Internets And Non-Internets

I debated whether to post this here, in STEP, or after Kyle's poem. It is a nice reflection of the role on internet in our lives.

Is it me or did many of those paragraphs seem over complicated and unnecessarily flowery when it came to the words used? now I'm certainly not brilliant but I like to think I'm quite smart, but Because of the way it was written this head of fairly low impact on my view towards the subject, Even though I understood The points that Were made.

Is that understandable of me or do I need to improve my vocabulary?
though to be honest most of the stuff that's posted on this site is either very insightful or very hard to understand

The essay was a bit jumbled - but I accept that in blog postings if I can still see the main points. I personally love big flowery words but not when they get in the way of comprehension.

I will admit that it does help if you know that ''Rushkoff'' is Douglas Rushkoff, what FIDONET was, have used the term 'neo-ludditism' in everything life, and grew up reading 'Neuromancer'. That essay is definitely nerdy (as most talk about the internet is) but not incomprehensible.

If anything is "very hard to understand" on this forum tell me. I'm 20 years older and an academic by trade so I'm going write in a different way than you -  but I do not write to be obscure and impress with my obscurity.

Let's take this sentence from the essay: "There’s no social equivalent of Moore’s Law, after all, is there?"

Moore's Law is probably the single most important law in explaining modern society as it states: "The number of transistors in circuit has doubled approximately every two years." Every 2 years computer have become almost twice as fast and twice as compact. This is an incredible pace of advancement.



There is no social comparison to this sort of rapid progress. For example there is no 'law' that says "The number of happy people doubles every two years" or "The number of rights a citizen has doubles every two years." So we find ourselves using technological that increasingly approaches near magical levels while our social structures and culture are only slowly progressing (and perhaps even regressing).

So that sentence assumes you know what Moore's Law is but it isn't gibberish. If a paragraph give you trouble send it over to me, I'm trained to put them in head-locks and squeeze them until they tell me their secrets or confess that they are illogical.

Generally when I say I don't understand someone it's because either I have no prior knowledge to the actual subject or because I have no knowledge about certain portions of the subject such as certain political or economic leaders or scientific, philosophical concepts.

Generally if it's anything that you yourself Has posted I'm able to understand it perfectly after one or two trips to Google!
So how long do you think it is before we reach sentient AI?

Hmmmmm - how long to Skynet....?

Let's take The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) by Ray Kurzweil.

In it Kurzweil predicts that Moore's Law will continue to about 2020 and then a new paradigm in computing will have to occur for blistering this pace to continue. Perhaps something like quantum computing that uses quarks instead of electrons to do operations. Kurzweil believes this will occur and that by 2045  

"progress will be so rapid it outstrips humans' ability to comprehend it. [At this point] technological advances will irreversibly transform people as they augment their minds and bodies with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Once this technological 'Singularity' has been reached, machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards this intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe."

Interesting theory - to say the least.

Here is a graph from that book that shows humans should currently have the computation power to simulate insect and rodent brains at this point (and I have seen videos that seem to show this) and we will soon have the technology to compete with the miracle of engineering that is the human brain.


So basically you will be 45 when Kurzweil's 'techno-Singularity' occurs and will have encountered AIs since your late twenties. At least according to Kurzweil who was a pioneer of speech-recognition technology and whose 'Kurzweil 3000' is one of Dragonspeak's main competitors...