A well it looks to me like a question followed by one persons definition of an answer. I've added Qs and As to assist in understanding. Obviously answering questions in great detail would make Lincs a terrible politician.
Life is created in a lab for the first time
- Thread starter skitzee2k
- Start date
A well it looks to me like a question followed by one persons definition of an answer. I've added Qs and As to assist in understanding. Obviously answering questions in great detail would make Lincs a terrible politician.
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joinerjohn
Nah Linc's would be a great politician. The amount of filibustering he could do is just incredible. 
The amount of filibustering he could do is just incredible.
I like that word, and its a good point!
That's exactly my point, he presents stuff like this as though it is his when it obviously isn't.
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That's a bit of an overstatement isn't it!
When you read the details you find that he started with an existing bacterium and swapped out its DNA. That's not creating life; it's just genetic modification on a grand scale. The new DNA wasn't built from scratch either but assembled from bits that can be obtained by mail order. What we have here isn't man-made life. It's existing life chopped up and reassembled to produce a new bacterium. To really create life you would have to assemble the whole cell, starting with nothing more than chemical compounds that can themselves be synthesized from elements.
This may happen some day. There was a time when chemist thought that the compounds they labelled 'organic' could only be synthesized by living organisms. They were wrong.
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EddieM
We as humans will not have developed sentient life within the foreseeable future, that much I would bet on.
FFS
It's hardly a recreation of the human species.
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Lincsbodger
It inevitably will happen at some point. Artificial Intelligence is advancing in massive strides, i predict sentient AI will arrive about 2050-2075, the same time as the Technological Singularity.
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EddieM
What does technological singularity mean?
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Lincsbodger
well........you have to know what a paradigm shift is first. A Paradigm shift is where someone makes a fundamental discovery that comp0letely chages the way scientific theory thinks, like the discovery that the earth goes round the sun, or the invention of high pressure steam engines.
A few years ago, some guy platted the dates of hundreds of paradigm shifts in dozens of scientific fields, and you can see thatthe average time between paradigm shifts is getting shorter or and shorter, or, look at it another way, the speed at which we are inventing new things and discovering new science is getting faster and faster. The rate of discovery is increasing on a logarithmic rate. The theory goes that there will be a point where new science is being discovered so fast all of a sudden ALL scientific knowledge will suddenly become available to mankind, and it will occur at the same time as true Artificial Intelligence is invented. This point, where all of a sudden we know everything, and all knowledge and technology is mastered or master-able, is called the Technological Singularity.
The arrival of AI and the technological singularity will herald a new phase in human development, where man and AI combine to form superior, immortal man-machine cybernetic intelligence.
The scary bit is that the calculated date if this occurring is somewhere between 2045 and 2075.................
You didn't, you don't operate that way. You just like to present stuff like that in such a way as to lead people to think it's coming from you.
(Do you work in advertising?)
Ignoring the fact that you only ever post in the discussion section, so you're hardly making useful posts. I would say that your statistical analysis aptly illustrates the difference between somebody who craves approval (guess who) and somebody who doesn't give a sh1t (that would be me).
Oh come come bodger, you can do better than that when somebody questions your integrity. Where are all the insults, the swearwords, the tantrums. At the very least you could have mentioned something about stolen hubcaps or signing on, I am in Liverpool after all.
Who did them calculations then? Jules Verne, Erich Von Daniken. David Icke???
Lincsbodger said:
By definition, it will be the point at which everything is invented.
That includes everything that has every been postulated by every sci-fi writer throughout history: warp drive, the replicator, the holo-deck, the orgasmatron, the telephone ignoring machine ---. Also, the satan bug, the quark bomb and the self-updating software update. In my experience, our ability to create some new technological wonder has always run well ahead of our ability to use it wisely. If we aren't very careful, the technological singularity will be the point at which everything disappears up its own a**ehole.
Never a true word
That graph tells us that the time between 'events' has been reducing by a factor of ten every ten years. If we extrapolate it up to the present, it predicts that a major technological change will happen every year. Now extrapolation is a dodgy business but extrapolating up to the present can at least be tested.
Are we seeing a major change every year? That rather depends on your definition of a major change. One of the things I was taught back in the eighties was that changes were happening at roughly 55 year intervals. Examples given were steam engines, electricity and internal combustion. (I might have missed one out somewhere.) The next one was predicted to arrive soon and, sure enough, we got the internet. Maybe K-Star will be next.
So let's take the graph at face value and see what it predicts. In ten year's time, changes will be happening ten times a year. In twenty year's time they will happen 100 times a year. That's not a singularity; it's an asymptote. There is no point in the future when everything happens at once. We're safe!
Are we seeing a major change every year?
That rather depends on your definition of a major change. One of the things I was taught back in the eighties was that changes were happening at roughly 55 year intervals. Examples given were steam engines, electricity and internal combustion. (I might have missed one out somewhere.) The next one was predicted to arrive soon and, sure enough, we got the internet. Maybe K-Star will be next. So let's take the graph at face value and see what it predicts. In ten year's time, changes will be happening ten times a year. In twenty year's time they will happen 100 times a year. That's not a singularity; it's an asymptote. There is no point in the future when everything happens at once. We're safe!
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