Wells Goo
From ComputerWorld:
Intel founder Gordon Moore's observation, made 40 years ago last month in Electronics magazine, originally dealt only with the density of semiconductors: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."...
For a fresh look at the future, meet Ray Kurzweil and the...Law of Accelerating Returns, unveiled in a 2001 essay [QuickLink a5780], measures the computational power of machines back to the time of [H. G.] Wells....
Computational power doubled every two years, Kurzweil found, from the late Steam Age through the Electromechanical Age, until 30 years ago. Then, with the dawn of the Digital Age, computational power began to double yearly....
"We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century - it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). ... Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence."...
This future...leads to the Singularity, where societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we can't even imagine what will happen from our present perspective....
Kurzweil didn't invent the Singularity, only a model for measuring our progress toward it. Singularity is generally credited to mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who began expounding on the topic in the 1980s. He explained it in detail in his 1993 essay "Technological Singularity" [QuickLink a5790].
And just so you don't get too comfortable, beyond the Singularity could lie the Gray Goo, posited by Eric Dexler of the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology think tank. The Gray Goo is a return to the seminal pool, this one formed by nanomachines that destroy mankind....
From Drexler:
Genetic evolution has limited life to a system based on DNA, RNA, and ribosomes, but memetic evolution will bring life-like machines based on nanocomputers and assemblers. I have already described how assembler-built molecular machines will differ from the ribosome-built machinery of life. Assemblers will be able to build all that ribosomes can, and more; assembler-based replicators will therefore be able to do all that life can, and more. From an evolutionary point of view, this poses an obvious threat to otters, people, cacti, and ferns - to the rich fabric of the biosphere and all that we prize.
The early transistorized computers soon beat the most advanced vacuum-tube computers because they were based on superior devices. For the same reason, early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. "Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable. We have evolved to love a world rich in living things, ideas, and diversity, so there is no reason to value gray goo merely because it could spread. Indeed, if we prevent it we will thereby prove our evolutionary superiority.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
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