Three Futuristic Questions
So, about a week ago, Jamais Casico put up a page where he asked the following three questions:
- What do you fear we'll likely see in fifteen years?
- What do you hope we'll likely see in fifteen years?
- What do you think you'll be doing in fifteen years?
Here are my attempts to answer them.
Continue reading "Three Futuristic Questions" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 3:05 PM on July 20, 2007
The Mister Burns Problem
Okay. This is another strange essay brought on by, in equal measures, pop-tarts, the death of Jerry Falwell, reading odd websites and doing laundry in the small hours of the morning.
As stated elsewhere on this site, I believe that aging is a disease that will be cured one day. I hope it will be within my lifetime but I see no law of nature that forbids us from curing it eventually. But, at the moment, I'm thinking of this in terms of Jerry Falwell, his legacy and what has been termed the Mister Burns Problem.
Continue reading "The Mister Burns Problem" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:52 AM on May 22, 2007
Utopia?
I believe some pretty sketchy things:
- I believe that the premise of strong AI is sound.
- I believe that artificial life is already here.
- I believe the premise of molecular nanotechnology is sound.
- I believe the premise of cryonics.
- I believe the premise of brain taping.
Given that I believe all that (I blame years of science fiction and an abortive career in physics.) more reasonable stuff like space elevators and the cure for aging are pretty tame.
Posted by Pace Arko at 2:50 PM on March 25, 2007
Education Stinks
Preface
Ever since Vinge's innovation feedback loop idea was introduced to me nearly twenty years ago, I've always been very interested in searching for and understanding the damping mechanisms for it. I had a feeling that Vinge and especially Kurzweil have oversimplified. This was something that I suspected vaguely for quite some time but Bob Seidensticker's book gave me the coherent rebuttal that I was looking for.
This will be the first of a series of essays where I try to examine each of Seidensticker's points in turn.
Continue reading "Education Stinks" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 10:47 AM on August 25, 2006
Yes, more stuff about accessibility
By way of Amor Mundi, I found a link to this really interesting site called, the Open Prothesthics Project. This is nifty to me on several levels.
- It ties into accessibility and assistive technology.
- It ties into open source engineering. GPL doesn't have to be just about software.
- It can tie into stuff like fab labs. Imagine if doctors in poor countries had access to open sourced designs and fab labs to build limbs for mine victims.
- This is the kind of grass-roots, human empowerment that flies in the face of gloom and doom.
In a vaguely related sense I have some other accessibility links.
- Game Accessibility is a site that focuses on making software games accessible to people with disabilities. Remember when I wrote about that kid, blind from birth, who totally conquered Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber?
- Then of course there are the obligatory accessible web design links I'm so found of listing here--How to embed Adobe Flash objects correctly and one way to do web page tabs correctly.
Posted by Pace Arko at 7:11 AM on August 15, 2006
The Emergence of Sapience from the Internet
A week ago I read a short story by Tad Williams about the spontaneous emergence of sapience from the Internet. It wasn't really that good. Arthur Clarke did it many decades earlier and did it much better.
Anyway, uninformed amateur scientist that I am, I'm skeptical that consciousness will emerge from our computer networks as long as they are organized as they are. It may be true, using crude numerical comparisons of moving parts, that the Internet is at least as complex as a single vertebrate brain. But this ignores several key issues.
Continue reading "The Emergence of Sapience from the Internet" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:17 PM on July 5, 2006
We'll muddle through
After swapping out the power supply and CPU fan with higher quality models, one of my desktops is finally quiet enough to contribute to the SETI at Home. This project is a small way I can contribute to science without actually being a formal scientist myself. Once I quiet the other machine I have, I may set that to working on the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Maybe I should leave the machines off. Together, they'll consume about 300 or so watts as they tear through data during idle time. Doggone it! I have a network for a reason though. I can finally set these things to be development servers. Maybe even tack a server outside my firewall. Something I've been meaning to do for years.
Continue reading "We'll muddle through" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:00 PM on October 27, 2005 | Comments (5)
Thinking about labor and education
Well it's more than a month since I've said anything. Mostly this was writer's block and other preoccupations. But to resume:
It's common now for labor to outsourced from countries with high living standards and strong regulation to countries with lower standards of living and weaker regulation. Large businesses do this to reduce their costs. Perhaps some of you out there might disagree with the following but, I think that as the world continues to shrink to due better transportation and communication technology, this process seems unavoidable short of cutting a local economy entirely out of the global one.
The other threat is that technology continues to advance. It continuously creates, destroys and redefines jobs. This process seems much faster now than it did a hundred years ago.
Continue reading "Thinking about labor and education" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 4:01 PM on October 17, 2005
The Bet
And before you get the idea that it's all glowing wonders and rose-tinted glasses here at the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries, let me say few words about an essay I read over at Worldchanging the other day.
Posted by Pace Arko at 6:04 AM on September 1, 2005 | Comments (2)
Fashion modeling and athletics are doomed
We pay some people very good money because their bodies have certain talents in running around in a field chasing a ball or jumping through hoops or some such nonsense. We pay others very good money simply because certain aspects of their phenotype make us look longer at adverts then we'd otherwise would.
But I have seen the future and it doesn't look good for people who make their living this way. Technology will bring a democratization of talent.
Continue reading "Fashion modeling and athletics are doomed" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:32 PM on August 2, 2005
The Long Downward Spiral of the Space Shuttle
Let's face it. With each passing year, the Space Shuttle grows more and more pathetic. Bold promises for human spaceflight continue to ring hollow.
Robots will always be cheaper and do more science. SpaceShipOne is just a joyride--and no, that's not just sour grapes over the ticket price--four or five minutes in freefall is simply not a useful engineering accomplishment. Colonizing is really the only reason for humans in space. Aside from supporting good international relations, and keeping Russian scientists and engineers employed and destracted from building missles for the highest bidder, the International Space Station has no serious mission.
The point is that none of these things has any long term reason for being. But you've all heard me gripe about this stuff before. So what's my constructive alternative?
The world's space agencies (ESA, IPNE, RKA, NASA, NASDA, CNSA, ISRO and anyone else who is willing to spend a few billion dollars.) should band together and build a few space elevators.
Only if they do this will I take human spaceflight seriously again. Interesting article in Spectrum about the space elevator.
Posted by Pace Arko at 10:44 PM on July 31, 2005
The agony of the posthuman condition
In reviewing my site, you'll see that I have a lot of rants about transhumanism. This is a subject that has been percolating among the big thinkers for many decades (Depending on how you define it, it's actually been speculated about for millenia--at least since the beginning of recorded history.) but in this new century science and technology has advanced to a point where these are no longer idle questions, nightmares and daydreams.
Is it possible to modify the brain so as to enhance human wisdom, assuming we can define it, or at least parts of it, adequately and formally? Is it possible to create superhuman wisdom?
Continue reading "The agony of the posthuman condition" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:32 PM on July 26, 2005
Urban Density
I've lived most of my life in dense urban environments, mostly in apartments and flats. I like and prefer it. The brief times I lived in the country or suburbia I didn't like it. A decade or so ago, for about fifteen years, I lived in a huge old house, right in the middle of Seattle, and it was beautiful but, it was also larger than we needed and hard to maintain as well. Large houses, with yards or gardens, give you privacy and beauty, even in the city, but sometimes I wonder if they're more trouble than they're worth.
And don't even get me started on suburbia or rural areas. I can't stand them. The physical isolation, the fact that I need a vehicle to get anywhere, is singularly annoying to me. The cheap shoddiness of suburbia also annoys me--no sidewalks, no grid pattern streets, cheap houses with no basements. You see kids playing in the streets, maybe under the watchful eyes of adults but mostly the adults stay indoors. Trailer parks--the rural and suburban equivalent of slums--deny the idea that suburban life is somehow better than urban life. It is true that cities are psychologically isolating. Vast throngs lead to alienation but I'd rather have that than physical isolation.
These are mostly personal opinions. I realize that my choice of living environment is not for everyone. Suburbs have a few things going for them. They're cheaper than the city and they are geared towards raising families but, I think it's debatable that they're safer or somehow better than dense city life. You can raise healthy, physically fit kids in the city, it's just more expensive to.
But here's something to notice: city dwellers spend their money on different things than suburban dwellers do. City dwellers are less likely to accumulate a lot of stuff simply because they don't have room for it. Instead, they spend their money on less than tangiable things, travel, entertainment and so on.
Urban planners are beginning to realize that density is environmentally good, even if some people don't like it much. Urban dwellers have fewer children, accumlate fewer possessions and use energy, services and goods more efficiently than their rural counterparts.
For some people urban spaces conjure images of Soylent Green or Blade Runner, and they're horrified by it. Me, perhaps perversely, I'm drawn to it. I read the Asimov's Caves of Steel and I liked it! Somehow the idea of stacking people into huge boxes like blade servers had some kind of weird attraction to me. That was how I thought the future was going to be. If the population keeps going up, eventually we're all going to live in capsules.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:55 PM on July 3, 2005
Where are we headed?
As I go to vote later today, the arrogance of our foreign policy and the alienation of long time allies will figure large in my mind. A correction must be made. This is probably no surprise to my friends, since turning 18 in 1981, I've been a life long Democrat. But there are other reasons why I'm voting for Kerry. These reasons, I think, matter even more to global civilization then our lonely occupation of Iraq.
Continue reading "Where are we headed?" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:01 AM on November 2, 2004
Living in the future
There was this documentary series I saw on public television back in the early Eighties, I think it was called "Fast Forward" or something. It was terribly prescient and had a very avid view of information technology--computers, networks, telecommunications. Years later and the future that the series pundits (I think they even had a young Nicholas Negroponte on there.) predicted has more or less come to pass. The Internet is commonplace now but it continues to affect our social world in ways that are subtle and surprising. Most of the time I don't really pay attention to this. Plenty of others have pushed many pixels around to say something about it--privacy, intellectual property, security.
So, at the start of my fifth decade, I am living in the future of my teenage years. What am I still waiting for?
- The space elevator.
- Rejuvenation and life extension.
- And the key one, a fast and powerful way to insert training into my brain--the science fiction image of taking a pill to learn a foreign language.
Posted by Pace Arko at 7:44 AM on September 17, 2004
Here's a reason why I'm glad to live in a constitutional republic.
Prince Charles of the UK weighs in on nanotechnology. I guess the guy is entitled to his opinion, but you'd figure he make an attempt to be better informed about it. But to be fair, we have our share of foolish notions about scientific research here too.
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:02 AM on July 12, 2004
The ultimate elevator must be built!
Recently a scientist predicted that we could have an operating space elevator within 15 years if a mere ten billion dollars is spent. The cynic in me thinks he is underestimating the cost, but I do agree with the time frame. If we spent the money, we could do it by that date.
This is something that should be built. I think it matters much more than Bush's diversionary promises about exploring Mars. It matters more than than a privately fund jet-powered joyride called SpaceShipOne. I'd say, that in some ways, it matters even more than Sputnik or Apollo. It matters because it actually makes space travel, really, really cheap. Once leaving Earth's gravity becomes extremely cheap, everything else follows. The industrialization and infrastructure of space can finally take off.
Posted by Pace Arko at 10:43 PM on July 5, 2004
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Must End
Post-industrial countries subsidize the fossil fuel industries by about 73 billion dollars every year. On the other hand between 1 and 3 percent of the 40 billion dollars spent energy investment in developing countries is actually spent on renewable and alternate forms of energy. This is according to the report, The Price of Power, which was released by the New Economics Foundation, a think tank based in the UK.
The gist of the argument the report makes is that fossil fuel use not only contributes to global warming but also perpetuates poverty in the developing world by keeping citizens dependent on centralized energy distribution systems based on fossil fuels. If India, China or Indonesia are ever going to reach a standard of living equal to that of the post-industrial world, they're going to have to invest in decentralized, small-scale, energy sources, like solar, wind, biomass and hydro.
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:44 AM on July 5, 2004
Why I am not impressed with SpaceShipOne
Short Answer: It's only suborbital. It's just an exotic, jet-powered joyride for rich people.
Long answer: Look, if purely private funding built something like a space elevator, then I'd be impressed, then I'd say NASA, ESA and the RKA need to close up shop. But that's not gonna happen. Even if Bill Gates and Paul Allen spent all their money, it would equal only a small fraction of the money (Military, engineering and scientific research budgets.) spent by governments around the world on space use. That's just facts. If you want to explore and colonize a harsh enviroment, expect enormous government subsidy and a lot of interesting but monetarily profitless scientific research. We will one day colonize space and, the private sector will play noteworthy roles but, it's certain that the governments of the world will play the biggest part in that process.
Why am I so harsh? Why am I such a killjoy? I was born in the Sixties and grew up as a nerd in the Seventies. This means I read a lot of libertarian-flavored hard science fiction and rants that spun fantasies about the miracles of private funding even as I watched the United States and Soviet Union scale back their ambitions after their military goals had been achived. The contradiction was so obvious to me as a sorely disappointed teenager as the Eighties dawned. As I prepared to become a physics student in university, it became clear to me exactly how hard space travel really is. I grew increasingly irritated with certain science fiction authors ranting about how the government was screwing things up. Their promises of a bright future created by some privately funded miracle rang hollow to me.
Technology just doesn't work that way. There's a lot of hidden, subsidized, profitless scientific research lurking in the past of every technology we buy and sell today. The Libertarians forget that. By the time a piece of technology becomes commercially viable, all the hard work has already been done.
Anyway after reading all the gushing news stories about the privately funded miracle of SpaceShipOne, this rant triggered in me. It may be unwelcome news to worshippers of Ayn Rand and Heinlein, but NASA and JPL ain't close closing up shop anytime soon.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:24 PM on June 21, 2004
Bioengineering is faster and cheaper than terraforming
My news aggregator handed me a Slashdot article about terraforming Mars and other planets. One of the points raised was that terraforming, while possible, would be very slow and expensive, taking thousands of years before a stable biosphere was achived. Perhaps nanotechnology might speed this up a bit but re-engineering a planet, moving its orbit, dragging a moon to it if needed, getting the right moisture and pressure balance, and so on and so on is an incredibly complex task.
Seems much simpler and much faster to re-engineer humans instead:
- Design them so as thrive in Mars's low gravity.
- Design to them to have collapsible lungs like dolphins so as to take a few hours between breaths.
- Make them symbiotic with tough, oxygen producing plants, perhaps "eating" the plants oxygen.
- Give them thick, metal scaled hides to resist Mars' intense ultraviolet radiation.
In the end, just like Ray Bradbury and Fred Pohl said, we will be the Martians, with old Earth as the hostile and alien environment. To colonize space, human is going to have to diversify into new, artificial species.
Or maybe what will happen is the ultimate naturalization process. As space travelers move from world to world, they'll spend a few days in a vat before planetfall to acclimatize themselves. Nanoscopic robots in these vats will rewrite their bodies atom by atom so that they can thrive on the worlds they visit or colonize. If they return to Earth, they revert back to venerable ol' homo sapiens.
Science fiction novels have already explored this but, perhaps not as much as they should have. Each time space travelers changed their bodies, this would have profound mental effects. Perhaps some bodies would be more fun to inhabit than others. Or maybe, after the novelty wears off, one body will be as boring as the next. Something weird to think about.
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:44 PM on June 20, 2004
The End of Work?
We've all seen it. These processes have been facts of life ever since the Industrial Revolution began. One could argue that it all started with agriculture and domestication. We were doomed as soon as we developed language and harnessed fire. It happens over and over again. Some group of bright sparks somewhere invents processes to, save money, increase productivity, create whole new industries and destroy old ones.
Some have predicted that eventually this will result in the end of labor but, I don't agree. What's really happening is even scarier. It means endless retraining throughout our lives as laborers. This is scary because educational methods and pedagogy stink and are often very expensive.
Today I am a computer technician and webmaster, but it is certain I won't be forever. I am forced to keep my rates low, because, in some cases, I compete with folks in Argentina, India or China. And you know Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia and many others are moving mountains to make web administration as easy as word processing. I specialize in accessible web design, but eventually the production and authoring tools will get good enough to assure minimal levels of compliance without making the author think about it. The point is, I am constantly aware that my job isn't safe and that whatever profits I make, I must save and invest, save and invest, save and invest.
So far, I've managed to scrape along but I still haven't made enough to get back on health insurance. I still haven't made enough to have money for toys and fun. I still haven't made enough to start saving for disasters again. This I see as my fault. I really should be pushing myself harder than I am. I've been mucking about these last four years, more than I should have. There is no denying that I've learned a lot of things and done a lot of things these last four years, but I am still not disiplined enough to really work the system.
I'll cut myself a little slack though. Ten years ago, I would have never imagined myself owning my own business. Necessity dictates invention.
Hmm. I've wandered far off topic. I orginally wanted to rant about automation, outsourcing and the global economy but, instead it's become rather personal. Hmm. Well, maybe I'll print up some business cards today.
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:53 PM on June 19, 2004
Transhumanism on the Left
I was never really happy with the politics of some of the prominent people in transhumanism (In short, I am not a Libertarian.), but now there appears to be a new ideological stripe emerging in the movement thanks, in part, to James Hughes.
I guess the only problem I have with Democratic Transhumanism is that it still has strong utopian feeling in it. This worries me because, this sets us up for a big disappointment when the new technology turns out not to cure everything we thought it would. Remember all the utopian thinking about the Internet in the late Eighties and early Ninties? Or nuclear energy? Or the computer?
I guess my position is that of a tranhuman realist. I believe that all this utterly plastic technology will arrive, probably sooner than we expect, that will allow us to radically alter our biology, but I don't believe this will result in utopia or dystopia. Uexpected good things will happen and unexpected bad things will happen, the only thing that is certain is that things will change. Some of us will be exchanging the agony of the human condition for the agony of the post-human condition. The universe may be meaningless, but at least it's interesting.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:40 AM on May 7, 2004
We don't belong here.
The Earth is in trouble and even after molecular manufacturing becomes commonplace, not all of the damage we've done to it will be erased. Therefore, inspired by VHEMT, I've decided form my own organization: The Voluntary Earth Evacuation Movement (VEEM). The aims of VEEM are as follows, in the intrest of saving, or at least partially restoring, the ecosystem that proceeded homo sapiens, I resolve to:
- Support any technology that radically alters human biology (To drastically reduce terraforming costs.) and lowers the cost of space travel (Getting from surface to orbit should be as cheap as possible.).
- Publicly repeat that it is in the best interests of the natural world if all human life evacuates this planet as fast as possible.
- Repeat that this evacuation must be voluntary. Perhaps a process akin to the mass migration from rural to urban life that occurs whenever a country begins to industrialize may occur. People go where there is money to be made. If most of the economic activity is in space, people will move there.
- Repeat that no one should be forced to remain or leave the Earth's surface, however all those who choose to remain must be subject to strict technology caps. Living on the Earth is a luxury, not a right.
Posted by Pace Arko at 1:23 AM on April 29, 2004 | Comments (2)
The Funeral Industry goes after the Cryonics Industry
As I've said many times before, these are science fictional times we live in. I just got news that the Arizona Legislature is attempting to pass rules that may outlaw many of the procedures and services offered by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Alcor, in case you didn't know, is an organization that offers cryonic suspension. This bill (HB 2637) is being spearheaded by Arizona's funeral industry, allegedly because that same industry feels threatened by the cryonics movement.
I must have read at least a half dozen shorts in Analog about just this sort of plot premise! First Ted Williams, now this. Interesting times.
Posted by Pace Arko at 4:29 PM on February 24, 2004
The future is here, not exactly what you expected, huh?
So I read this post over at the Speculist that talks about the failed dreams of futurists--namely flying cars, jet packs, airships and so on. At first I decided to reply directly to the post but the post grew so long that I decided to put it here.
Continue reading "The future is here, not exactly what you expected, huh?" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 6:50 PM on November 20, 2003
The Cyborg Liberation Front
I've been watching the transhumanist movement from afar for many years now. I think they can be viewed as a facet of a growing paradox. The technology that allows us to completely engineer human beings into new species is driven into being from the needs and urges to heal human beings. The luddites, religious conservatives and radical enviromentalists may not like it, but they are fighting some very basic social urges if they try to ban these emerging techniques. Partly in their defense however, I am skeptical that if the Singularity arrives it will be some great, rosy paradise.
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:20 PM on July 30, 2003
The cyborgs are already among us
People with motor impairment can now steer wheelchairs with their thoughts thanks to a skullcap lined with tiny electrodes that sense brainwaves. Neurology has advanced to a point were we can write software that recogonizes specific patterns and locations in human brain activity. These patterns correspond to specific commands like turning, breaking or acceleration.
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:29 AM on July 27, 2003
We are the robots!
Marshall Brain (Damn, I wish I had a name like that!) predicts that new strides in robotics and automation will eventually lead to massive unemployment. Of course, this subject has been raised before, and so far, nothing has come of it. But this time Brain thinks it's serious.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:51 PM on July 26, 2003
Your dose of African flavored cyberpunk
By way of MetaFilter, I found a 17MB movie about the future of global law enforcement. In several ways, this had a greater impact on me than Matrix Reloaded or T3.
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:49 PM on July 8, 2003
More thoughts about African Cyberpunk
As I mentioned earlier, Gibson and Stephenson got it wrong: The place where all the technology will be churning in the decades to come will not be Asia. China and India are already sort of established and old hat now. Indonesia, Southeast Asia and Malaysia (Or whatever succeeds them, if they break up.) may generate a flurry of interest for a number of years but essentially it's a story that we've already heard for 20 years already.
So where is it really going to end up? Where is that gritty mix of chrome and squalor, future and past, repression and anarchy that makes up the idea of cyberpunk most obvious? Africa. The post-industrial world can't send their old computers out there fast enough. Already African software companies are beginning to sprout. Obviously they face all kinds of problems, lack of electricity and clean drinking water to start with, but whoever said industrialization was a painless process?
Posted by Pace Arko at 2:42 PM on June 4, 2003
We are in the XXI century!
So I am writing code at 4 in the morning, listening to KEXP (which I've already mentioned and linked to elsewhere in my site. Go look for it Sam!), and I hear something that makes absolutely plain that the XXI century is upon me: I hear an MC mention nanotechnology in his rant. Nanotech in rap. Can you get any more futuristic than that? Anyway the artist is EL-P and the mention is in "Accidents Don't Happen" on the album Fantastic Damage.
Anyway this is the reason why I prefer listening to KEXP early in the morning: they stop doing the heavy rotation of the whiny white guy music that passes for "independant music" these days, they play stuff with cuss words in it and play stuff that really is obscure. Sigh, even on small "hip" stations they still do boring rotation. I'm an old geezer who misses the speed and anger of punk. I am sick to death of Camper Van Beethoven clones!
Posted by Pace Arko at 4:44 AM on May 29, 2003
So what happens to piloted spaceflight?
On Saturday, I was very glad that I don't have a television. There's nothing worse than hearing the same thing over and over. I didn't learn about the disintegration of the Columbia Shuttle until at least 6 or so hours after the fact. Getting my news via the Internet allowed me a necessary distance from this event. And it makes me think.
Continue reading "So what happens to piloted spaceflight?" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 8:10 PM on February 3, 2003
The Yin and the Yang
By the way, check out Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Accessibility to learn various simple methods to make your site accessible.
Another screed I posted at Nanodot some months back.
Continue reading "The Yin and the Yang" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 10:07 PM on July 23, 2002
Transcending the Shallowness
This is another little mini-essay that I've culled from my posts at Nanodot.
Continue reading "Transcending the Shallowness" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:44 PM on July 23, 2002
The Vanguard of Cultural Evolution
A week or so ago, I wrote an interesting reply to a post at Nanodot about the persistence of the geek factor throughout human history and prehistory. I liked it so much I've decided to reproduce and amplify it here so as to produce some of my own content.
Continue reading "The Vanguard of Cultural Evolution" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:22 PM on July 23, 2002
Why I Don't Read Science Fiction Anymore
When I read stuff about giant arcologies and I note that hardware stores still don't sell robot housekeepers or personal jet packs, I just sigh. Hopefully I'll see these things before I die.
Posted by Pace Arko at 1:10 PM on February 26, 2002
The cyberpunk movement got it wrong
Asia will be old hat, along with Europe and North America, when nano and AL really get going. I predict the real interesting technological churn will happen in the finally developed, finally stable countries of Africa. Think I'm nuts? Stranger things have happened. Never say never.
Posted by Pace Arko at 7:31 AM on February 24, 2002
Transportation in the XXI Century
Hey look! Paper Models of High Speed Trains! Automobiles powered by fuel cells!
Posted by Pace Arko at 6:50 PM on August 15, 2001 | Comments (2)
Progress as Entertainment
I've changed my mind in the last few years. I've always found some of the political and economic ideology of the extropians, transhumanists and their ilk objectionable but now, I think some of them are getting a little too religious.
Continue reading "Progress as Entertainment" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 3:26 PM on August 3, 2001 | Comments (2)
Is civilization speeding up?
I read James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything nearly a year ago and today I came across a skeptical review of a book with, in my mind, a similar theme.
Is technical progress accelerating? An odd question to ask in this economic correction. The transhumanists and extropians think so. It is true that are there are more scientists, technicians (craftspeople) and engineers alive now than at any time before the XIX century.
Posted by Pace Arko at 1:23 AM on May 29, 2001
On the Morality of Superhumanly Intelligent Artificial Organisms
Let me explain what I mean by that title. I don't mean to ask if the creation of superhuman artificial intelligences is a wise decision or not because a lot has already been said about that.
Also I am not going discuss or argue about whether it's even possible to create life, sapience or superhuman intelligence artificially except to say that I believe it's merely an engineering problem. If you disagree with this, well, I guess this rant really isn't relevant to you.
What I am going to examine is what kind of moral character will these beings have if they come into existance.
Continue reading "On the Morality of Superhumanly Intelligent Artificial Organisms" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:09 AM on May 22, 2000
"Driving makes you stupid."
Chairman Mao made everyone in China ride bicycles. It was probably one of the few environmentally sound decrees he made. I heard that his population growth policies weren't very smart but, he was the champion of bicycles. Now the situation in China has reversed itself--sane birth control policies yet everyone who can afford one is allowed to buy a car.
Continue reading ""Driving makes you stupid."" »
Posted by Pace Arko at 4:46 AM on June 21, 1999