Transhumanism- a matter of exponential growth in technology
March 15th, 2007 by MarkRecently, I saw the following video on one of my friend’s personal blogs:
My first thoughts were of all of the 50’s sci-fi I’ve read. You know the type, people getting rockets equipped with super computers sporting “millions of vacuum tubes” and flying to Jupiter’s moons… in 1995. The vast bulk of the literature I’ve read far overestimated many types of technology such as space travel, while simultaneously underestimating the incredible computer technology that actually did become reality. So, I found myself immediately wondering what sorts of technological progress the video over-stated and what sorts it understated.
I mean, with several decades of incredible breakthroughs in computing, it’s really easy to over-estimate, right? Just as my great-grandmother, who grew-up in a time in which cars were unseen and then lived to see planes, and eventually space-faring rockets might have over-estimated future progress in transportation technology, isn’t it reasonable to consider that we might be over-estimating advances in information technology? Maybe, maybe not. Raymond Kurzweil, one of the leading authors on transhumanism and futurism makes a pretty good case that we have very good reasons to expect continued exponential growth in a wide variety of fields that hinge on information technologies.
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March 18th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Too bad I never heard of that smart-guy fest while I was at Monterey. It would have been really cool to attend it.
March 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I saw Ray Kurzweil in person at the RSA conference in San Francisco last month. He was phenomenal. I’ve also read his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which gives a similar insight into the exponential growth of technology. I tend to agree with most of Kurzweil’s points, but he sometimes gets a little crazy and tends to read exponential growths into some situations when none exist.
I think that it’s very reasonable that we haven’t made the huge advancements in space travel and such. Ultimately, the things that advance fastest are those things that have direct positive economic impact. Travel of various types is a pipe dream of the science fiction writer and the desire of the average person, but economically speaking there’s not enough money to be made to justify the huge energy cost associated with space travel. In today’s information age, people are brought closer without leaving their office. Ultimately, when the energy crunch starts happening, I expect we’ll see more energy devoted to useful things like Google data centers, and less towards spurious travel.
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:46 pm
I think Kurzweil is right about the energy side of things, too. Energy is getting cheaper at an exponential rate. How much appreciable to you is the energy cost of leaving the light on in a room while you aren’t using it? How about your grandfather, how appreciable was that cost to him? I think we’ll see cyclical energy crunches as we always have, but that 30 years from now people will be using (and generating) far more energy per capita than they are now.
Space travel has also been getting cheaper at an exponential rate. What was once a huge drain on the biggest economy in the world is now cheap enough that developing countries such can participate. The difference is just that US is no longer willing to pour massive resources into it. As space travel continues to get cheaper, though, it will eventually have even more economic uses than it already does.