The Social Implications Of "The Singularity Moment"

The problem is that the gene is never all the way on or all the way off. The repressor is "leaky" and allows for low but measurable expression of the lac gene which is vitally important to the function of the operon since this low level of B-galactosidase activity produces the lactose metabolites that turn the gene on in the presence of lactose. You also need to model the binding dynamics (i.e. Kd values) of lactose metabolites with the lac repressor and c-AMP binding dynamics at the promoter site. On top of all of that, you need to model global regulators that can also affect lac expression, all with their own binding dynamics in different environments. Boolean values will simply not cut it.Biology is much more analog than it is digital, which is the one draw back I see with using computer simulations for mimicking biological systems.

I think it is more of a quantum leap than a continuation of current technology. We do have computers that enhance our senses, but there doesn't seem to be much flow in the other direction, from human brain to computer. I think that will require a completely new technology that no one really knows how to get to right now, and those types of advances are notoriously hard to predict.On the face of it, being able to calculate numbers as fast as your computer or being able to access Wikipedia just like you access your memories would be pretty wild.

Perspective is everything. We can start by asking some basic questions regarding education in general, intelligence in general, and tie it in with human progress in general. There are many concepts, ideas, and realities that are only twenty to thirty years away. I recently watched a TED talk on one of them: The world could run out of food two decades earlier than thought (By 2027)Thus, while Kurzweil and other Sci Fi dreamers are telling us that we collectively will reach some sort of Turing moment where our collective intelligence will leapfrog, the whole concept of intelligence itself has to be defined by basic issues and problems such as how to feed ourselves or how to keep from spending money on 70 year old bombers lumbering through the skies with nuclear weapons.

They say we live in an age of information. Information, however, is more than numbers. I recently read an article that talked of the speed of the top ten world supercomputers. Top 10 supercomputers of 2017How will these machines contribute to solving real world problems? The question is not whether humans will be replaced by computers or even whether humans can someday think as a computer. The question is whether we as a species understand the consensus as to the best use of the technology and brainpower we possess.