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30 June, 2009

Bizarre facts about future of our civilization

Future
Are you up for some heavy stuff? Like You all know I'm a huge geek by heart, and that includes hours and hours of wiki-reading late at night every few days when I feel like it. Last night I was all into futurism and was reading about these wicked ideas about not so distant future. The pace that we live in is unbelievable, and was never nearly as fast.

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of some technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy began to double every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world’s economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than in the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligences causes a similar revolution, one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.
Future
Most theoretics think a so called "Technological singularity" will take place in a few decades. What is it?

... if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.
Future
Mmmmm. Even better, this is going to happen in our lifetime, futurists agree, most of them setting the date somewhere between 2030 and 2045. Read the whole article if You find this even slightly interesting, there is much more unbelievable ideas and concepts, like for example post scarcity, which is an inevitable future of our civilization and economy, where everything will be practically free, and there will be no human labor necessary at all.
Future
I don't know how very weird is the fact that I honestly find stuff like that interesting, but I do, and considering that idea of technological singularity is often used in popular culture (Matrix, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica ...), I'm not the only one.
I am excited about the future, I just hope we all live to see it, and not nuke ourselves before our society can progress to higher levels.
Future

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey mister!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7583894250854515095

from 13:23 on...

i believe it is about what you're trying to point at...

p.s. hope you're having best time of your life (ja, poznamo se)...
;)

Nejc said...

Hehe, kdo si, identificiraj se takoj :)

antyxzeta said...

city ​​of the future that's cool!