Digg Likes X-Seed 4000 Tuesday, Jun 27 2006
futurism 10:55 pm
My X-Seed 4000 post reached the front page of Digg’s technology section today… the page has received about 5000 hits in the past seven hours, pretty cool. (Update: the final traffic count was about 25,000 unique visitors in the single day that the post was linked from digg’s front page.) In honor of this, let’s brainstorm structures significantly bigger and more exciting than X-Seed:
1. Space Pier
2. Space beanstalk
3. 100km-aperture hypertelescope
4. Death Star
5. Borg Cube
6. some structures from Halo
7. Ringworld
8. A Dyson sphere
9. Deep Space Nine
10. Many proposed space colonies
11. Globus Cassus
12. Omega Point
Add your own in the comments.
I don’t think structuralism like this is in our far future, but rather computational megaprojects like MBrains and JBrains. Perhaps these should go on the list–the ‘virtual structures’ that could be created inside these devices would be vastly more impressive.
Seriously. There’s more cultural complexity in a few square meters worth of SecondLife servers than the entire state of Montana, I’ll bet.
“There’s more cultural complexity in a few square meters worth of SecondLife servers than the entire state of Montana”
How do you compute that?
Not only I seriously doubt it but I think THIS is the very fatal flaw of the Singularitarians:
GROSSLY UNDERESTIMATING the complexity of the “real world” however dumb it may look like in so many instances.
P.S. You won’t take any critiscism, will you?
This is also a fatal flaw.
To paraphrase Joseph Fouché, it’s worse than unethical it is an ERROR.
(He actually said “it’s worse than a crime it’s a fault”)
http://vdaucourt.free.fr/Fouche/Fouche.htm
Sure we’ll take criticism. Also, notice how I wouldn’t even be able to get your advice if you weren’t using a keyboard to input your information to a web server.
Don’t pigeonhole my (vaguely inferred) position on virtual vs. real as being representative of Singularitarians in general. Singularitarians care about the impact of superintelligence because it will matter in the *real world*, not because it will only matter in virtuality. So you could say we’re more focused on the real world than the virtual. (Although the distinction is illusory.)
Thanks for acknowledging my remark.
May I add a few details…
“if you weren’t using a keyboard”
I do not despise technology, I have been a software engineer for 38 years now.
“Singularitarians care about the impact of superintelligence ”
I DO care about superintelligence too I even emailed you about that in case you remember.
“because it will matter in the *real world*”
I do understand that Singularitarians are interested in the real world and not only/mainly in virtuality.
“Although the distinction is illusory”
Agreed in the sense that virtuality happens in the real world (I would not agree the other way around).
Though, all those points are the basis of my criticism:
-Software is still as unmanageable today as it has ever been.
See Fred Brooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month, 30 years and still up to date.
Isn’t nanotech, biotech and AI relying on software?
- I have been promised “intelligent computers” since the very beginning of my career in 1968 at IBM (they nearly apologized for teaching us programming).
I still believe that *some* truly effective superintelligence can come out but I do not see it being some “God in a box”, whish granting genius. Therefore I share neither the paranoid scares nor the demented expectations of the Singularitarians.
- However I do share the opinion that such superintelligence is the most important technology than can emerge and that it better emerge BEFORE we make a mess with nanotech and biotech, in order to minimize the damages.
- I think lofty ideas like “uploading” are plain nonsense because WE DON’T KNOW what consciousness and even feelings and any qualia ARE.
This is not to say that I ascribe “mystical qualities” to such things, just that you cannot pretend handle matters you don’t really know about.
This reeks of religious fantasies gone “hi-tech”.
- To repeat myself from the previous comment, COMPLEXITY is the stumbling stone of the Singularitarian dream:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/there-more-things-heaven-earth-horatio
Pyramid-like structures, similar to those seen in Blade Runner?
I came to see archologies. I saw the proposal on Discovery Channel for one in Hong Kong, but I think the ones on Sim City 2000 were the most impressive.
I hope that one day we can rid the world of auto’s by using magnetic rail trains linking archologies!
What is a dyson sphere? Or a ringworld?
where are some sites that i can look into theses futuristic ideas?
great blog