We are still on for the Future Salon with Jaron Lanier on the 23rd of April, or at least I haven't heard anything different.
Thought I share with you a couple of quotes from the One Half of a Manifesto, but first how the eloquent Futurist Paul Saffo describes Jaron Lanier:
When we get a century or so into this revolution, Jaron Lanier is going to prove to be one of the most prominent, deep thinkers. As brilliant as Jaron is, we only have a vague glimpse that there's somebody very special in our midst. This is an intelligence that comes once in a generation. It's not an exaggeration to say it's a little bit like meeting a Mozart.
Some almost random quotes from Jaron Lanier's Half Manifesto:
But technologists are the inevitable winners of this game, as they change the very components of our lives out from under us. It is tempting to many of them, apparently, to leverage this power to suggest that they also possess an ultimate understanding of reality, which is something quite apart from having tremendous influence on it.
In order to embrace an eschatology in which the computers become smart as they become fast, some kind of Deus ex Machina must be invoked, and it has a beard.
Stephen Jay Gould who argues in Full House that if there's an arrow in evolution, it's towards greater diversity over time, and we unlikely creatures known as humans, having arisen as one tiny manifestation of a massive, blind exploration of possible creatures, only imagine that the whole process was designed to lead to us.
A great long term art project for some rebellious kid in school now: Genetically engineer an animal with wheels! See if DNA can be made to do it
Why in the long history of evolution was the wheel never invented? We seem to find lots of uses for it, even without laying out pavement or tracks first. Will it be possible to tweak DNA to create a wheel?
If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science.
Four years of Accelerated Change later, the investment obsession regarding LINUX is gone, but it still is the great hope. (May be there is a silver lining coming from the Google Platform.)
I can hardly wait for Jaron Lanier's update at the Future Salon on the 23rd of April.
See you there.
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