In the Future…
…evolution will keep on truckin’.
Futurist: M104 member Robert Hinkley
The linked article says:
In essence, the reduced gape of the animals limits their ability to eat the toads likely to do them the most damage.
Excellent. Now if I could only evolve a gape small enough to prevent me from eating the food that does me the most damage.
As the elevator doors slide closed behind me, I round the corner to observe that the office is quiet — perfectly, blissfully quiet — just as it always is.
I love Monday mornings.
The 19th floor of the Hamilton Building is a delightful place, a veritable paradise on earth. The ceiling of the main lobby, or “atrium†as we like to call it, is 25 feet high, except for the dramatic glass cathedral skylight in the center — that reaches some 12 feet higher. In fact, the 19th floor was originally the 19th – 22nd floors. We had to do a substantial amount of structural work to accommodate all the marble we brought in, especially for the fountain. As we made our way up the building over the years (starting with just a single office way down on the second floor), we left our mark at every stage of the ascent. So today we not only have an executive suite that Kublai Khan himself would be proud to call his own, we have very comfortable accommodations all the way down to the first floor. The sniveling, underachieving whiners with whom I swore I would always identify — that lasted about six months — have it better than they can possibly imagine. Whenever any of them has the temerity to complain about anything, I fantasize taking them back to the sixth floor of the old WorldConneX building and letting them cool their heels in one of those cubicles for a few hours.
Of course, that would never work. Even if the setting could be recreated (and it couldn’t; Vision bought out WorldConneX years ago, a move that I had a small hand in — although, come to think of it, that doesn’t necessarily imply an improvement in habitat for the local fauna), the essential angst would be gone. The ingrate in question would know that he or she would be coming back to work for me before long, so the experience would be devoid of that heaviness, that slow, persistent dread, that thought that one must always try to suppress, though one can never fully escape — I’m going to be stuck in this hell-hole for the rest of my life.
Aside from the lobby, the 19th floor houses only the boardroom and two offices, my own and that of my Chief Operating Officer. The Chief Counsel, CFO, and lesser luminaries dwell in somewhat more, shall we say, reserved opulence on the 16th-18th floors. They are a fine bunch, friendly and deferential to me and scared to death of the COO. Just as it should be.
Good Cop is the role I was born to play.
Recently Phil spoke about the coming portability of all knowledge:
[My iPod] holds 20 gigabytes of memory, or about 500 songs. Last year’s model could hold only 10 gigabytes, about 250 songs. If I were using my iPod to hold text rather than music, it could hold about 20,000 books. And at the rate its capacity is growing, by the year 2020 my little iPod could hold the entire Library of Congress — text, graphics, everything.
Imagine what life will be like for a college student in the year 2020. Imagine what it will be like for a first grader! This thing is smaller and lighter than any single textbook any of us ever had to lug to school. Let me pass it around. Imagine holding virtually all human knowledge in the palm of your hand.
With the 40 gig iPod now available, storage capacity seems to be on schedule. Digital availability is on the way too:
Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with [Oxford University, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library] to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.
The libraries are bringing their information to the table. Google is offering the money, expertise, and manpower necessary to digitize and electronically catalog these collections.
“Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today,” said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University’s head librarian.
Two decades? I’m betting it’s closer to 15 years.
UPDATE: While we’re talking about these kinds of things, Dean Esmay has a link to a news story about chimeras, which kicks off a very interesting discussion.
I would never have believed what a can of worms republishing my old post about Leon Kass and therapeutic cloning would open up. (Of course, the Instalanche was a major factor.) First off, Daniel Moore took me to task on definitional grounds. (Note the excellent comments by co-blogger Stephen Gordon and M104 member Karl Hallowell.) Grace at Orthodox and Heterodox found my views “chilling,” while Justin Katz and friends at Dust in the Light went to some trouble to show that my views amount to advocacy for slavery and other evils. Gumby at Two Docs and a Shovel comments as follows:
This is why the hair on my neck sticks up. No longer does this blastocyst exist as a potential person, it is an object. A thing to be grown and discarded at the whim of the donor.
In the Future…
…we will wear glittery white suits and drive shiny silver robots up
stairs.
Futurist: M104 member Robert Hinkley
I got out of bed, trembling. I was soaked with perspiration. I unbuttoned the
flannel pajama top and let it fall to the floor. The cabin was chilly. I opened
my small closet and looked for something warm. I grabbed a t-shirt and a wool
sweater. Putting them on, I headed down the hall.
I knew not to go to Sybil about the dream. It would be hard for me to talk
about it. Communicating was still an immensely exhausting activity, although
Jerry said that I was getting better at it every day. Besides, talking about
it would only upset her. For some reason, I found it much easier communicating
with Jerry than with Sybil.
I decided instead to make my way very quietly
to the front porch and sit there for a while. The sun would be up before too
long. I liked watching and listening as the forest slowly came to life. I�d
done it many times.
To my surprise, I found Jerry in the kitchen,
putting a tea kettle on. It was a good hour before either he or Sybil needed
to start warming up the grill and putting the coffee on. This time of year,
on a Thursday, we weren�t due for much breakfast business, anyway. There was
certainly no need to make such an early start.
�Morning, Sport,� Jerry whispered. �What you
doing up so early?�
I shrugged.
�Another dream?�
I shrugged again. Then, thinking better of it,
I gave a single nod.
Jerry looked at me for a long moment. Sybil�s
husband was a big man, bearded, and dressed as always in a flannel shirt, jeans,
and hiking boots. His face was deeply lined from years of working in the sun.
�Well, there you go,� he said after a moment.
�Tea?�
I shook my head.
�I thought I�d surprise your mom with a little
breakfast. What do you think?�
�Good�idea,� I said haltingly. There was no
point revisiting the fact that Sybil was not my mother. I cringed at the sound
of my own voice, much louder than it should have been.
Jerry laughed.
Well, I was…yesterday, but you kind of have to dig for it.
Those who insist that a hydrogen-based energy economy is impractical and undoable have a lot of recent news to contend with. It looks like we’ll either find a way to do it at the molecular level or using good old atom-splitting technology.
I’m fine either way.
It’s a good-news, bad-news day for the salvage industry. This morning we learned that “Electronics recycling is a growing business.”
But this afternoon we learned that “Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower.”
Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.
“It’s a totally biodegradable and non-toxic plastic,” said Pvaxx spokesman Peter Morris…
The company’s new plastic, which was created over the past five years but was in development for longer, can be rigid or flexible in shape.
Some 650 million mobile phones will be sold this year, and most of them will be thrown away within two years, burdening the environment with plastics, heavy metals and chemicals. A biodegradable cover can offer some relief for nature, Warwick University said.
Yes, but it’s no help for a salvage empire.
Here’s an important development:
…(S)cientists from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have proposed a scheme to transfer the quantum state of a pulse of light onto a set of atoms and have demonstrated it experimentally.
The current experiment paves the way for new experiments in which the information contained in light can be mapped onto atomic clusters and then back into the light again. In this way, one could not only store the state of light in an atomic clusters, but also retrieve it. This process will be necessary if we want to build quantum repeaters, that is, devices which will allow the extension of quantum communication far beyond the distances (of the order of 100 km) which are achieved nowadays.
Hmmm…long-range quantum communication. That should come in quite handy. As Seth Shostak pointed out a while back, quantum communication provides the means of sending interstellar signals with caller ID turned off. Just in case, you know, some of the folks turn out to be more like their movie counterparts than we would hope they would be.
(via Kurzweil AI)