (Sumerians comes to mind first) understood how time progressed and sped up as it went along.

Amazing that with all of our science we are finally realizing this when the antiquated civilizations, without any advanced technology to speak of, already knew it.

reply to post by Donnie Darko

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Very interesting observation.

I can see why you say that.....it also marked the First Gulf War.

It also marked the Bush Doctrines.

Wild little observation.

I understand that the Gregorian and Julian Claendars are off a bit. How does that line up with the old coptic calendars I wonder...mmmhhh!!

Hmmm. I believe most scholars think the millennium should have actually been in 1996 or 1997. That in itself is pointless though, at least if you're not Christian, if what happened in 1990 happened instead in 1980, I would consider that the beginning of the 21st century.

You can tell from reading any article or book written between 1988 and 1992 that there was a HUGE shift in consciousness around that time period.

Art Bell always used to talk about this idea too, his phrase for it was "The Quickening", I see it most myself in computers, it doesn't really seem that long ago I was working with just a few megahertz, not even a megabyte of ram, and no internet.

Could it possibly be that the timewave maps out the progress of biological life in terms of Novelty, and that the Zero 'endpoint' is the end of biological forms being dominant/having the most novelty? Along those same lines, the zero point may well be what we refer to as the technological singularity.

reply to post by jimminycricket

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I was having pretty much that same conversation yesterday about how quickly PC's got so ramped up so fast & mobile phones too, not so long ago nobody had one & now look...BONKERS

[edit on 10/6/2009 by moobaawoof]

The exponential series of Moores law is part of a larger exponential series: Evolution.

Singel celled to multicelled
Single sense to multiple sense.
Asexual to sexual.

Evolution builds on what it already has. Each progressive step makes the next step multiple times better / faster / more capable. Evolution is an exponential series.

Imagine a cell-type, as a result of evolution, which was not hard-coded, but could be programmed / adapted in realtime to suit the requirements at hand. This is a braincell, and it has been proven to be a most advantageous trait. But now these new 'braincell' animals have a problem: other animals have brains too... So now the braincells need to adapt faster, learn more quickly. And it is also important WHAT they learn. Suddenly evolution is no longer just bound to the DNA, it becomes an evolution of IDEAS. An idea is a soft form of evolution; You don't need a dozen generations to adapt to a simple change; the whole population can adapt to a change just by communication of an IDEA. And the ideas become more and more complex, in the same evolutionary exponential series.

Until...

The creatures who have the brains, which house the ideas, discover how to modify their own DNA. And this is the point we are at. But this is not the end of evolution, this is simply the NEXT STEP in the exponential series. Creatures which modify their OWN GENETIC CODE and supplement their biology with technology are climbing the vertical part of the exponential series.


All this taken into account, exactly who or what are YOU? Your ego, your 'self'... what is it? Well it's an evolving software program -- a set of ideas -- running on a machine (your body). You are essentially a cascade of evolutionary developments. But that's OK, because, for the first time ever, you don't have to cease to exist (die). You will be able to be transfered to a new body, in the future, and heres how:

Imagine a new cyborg technology is released into the market. This new technology is like having more mental and physical capacity... like a second body. It simply plugs in to your existing system, and you expand onto it the same way you learned to walk, speak, and ride a bike. Once you are comfortable in your new body, you expand it some more; Add a few exabytes of visual memory, additional sound processing capability, maybe infrared vision, ultrasonic hearing, etc etc. Pretty soon you have more extras than you do original parts, and, having expanded your existence onto this new hardware, you feel that it is time to get rid of some of the old clunky hardware you previously called a body -- it's giving out on you anyway, being almost 200 years old. Eventually -- and this is how I envision it actually happening -- people will have all new parts but in the existence sense, it will still be you -- because you have not been copied across and the original killed. You have migrated across as an electrical or wave entity.

I envision people will not like silicon hardware. So the body parts which are silicion will be hidden, and all visually exposed body parts will be biological, but genetically engineered and grown in a tank, or in your own body under the supervision of nanorobots.

Yeah. There's such a huge gap between someone who had a Teddy Ruxpin as a kid and someone who had a Tickle Me Elmo!

Maybe so....but

Even today's computers with all their speed and power can not
think and therefore are no more Intelligent than a cockroach.
They can only do what the original programmers had anticipated,
so by 2049 they are still going to be just calculators, but very fast
calculators. Still a long long way from becoming skynet.

what caught my eye was when it said that by 2013 the computational power of a computer will exceed that of the brain, than then it went on the say it would exceed the power of the entire population.

i disagree with this.

If one is to believe any man made object can exceed the infinite creative and therefore computational power of the mind they are sadly mistaken.

I think a better way to put it would be like this:

"by 2013 the computational power of a computer will exceed the computational power of the conscious dulled down mind."

UNfortunately this is not the case - the recent work of Peter Singer in "Wired For War" - thebest work on robots and AI in military evolution ever written and the worlds leading thinker on this issue has been very definite in when AI will be fully introduced - total autonomy will be on the battle field by 2020 - at the VERY LATEST.
By 2013 there will be fully mechanised infantrymen on the field. By 2030 according to Moores Law the average computer will be 100,000,000,000 more powerful than today.

AI equivalent to our own is expected to be delivered by industry by 2013 -

so what would a fully mechanised robot soldier look like ? here you go.....

YouTube Link

An exceptional observation - Francis Fukiyama a leading luminary on International Relations and Political Science declared this period the "End of History".

Kudos

reply to post by rapinbatsisaltherage

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"2049 a 1000 dollar computer will have more computational power than all humans"


LOL, I need that now, my computer is so slow.

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Reply to OP:
Yes everything is growing at a extremely high rate, I mean if you believe in the technological singularity of 2012 then it is going to become infinite very soon. Now the issue is this IMO: If we are having problems now with energy requirements then what happens when we hae 10 billion to supply?

In that case let us hope that the techno singularity does happen. We are in for a interesting 20 years for sure. Great thread, star and flag.

reply to post by audas

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Wow, that would be crazy to see that, but I think we all will by 2035. I wonder how far off they really are from that type of machine. Of course some nice advancements in nano-tech and metallurgy would have to be made to make a 'soldier-bot' practical but that is all very possible within the next 30 years.

Excellent post, star and flag my friend. I enjoyed this video very much. It is hard to wrap our brain around all the information that is in the video at one glance so I watched it twice. Still unbelievable. Thanks!

I think the digital revolution will bust within the next 10 years, mark my words.

I would say that while technology has accelerated in the time since 1989, pop culture has stagnated.

How different are 1997 and 2009 really? Both have the same subcultures, similar music styles, similar fashion. Both have digital technology, today just has much better tech.