Star Trek

Wired blog article on AI and it's implications
Great read! Discusses the implications of AI, how soon we're likely to see it, and a number of possible utopian and dystopian worlds that may arise

He also quotes
"Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own."

He reminds me of a quote from two people argueing on digg, star wars vs star trek. The Trek fan said "Trek fans grow up to be biologists, engineers, astrophyscists, and pilots. Star Wars fans grow up to be Star Wars fans."

EDIT: More quotes

"But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today."

"As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor."

Wow... long, but worth the read!

"It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds - a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish. "

It scares me, because if what he is saying about the advancement of these technologies, then it means we as a race are not nearly mature enough to handle them. We still fight wars, have nations vying for power in all its forms. Within nations, people compete with each other, for economic and military dominance.  We are still a world based around competition not around cooperation, and introducing such powerful technologies into such a world would be devastating.

Quote (Bulltii @ Oct. 18 2008, 10:08 pm)

Wired blog article on AI and it's implications Great read! Discusses the implications of AI, how soon we're likely to see it, and a number of possible utopian and dystopian worlds that may arise He also quotes "Thursday nights my parents went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me. I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style, with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry's vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots, dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry's dream as part of my own." He reminds me of a quote from two people argueing on digg, star wars vs star trek. The Trek fan said "Trek fans grow up to be biologists, engineers, astrophyscists, and pilots. Star Wars fans grow up to be Star Wars fans." EDIT: More quotes "But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today." "As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor." Wow... long, but worth the read!

Strange his quote on how he believed ethical humans will rule the future or that human even have a future in space in their present form..

The humans of the 2030 will be so different than what are we are today. Even ethnic we know will be shaped by technolog..

One of the best Novel I ever read on the matter called " a look from the edge" show how human civilization will be change by advantage in genetic, where human can change them selve at will, changing sex, size shape and even create clones of themselve for company and how machine intelligences basic look after us like we are their pets..

As for ethnics we not even ethnical now i doubt we do any better in the future.

The pet scenario is covered in the article, where we're allowed to just live out our indulgences as machines make all the true decisions.
He states that while it is possible in such a world that we have retained the ability to shut the machines off, doing so would be comparable to committing suicide.

He worked as a computer programmer and microchip designer, and the article covers his exploration into the ethics of his work. I thought the comparison to WWII and prior atomic scientists to his own position (and indeed the position of those in working in genetic engineering and nanotechnology) was very interesting