Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
Moving to the "Cloud" will become increasingly mainstream for a variety of reasons but most important will be the huge reduction in capital expenditures related to its adoption. See these top 10 trends related to the cloud at this site.
A new dawn has come in the business world and its implications have not yet reached many businesses or industries to date but the opportunities related to this innovation are significant. To the extent that "globalism" and offshore outsourcing has mpacted industries and organizations, hold on to your hats. Recalling days long gone of rhetorical exchanges with arrogant IT professionals who built fences around burdensome technology that kept process improvement from adoption for years on end, one could only dream of a world where ideas were the basis of business process improvements and technologies actually contributed to their more rapid adoption. Those days are here. When more people and business leaders wake up to the reality of what computing in the “Cloud” represents, despite strong opposition from some internal IT people distraught with the concept, a new world is indeed opened. Enterprise solutions that extend powerful system solutions are available to your business with no hardware investment and quite affordable licensing fees. Want to dramatically improve your business process while eliminating costs? See this white paper on the ins and outs: Reinventing the business workplace.
I love the accomplished Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's grasp of the new media vs. the old and in particular this excerpt from his column in Wired Magazine, "A Costly Addiction" dated November of 2006. When this site sets forth the notion that protectors of the past, particularly as it relates to copyright protection, are battling the creators of the future there are few more capable of portraying the realities of this battle than this legal mind who wrote:
"Of all the things that have not gone according to the framers' plan, perhaps this is the most significant. Practically everyone in Washington, DC, is now dependent in precisely the way our founders feared. All but a few members of Congress devote the majority of their time to raising money for reelection. Doing the job we've hired them to do – governing – takes a distant second place. A good politician comes to understand precisely how much his campaign will gain or lose with each decision he makes. Like rats in a scientific experiment learning which lever delivers food, politicians learn the complex dance that keeps them in office.
So it should be no surprise that this dependency (or corruption, as it ought to be called) has begun to permeate the institutions that support policymaking, including academia. In the recent congressional hearings on telecom and network neutrality, for example, 77 percent of the nongovernmental testimony was from commercial or trade organizations directly dependent on the result – meaning less than 23 percent came from sources that were even arguably neutral. That figure will continue to fall until the only people heard in DC will be those who have a direct financial stake in the outcome they plead. Independent policymaking will be as common as powdered wigs.
The answer is obvious to anyone watching the history of policymaking as it affects the Internet. The winners have been the industries most skilled in playing politics (read: the content industry); the losers have been the ones focused more on innovation than on sucking up to Congress (read: much of the technology industry). Those losers, though, are the future; the winners, the past. And it takes an extraordinarily perverse view of progress to think that protecting the past is the best path to the future."
View his site http://lessig.org/content/columns/ and read his book.
Futurist R. Kurzweil explains that capturing just .03% of sunlight falling onto the earth would satisfy projected human energy needs through 2030. The technologies for this solution exist and it is only a matter of time before the adoption of these and other new technologies will solve many challenges, like energy, which modern human civilization is facing. However, the implication of the dramatic evolution of technologies will result in even more compelling and revolutionary change that will impact humanity in ways presently unimaginable to most. Humanity will inevitably move beyond its biological constraints and this evolution, termed by some as the new age of Singularity, will soon be upon us all.
An objective historical account of the exponential explosion of technologies shows what has occured in just the past few decades: the paradigm shift rate is doubling every ten years. For example it took a half century to adopt the telephone and only eight years to adopt the cell phone. These principals are based on indirection; learning from the past and adopting this learning into the next stage of change: it is the nature of evolution. A good example is in biological evolution, where RNA and DNA took billions of years to develop, while the Cambrian explosion took but 10 Million years to occur. As shown in nature, we cannot think of technological change in a linear fashion: it is logrythmic and exponential.
This thinking and the depth of research and understanding which substantiates these trends and ideas is represented thoughtfully by Ray Kurzweil and can be viewed on TED.
Singularity
Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”), "experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.
And that’s the Singularity?
Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.
The date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.
Why is this called the Singularity?
The term “Singularity” is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. The dynamics leading to the Singularity are at the root of the emerging human revolution which we are only begining to see the signs of today.
Copyright © 2021, Bryan K. O'Rourke. All rights reserved.
