From 10 Zen Monkeys:

…So guy geeks are always talking about how you can connect to more people and form more networks with people you never met. And my research tells me women’s brains are just more interested in face reading and voice reading and reading all the messages you get beneath the words. Guys tend to concentrate more on the abstract ideas behind the words. So email is unfulfilling for most women. They want to get together at lunch with their friends and make eye contact and stand way too close to each other. More…

From Wired:

Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon’s way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency’s nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December. For my story in the March issue of Wired (online next Tuesday), Tether and I talked about everything from bio-terrorists to zombie rodents to thinking machines to the golf courses in Iraq. Here’s the transcript.

I love to be reminded of our place in the cosmos:

The Powers of 10

February 19, 2007
By InfoWorld Staff:

Tinkering along the fringe of possibility, hoping to solve the impossible or apply another’s discovery to a real-world problem, these free thinkers navigate a razor-thin edge between crackpot and visionary. They transform our suspicion into admiration when their ideas are authenticated with technical advances that reshape how we view and interact with the world. More…

Technology seems difficult to define.

Dictionary.com tried but found it hard to nail down. If you head over to thesaurus.com you’ll find four synonyms listed. The first entry is “communications,” meaning ‘exchange’ and lists these synonyms: information technology, means, media, public relations, publicity, route, telecommunications, transport, travel.

Communications? That’s interesting. That’s what neurons, people, and computers have in common. They’re all just different levels of communication, that is, sending and recieving messages.

In anthropology, technology means ‘the body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.’

That sounds a lot like ‘all knowledge.’

Knowledge is different than thinking. Knowledge can exist encoded in non-cognitive material. Our brains must think in order to encode knowledge. The problem is it’s fallable and basically self-destructs in relatively little time, losing it’s stored information forever. So it’s unreliable.

Storing knowledge encoded in stone on the other hand will ensure the message lasts. But alas the stone eventually weathers.

The best way to ensure the survival of a message, a finite piece of knowledge, is to copy it, which is to communicate it.

Take that rigid stone enscribed with your knowledge, apply ink to the stone and ‘press’ it against paper. Do this hundreds of times and your message is much more likely to stick around. Scan that piece of paper into the Internet and you’ve now re-encoded it into a digital medium. Now, allow that message to propagate perfectly and easily all over the world. Aside from information sent out into space, it’s gonna be really hard to destroy all of those copies.

As the Internet grows it connects nodes covering the globe and beyond to one another. It has weaved into every part of our lives and this trend will only continue. With an important caveat: the rate of that expansion is growing at an exponential rate. The rate. That means that in the next ten years, the amount of technological advancement will be equal to sum of all technological advancement in the previous 100 years. It happened in the last ten years.

Think about what happens when anything grows exponentially.

Yeah. Whatever it is, it reaches a point – the knee of the curve – where all hell breaks loose (very scientific term!)

If the rate of technological change advances exponentially then the day is coming when we will reverse-engineer the human mind and create artificial intelligence (which is listed as a synonym for technology on thesaurus.com) systems able to compute more than a single human mind. And soon after that, more than one human mind, and after that…who knows…a million human minds?

That’s big. No, that’s HUGE. And it’s called the Technological Singularity.

Brace yourself – the world is going to shake…

…is shaking!

-BloggingtheSingularity

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