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...economic destiny and prosperity of entire nations may rest on one question: Can silicon-based computer technology sustain Moore's law beyond 2020? Moore's law (see sidebar) is the engine pulling a trillion-dollar industry. It's the reason kids assume that it's their birthright to get a video-game system each Christmas that's almost twice as powerful as the one they got last Christmas. It's the reason you can receive (and later throw away) a musical birthday card that contains more processing power than the combined computers of the Allied Forces in World...
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...
...minds in virtually any imaginable way. Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained, restricted to a mere 100 trillion connections. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another over a wireless local area network, they can create any set of neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing) and create new hybrid (i.e., combined biological and nonbiological) networks, as well as add powerful new forms of nonbiological...
...success of the last eight years, it's a validation of the basic strategy. It also puts into the sharp focus the big choices we have to make now in order to guarantee prosperity and progress, and the contrast is really quite clear. Governor Bush proposes to spend $1 trillion attempting to privatize Social Security and almost an additional $2 trillion on a huge tax plan that combined with the privatization plan would completely spend even the most expansive surplus estimates and more. And that's before you start adding in the so-called Star Wars proposal and the other...
...savings and private investment. I've always encouraged investments in the stock market, investments in private savings accounts, but they should come on top of the foundation of Social Security. That's why I call it Social Security Plus. The difference is, that Governor Bush proposes to drain $1 trillion out of the Social Security trust fund, which makes this plan Social Security minus...