On December 3rd, Matthew Taylor will be giving the first Lambda Lounge talk about a non-technical topic called Humanity 2.0: how you are enabling the redefinition of “life as we know it”. There will be no code, no programming, and no algorithms — although the topic of the talk revolves heavily around technology.
Here’s a preview from Matthew’s blog:
Even if your grandparents had been science fiction writers, it would have been hard for them to predict how the evolution of technology played out to affect your life. You may have heard something like “Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have television”, from a sagely octogenarian when you were young. Now think about what we might be telling our great-grandchildren along the same vein.
“In my day, we didn’t have nanotechnology that allowed people to buy furniture plans out of thin air and transform their coffee tables into ottomans!”
Of course, that is just a guess. Judging from how wrong the sci-fi writers of the past predicted our future (where are my flying cars!), my statement is most likely way off. But you get the picture.
Technological evolution is a natural extension of biological evolution, and the rate of evolution in general is increasing exponentially. As in all exponential curves, there is a limit that the curve approaches, but never reaches. So what happens as the rate of evolution approaches infinity?
To find out, you are going to have to go listen to Matthew talk about this idea as well as quite a bit about the nature of humanity and the universe in general in an attempt to put our human experience into context.
Hope to see you there!
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