Remember when the Toflers came out with the idea of "future shock"? And what they described just kept coming on, and now we are in post-post-future shock and awe....
This Project (PRJ: Singularity) is to focus on the convergence of specialized fields resulting in amazing tools extending human capacity in a great leap into a qualitatively different "culture".
For example, the shift from H&G (hunting and gathering) to Agriculture, or the age of medieval chivalry into Guttenberg/Renaissance. As water reaches a boiling point, as the J-curve goes completely vertical...
The theory of anyons has spawned some beautiful but difficult mathematics, and the quantum Hall effect describes electronic modifications which occur in strong magnetic fields at low temperatures. The state in the vast arena of quantum mechanics identified as Hilbert space could accomodate information--for storage and bandwidth needed in IP. As the math, physics, and IP fields come together, an order of magnitude of information reduced to the size of quantum mechanics is now on the horizon.
ReplyDeleteMAGNETS. We think of magnets in terms of discrete objects: a ball, a horeshoe, or even a planet. What about magnetized sheets or films?
ReplyDeleteMulti-layers may have applications for data storage or sensing. In addition, the "charge" or quality of magnetism is unitizing -- extending from the interior atoms all the way out beyond the edge of the material into its field.
Finally, if magnetic and electrical engineers could work with radio applications on a nano-scale, magnetic oscillations using nanomagnets, we foresee radio sets the size of bacteria, based on synchronization (phase-locked oscillations) and the electrical spin-torque effect.
MEDICAL. Synthesis of technologies leading to personalized medicine: Today's DNA sequencing labs read about 67,000 base pairs per hour (bpph). Various successors to the Sanger-based technology used in the first wave now approach 100 times that reading pace, to 6 million bpph. Using picolitre-sized chemical reactors, enhanced light-emitting chemicals, and complex informatics, the process can be miniaturized as well as shortened.
ReplyDeleteIndustrial Medicine as now practiced, and consisting largely of conveyor-belt drug dispensation, and surgical interventions, will be replaced by designer therapies.
This distraction with hardbox computers and digital "players" is the low-hanging fruit. We are way behind on wet and dry chemistry applications, anti-gravity transport, nano-technology.
ReplyDeleteIn 1967 Herman Kahn published/coedited "The Year 2000". He predicted high-speed DP, fax machines, and mobile phones. Not bad.
ReplyDeleteHe also predicted, by the millenium, interplanetary space travel, giant supersonic jets, cheap nuclear power, dream-machines, artificial moons, automated supermarkets, and colonies at sea and on the sea bed.
Are we stagnating? Should we credit our deference to safety? No. We have not failed to produce anti-gravity unified field engines because we wanted to be Greener. We lost our tools. The oligarchs, who want us to be ignorant, poor, and short-lived took over our Government. Our labs. Science in the interest of humanity...became a lost dream. A joke. Is to laugh.