I can recall readin Mr Martin’s boooks growing up in the mid to late ’70s,especially the book quoted from in the recent Discover magazine article about him,”The Wired Society”. Look at the list of predictions in the article! He predicted PDAs and cellular phones.Telecommuting.The ubiquitous ATM machines and theatre ticket kiosks we have.The popularity of e-mail and instant messaging on the yet-to be invented World Wide Web and Internet.The one thing that frightens me about the article and this should you as well,is the reference to “breeding software and hardware” Quote:
“Martin predicts that in as little as 10 years,what he calls breeding factories-vast buildings as big as a General Motors assembly plant filled with parallel-processing supercomputers-will dot the Earth.”HELLLO>> Remember,Terminator 2???SKYNET?? Or here’s another movie example from Wargames:Rember what the General said about taking people out the loop..If We want these supercomputers or AIs to learn,then let them learn from us.Im for an all-evoling neural-net vision of the Internet but let’s be able to plug into it ala William Gibson and control the exponential growth of AIs.Or else
the nightmares of Terminator 2 and Blade Runner will come back to haunt us.Our own creation will seek to eliminate and surpass us.Just something to think about…..