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POPSTransformers - The Nature of Alien Life
The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second. According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second. Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead
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POPSThe Singularity Frankenstein Singularity defender George Dvorsky is spot-on when he calls for the singularity-aware to “frame the issue as a scientific endeavor and pitch the various scenarios as hypotheses” and in that “we need to keep the language within the scientific vernacular”. And that’s exactly what’s NOT happening.
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POPSCan the Singularity Save Us From Ourselves? Persons who believe firmly in the inevitability of The Singularity might be surprised to learn that the default human society is the closed society, resistant to change. Most of them have never known anything but open societies, born of western civilization’s restless urge to expand intellectual horizons. They live in an exceptional time, in an exceptional society, yet somehow believe it to be the human default. That type of blindness comes from forgetting to study history.
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POPSThe Singularity The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two. Below clips about the book and a film "The Singularity is Near".
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POPSLight bending material...and an idiot's opinion cool technology, but the idiot they interviewed watched way too much star trek. it will happen between 'now and the technological singularity'? c'mon dude...can you be anymore of a nerd/idiot? and that's coming from a nerd.
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POPSA History of Intellectual Discussion of 'Accelerating Change' Accelerating information and communication technologies have today become the most dynamic systems in modern society. Faced with the daunting prospect of further acceleration in their capacity, most people presently either deny the possibility, or ignore the phenomenon entirely. Futurists and Transhumanists believe that the evidence is strongly against the first response, and that the second response is unwise. Learning about accelerating change and grasping the concept from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective is the most pressing challenge of today. Here's an excellent article from http://www.accelerationwatch.com/history_brief.html that accumulates some of the most incisive thoughts on these topics from a range of careful future thinkers, and to provide a number of synthetic interpretations, including one, the developmental Singularity hypothesis
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POPSThe Quickening The Mayans spoke a lot of "the quickening" of time and we are in the first half of the 21th century now. Some say the "change" will occur in 2012. Are we headed for some sort of noosphere? Exciting stuff, eh? .:D Peter Russell shows that humanity has reached a crossroads in its evolutionary path. Computers, satellites, fiber optics, video recorders and other technology, are the catalysts linking our planet into one, worldwide community - a "global brain". This technology, combined with a the rapidly growing human potential movement, is helping to create a collective consciousness that is humanity's only hope of saving it from itself. However, Russell warns if we continue on our current path of greed and destruction, humanity will serve only as a planetary cancer.
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POPSThe reality and components of the *Spike* / *Singularity* / Crisis There seems to be a general expectation among people who think about the future that we are heading into a critical period in human history. A significant number of factors seem to be heading away from what we might consider ‘norms’ we know how to manage and into areas we have trouble predicting and in some cases raising reasonable fears we may not be able to handle them. What seems to be lacking is a strong consensus on what the most important factors are.
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