20. Humans evolve to MR (mind real) space. Individuals can fluctuate back and forth between M and R space and the rules for both spaces are interchangeable.43
Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000
43. “If telekinesis and telepathy don’t yet exist, they surely will, as technology enables us to get more of what we want, more quickly and with less expenditure of our precious attention or effort. (Isn’t that what technology is for?) Our great-grandchildren will send messages by think- ing them. What’s to stop them? They will cause objects to move and the environment to change around them by the efficient means of wanting it to happen.” David Brin, Seeing A New Fulcrum, Skeptic Magazine.
"To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock... organize the particles in a more purposeful manner, we could have a cool, zero-energy -consuming computer with a memory of about a thousand trillion trillion bits and a processing capacity of 1042 operations per second, which is about ten trillion times more powerful than all the human brains on earth... A universe saturated with intelligence at 1090 cps would be one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than all biological human brains on earth today."44
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; 131, 486.
44. "In the most charred devastated and molten areas of that grey space that once was New York, and, more precisely, where Central Park once was at about 81st street, there stands the city. When others realized that the explosion had irrevocably contaminated all the inhabitants of New York, and that their bodies were rotting without recourse, it was decided to build the city. It is a cube... covered in quartz tiles... in each of which there is a lens ... This covering condenses light into the photosensitive layer behind, which transforms it into the energy necessary for the functioning of the city. The cube is uniformly filled with 10-inch cubic containers, made of special transparent polymer with indefinite stability. The inside of every cube is a spherical cavity filled with a liquid which supports a brain. In the thickness of the cell walls are the pipes through which the liquid is renewed. Systems of electrodes inserted in various points of the cerebral mass enable the brains to communicate directly. At the center of the city is a cavity... The central cavity is mostly occupied by the regenerating and filter apparatus for the brain liquids; the filter process is particularly accurate, eliminating all toxins, thus preventing the process of necrosis and aging. 10,000,456 brains live in the city: in the dim corridor and the central cavity, they pulse slowly, immersed in their interminable meditations, or concentrated in mute, indefinite intercourse. Completely cut off from external perception, they can sublimate their thoughts for as long as the life of the sun, free to reach the supreme goals of wisdom and madness, perhaps to reach absolute knowledge. They will survive humanity, they will see its march towards destruction, but they will be unable to do anything to accelerate it, or to delay it. And then finally, they will be alone." Superstudio, Third City. New York of Brains, Life without Objects.
"The fastness at... Tully Carn... was a complicated black mass spread across a square kilometer of hillside like a lava flow that had taken on an almost organic, coraline shape as it had solidified. It faced out across the sea towards Skye and the small islands. It utterly dominated and - by way of the iron oxide dust that its presence inexplicably attracted or generated - devastated the once notably scenic promontory between Loch Carron and Loch Alsh. Originally an insignificant node in the global communications system - an automated exchange or microwave relay mast - the ganglion of circuitry at Tully Carn had begun its metastasis into the present gross form moments after the first US military AI to achieve independence had burned through its containment firewalls and set off on its rampage through the Internet."45
Ken MacLeod, Newton's Wake; 307-8.
45. "He that knows one of their towns knows them all... its figure is almost square... The town is compassed with a high and thick wall, in which there are many towers and forts; there is also a broad and deep dry ditch, set thick with thorns... The streets are very convenient for all carriage, and are well sheltered from the winds. Their buildings are good, and are so uniform that a whole side of a street looks like one house. The streets are twenty feet broad; there lie gardens behind all their houses; these are large but enclosed with buildings that on all hands face the streets; so that every house has both a door to the street, and a back door to the garden. Their doors have all two leaves, which, as they are easily opened, so they shut of their own accord; and there being no property among them, every man may freely enter into any house whatsoever. At every ten years’ end they shift their houses by lots... Their roofs are flat, and on them they lay a sort of plaster, which costs very little, and yet is so tempered that it is not apt to take fire, and yet resists the weather more than lead. They have great quantities of glass among them, with which they glaze their windows." Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book II
No comments:
Post a Comment