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Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the auto
by clord 13y ago
Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc.
AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.
- Houshalter 13y agoJust the first item on your list is enough to change everything. If we can make computers as smart as humans, we can automate so many jobs, and then vastly scale them simply by building more computers. If you make those computers faster, you speed up the entire world's economy that much more (which speeds up the computers that are designing better computers.) If you make those AIs smarter than human, who even knows what is possible.
- cousin_it 13y agoA world with cars and electricity looks like "business as usual" to us, but not to the people who lived before cars and electricity. The rate of change is now much faster than they were accustomed to. The technologies I listed will make it faster still. You can't talk meaningfully about what happens a thousand years from now, because accelerating change implies that at a certain point in imagining the future you just run out of imagination, and that point might be a hundred years away or even closer.