The singularity

No doubt you have heard about the prediction of mad genius Ray Kurzweil ofthe singularity, when machines will be smarter than people and we ' ll connect our brains to the cloud.Well, that probably won ' t happen, for better or for worse. However, our unquestioning love of technological advances is a serious blind spot. It ' s trivially obvious that there are downsides to nuclear weapons, internal combustion engines, and hydrogenated vegetable oil, to name a few. And it ought to be just as obvious that if firearms were still muzzle-loading muskets we ' d have less of an argument about them and a lot less to fear.But I haven ' t heard very many people worrying about a disastrous technological singularity. As a thought experiment, what if teleportation became possible? It seems to me it would be the end of civilization, possibly of humanity. Door locks would become irrelevant. Anybody could remove any object or person from any place. You could knock down skyscrapers by teleporting away part of their footings, kidnap anybody from anywhere, kill anybody by removing the head, steal all the gold from Fort Knox. And anyone who had a monopoly on the technology would have absolute, unassailable power over all humanity.Okay, that ' s probably impossible. Laws of physics and all that. But sci-fi writers don ' t seem to have thought it through. But technology that is possible is also pretty scary.Consider 3-D printing. It ' s a cool way to make customizable objects, including prostheses a...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs