Major props to Nemencine for putting this together. I don't feel qualified to refute many of the points he brings up, and I'm in agreement with many of his points anyway.
Futurology is endlessly fascinating to me, because the possibilities seem endless. We are in the midst a dramatic exponential curve and it's only going to get exponentially more intense during our lifetime.
Humans came about roughly 200,000 years ago. Our first major development was agriculture about 12,000 years ago.
For roughly 188,000 years, which you can't even comprehend, we lived as hunter gatherers. It took tens of thousands of years to develop metal tools. Innovation happened over hundreds and thousands of years. In only a few thousand years, we arrived at the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated innovation to progress in the span of centuries and decades, rather than millenia.
Fast forward to today, where innovation takes place in the digital realm, and every 20 MONTHS the previous computing power is obsolete. This has led many to start consider the "technology singularity" event, where we eventually create an entity on Earth that is more intelligent than a human.
People tend to think about this new intelligence as some sort of "Terminator" esque entity, but I think the reality is it will be something more along the lines of what Nemencine is discussing; through genetic engineering and the implementation of nanotechnology. The superhuman intelligence will exist in a digital media first; something without form, but eventually it will take shape.
What it will look like, noone knows. But it could be absolutely terrifying. The singularity event will dwarf the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolution in significance, as the world ushers in the first super-human intelligence that we are aware of.
Futurology is endlessly fascinating to me, because the possibilities seem endless. We are in the midst a dramatic exponential curve and it's only going to get exponentially more intense during our lifetime.
Humans came about roughly 200,000 years ago. Our first major development was agriculture about 12,000 years ago.
For roughly 188,000 years, which you can't even comprehend, we lived as hunter gatherers. It took tens of thousands of years to develop metal tools. Innovation happened over hundreds and thousands of years. In only a few thousand years, we arrived at the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated innovation to progress in the span of centuries and decades, rather than millenia.
Fast forward to today, where innovation takes place in the digital realm, and every 20 MONTHS the previous computing power is obsolete. This has led many to start consider the "technology singularity" event, where we eventually create an entity on Earth that is more intelligent than a human.
People tend to think about this new intelligence as some sort of "Terminator" esque entity, but I think the reality is it will be something more along the lines of what Nemencine is discussing; through genetic engineering and the implementation of nanotechnology. The superhuman intelligence will exist in a digital media first; something without form, but eventually it will take shape.
What it will look like, noone knows. But it could be absolutely terrifying. The singularity event will dwarf the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolution in significance, as the world ushers in the first super-human intelligence that we are aware of.