We are going to an exciting and possibly very dangerous place.
The exponential growth of computing power over the past 20 years has been astonishing. Where will we be 20 years from now?
The average PC is far more powerful then mega-million room-sized mainframes of a generation ago. I'm talking about mainframes that were operated by white-jacketed nerds in air-conditioned rooms in which access to normal people was strictly prohibited.
I currently have an iPod strapped to my belt that holds nearly 40GB of data - almost 10,000 songs consisting of my music collection. This is nothing however compared to my home network, which consists of 5 PCs and laptops with a combined storage space of 3.5 terrabytes that could easily hold the text of every book ever written. I have over 45,000 songs and gigabytes worth of other files and media.
Where will we be in 20 years if we progress at the same rate? You could have a device the size of a wristwatch that holds the entire World Wide Web that could calculate Pi to 500 quadrillion digits in microseconds.
Computers have a very good chance of taking over the world and enslaving the human race. It sounds like weird science fiction but I am convinced that this is a possiblity. We are not that far away from thinking machines that can build replicas of themselves and robots that will be designed to overpower and enslave us. We must be very, very careful.
I used to have a professor who seemed obsessed with robots gaining consciousness and what that would mean. I wanted to ask him if he had ever seen "The Terminator".
You've seen Dune and understood the implications?