Thu, 08 May 2003
Signs we're living in a different century
I've been a bit tired today; had to spend the first part of
the week playing catch-up with a months' neglected feature
writing (after knocking out draft 1.0 of "Glasshouse"), and
now I think I've got a combined case of (a) a mild summer
cold, (b) cognitive whiplash from no longer being elbow-deep
in something new and obsessive, and (c) up-front exhaustion
whenever I contemplate the 200,000 word doorstep I have to
write by December. But still ...
This is not the twentieth century any more.
I just picked up a 256Mb compact flash card for £41,
including international delivery. That's 25 times the size of
my first hard disk, for almost exactly a tenth the price.
While writing up my trip to the Media Lab for Computer Shopper
I stumbled headfirst into a moment of epiphany: because I
hadn't realised that one of the goals of the Center for Bits
and Atom's Fab
Lab project is to make it self-replicating --
sufficiently comprehensive that if you have access to one of
the compact toolkits you'll be able to make duplicates of it.
In other words it's a cargo-cult Von Neumann machine, and they're working on
it today, about seven years ahead of where I placed it in
Lobsters.
And the first blind people with with
retinal
prostheses have been reported to be showing good
results. (This means quite a bit to me -- both my retinas are
dodgy, in different ways, and I might be needing at least one
of these gadgets within the next couple of decades.)
The twenty-first century: it's not all about
recessions, terrorism, and megalomaniacal presidents.
[ Discuss singularity ]
posted at: 20:02 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry
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