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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1273)	4/20/1999 1:48:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Hello Joe, > Thanks again for your post on Kurzweil. I'm still very intrigued by the book and many of the thoughts. One of the things that I start to think is interesting is that people expect that machines are going to jump out and "rule" the earth. They often try to think of robots sitting in the White House ... While in reality they are all around us, and already starting to have a major influence on our lives ... at least here in the US. If you think about the fact that there are soda machines, which now automatically contact the distributors when they need a refill. They order the appropriate refills automatically, and even create the work orders for one human to load the truck, and another work order for the driver. Here we are already seeing the beginning of machines guiding or "controlling" the behavior of humans. Likewise, most of these on-line web sites (such as Amazon or E-Toys) have created extremely automated systems for taking orders, and then issuing the appropriate paperwork for someone to pick and pack the order and have it drop shipped to the customer. These systems are then integrated into the inventory control systems which can change items and text on the web pages based on excess inventory levels. I believe that these subtle ways in which we employ automated systems are only going to get more and more "efficient". An extremely complex form of "push the bar and get some food" ... these systems are helping us to run a more efficient business, but we are offloading more and more "processing" and "decision support" to these systems. I believe that the human-machine that is coming will not appear suddenly nor be very visible, but instead will become a subtle dependency that we will develop and use. At some point "it" will be making decisions about what stimulus to provide to what group of humans to create a particular reaction ... ;-) Scott C. Lemon