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Fourth, the forces that conspire towards convergence don't seem to have strong counter-forces, suggesting that convergence will tighten over time. Perhaps in one hundred years, or two, technological development will not vary much around the globe. In this sense "the future will be more evenly distributed" to paraphrase William Gibson. In reaction to this homogeneity, perhaps the variation we see in regions we will see in individuals. People will choose to abstain or forsake particular global standards of technology in a form of idiosyncratic distinction. (See my post on the Neo-Amish.)  They will re-distribute the future themselves. But like the Amish they will harbor these "redistributions" as a personal choice within an ocean of planetary convergence. When everyone has access to all technologies (and all the same technologies), no one will have time to use or load them all. Then the only course will be to carry or "distribute" your personal slice of the technium. In this way while the planetary culture slides toward convergence of technologies, billions of technology users will diverge in their personal choices as they edge toward using smaller and more eccentric selections of available stuff. Your identity will be displayed by what you don't use.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers.

The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology.

A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority

Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.

Digital technology gives the professional a new language as well. An image stored on a memory disc instead of celluloid film has a plasticity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo

Digital technology gives the professional a new language as well. An image stored on a memory disc instead of celluloid film has a plasticity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo.

As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text doe

The recent live-action feature movie “Speed Racer,” while not a box-office hit, took this style of filmmaking even further. The spectacle of an alternative suburbia was created by borrowing from a database of existing visual items and assembling them into background, midground and foreground. Pink flowers came from one photo source, a bicycle from another archive, a generic house roof from yet another. Computers do the hard work of keeping these pieces, no matter how tiny and partial they are, in correct perspective and alignment, even as they move. The result is a film assembled from a million individual existing images.

t is a formidable task, but in the past decade computers have gotten much better at recognizing objects in a picture than most people realize. Researchers have started training computers to recognize a human face. Specialized software can rapidly inspect a photograph’s pixels searching for the signature of a face: circular eyeballs within a larger oval, shadows that verify it is spherical. Once an algorithm has identified a face, the computer could do many things with this knowledge: search for the same face elsewhere, find similar-looking faces or substitute a happier version.

It is a formidable task, but in the past decade computers have gotten much better at recognizing objects in a picture than most people realize. Researchers have started training computers to recognize a human face. Specialized software can rapidly inspect a photograph’s pixels searching for the signature of a face: circular eyeballs within a larger oval, shadows that verify it is spherical. Once an algorithm has identified a face, the computer could do many things with this knowledge: search for the same face elsewhere, find similar-looking faces or substitute a happier version.

Academic research has produced a few interesting prototypes of video summaries but nothing that works for entire movies. Some popular Web sites with huge selections of movies (like porn sites) have devised a way for users to scan through the content of full movies quickly in a few seconds. When a user clicks the title frame of a movie, the window skips from one key frame to the next, making a rapid slide show, like a flip book of the movie. The abbreviated slide show visually summarizes a few-hour film in a few seconds. Expert software can be used to identify the key frames in a film in order to maximize the effectiveness of the summary.

way for users to scan through the content of full movies quickly in a few seconds. When a user clicks

In the West, we became people of the book.

There were more than 10 billion views of video on YouTube in September. The most popular videos were watched as many times as any blockbuster movie.

With the new screen fluency enabled by digital technology, however, a movie scene is something more flexible: it is like a writer’s paragraph, constantly being revised. Scenes are not captured (as in a photo) but built up incrementally. Layers of visual and audio refinement are added over a crude outline of the motion, the mix constantly in flux, always changeable.

To date most fan responses appear in text form, on sites like the Internet Movie Database. But increasingly fans respond to video with video.

With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip.

On Google SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse, you can find insanely detailed three-dimensional virtual models of most major building structures of the world.

printing broadcast them

Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music

scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques

Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated

The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium

Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization

paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of informatio

Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we've ever built - say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information

the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information

The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell.

Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage.

One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information.

Measured by the amount of digital storage in use, the technium today contains 487 exabytes (10^20) of information, many orders smaller than nature's total, but growing. Technology expands data by 66% per year, overwhelming the growth rates of any natural source.

the laws of physics don't (as far as we know) improve with time, but extropic systems like life, mind and the technium do. Over billions of years they gain order, complexity, and their own self-organized autonomy — all things not present in the universe before. As Paul Davies points out, "life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history."

Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move towards the immaterial.

Forty percent of US exports today are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). Disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium

Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium's ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial.

Every scientific theory is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries stacked with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated information.

the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics.

If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk.

Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times

Once scientists built large scopes to examine matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, they saw the world was incorporeal. They discovered that matter is, at the bottom, empty space and waves of quantum uncertainties.

All creation is assembled from irreducible bits. The bits are like the "atoms" of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life.

To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. Surprisingly almost any kind of material can serve as the matrix for a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well.

The third postulate is: All computation is one.

The physics of person munching on a banana is computationally equivalent to the best possible virtual simulation of the same act. Both phenomenon require the same degree of universal computation, one in particles, and one in electrons.

The Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration

The consequence of these three propositions — that computation is universal, ubiquitous, and equivalent — suggests that the logical processing of bits is the most potent form of self-organization at work in the universe.

If everything can compute, and all computation is equivalent, then there is only one universal computer. All the human-made computation, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggyback on cycles of the Great Computer, also known as the Universe.

doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, "at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source." This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

Generally, a society does not abandon a new technology to return to an earlier version. When a current technology is suspended in the natural course of evolution it is usually displaced by a more complex variation, and the old version is swept aside as a viable minor alternative, or at least a curiosity, but rarely goes extinct.

Rather than a series of linear displacements climbing a ladder of evolution, the technium progresses as a widening field of accumulation.

Existing technologies keep operating almost intact, but are subsumed under additional new, more complex layers.

As any modern farmer will tell you, the glories of virtual worlds and e-commerce depend upon a rather primitive cycle of poking seeds into dirt and harvesting the replicants

For all practical purposes the flexibility of a technological system is eliminated once its initial choices and defaults are fixed. As systems scale up they acquire inertia.

The more established a process is, the harder it is to change, the more it proceeds along its path. Big technology is hard to stop.

This grid, built 100 years ago, lighted your grandparent's home, and our parents', and now brightens mine, and will light the lights of our grandchildren and probably their grandkids.

This technological longevity is almost a kind of immortality that transcends our comparatively brief lives. The technium's scope exists outside of our oversight, especially outside of our personal oversight. Its omnipresence together with its relative immortality grants it a version of autonomy.

The second way that technology gains a measure of autonomy is through its self-creation of needs.

It is this stratified stability created by extropy, evolution, and self-organization which prevents the collapse of complexity. If complexity had to re-assemble itself at every instance, nothing really complex would be possible.

The technium today is entirely populated with combinations of primitive technologies that have been ratcheted up into more complex devices.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology.

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.  That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents.

"New technologies are never created from nothing." Arthur observed. "They are constructed—put together—from components that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building blocks—for the construction of further new technologies."

(Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more valuable.) In six years the average weight per dollar of US exports (the most valuable things the US produces) dropped by half.

Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirit." But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well. Although it may not dominate matter's behavior, information must rest in the essence of matter. That's a lot less intuitive. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating.

One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC, or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. A Dell laptop could, if anyone wanted it to, emulate an iPhone.

In that curious way of life, growth triggers more growth. The web of technologies is ever expanding because a particular technology will self-generate new needs, new demands, and new appetites.

But where did this remarkable harvest of lawful order come from if it was not somehow "built into" that tiny file of physical laws? I claim that the trajectory of the technium was embedded into the fabric of matter and energy. If that is true, then one literal interpretation of that claim is that the 10^29 bytes of information now in the extropic realm were somehow dissolved into the one gigabyte of information of the physical laws, and unpacked over time. By the same logic, the dense leafy information displayed by a huge oak tree was previously dissolved into the microscopic informational packet of a tiny acorn, and unpacked over 80 years.

For instance in the age of automation, older hand tools are perfect for working off the grid, or in tight spots, or in countries with little cash. In an urban world, swords are hammered out by blacksmiths for ritual purposes. Quilts are sewn by hand for recreation and community. Fish are caught by hook for sport. Leather is used for the best shoes because the improvements on leather aren't really better. Commonly, the transition to the new appears faster than it is, as the old lingers invisibly behind the glittering flash of the new. For instance, despite the dominance of automobiles on modern culture today, more bicycles are sold each year than cars.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a  2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity  in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of  synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.  On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.