After the Great Boredom: Gaming 3006
Go now and read this piece in Gamasutra to see how one the UK’s (or anywhere’s) best games journalists, Jim Rossignol, envisions gaming (and more) circa the year 3006. A taste:
Neuroscience has long been aware that the brain is little more than a pattern completion engine, so like all 31st century denizens I carry a personalised ludic pattern box, a handy device which produces generative gameworks——patterns that are suitable for my brain to complete on a subconscious level. I play the games without conscious reasoning——a vital exercise for the more strenuous activities I will later undertake. This kind of exercise is an aspect of ubiquitous gaming that goes unnoticed in 3006.
Actually, that hardly gives you the idea of the piece, which ranges across everything from singularity to some very post-3pointD ideas. But like I said at the beginning of this post, go. Now.
Feeds
Nice little Kurzweil riff, but pushing it waaay off to 3006 (where it’s just not real) concerns me probably as much as the idea of pulling something like it waaay into the 21st century concerns most people right now. I can see Kurzweil saying, “Yes, 1,000 years of technological progress is a good estimate to achieve this capability. What you’re missing is that 1,000 years of progress will happen in a much shorter amount of time.”
Abstract to Ray Kurzweil’s The Law of Accelerating Returns (required reading for those who haven’t caught it yet):
“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.”
Podcast of Kurzweil’s Keynote, When Humans Transcend Biology, at Accelerating Change 2005. (”What will things be like in a hundred years? Well, we’ll have very small cell phones.” And better first-person shooter graphics! Yay! :))
Kurzweil fails to take into account the enormous negative impact of the Great Boredom of the 22nd century on human development…
But in all seriousness I’m not sure I accept the current singularity diagnosis for the future. I mean technology has a habit of going off at tangents - computers now seem to be far more about communication than about computation, for example.
> I mean technology has a habit of going off at tangents - computers now seem to be far more about communication than about computation, for example.
Agreed, but computation’s really not prone to tangents though. This graph goes back to 1900 and shows the jump through five different substrates, and there’s a line of substrates waiting to take the torch from integrated circuits. I’ve got my effectively infinite computation from the human point of view in the 21st century.
From the Future Trends section Wikipedia entry on Moore’s Law, talking about tapping out “the need” for increased computation:
“Since the rapid exponential improvement could (in theory) put 100 GHz personal computers in every home and 20 GHz devices in every pocket, some commentators have speculated that sooner or later computers will meet or exceed any conceivable need for computation. This is only true for some problems—there are others where exponential increases in processing power are matched or exceeded by exponential increases in complexity as the problem size increases.”
Make’s me think of the quote attributed to Bill Gates back in the day: “640kb ought to be enough for anyone.” :)
> I’ve got my effectively infinite computation from the human point of view in the 21st century.
That should read “I’ve got my money on effectively infinite…”
Mark, can you change that?