"Vernor Vinge. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" - читать интересную книгу автора

commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to
regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one
sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing
a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance,
group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical
meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated
from ego issues such that the contribution of different members
is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases
could be used much more conveniently than in conventional
committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team
operations rather than political meetings. In a political
setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the
power of the persons making the rules!)
o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine
tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is
proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before
anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day
Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our
contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of
their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET
"group mind" gives the system administration and support people!
The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of
its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and
computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn
Margulis' [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor
recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with
millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within
the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are
other paradigms. For example, much of the work in Artificial
Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection
with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand
biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the
creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for
guidance or for the providing features we don't understand well enough
yet to implement in hardware. A long-time dream of science-fiction has
been direct brain to computer interfaces [2] [29]. In fact, there is
concrete work that can be done (and is being done) in this area:
o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability.
Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14]. This is an
exciting, near-term step toward direct communication.
o Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is
low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron
targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits
per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would
otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.
o Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths
of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the
fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an