I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-

I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over-done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped. But he has a point. We are on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us. The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories, great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human. This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.