Rapture of the Nerds

[singularity-me-blog]

Video phone

One of the technologies from sci-fi films that I really liked as a kid was a video phone. Everybody had them and you would call someone and their face would appear on a screen and stuff like that. 

And it was really exciting because I thought a technology that simple would soon appear in real life. But it didn't, video phones never came to our homes. Or did they?

Yes they did... Not in the form from those sci-fi films, but still. It's called Skype! I've been using Skype video calls more and more for the past few years. And I know other people do too. And it's available on loads of different platforms.

So there you go! Another sci-fi technology came into our life and we didn't even notice. That's how it's going to be with all of them really... up to the point of Singularity.

[singularity-me-blog]

Self-driven cars

The idea of driverless cars has been surfacing in the media more often lately. It's clear now that the world is preparing for this revolution that will slowly occur in the next five to ten years. Still there are people who are saying that self-driven cars are not going to be widely popular because a lot of people enjoy the whole process of driving a car. I can imagine that around hundred years ago the same type of people were saying similar things in regards to automobiles. "Why would you want to drive that ugly, smelly piece of metal if you have a beautiful horse in your stable. People are enjoying riding horses and so this mechanical beasts will never make horse riding disappear." And to be fair, horses didn't disappear, they are just no longer used as means of transportation. People still enjoy riding horses as a recreation activity. They enjoy horse races too. But would you ride a horse to work everyday? The same thing is going to happen to cars.  The non self-driven cars are not going anywhere even in 50 years. There still going to be Formula One and Nascar. And certain enthusiasts will keep enjoying driving their car from time to time on some limited roads. But in ten years a non driverless car on M1 would be as stupid idea as a horse is right now.

[singularity-me-blog]

Human body is like a software and hardware product with millions of years in development cycle. When you open the source code for the first time, it looks like a very complicated project. But after a while you realise that the complexity comes from redundancy of the code. For some reason evolution is not a very good engineer and our source code need some serious refactoring. That is why our goal is not to copy the current source code of humans, but to read it, understand it, and then rewrite it efficiently. This will allow us to replicate the same functionality with less resources.

[singularity-me-blog]

One of the reasons why people are sceptic that Singularity is near is because we experience technological progress linear while it is actually an exponential process.  We just see and remember stuff that has happened few years ago without grasping the whole picture.  Therefor for most of us Singularity is going to be an unexpected and surprising event. Much like the WWW was for the previous generation.

[singularity-me-blog]

What if the reason we haven't met any aliens is because there were not supposed to be any?

What if the Universe was created that way to consist of dumb matter with only just a spark of intelligence. And it's this sparks goal to process the dumb matter around it. To expand beyond the boundaries of its crib. To turn the silent and dead Universe into an intelligent living being. 

Because what is the Universe if not just a bunch of construction materials and power sources?

[singularity-me-blog]

Good morning! (Taken with instagram)

[singularity-me-blog]

Technology has advanced leaps and bounds for quite a long time now. We’ve gone from steam power to tablet computers in something like 200 years. This trend has been most apparent during the last half-a-century. And there are no signs that things will change any time soon.

So then, what’s the limit? Where are we going? And how far into the future of technology can we really see?