The web smells like life.

It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.

Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this technology's charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.

And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

But increasingly, we resist one-way media. We reject the megaphone of the broadcast era and turn to the many-to-many collaborative strands of the Internet.

And as we do—as we grow comfortable in our new roles as publishers, producers, designers, and distributors of media—we begin to bump up against a legislative regime that threatens to lock down our digital freedoms and turn millions of us into felons.

Outlook For 2008: Steganography And Vishing

The company is also predicting more mobile-oriented exploits and Web application exploits in the year to come.

In fact, the company predicts that the number of exploited sites will surpass the number of sites created specifically to spread malware in 2008.

"Compromising sites -- particularly, sites well-visited by end-users, such as the Dolphin Stadium attack that occurred a few days prior to the 2007 Super Bowl XLI in Miami -- provides attackers with built-in Web traffic and minimizes the need for lures through email, instant messaging or Web posts," the Websense report says.

I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar
>

Jacques Attali, whose book
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Lignes d'horizons
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(
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Millennium,
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in the
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English
>

translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age
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of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his
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new book
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Fraternités,
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Attali describes how our dreams of utopia
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have changed over time:
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"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more
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than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via
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their death, to the company of gods and to
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Eternity.
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With the Hebrews and
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then the Greeks, some men dared free themselves from theological demands
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and dream of an ideal City where
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Liberty
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would flourish. Others, noting
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the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some
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would entail the alienation of others, and they sought
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Equality
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."
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Jacques helped me understand how these three
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different utopian goals exist in tension in our society today. He goes
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on to describe a fourth utopia,
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Fraternity,
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whose foundation is altruism.
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Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of
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others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.
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This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological
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approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the
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most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should
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rethink our utopian choices.
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I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life,
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and of the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this
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respect comes a necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century
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chutzpah, lack at our peril. The commonsense view, grounded in this respect,
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is often right, in advance of the scientific evidence. The clear fragility
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and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give
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us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles
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me.
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We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb
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and the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels
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to our current situation are troubling.
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Danny's answer -
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directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots
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- came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes
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would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.
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But I guess I wasn't totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in
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Kurzweil's book in which he said, "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but
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if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." It seemed that he
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was at peace with this process and its attendant risks, while I was not.
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The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics
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(GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents
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and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses
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are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not
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require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable
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the use of them.
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Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but
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of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely
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amplified by the power of self-replication.
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The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century
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weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in
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government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies
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have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by
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corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology
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- with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical
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inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are
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aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the
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now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial
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incentives and competitive pressures.
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This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species,
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by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as
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to vast numbers of others.
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>
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Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set
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our course? I have found the ideas in the book
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Ethics for the New Millennium,
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by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little
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heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing
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is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and
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that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal
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responsibility
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and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical
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conduct for individuals and societies that seems consonant with Attali's
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Fraternity utopia.
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The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes
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people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material
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progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key - that there
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are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.
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My continuing professional work is on improving
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the reliability of software. Software is a tool, and as
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a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which
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the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more
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reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place;
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if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated
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to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come.
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This all leaves me not angry but at least a bit melancholic. Henceforth,
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for me, progress will be somewhat bittersweet.
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TECHNOLOGY: EVOLUTION BY OTHER MEANS

When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

--Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of technology

A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid.

--Gregory Vlastos

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?

As technology is the continuation of evolution by other means, it shares the phenomenon of an exponentially quickening pace. The word is derived from the Greek tekhn¯e, which means "craft" or "art," and logia, which means "the study of." Thus one interpretation of technology is the study of crafting, in which crafting refers to the shaping of resources for a practical purpose.

The Inevitability of Technology

Once life takes hold on a planet, we can consider the emergence of technology as inevitable. The ability to expand the reach of one's physical capabilities, not to mention mental facilities, through technology is clearly useful for survival. Technology has enabled our subspecies to dominate its ecological niche. Technology requires two attributes of its creator: intelligence and the physical ability to manipulate the environment.

A Planetary Affair

The introduction of technology on Earth is not merely the private affair of one of the Earth's innumerable species. It is a pivotal event in the history of the planet. Evolution's grandest creation--human intelligence--is providing the means for the next stage of evolution, which is technology. The emergence of technology is predicted by the Law of Accelerating Returns. The Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies emerged only tens of thousands of years after its human forebears. According to the Law of Accelerating Returns, the next stage of evolution should measure its salient events in mere thousands of years, too quick for DNA-based evolution. This next stage of evolution was necessarily created by human intelligence itself, another example of the exponential engine of evolution using its innovations from one period (human beings) to create the next (intelligent machines).

>
>

Evolution
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has been seen as a billion-year drama that led inexorably to its grandest creation: human
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intelligence
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. The emergence in the early twenty-first century of a new form of
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intelligence
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on
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Earth
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that can compete with, and ultimately significantly exceed, human
>
intelligence
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will be a development of greater
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import
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than any of the events that have shaped human
>
history
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. It will be no less important than the creation of the
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intelligence
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that created it, and will have profound implications for all aspects of human endeavor, including the
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nature
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of work, human
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learning
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,
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government
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,
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warfare
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, the arts, and our
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concept
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of ourselves.
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Even if we limit our discussion to computers that are not directly derived from a particular human brain, they will increasingly appear to have their own personalities, evidencing reactions that we can only label as emotions and articulating their own goals and purposes. They will appear to have their own
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free will
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. They will claim to have spiritual experiences. And people--those still using
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carbon
>
-based neurons or otherwise--will believe them.
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