Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule.
What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
It's reasonable to say that certain things we understand should perhaps have limits on how they're used and how certain technologies are deployed. That's very much what we should do as a society.
Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.
The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.
It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The advancement of the arts (technology) from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.
See {70777} for an even more dire prediction.
We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.
Life in space isn't easy. It's full of challenges that push the limits of technology, and often requires truly innovative solutions.
Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.
