The Room at the Bottom
The switches, the on-offs the zero-ones the unitary fibers of the digital flowering are now countable atomic widths and near-countable atomic heights and lengths, and soon all will be countable and soon they will shrink to dozens of atoms in total and as they do so their switching times and mechanisms will shrink down to femtosecond motions of single electrons, and while this won't really spell the end of us as the cutting edge until we build up, build up we will, and dozens of atoms will be adders and hundreds processors and thousands computers, and no matter what the stuff we make this computronium from, a few of your red blood cells will be quietly replaced with computers armed to the teeth with algorithms, and with charged surfaces that sift and rearrange its apparent surface to attract and repel the bulky molecules of our bodies.
First we'll just draw maps with it.
There will be a beautiful soaring age lasting perhaps an entire decade where the maps we draw of the brain as a million wirelessly-enabled bloodcell-sized computers survey us, occasionally flashing faked passports at white blood cells thinking they might be pollen or viruses, will show us amazing wonders, and we'll learn of the symphony in each of us with a depth and a richness that will make our previous guesswork sound hollow and silly, and with each new discovery, the vitalists will howl with laughter at those of us who said we'd ever understand it all at the rate we were going.
Mr. Kurzweil of course will just continue smiling that infuriatingly placid I've-got-a-secret smile of his.
He will be smiling because the second act of this coming decade of thrills is the real kicker, the shocker, the one nobody saw coming because someone somewhere is going to program these little bastards to actively intervene in the program. First the biohackers will inject themselves with a virus that puts light-sensing vacuoles on their brain cells, and LEDs on their blood monitors, and they'll have heads-up displays and on-board supercomputers and someone will be saying they're actually dumber than anyone before them because they don't really memorize or even properly look up anything anymore, it's all on the computer that's gushing around inside them, past the heart, through the lungs, over and over, swapping packets, on and on.
But by the time the first heads-up displays are properly working, someone will have figured out how to make stable computronium tumors.
Little knots of metal and glass clump together at the base of the skull, and in the frontal lobe, and little strands crisscross the brain, held together only by a little electrostatic cling from each cell-computer, beguiling the immune system with false signals easily, and starting to really read-write with the pulsing, stormlike computation of the mind. Somewhere someone is saying it's no real disruption, no real difference, still a tool and there are still no signs of any Singularity anywhere.
This'll be a bit funny because her measured IQ against any 20th century human will be hard to measure, she'll be able to do finite element analysis in her head, and although she hasn't heard about it on her feeds yet, someone's passing around a "mirroring" program that stores your personal storm data to such detail that you could probably rebuild yourself from it on a new brain...
Probably.
First we'll just draw maps with it.
There will be a beautiful soaring age lasting perhaps an entire decade where the maps we draw of the brain as a million wirelessly-enabled bloodcell-sized computers survey us, occasionally flashing faked passports at white blood cells thinking they might be pollen or viruses, will show us amazing wonders, and we'll learn of the symphony in each of us with a depth and a richness that will make our previous guesswork sound hollow and silly, and with each new discovery, the vitalists will howl with laughter at those of us who said we'd ever understand it all at the rate we were going.
Mr. Kurzweil of course will just continue smiling that infuriatingly placid I've-got-a-secret smile of his.
He will be smiling because the second act of this coming decade of thrills is the real kicker, the shocker, the one nobody saw coming because someone somewhere is going to program these little bastards to actively intervene in the program. First the biohackers will inject themselves with a virus that puts light-sensing vacuoles on their brain cells, and LEDs on their blood monitors, and they'll have heads-up displays and on-board supercomputers and someone will be saying they're actually dumber than anyone before them because they don't really memorize or even properly look up anything anymore, it's all on the computer that's gushing around inside them, past the heart, through the lungs, over and over, swapping packets, on and on.
But by the time the first heads-up displays are properly working, someone will have figured out how to make stable computronium tumors.
Little knots of metal and glass clump together at the base of the skull, and in the frontal lobe, and little strands crisscross the brain, held together only by a little electrostatic cling from each cell-computer, beguiling the immune system with false signals easily, and starting to really read-write with the pulsing, stormlike computation of the mind. Somewhere someone is saying it's no real disruption, no real difference, still a tool and there are still no signs of any Singularity anywhere.
This'll be a bit funny because her measured IQ against any 20th century human will be hard to measure, she'll be able to do finite element analysis in her head, and although she hasn't heard about it on her feeds yet, someone's passing around a "mirroring" program that stores your personal storm data to such detail that you could probably rebuild yourself from it on a new brain...
Probably.