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Pastimes : The Big Picture - Economics and Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (683)	9/25/2003 4:17:02 AM
From: Crabbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 686

I misread your first post badly. I guess I was looking for disagreement as that is about all I have encountered in the past. While I wouldn't quite Categorize my musings and thoughts over the past several years as rantings that description does not miss by to far. I have several posts on this thread from 1997 on the subject if you would like to look back at them. The first post on this thread that I feel starts to express some of my radical ideas is post number 101, 103, 230, 235, 239, 254 shows my lack of recognition of the speed things were occurring,. Another post of interest is post 95 by Sid Turtlman it was the first reference to outsourcing or off shoring jobs to India, at the time I ignored it today it is the biggest problem in jobs recovery. Getting back to your post. While I agree this is bigger than any event or process in history, though the invention of the club was monumental, as it started this process of productivity increases, I kind of regret your stating it here as most readers will already consider us "Pie in the sky dreamers". I have long considered the computer to be the next stage of evolution. It may not actually replace us, crocodiles and sharks still live today and lived many millions of years ago. Terminator is foolishness. As long as an ant stays out of my attention I could care less about it but if it tried to "pull my plug" I might consider it a danger and eliminate it. We will coexist, and just as I don't think much of an ox it is just a beast of burden. The Sentient computers/cyberspace to come will care less if I utilize my dumb desktop PC or imbedded controllers in my machinery. Your thoughts of it being cyberspace instead of computers in general are interesting. Have you ever read Robert Heinlein's book "The moon is a harsh mistress"? In that book a computer grew and grew by updates and additions till one day it "Woke up". Will Cyberspace wake up on it's own? I think not. Von Neuman Computers can never wake up. Conscious thought requires massively parallel processes best accomplished by neural networks, but massive enough neural networks are not yet within our capabilities. Quantum computing is advancing with increasing speed and for the sake of the doubters i won't even touch lightly on the theories of how and why they work. I do think though that state of the art quantum computers are now 7 bits wide. At 120 bits wide 120 bit standard encryption now used on the internet would be not more unreadable than straight text as a quantum computer could break the code in one cycle. Combinations of these and other technologies will be necessary for computers to "evolve". While discussing technology and where it is headed is fun just for the sake of it, I am on this thread more interested in discussing the economic implications as they affect us today and in the near and not so near futures. You state that we will do fine. I agree given time we will do fine. The transition is the problem. How do we get from the industrial revolution labor based, money exchange medium, economy to a post information revolution economy of tomorrow, one that litterally needs no labor as simple robots do the manual labor and complex computers make the decisions? Simple robots could be a GPS/Computer controlled tractor, or the internal workings of a city, or your autonomous vacuum cleaner available today from Electrolux and others for ~$200. BTW you underestimate the powers that computers are gaining in sight and sound. I think today a computer could easily recognize a clothes line or a tree. Computers in fact can recognize, nearly instantaniously, human faces, picking terrorists out of a crowd. Computers recognize voice input from any vocal source, just call MSN and input your phone number by voice. One of Microsofts major projects is "Natural Language Processing" the ability to recognize and generate random intelligent speech. The vocalization has been easy since "Speak and Spell" in the late 1970's. My first home computer a TI99/4A had a speech synthesizer. Using basic you just wrote the statement "Say XXXXXX" fill in the XXXXX with a word and it would say it. It even would have pronounced the XXXXXXXX something like Cha-Cha-cha...... Computers are now being built that exceed the human mind in processing power. IBM is building 2, ASCI Purple and Blue-Gene lite. Purple will be delivered next year and at 100 trillion HZ equals the human mind. Blue-Gene at 360 Trillion HZ exceeds human processing power by a factor of about 3.6. When I say human brain processing power that includes sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, sex, thought, every synapse of the brain. Moore's law predicts the equivalent on your desktop within 15 years. I think in your considerations of the coming revolution you have neglected the transition from here to there. This transistion if well considered offers the possibility of huge profit for each of us if we make the proper considerations and place our money properly. Rod