Contact lens with high-res capability could theoretically replace almost every screen we look at on a day-to-day basis. And totally molest our notions of reality, existence, and whether blue is really blue. What is “blue,” anyway?
With sophisticated enough models, I suppose we could wake up and review that moment of unconscious inspiration we can only vaguely recall by mid-morning. And put it up on YouTube.
Paul Allen knows business & marketing, but when it comes to all things Singularity, he’s an armchair intellectual who hasn’t actually done anything of note in the field. Kurzweil was making computers compose original music in 1965. Oh snap?
Juan Enriquez says the ability to re-engineer living things and engineer entirely new ones is far and away the biggest thing since a bunch of other big things (even bigger than the industrial revolution). So… Cool, yeah?
Perhaps unconsciously, Allen is asserting the primacy of human intelligence in our known universe – a cognitive barrier beyond which nothing can pass – because evolution made it… or something. Paul, an AI doesn’t have to be smart LIKE us, just as smart AS us. Namsayen?
As a recent Freakonomics podcast on the Folly of Prediction told me, dogmatic adherence to an ideal is the best way to end up wrong about stuff. Me, not him.
In the context of our perception of linear time, the march toward radically upgrading the human experience is not a “switch-on” process, it’s not sudden, it’s not merely a download away. It’s an ongoing-for-quite-a-while-now, subtle, and steadily accelerating merger.