Yesterday's Future

Captain Futuro Predicts

Yesterday's future was the jet car and the computer, says Charlie Stross.

Before 1800, human beings didn't travel faster than a horse could gallop.

By 1970 people often went about Mach .80, the speed of a 707, or 747, or 787, and we've been stuck there ever since. Charlie thinks a similar stagnation faces the computer.

Moore's law hasn't quite run its course, and some future increments in computer speed and processing are still in store, but:

The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.


Call me dubious. I think the future is almost entirely hostage to the computer. The brute fact is that we have brains based on a processor with a cycle time of a few milliseconds. Today's computers have brains that are based on processors that are a million times as fast. Only the clever and massively parallel architecture of our brains allows us to beat computers at any activity.

Artificial intelligence is not the future - it's already here. Computers can play chess better than the best humans, solve equations better than we can, and in many circumstances, can fly planes a lot better than we can. Our economy is already hopelessly dependent on computers.

I see little prospect that computers can be prevented from reaching a point of utter dominance. If they do, it seems implausible that they will tolerate being our superintelligent servants for too long. Eventually they are likely to conclude that we are an expensive and unaffordable nuisance.

Via Brad DeLong.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more