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I think there is a serious underappreciation for the societal impact that diffusion of rapid proto-typing technology at the individual level (the RepRap Project being one famous example) can effect. The benefits of Economy of Scale without the necessity of acquiring the Scale, as it were. Still much work that remains to be accomplished yet before this becomes more than promise, but the economic impact alone ought to qualify as "world changing", I think.
I also think that you've overlooked the psychological aspect of the singularity precursor period (I would be prepared to argue that humanity is in the early stage of just such an epochol event now). Often called the psychology of crowds or the like, there is an undeniable positive or encouraging effect on each of us from observing the habits and actions of others. Encouraging this effect is what accounts for the near-endless list of "celebrity endorsements" we get to endure. The accelerating rate of advancement that the singularity model posits results from some combination of the technology development itself, but almost as importantly on the dispersion rate of acceptance an advance has within the population as well. The greatest idea in human history is essentially meaningless if people don't empoly it to their advantage somehow. An exponential rate of growth follows essentially the same development course as a linear projection until it reaches the explosive growth stage; its hard to tell between the two until then. I don't think we've allowed sufficient time to elapse to make an informed judgement regarding that portion of the singularity theory yet.
I suggest that how a technology gains acceptance (and how that process is resisted by entrenched competition) will have nearly as much impact on human society as will almost any particular technology itself, until wide-spread acceptance does occur - at which point it will transition to the "only common sense" catagory if history is any judge. :)
But most physical objects are more fungible - one fork is pretty much as good as another, most MP3 players are nearly as good as the best. So I suspect that nanofactories might start out only used for hobby printing of personal creations, but quickly open source designs would start to appear, and as volume of production increases, people would buy better nanofactories and buy their supplies in larger, cheaper volumes. (Or they might start re-cycling nanoblocks - a cost advantage commercial producers would find hard to compete with.) Even if it never got cheaper than mass manufactured goods, home production avoids the mark-ups of conventional commercial distribution. So at a minimum, nanofactories would make anything they could reproduce into a low-margin business.
Even if naofactories didn't turn out to be radical vs conventional manufacturing - they WOULD radically leverage new technology introductions.
E.g. suppose we had nanofactories, but didn't already have wireless or cell phones, and someone released an open source design for a "radiophone" (hand held unit and base station), with the handset able to use any base station within 2 miles to make a call, and the base station able to either use the existing phone network or forward a dozens calls over a high powered radio link to any other nearby base station. People would quickly build phones and base stations for their own use. Within a few weeks, there'd be so many base stations that one could make a call from just about anywhere in a city. Then someone might release a new variant that allows making calls while driving, and we'd essentially have cellphone technology rolled out in a few months. Within a year, hundreds of customized variant designs become available.
Such a change to rapid roll-out of open source technologies would cause secondary radical changes. E.g., would anyone be able to start selling cell phones after the above system got rolled out? Maybe - but more likely that whole market would be ruined for commercial exploitation.
And what if a company comes up with a great new gadget? Within a few weeks of announcing it - maybe even before they start to ship it - an inferior knock-off open source design appears, spoiling the market. Even products tied to a subscription service would be at risk, as pirate gadgets were made and the service hacked; or free alternative user-supported services were set up as an alternative to the paid service.
Having quality personal 3D fabrication devices could accelerate change and adoption. If meaningful and impactful technology was produced then delays like the years needed to upgrade broadband could be circumvented. This would be more useful. While most of the time it would be some meaningless fad product. Like the current speed of getting a lot of people to watch a new funny cat video on Youtube.
I accept that more and more incremental greasing of the wheels of progress at some point can lead to emergent qualitative changes.
Success in home printing of books would not be really meaningful except to some authors and publishers. The general public is just skipping a trip to Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com or converting a short run series of PDF's into something bound and nicer.
When the first Iraq war broke occurred and America entered Kuwait, the Saudi state media did not even report that it had happened. As people with satellite TV could see CNN, the desire for satellite dishes ballooned and state media realized that they had to loosen up a bit. Since then, the market has continued to expand and while some Satellite channels broadcast antisemitic and terrorist propaganda, some of these same channels broadcast shows which actually debate such issues. And they are bringing views of other cultures to formerly isolated places. Oprah is massively popular among Saudi women (she dresses conservatively and yet is liberated, entrepreneurial and discusses some real issues) and a Turkish soap opera which has featured a married couple where the husband supports his wife and her career, has been said to have caused divorces in Egypt.
This technology has even begun to affect language usage patterns. People across the Arabic world where the language can vary greatly between different regions can see shows made in other nations. And the significant over-representation of English language content on satellite broadcasts and the number of English language channels in general, makes English an easier language to learn by non-native speakers across the world.
Even religion will be affected as secular science shows proliferate across the planet and Christian evangelistic programing (often targeted to specific language groups by converted diaspora) out perform other religions like Islam which often focus on the Islamic world.
As more satellite TV channels - both pay-per-view and free-to-air - have brought more content to more homes, repressive governments and clergy have reacted with bans, "codes of conduct" and even death Fatwas to keep the content which might erode their power out of their societies but their success has been unimpressive. As the dishes get smaller, bans on ownership become even less enforceable. One company in the West currently offers people the ability to send in a picture of their building's architecture so that a rectangular cover with the appropriate camouflage can be delivered with the dish. In the West that is an aesthetic issue. In Iran it could prevent a fine and maybe a criminal record.
I would nominate satellite TV as having made an impact on the world which is far greater than is understood and will continue to do so for some time; at least until cheap, high bandwidth Internet access and computer technology is available in the poorest and most isolated areas of the planet.
When mainstream media take notice of emerging Brain/Computer Interface (BCI) technology, as CBS' 60 Minutes did last night (11/2), you know the Tsunami is already upon us. This fall's launch of Emotiv Systems' consumer level EPOC BCI, at just $300, was a fundamental 'Trigger of Change', which already has a thousand hackers mutating it into higher performance and new applications. It is a revolutionary technology because the EPOC not only empowers people to hack IT, it enables them to HACK THEMSELVES. More electrodes, of greater sensitivity, with more sophisticated signal discrimination at higher resolution, organized through smarter software on more powerful processors will enter this field soon enough, as the price of these next generation headsets plummets by a factor of 10 over the next four years. DARPA just issued a contract for $4.2 Million for a demonstration of Synthetic Telepathy applications of the technology, but its a safe bet that EPOC hackers will get there first.
Imagine a world just two Moore Doublings hence, in which your mind is unbound from your cranium, and the space and boundary between it and this electronic medium have dissolved and no longer have any meaning. The nature of human existence is changing, irrevocably and profoundly, and it will sweep us far down the road we're on, between "Animal" and "Machine". In this Brave New World, the BCI will be as common as Baseball Caps or iPod Earbuds, with an ever increasing segment of the population digitally connected - 'right into the old brainbox' - pretty much anywhere (WiMAX) and pretty much 24/7.
As we blend into the Digital Environment, human consciousness will increasingly regard our temporal physicality as just another Avatar, and a crude, inadaptable, anachronistic one at that. Its not just the EPOC, its a dozen other technologies (including Millimeter-Wave Voice-to-Skull, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Binaural Hemispheric Synchronization, Haptic Telepresence, and the EyeTap, to name a few) which are all converging with it, in realtime.
We are only months away from changing the fundamental nature of what it means to be 'human', for large numbers of early adopters, who will be the vanguard of the progeny of our present species. How much longer do you really believe we'll still be walking around in these Meat Bags?
For example, in the last couple of weeks, it came out that the U.S. Army is now deploying A.I. avatars into MMORPG environments to interact with the human players, to see if they can be recognized as non-human. This is a de-facto Turing Test, which the Army would not be attempting if it didnt have reasonable confidence that they would succeed. If true, it means that the Singularity may already be upon us.
If you think that keeping an Ebola carrier quarantined at JFK Airport is dicey, just wait till a military artilect starts prowling around online. Its sad to think that 10,000 or so years of human civilization may be nothing more than an evolutionary 'Speed Bump' between Animal and Machine, but every week's email newsfeed from kurzweilai.net provides a mountain of fresh evidence that such is, in fact, the case.
Terence McKenna was right; the only way that our 'wetware' will be able to cope with this transcendence is through Tryptamine pharmacology. The Indole Alkaloids he called 'Entheogens' could today be best described as "Nanomolecular Cognitive Prosthetics". Apart from attaining such higher consciousness prior to our merger with the machine intelligence, it is inevitable that our future WILL find it increasingly difficult to relate to present day Meat Bags....
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/10/singularity-su...
roadmap
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf
the Modha and other emulations at the human brain scale will not be actual human minds but more for studying emulations of brains at the same complexity.
Following this path to useful synthetic brains will likely take longer. Check the roadmap for the different possibilities.
These would be licensed for mass production world-wide, non-exclusive, to all comers.
Anyone (any jusrisdiction) that doesn't move as fast as possible to exploit it will find itself at an immense competitive disadvantage.
If they can make it work and if they can hit the cost target then it would have a bigger impact if they can get it scaling for big deployment.
The delays is not so much when it (or any new fusion energy option) is perfected. The delays are after you show it could work then to make a commercialized product and to make the factories to pump them out and to overcome any regulatory delays and other issues. Note: any nuclear fusion that can output energy at 1/4 cent / kwh would have massive weapons issues. You could adjust it to generate neutrons or power neutron generation and make all kinds of bombs etc...
Plus there can be building a supply chain issues.
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Subject: [nextbigfuture] Re: What Could be High Impact Radical World Changing
Technology?
Actually, in order:
1) The first order of business after achieving unity will be refinement of the protype into replicable mass-producable designs.
2) These designs will be offered for license at very reasonable rates world-wide; anyone who wants to put up a factory will have the opportunity to do so.
3) Any jurisdiction that drags its feet in implementing the technology will find itself at a crushing competitive disadvantage. That will be a powerful inducement.
4) There is no neutron output, other than a small percentage of unwanted side-reactions producing low-energy neutrons producing very short half-life isotopes. As a weapon or weapon production tool it is as close to useless as it's possible to get.
5) The components of the generator are mostly off-the-shelf, except for beryllium pin cathodes and the foils for the patented X-ray shell. The ramp-up will be a couple of years or so; demand will stimulate supply pretty rapidly.
Brian H.
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