Cav > Books: sci-fi‎ (14)

"...But perhaps the best way to grasp the enormity of predicting 100 years into the future is to recall the world of 1900 and remember the lives our grandparents lived.
Journalist Mark Sullivan asks us to imagine someone reading a newspaper in the year 1900: In his newspapers of January 1, 1900, the American found no such word as radio, for that was yet twenty years in from coming; nor “movie,” for that too was still mainly of the future; nor chauffeur, for the automobile was only just emerging and had been called “horseless carriage ….” There was no such word as aviator …. Farmers had not heard of tractors, nor bankers of the Federal Reserve System. Merchants had not heard of chain-stores nor “selfservice”; nor seamen of oil-burning engines …. Ox-teams could still be seen on country roads …. Horses or mules for trucks were practically universal …. The blacksmith beneath the spreading chestnut-tree was a reality."

"As a consequence, we are better able to see the direction that science and technology will take in the coming century. There will always be totally unexpected, novel surprises that leave us speechless, but the foundation of modern physics, chemistry, and biology has largely been laid, and we do not expect any major revision of this basic knowledge, at least in the foreseeable future. As a result, the predictions we make in this book are the product not of wild speculation but are reasoned estimates of when the prototype technologies of today will finally reach maturity.
In conclusion, there are several reasons to believe that we can view the outlines of the world of 2100:
1. This book is based on interviews with more than 300 top scientists, those in the forefront of discovery.
2. Every scientific development mentioned in this book is consistent with the known laws of physics.
3. The four forces and the fundamental laws of nature are largely known; we do not expect any major new changes in these laws.
4. Prototypes of all technologies mentioned in this book already exist.
5. This book is written by an “insider” who has a firsthand look at the technologies that are on the cutting edge of research."

"The relationship between perception, insight, and imagination goes well beyond basic psychology or historical debates. To recap the neuroscience view, imagination comes from using the same neural circuits used to perceive natural objects. In this way, imagination is like reverse perception. Perception, however, is constrained by the categories that an individual brings to the table. Although categories may not be absolute, they are learned from past experience, and because of this relationship, experience shapes both perception and imagination.
In order to think creatively, and imagine possibilities that only iconoclasts do, one must break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization—or what Mark Twain called “education.” For most people, this does not come naturally. Often the harder one tries to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. There is a better way, a path that jolts the brain out of preconceived notions of what it is seeing: bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks."

"The goal is keep people’s amygdalae from firing. In addition to responding to fearful situations, the amygdala has a hair trigger for anything unfamiliar. Iconoclasts, by definition, are foreign to most people, and anything that seems new or different will tend to set off the amygdala in most people. This is not a good situation. When the amygdala fires, it activates the arousal system of the body. The end result is that people will avoid the unfamiliar.
The key to taming other people’s amygdalae lies in familiarity. The successful iconoclast creates an aura of familiarity to keep the amygdalae of his target audience in check. When Ray Kroc created Ronald McDonald as a connector to children, he banked on the familiarity of clowns to kids. Without this familiarity, it would have been absurd to market hamburgers to children with no disposable income. Arnold Schwarzenegger accomplished the same feat. Having already created connections with millions of people through movie roles, he banked on his familiarity to become governor of California."

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean...”

"...Kurzweil, after Moravec,Moore's Law to describe exponential growth of diverse forms of technological progress. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." He believes the Law of Accelerating Returns implies that a technological singularity will occur before the end of the 21st century, around 2045."

"Kurzweil describes a series of thought experiments which suggest to him that the brain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. Based on this he introduces his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM). He says the neocortex contains 300 million very general pattern recognition circuits and argues that they are responsible for most aspects of human thought. He also suggests that the brain is a "recursive probabilistic fractal" whose line of code is represented within the 30-100 million bytes of compressed code in the genome.
Kurzweil then explains that a computer version of this design could be used to create an artificial intelligence more capable than the human brain. It would employ techniques such as hidden Markov models and genetic algorithms, strategies Kurzweil used successfully in his years as a commercial developer of speech recognition software. Artificial brains will require massive computational power, so Kurzweil reviews his law of accelerating returns which explains how the compounding effects of exponential growth will deliver the necessary hardware in only a few decades."

"After lossless compression, due to massive redundancy in the genome, the amount of design information in the human genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which (around 25 million bytes) pertains to the brain.
That's not simple, but it's a level of complexity we can deal with.
It represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world."

"...He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.
So it goes.
The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.
So it goes.
A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.
It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.
So it goes..."