by KaiserJeep » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 09:55:40
Computers are NOT as intelligent as humans, they cannot exist without us. In fact, I would not call what computers do have "intelligence" at all.
My view of what is happening is that the human race is now a hybrid species, locked in co-dependance with another species which is electronic. It is an unequal partnership, they cannot exist at all without us, and we simply prefer to have them around. However, the payback for us, in terms of enjoyable entertainment, access to knowledge, and new capabilities enabled by electronics and the web, is enormous. Our electronic devices and our network enrich our lives, enable things such as this very conversation, not possible or even conceivable before the network was created.
Nor will we relinquish our new electronic servants. They offer much more than the relatively paltry efforts needed to become networked costs us. African countries exist that don't have enough food, or an electrical power grid, but do in fact have the WWW and smartphones and cell towers. The network and the electronic servants are simply too valuable to relinquish ever again. They enable the feeding of more people with less food. In the absence of grid power, portable solar chargers are used.
In the First World, 99+% of net traffic is frivolous in nature. In Africa, at least 90% of network usage is related to practical communication matters of survival, dealing with food and water and shelter.
Believe me, the new hybrid human/electronic species, and the network that enables these benefits, is here to stay. We are the Boomers, poorly equipped and skilled for mobile devices and the WWW. Our parents, who are now vanishing from the Earth, had practically no ability to interact with a network. My Father did E-mail, and was survived by his second wife, who continued to pay for and use his E-mail account after his death, as it was a means of communication with her extended family. Thus I continued to get E-mail from "him", under his name, for years following his death.
The knowledge gap between us the Boomers, and our own kids, is just as great as between our parents and us. But the all-pervasive network and the communications and access to knowledge that they possess is greater than ours. Their kids - my grandkids - will grow up in a world that may or may not be better than ours today, but without a doubt will be networked. Bit-perfect digital records of the decline and fall of the human race when FF exhaustion reduces our numbers, will exist forever more. The new hybrid species will evolve in ways we cannot conceive, and that do not resemble anything in the History of the prior, non-networked human species.
If you are reading this, you are a member of that cybernetic new species that is replacing non-networked humans. YOU have been assimilated, whether you understood it as it was happening or not. It is a Brave New Digital World. But this new world and this new hybrid species already exists, and will not ever die. Its numbers may wax and wane as a function of available resources, but you have no choices in this matter, you already did the act itself, you reproduced via electronic coitis, or became infected with the digital virus, or grew into a new level of consciousness - whatever terminology works for you (none are exactly correct anyways) - and you are now a cybernetic individual.
The Singularity, like the Oil Peak, is in the Past, not the Future.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
'
'
