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BILL RICHARDSON Energy Sec.'s v.p. chances toast after Los Alamos woes. Hey, but now you can lose the Atkins diet...
...half-baked ideas. It is a flow of gossip tidbits, news headlines and floating first impressions. Notions don't stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled by the audience. Screen culture is fast, like a 30-sec. movie trailer, and as liquid and open-ended as a website...
There may be a silver lining to all this. If Moore's law somehow continues unabated, then by some estimates our computers by 2050 will be calculating well beyond 500 trillion bytes per sec., at which point, as Ray Kurzweil suggests (see "Will My PC Be Smarter Than I Am?"), they will be considerably smarter than we are. Evolution says organisms are replaced by species of superior adaptability. When our robots tire of taking orders, they may, if we're lucky, show more compassion to us than we've shown the species we have pushed into oblivion. Perhaps they will...
...subtle ways in which humans are intelligent--including musical and artistic aptitude, creativity, the ability to physically move through the world and even to respond to emotion. A necessary (but not sufficient) condition is the requisite processing power, which I estimate at about 20 million billion calculations per sec. (we have on the order of 100 billion neurons, each with some 1,000 connections to other neurons, with each connection capable of performing about 200 calculations per sec.). As Moore's law reaches its limit and computing power no longer doubles roughly every 12 to 18 months (by my reckoning...
...effective missile defense has been so slow and costly is that the ABM treaty prevents us from testing the most promising technologies, such as sea-based and space-based weapons. Even today, we cannot test a high-speed interceptor against any incoming missile traveling faster than 5 km per SEC. because the Russians are afraid it might be effective against their ICBMs. This is quite crazy. It means that because of a cold war relic, the U.S. has to forgo building the most effective defense it can against nuclear attack by a rogue state such as North Korea...