Wetware

Wetware, a book written by Rudy Rucker, sounds really cool. He's hip and knows tech and science inside and out and his amalgam of digital/organic constructs defines how man will merge with machine, something echoed in very precise terms by Ray Kurzweil, one of the true seminal thinkers in tech who has authored visionary tomes Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near outlining the Law of Accelerating Returns and the impact it will have on society. In both books, the connect of digital to organic goes beyond wetware as digital computation combined with nanotech and robotics enables the fabrication of bodies that are far stronger and more flexible in construction to the bodies we have now. (Robocop II is a VERY crude approximation here.) When the issue of "mind uploading" comes into play, the science becomes more speculative but researchers are mapping brain functions at high level through the use of MRI and other related technologies and breakthroughs have already happened with MIT mapping, in software, how people see, something that is being incorporated into robotic vision at the present time.

There is no question that tech is accelerating at a double exponential rate because of the Net and because of this, the merging of man and machine will become inevitable if we are to remain masters of our own fate given how long it takes for species like ourselves to evolve. Our compute speed is set, compute speed in systems is not. In ten years, the system you have on your desk will be a thousand times faster than the ones we have now. That roughly translates to five to ten teraflops in a device with no moving parts, is always connected to the net and has a form factor of a subcompact computer integrated into a digital environment where "everything will be alive" - MurryC. In twenty, it will be millions of time faster and we have not even discussed the rapid development of quantum computers, systems that will change everything in terms of computation (The Matrix anyone?) and the impact THAT will have on society.

I agree with MurryC on the merging of man to machine, I question the dominance of "our" wetware over systems when viewed in the hard light of the acceleration of tech. The other question I have separate from this discussion is, "Are we smart enough to deal with this?" when people still kill each other over religion and politicos argue over stem cell research because of religion while tech continues to develop unabated at ever increasing speeds.

Bill Joy (a Sun Computer founder/developer of Berkley Unix/one of the great programmers in the world wrote Why the Future Doesn't Need Us - Wired/4/2000) and Ray Kurzweil are at opposite ends of the spectrum regarding tech with Joy the pessimist and Kurzweil the optimist. I tend to be neutral although the stupidity of man never ceases to amaze...