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and more sophisticated. There\'s no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps.

\"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, and how we\'ll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth.

\"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological human brains on Earth and that number won\'t change much in fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through that. By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a billion times that. We\'ll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively insignificant.

\"People didn\'t throw their typewriters away when word-processing started. There\'s always an overlap -- it\'ll take time before we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be.\"

It\'s well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with technology, but it\'s a lot more important to talk about the stuff we\'ll be allowed to do with technology. Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a by-your-leave.

Even P2P\'s worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty.

What\'s going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn\'t song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new tools?

\"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious software] is the most important battlefield today.

\"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we\'ll spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude more important than biothought.

\"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld.

\"That\'s partly because technology is unregulated and people have access to the tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today\'s software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever.

\"But here\'s the thing: you don\'t see people advocating shutting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It\'s an important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet.

\"I hope it\'ll remain that way -- that the Internet won\'t become a regulated space like medicine. Malware\'s not the most important issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods.

\"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn\'t have to put malware through the FDA\'s regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware do.

\"In Huxley\'s Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who
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