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fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through that.
By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of
a billion times that. We’ll get to the point where bio thinking is
relatively insignificant.
“People didn’t throw their typewriters away when word-pro-
cessing started. There’s always an overlap — it’ll take time before
we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will
ultimately be.”
It’s well and good to talk about all the stuff we
can
do with
technology, but it’s a lot more important to talk about the stuff
we’ll be
allowed
to do with technology. Think of the global freak-
out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-
sharing tools: universities are wiretapping their campuses and
disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate,
general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds
are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed
out the window without so much as a by-your-leave.
Even P2P’s worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose
technology with good
and
bad uses, but when new tech comes
along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing
an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty.
What’s going to happen when the new technology paradigm
isn’t song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will
the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem
to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with
the new tools?
“Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [ma-
licious software] is the most important battlefield today.
“Everything
will become software — objects will be malleable,
we’ll spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders
of magnitude more important than biothought.
“Software is already complex enough that we have an ecologi-
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