So, after a week off from almost all computer-related activities, I return to zero comments about my last post, the poem. I can only assume this means that my readership is not only small, it is culturally retarded.(I like to cast blame outward whenever possible. It's a neat trick I learned from Bill O'Reilly... if you get good at it, you can always feel like a victim no matter how much of an asshole you're being. Not only does this aid in sleep and digestion, I find it improves the quality of your skin as well).
Anyway, pineapples. It starts with this story I heard on NPR about The Singularity.
Basically, there's this super smart dude named Ray Kurzweil who's really good at predicting technology; e.g., he predicted the emergence of a world wide web 10ish years before it showed up, which is pretty extraordinary if you look back at where the intertoobz were in 1986. Here's his prediction for something he foresees popping up 2045ish which is so extraordinary, he (among others) refers to it as a singularity:
... And one thing we'll be able to do is send millions of nanobots, blood cell-sized devices, inside our bloodstream. They'll keep us healthy from inside. They'll go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons, just the way neural implants do today, and put our brains on the Internet, make us smarter, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. And so, we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence. So over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity. When you get out to 2045, we'll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.
How fucking cool is that?!?
I mean, we're talking a Holodeck inside your head here. Shoot, one could even extrapolate to the kind of cool technology they talk about in Old Man's War, and Battlestar Galactica, where you can download your consciousness onto a different (perhaps even Tricia Helfer-esque) body.
I want to see (have) that!
And, thus, I have foresaken a chocolatey, fatty (or, if I really had my druthers, boozey, cigarettey) mid-afternoon snack for pineapple so I can live to 76.
Seriously, we live in some amazing times.
