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Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
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I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world, although neither of these outdated and tinged terms can accurately capture what is new about it.
Edge 235
BETTER THAN FREE By Kevin Kelly
Tags: internet, kevin-kelly, network-economy on 2008-03-10 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Our wealth sits upon
a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly. -
In a
real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight
uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative
value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated,
nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated,
counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place,
over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to
free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold. -
Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever
you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it
is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative
asset. -
Personalization
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As many
have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between
the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is
deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. -
Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual,
$10,000. -
Accessibility
— Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date,
and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile
world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included,
will be happy to have others tend our "possessions" by
subscribing to them. -
The fact that most of this material will
be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding
to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes
on. -
Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You
can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps
you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? -
Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators.
Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with
the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect.
But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount,
and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. -
Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside
within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs
at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does
not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder
it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is
seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions
of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications,
millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it
free — being found is valuable. -
From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the
work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. -
Rather, these new eight
generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing
mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become
to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with
a click of the mouse. -
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the
path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and
attention has its own circuits. -
I think ads are only one of the paths that
attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the
new ways money is made selling the free. -
Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies
in a factory. There is still a lot to learn. A lot to figure out.
Write to me if you do. -
Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application
for free, but even if you don't need a manual, you might like to
be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You'll pay for authenticity.
Four Stages in the Internet of Things - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: giant-global-graph, kevin-kelly, semantic-web, technium, world-wide-database on 2007-12-09 -All Annotations (0) -About
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What happens here is that after linking and sharing computers, then linking and sharing documents, we are linking and sharing data in those documents. We are sharing and linking the subjects and meaning of what those documents are about.
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In fact, you could think of this stage as the World Wide Database.
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Another tremendously unappreciated enabling technology is the API. This gateway allows controlled sharing of vast archives of data, unleashing the data's power via the usual network effects -- the more that use it the more valuable it becomes.
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But learning how to share data is what the next web will be about. Those who are able to let go and understand that all the real value in this next stage will be built on the emergent value that comes from deep interlinking, deep interconnecting, and freely (as is reasonable) releasing your precious data, those will be the technologies and organizations who gain the most.
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What we ultimately want is an internet of things.
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That fourth stage is the drift towards linking up the things themselves. You want all the data about a thing to be embedded into the thing.
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An operational Semantic Web, or World Wide Database, or Giant Global Graph, or Web 3.0, will make possible millions of seemingly smarter services. I won't have to re-tell each website who my friends are; once will be enough. If my name shows up in text, it will know it's me.
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The apparent smarter nature of the web will be due to the fact that the web will "know" more. Not in a conscious way, but in a programatic way. Concepts and items represented on the web will point to each other and know about each other -- in a fundamental way they do not right now.
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If the web knows you are always you, who are you? If the price of total personal service is total personal transparency, is that any different than total personal surveillance?
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I'm counting on the fact that kids will love it.
A Cloudbook for the Cloud - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: cloud-book, cloud-computing, internet, kevin-kelly, network-computer on 2007-12-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Dimensions of the One Machine - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: kevin-kelly, web on 2007-12-07 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.
When Answers Are Cheap - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: answers, holistic, kevin-kelly, philosophy, predictions, reductionism, technium on 2007-12-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Nowhere is the tendency to reduce the world to foundational bits (bits as in ghostly bodiless information) more prevalent than in the realm of digital technology. The view of the reduced bit is a common viewpoint of contemporary futurists who see the world, past, present and to come, in terms of information. It is my viewpoint, and the perspective of my own writing.
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"Most things that are experienced - this very moment, for instance, or your entire life - are far more likely to be Mind's musings than the physical processes they seem to be." (Robot, p.168)
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Reductionism gives you answers, while holism gives you questions. No one said this better than Picasso, who is reputed to have claimed, "The trouble with computers is that all they give you is answers." Exactly. If you want answers, you become an expert reductionist. If you want questions, however, you exercise your qualitative holistic mind, as an artist would.
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As we have gotten really good in the reduction mode, making lots of computers, lots of knowledge, answers are becoming cheap. In fact someday answers (correct answers!) will be so cheap that the really valuable things will be questions. A really good question will be worth a thousand correct answers. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean that in the marketplace. Good questions will cost more than good answers.
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If we had to point out where the future is erupting into the present, most of us would say that a peephole into what is next can be found in Google. Google is the world’s brain. It is the product of reduction technology and what it provides most of all is answers.
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So I envision a question economy, running on a plentitude of answers. Most of these answers are generated darwinianly. Algorithms that produce answers score well in fitness criteria, and are then rewarded with more questions, and so on. Answers are made by robots, which leaves questions to be made by humans. Picasso would be happy here. In a perfect search world, humans will be paid to ask questions.
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Science, in fact, will come to be measured as the expansion of our ignorance, rather than an expansion of our knowledge.
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But in fact the mark of wisdom is that it embraces ignorance wrapped in answers. I believe a perfect search world will produce the first glimmers of global wisdom.
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I don't envision a world where answers stop coming, or reductionism diminishes. I *can* envision a world where questions become more strategic, more valuable than answers, and where therefore the ability to think in a different way, to dwell on and in qualities, to conjure up relations that supercede the parts, to grok the wholeness of things, and to inquire about meaning rather than function -- I can imagine a world where this would be very valuable -- for itself and as a way to keep the answers coming!
How much does one search cost? - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: google, kevin-kelly, network-economy, search, technium on 2007-12-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
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No one would have believed 20 years ago there was a $200 billion business in answering peoples questions (for free!).
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I believe we are at a cusp where we become increasingly dependent on search. It is possible we will never pay much or anything for search as searchers, except for premiums on superior search.
Where Mu sic: Will Be Coming From - New York Times
Tags: file-sharing, kevin-kelly, music, network-economy, nytimes on 2007-12-06 -All Annotations (0) -About
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But the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation is suddenly inverted. When nighttime electrical lighting was new, it was the poor who burned common candles. When electricity became easily accessible and practically free, candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.
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Free is overrated as a destiny. It is only the second phase of the three stages of copydom. The first phase -- perfection -- is experienced in both analog and digital. Perfect duplication made the modern world and modern music.
The second stage is freeness. Costless duplication made Napster possible and a music revolution thinkable.
Yet it is in the third level of digital copy-ness that the real revolution lies. This third power is liquidity, and it will take music beyond Napster.
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It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it.
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The growth of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that civilization has witnessed.
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The arrival of perfect, free and liquid copies of music means that new economic models of making music will be forced upon musicians.
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In the end, the future of music is simple: more choices. As the possibilities of music expand, so do our own.
Technology wants to be free - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: free, kevin-kelly, long-tail, network-economy, technology on 2007-12-06 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Let me state it more precisely: Over time the cost per fixed technological function will decrease. If that function persists long enough its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero. In the goodness of time any particular technological function will exist as if it were free.
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“there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and half prices have been headed toward zero.
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Over time, every successful luxury becomes defined by its use and the other goods that piggyback on it. It then becomes a commodity.
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In other words, any service or product that can be easily defined will become a commodity and drop towards zero.
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All these options make the consumer king, because you pick and choose where you want your free.
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Almost any product or service can be unbundled into various combos of functions, where one of the strands is priced as free, while the others remain expensive.
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But while we can expect the zero-price option (ZPO) in all industries and all major products and services, the corresponding counter price for the bundled functions will vary all over the place, often expensively.
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I like to think of it as the Zero-Price Uncertainty Principle. If you fix the price of one facet to zero, you can’t fix any of the other facets to zero. Only one function at a time can be fixed at zero.
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The zero-price option, which was once very rare, is now being driven to ubiquity by network effects.
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As members are added to a network linearly the value of the network increases exponentially, which charted looks “as if” it were headed toward infinity. The compounding numbers of members made commoditization possible, fluid, and fast.
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. Further, advanced technologies that encourage cooperation and collaboration permit faster invention and distribution of those inventions, which in turn permit the competitive pressure for lower prices to take effect quicker and deeper.
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These five traits of networked technology – perfect market competition, price transparency, innovation sharing, collaboration, and expanding markets – ceaselessly push technology toward the free.
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The technium conspires to guide manufactured items toward the free, where they can unleash their maximum good. The free, not the costly, is the true home of technology.
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As it became free, it became more indispensable in the ecology of the technium, and more instrumental in unleashing other technologies. It also became a factor in driving other technologies toward the free. In this way it is like health; free technologies tend to enable other technologies toward the free, in a self-sustaining, self-creating loop.
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There is a similar self-reinforcing positive feedback loop in the free-ization of technology. Nearly-free goods permit waste and experimentation, which breed new options for that good, which increase its abundance and lower its price, which generate more new options, which permit further novelty.
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Technology wants to be free, as in free beer, because as it become free it also increases freedom. The inherent talents, capabilities and benefits of a technology cannot be released until it is almost free. The drive toward the free unleashes the constraints on each species in the technium, allowing it to interact with as many other species of technology as is possible, engendering new hybrids and deeper ecologies of tools, and permitting human users more choices and freedoms of use. As a technology grows in abundance and cheapness, it is more likely to find its appropriate niche which it can sustain itself and support other technologies in commodity mode. As technology heads toward the free it unleashes the only lasting thing it can: options and possibilities.
Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 5: Feed The Web First
Tags: kevin-kelly, network-economy, technology on 2007-10-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Every network technology follows a natural life cycle,
roughly broken into three stages:
- Prestandard
- Fluid
- Embedded
A firm’s strategy will depend on what phase a network is
in. - Prestandard
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In any phase of innovation—prestandard, fluid, or
embedded—standards are valuable because they hasten innovation.
Agreements are constraints on uncertainty. The constraints of a standard
solidify one pathway out of many, allowing further innovation and
evolution to accelerate along that stable route. So central is the need
to cultivate certainty that organizations must make the common standard
their first allegiance. As standards are established, growth takes
off. -
For maximum prosperity, feed the web first.
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Eventually technical standards will become as important as
laws.
Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 4: Follow The Free
Tags: gift-economy, kevin-kelly, network-economy, technology on 2007-10-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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In the new order, as the law of plentitude kicks in and the
nearly free take over, both of these curves are turned upside down. Paul
Krugman, an economist at MIT, says that you can reduce the entire idea
of the network economy down to the observation that "in the Network
Economy, supply curves slope down instead of up and demand curves slope
up instead of down." The more a resource is used, the more demand
there is for it. A similar inversion happens on the supply side. Because
of compounded learning, the more we create something, the easier it
becomes to create more of it. The classic textbook graph is
inverted. -
While it is true that automobiles will never be free, the
cost per mile of driving will dip toward the free. It is the function
(moving the body) per dollar that continues to drop. This distinction is
important. Because while the function costs head toward zero, the
expenditure share can remain steady, or even balloon. With cheaper costs
we travel more, way more. With cheaper computation we consume billions
of more calculations. Yet for vendors to make a profit, they must
anticipate this cheapening per unit. -
But how are companies to make a profit in a world of constantly
sinking prices? In the supply. Technology and knowledge are driving up
demand faster than it is driving down prices. And demand, unlike prices,
has no asymptote to limit it. The extent of human needs and desires is
limited only by human imagination, which means, in practical terms,
there is no limit. -
The task, then, is to create new things to send down the
slide—in short, to invent items and services faster than they are
commoditized.
This is easier to do in a network-based economy because the
crisscrossing of ideas, the hyperlinking of relationships, the agility
of alliances, and the nimble quickness with which new nodes are created
all support the constant generation of new goods and services. -
If goods and services become more valuable as they become
more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then
the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things
of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free.
Ubiquity drives increasing returns in the network economy.
The question becomes, What is the most cost-effective way to achieve
ubiquity? And the answer is: give things away. Make them free. -
One might argue that this frightening dynamic works only
with software, since the marginal cost of an additional copy is already
near zero (now that software can be distributed online). But
"following the free" is a universal law. Hardware, when
networked, also follows this mandate. Cellular phones are given away in
order to sell cell phone services. We can expect DirecTV dishes to be
given away for the same reasons. This principle applies to any object
whose diminishing cost of replication is exceeded by the advantages of
being plugged in. -
The natural question is how companies are to survive in a
world of such generosity? Three points will help.
First, think of "free" as a design goal for
pricing. There is a drive toward the free—the asymptotic
free—that, even if not reached, makes the system behave as if it
has been reached. A very cheap rate can have an effect equivalent to
being outright free.
Second, pricing a core product as free positions other
services to be expensive. Thus, Sun gives Java away to help sell
servers, and Netscape hands out consumer browsers to help sell
commercial server software.
Third, and most important, following the free is a way to
rehearse a service’s or a good’s eventual fall to free. You
structure your business as if the thing that you are creating is free in
anticipation of where its price is going. Thus, while Sega game consoles
are not free to consumers, they are sold as loss leaders to accelerate
their journey toward their eventual destiny—to be given away in a
network economy. -
The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is
human attention. -
Following the free also works in the other direction. If one
way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things
now free may contain potential value not yet perceived. We can
anticipate the eruption of new wealth on the frontier by tracking down
the free. -
But the migration from ad hoc use to commercialization
cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you need to pass through
sharing.
Increasingly we see technologies pass through a
protocommercial stage. Huge numbers of people, exerting millions of
hours of collective effort, will jointly craft hundreds of thousands of
creations, but without the exchange of money. An entire society
following the free! Author Lewis Hyde long ago called this arrangement a
gift economy. The central task in a gift economy is to keep the gifts
moving. By social debt, barter, and pure charity, gifts circulate and
generate happiness and wealth. -
Releasing incomplete "buggy" products is not
>
cost-cutting desperation; it is the shrewdest way to complete a product
>
when your customers are smarter than you are.
> -
What can you give away? This is the most powerful
question in this book. You can approach this question in two ways: What
is the closest you can come to making something free, without actually
pricing it at zero? Or, in a true gesture of enlightened generosity, you
can figure out how to part with something very valuable for no monetary
return at all. If either strategy is pursued with intelligence, the
result will be the same. The network will magnify the value of the gift.
But giving something away is not usually easy. It must be the right
gift, given in the proper context. -
Turn off the meter, charge for joining. Flat or
monthly fixed pricing is one way of pricing "as if free." Fees
are paid, but there is no meter running. -
The ancillary market is the market.
Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 6: Let Go at the Top
Tags: kevin-kelly, network-economy, technology on 2007-10-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 3: Plentitude Not Scarcity
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Maximize the opportunities of others.
>
In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow
>
others to build their success around your own success.
> -
In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the
>
more valuable they become.
> -
The value
>
of an invention, company, or technology increases exponentially as the
>
number of systems it participates with increases linearly.
> -
The more interconnected a technology is, the more
>
opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse.
> -
The law of plentitude is
>
most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities
>
that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise.
>
Kevin Kelly -- This New Economy
Tags: book, economics, kevin-kelly, network-economy, technology on 2007-09-30 -All Annotations (0) -About
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The geography of
>
wealth is being reshaped by our tools. We now live in a new
>
economy created by shrinking computers and expanding
>
communications.
> -
This new economy has three distinguishing
>
characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible
>
things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is
>
intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type
>
of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous
>
electronic networks.
> -
The key premise of this book is that the
>
principles governing the world of the soft—the world of
>
intangibles, of media, of software, and of services—will
>
soon command the world of the hard—the world of reality, of
>
atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by
>
the sweat of brows.
> -
The tricks of the intangible trade
>
will become the tricks of your trade.
> -
The new economy is about
>
communication
>
, deep and wide. All the transformations
>
suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are
>
revolutionizing communications. Communication is the foundation
>
of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own
>
individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why
>
networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to
>
culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it
>
are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle.
>
Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in
>
economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable
>
leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural,
>
technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of
>
our lives.
> -
So how can we make the claim that
>
all
>
businesses
>
in the world will be reshaped by advances in chips and glass
>
fibers and spectrum? What makes this particular technological
>
advance so special? Why is the business hero of this moment so
>
much more important than its recent predecessors?
>
Because communication—which in the end is what the
>
digital technology and media are all about—is not just a
>
sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
> -
"Listen to the technology," advises Carver Mead, one
>
of the inventors of the modern computer chip. "Find out
>
what it is telling you." Following that lead, I have
>
assembled these rules of thumb by asking these questions: How do
>
our tools shape our destiny? What kind of an economy is our new
>
technology suggesting?
>
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
Tags: artificial-intelligence, kevin-kelly, predictions, ray-kurzweil, singularity on 2007-09-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Third, the notion of a mathematical singularity is illusionary. Any chart of an exponential growth will show why. Like many of Kurzweil’s examples, an exponential can be plotted linearly so that the chart shows the growth taking off like a rocket. Or it can be plotted on a log-log graph, which has the exponential growth built into the graph’s axis, so the takeoff is a perfectly straight line. His website has scores of them all showing straight line exponential growth headed to towards a singularity. But ANY log-log graph of a function will show a singularity at Time 0, that is, now. If something is growing exponentially, the point at which it will appear to rise to infinity will always be “just about now.”
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The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialize anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. Since these charts correctly demonstrate that exponential growth extends back to the beginning of the cosmos, that means that for millions of years the singularity was just about to happen! In other words, the singularity is always near, has always been "near", and will always be "near."
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Second, intelligence may or may not be infinitely expandable from our present point. Because we can imagine a manufactured intelligence greater than ours, we think that we possess enough intelligence right now to pull off this trick of bootstrapping. In order to reach a singularity of ever-increasing AI we have to be smart enough not only to create a greater intelligence, but to also make one that is able to create the next level one. A chimp is hundreds of times smarter than an ant, but the greater intelligence of a chimp is not smart enough to make a mind smarter than itself.
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First, immortality is in no way ensured by a singularity of AI. For any number of reasons our “selves” may not be very portable, or new engineered eternal bodies may not be very appealing, or super intelligence alone may not be enough to solve the problem of overcoming bodily death quickly.
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Even though we cannot know what will be on the other side of the singularity, that is, what kind of world our super intelligent brains will provide us, Kurzweil and others believe that our human minds, at least, become immortal because we’ll be able to either download them, migrate them, or eternally repair them with our collective super intelligence. Our minds (that is ourselves) will continue on with or without our upgraded bodies. The singularity, then, becomes a portal or bridge to future. All you have to do is live long enough to make it through the singularity in 2040. If you make it till then, you’ll become immortal.
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There are so many assumptions built into the Kurzweilian version of singularity that it is worth trying to unravel them because while a lot about the singularity of technology is misleading, some aspects of the notion do capture the dynamic of technological change.
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The Singularity Is Always Near
There’s a visceral sense we are experiencing a singularity-like event with computers and the world wide web. But the current concept of a singularity is not be the best explanation for the transformation in progress.
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When I mentioned this to Esther Dyson, she reminded me that we have an experience close to the singularity every day. “It’s called waking up. Looking backwards, you can understand what happens, but in your dreams you are unaware that you could become awake....”
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I might only suggest that the posting of va
