A few of us tested Tokbox for doing a live video conf call earlier today and it BLEW MY MIND. You can apparently have 50 people or more on a video conf at the same time! I think I’ll use this for the live show next week instead of uStream, see how it goes.
You can also use it to send video mail. Send me a message below.
http://www.tokbox.com/vr/3qi0vl5itj
TokBox – Free Video Chat and Video Messaging
I have nine macs!!!!!! I don’t need another fucking mac. I just want ONE ARSING PC that isn’t complete SHIT
I’ve been playing the new HTC Touch 3G for the last week. Here are my thoughts.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUdx6Cur9-U&hl=en&fs=1]
IEEE Spectrum has a series of new essays on the singularity from the likes of Vernor Vinge and Rodney Brooks (who have both been on this show in the last year).
My favourite quote so far comes from Vinge’s new essay “Signs of the Singularity“:
“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?†is probably “Yes, but only brieflyâ€.”
Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).
So, if Moore’s Law holds out:
2009 – 2 QIPS
2010 – 4 QIPS
2011 – 8 QIPS
2012 – 16 QIPS – which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.
Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?
We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?
Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.
Well, that’s not exactly true – Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?
It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.
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