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Friday, August 13, 2010

Calculating Futurological Predictions About the Arrival of Techno-Immortality

y - t = 0

[where "y" = a given futurologist's current life expectancy in years, and "t" = a given futurologist's rough prediction as to the time it will take for techno-immortalization to arrive]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal elaborates the formula for our amusement and also provides a very helpful illustration. I'm assuming this is in fact a grand unified techno-immortality wankery formula encompassing not only the futurologists wanking longevity pills or genetic sooper-medicines but also the ones wanking getting scooped into shiny Robot Bodies or wanking getting their brains uploaded into cyberspatial heaven and so on as well.

And, hey, kids! How'zabout this for a bonus formula?

Calculating Futurological Predictions About the Arrival of History-Ending Sooperintelligent AI
Current Year + 20 = AI + 1 = Robot God

This formula applies to predictions from the WWII era onward, every year by the year, right up to the present and ever onward, very possibly until the sooper-smart futurologists at some corporate-militarist think tank calculate the time is ripe to release the nukes or manage to peddle some geo-engineering boondoggle that throws us all back to the stone age.

2 comments:

Birney said...

Assuming that there is a way to stop death (and DARPA is even now researching how to create cells without cytokineses, and never bet against DARPA) how will this formula evolve to take into account entropy? I think Keynes is left without rebuttal, "In the long run we're all dead."

And as to the deus ex machina in the coming decades. . . Well, I for one welcome our new robot god overlords. (h/t to Pascal)

Dale Carrico said...

DARPA is the House and the House always wins.