Quote:
Originally Posted by pylon
i totally agree. I remember getting an Colecovision Adam in 1983 and thinking to myself.... how can it possibly get any better. I look at the accessibilty of technology now and am dumbfounded. I have a telescope that I can point at the sky, push a button, and it finds the planet or nebulae I want to look at. And better yet I can attach CCD cameras to it and have detailed views of objects millions of miles away with clear detail. All for around $2500. A looking at a tri-quarter on Star Trek TNG in the mid 80's seemed totally ridiculous. We now walk around with Iphones, that can pretty much give us an answer to any question we could possibly think of, in seconds. How long till these things will be able to scan the molecular and chemical composition of stuff?
Personally, I am cheering for Kurzweil, and his crazy ideas. If he thinks he can achieve immortality at by simply keeping himself healthy 20 more years, than that means I have a 30 year head start on him, and should see the same fate. It is a very pivotal time in humanity we are living in. I think the human as we know it has 500 years... max, before we are totally indistinguishable from what we currently know. If I could live long enough to witness interstellar travel, that would be to me, the ultimate scenario.
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Yes, I've often used that line of thinking to justify going out for nights with far too many beers. I may not need a fully functional liver if I can just hold on long enough and acquire the financial resources to get a healthy cloned liver in my distant future...
I do expect that in the next 20 years we will see much more integration of real life and the internet, blurring the boundaries somewhat between the virtual and the real through AR applications. Considering that we can already hold up a phone to use as a viewing window through which to see the world with an overlay of remotely accessed information about its contents, I would say that we are already on the way to changing how we commonly interact with physical contents of our real world in a deep way. What exactly this may mean for our cognitive capacities I'm not sure, but I would think that we will not go unchanged as a result of how we interact with this sort of integration between real and virtual.