Ugh, my head.

[memnus]

I've been in a bizarre mental place, recently. I'm not sure what it is, I can't even really characterize it, other than being unfamiliar territory. It may in part be the rain, or any number of things.

Ray Kurzweil's talk didn't really help much. He naturally expounded his grandiose vision of the future, applying exponential growth curves to anything and everything, predicting such things as covering the planet in solar panels to power our perfectly efficient energy-recycling nanocomputers. (The heat generated in one cycle is reabsorbed and used to power the next cycle. Maybe I slept through one too many frosh chem lectures, but, er, what?) Perfect, internal virtual reality worlds that are just as engaging and thorough as the real world, with less limitation. Programmable synthetic immune systems. No mention - at least not until questioned - of the possible negative consequences of these things. I think that bothered me somewhat more strongly than it really should have, but it still bothered me.

I think I'm genuinely scared of the future right now. I really think that might be it. If it is, it's something I've never wanted to be, and in fact been fairly proud of not being. I want to make it stop, right now.

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Comments

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I assume that when he says the thing that sounds like perpetual motion machine, what he actually meant (and he hinted at this talking about errors) is "it will run longer than it otherwise would." I also got a strong feeling from him of "being an optimist because somebody has to," as in "If I make exponential predictions about everything, chances are some of them will come true, and then I'll win a lot." It's the expotential growth lottery!

That talk put me in a really weird place because I was so sleep-depped there was a merry little voice in my head going "Aren't you glad you're a computer scientist? It means you get to be a perpetrator, not a victim. Here's five ways this could be abused. Don't they sound like fun?" Then I looked around and there was Cube, which made it that much better.

The talk felt geared to a less techy audience than we were. It really felt more like an IT keynote. I should know, I've had to sit through enough of them (or read through enough of their proposals) helping my mom with her job. Kind of "Here, here's some cool possible futures. I shall demonstrate how they're like sci-fi and give a couple examples of how close we actually are to them. This will theoretically excite you and motivate you so you won't get as bored during the meatier sessions that have actual information in them."