A History of the Future of Tech

EDIT: Edited 27/03/2022because I realise the formatting totally sucked balls. But I have not changed a single word, nor added or subtracted any. 

Technology marches all over every aspect of our lives. Not in a bad way, but still... 

I'm going to pose a question or two, see what you think. In my last post I mentioned that so much has changed so fast. In fact, I'd venture to say that the last 200 years have seen more invention and advance than the rest of human history together, if you list each of our scientific/technological/biological/mathematical/whatever achievements. This chap along with Shockley Brattain and Bardeen made the first transistors a possibility. He helped develop the first working practical transistor in his early 30's and passed away a few days ago aged 91. 

Question 1: Do you reckon Morgan Sparks could have predicted how fast the world would take to his invention and miniaturise it to the point that any 1000 top end laptops made today probably contain more junctions than all the discrete transistors ever manufactured? 

Question 2: What was more effective at changing the world, the unleashing of the awesome power of the atom on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the mid 40's, or the unleashing of the amount of data, information exchange, and communication speed made possible by these four men in the early 50's just a few years later? Kind of thought-provoking, huh? 

Question 3: Do you think that the effects of nanotechnology and genetics/geneticmod and other fields is being similarly underestimated today? And will arrive a whole lot faster than the current electronic technology has? 

Okay - another one for you. Given the iPhone and the trend it has started among others, what's left for the mobile phone industry? Keep in mind that mobile phones have all but killed the wristwatch industry to the point where they now have trouble avoiding the red in their figures, and that mobile phones have become more and more like micro versions of tablet and UMPC style machines. 

Can I suggest something? It won't be too long now before biotechs and nanotechs and genetechs experience an epiphany event - when they realise that together, they can create something that far exceeds the humble microchip in capability and capacity. And best of all, they will realise that it can be built right inside the most complex machine we know, ourselves. At that point transistors, microchips, mobile phones, computers, laptops, UMPCs, and the whole slew of devices we are used to seeing today will become as irrelevant and scarce as wristwatches...

Tech Marches. And Marches. Where Does It Go To?

As the article says, 60 years ago we only had vacuum tubes, which would make a computer such as this laptop I'm typing this on, around about the size of half the CBD of Perth. Considering that the image to the left contains vacuum tubes about as high as a lipstick and not quite twice the diameter (so you can imagine the scale) and is probably less than 1k of memory...

In just over fifty years we've gone from technology that barely managed to amplify whispers, to machines that we now take for commonplace, such as my laptop, and supercomputers in a case the size of an old PC tower.

Fifty years ago when I was a baby, my grandparents, going to the city of Vienna for the first time to visit their daughter, my mother, made the sign of the cross each time mum turned on an electric light. A few years later they were watching black & white TV, and a few years after that, colour TV.

Thirty-eight years ago I was avidly hooking together vacuum tube radios and tape decks and getting electric shocks and wishing I had some of those new fangled solid state devices, those transistors. They were well beyond the pocketmoney of a kid, but a few years later I worked with aircraft avionics and built a 4bit computer with 1024 BITS (not bytes!) of memory from a kit.

Thirty-and-some years ago, I bought a ZX-80 computer that was twenty to fifty times faster and more powerful, in a quarter of the size. Since then, progressivley better and better machines, to the point where a PDA which is one tenth to one twentieth the size of my first homebrew computer packs quite a few orders of magnitude more processing power and millions of times more memory.

Current designs will allow the processing power of a supercomputer cluster, in a device the size of a PDA or small tablet PC. And beyond that?

In Times To Come

I know I haven't been blogging to this blog for a while, and I've taken the old arachnet version offline, but this will all change soon, as soon as I have time between contracts again. I promise I'll be adding the old articles to this blog soon.

For now, I want to heark back to my favourite issue, transhumanity. I am still of the opinion that the first decent robot won't be developed until after we've managed to duplicate most of the cells of the human body - and then remove the cells and leave the duplicating structure. I similarly think that once nanotechnology can do that, i.e. create a second, more durable brain and a second more durable set of nerves and muscles and skin and bone - in the spaces between the cells - then we will also have enough of a handle on these things to download a mind and personality, store it, restore it.

It's been one of my tenets - first they will figure out a fairly simple thing like replacing a strand of nerve by "growing" nanoparticles that attach to specific places along the nerve cell, in effect paralleling the nerve. Because nanoparticles work at a very fine scale, the two sets of atoms will pretty much inter-exist, and take up hardly any more space than the original nerve did.

Once you do that, you have a man-built part intimately grown into the human cells it replaces. A man-built part that, having built, you can attach an input/output (I/O) connection toif you wanted to. But nerves is small change, do this at the level of brain neurons and synapses and you have aimulacrum of the brain, intimately grown into and among it. Here, you can begin to attach I/O of a serious order. Enough to grow a wireless network connection, for example...

And then you have download/upload capability for EVERYTHING inside. It becomes just a matter of how many petabytes it will take for a complete schematic and program. And whenmy body dies, of building the artificial body first then growing biological bits back into it, then finally hitting the upload switch.

Of course you could also clone using this, in a much more efficient and speedy way than natural biological cloning. And enhance... And add new functionality, stuff thst might comein handy. Using metallic materials for nerves results in faster signalling, i.e. faster perception and faster reflexes. Different material in the eyeball retina and lens will let us see UV and IR light. Rewire some of those cilia in the inner ear and you could hear electricity.

So when an article gets all het up about robot rights, remember that this robot could very well have started life as a nan-cy-clone of a human. They will have rights alright...

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