The Future of Digital Technology

 

Ever Wondered???

WHO ARE WE?

WHY ARE WE HERE?

WHERE DID WE COME FROM?

WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?

WHAT IS OUR FUTURE?

Many of us don't give a damn let alone a rat's ass about these questions as we go about living our lives in a state of relative oblivion, caring only about our families, our employment, our possessions, our faith, our vacations, and if we are going to get the COVID vaccines or not...  secondary issues might, and I use that term loosely, revolve around:  inflation, crime and violence, immigration, our children wearing facemasks in school, beinging taught CRT, and supply chain issues...

When I am not being philosophical and thinking about these questions my time is spent posting articles to my blog and opinion pieces (like this one) or writing a few pages on my next novel...  which makes 6, but I lost one, so this is 5.

Being retired and without a whole lot of hobbies, family, or friends, I have a lot of free time on my hands...  so, as anyone might do who is in their 70's, I spend a lot of time just thinking about all of it...  which brings me back to those questions above...

DO WE HAVE TO WAIT FOR DEATH TO GET THE ANSWERS?

Artificial Intelligence LEADER will rule the WORLD

A couple of years ago,Vladimir Putin warned Russians that the country that led in technologies using artificial intelligence will dominate the globe. He was right to be worried. Russia is now a minor player, and the race seems now to be mainly between the United States and China. But don’t count out the European Union just yet; the EU is still a fifth of the world economy, and it has underappreciated strengths. Technological leadership will require big digital investments, rapid business process innovation, and efficient tax and transfer systems. China appears to have the edge in the first, the U.S. in the second, and Western Europe in the third. One out of three won’t do, and even two out three will not be enough; whoever does all three best will dominate the rest.

We are on the cusp of colossal changes. But you don’t have to take Mr. Putin’s word for it, nor mine. This is what Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a serious student of the effects of digital technologies, says:  “This is a moment of choice and opportunity. It could be the best 10 years ahead of us that we have ever had in human history or one of the worst, because we have more power than we have ever had before.”

To understand why this is a special time, we need to know how this wave of technologies is different from the ones that came before and how it is the same. We need to know what these technologies mean for people and businesses. And we need to know what governments can do and what they’ve been doing. With my colleagues Wolfgang Fengler, Kenan Karakülah, and Ravtosh Bal, I have been trying to whittle the research of scholars such as David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Diego Comin down to its lessons for laymen. This blog utilizes the work to forecast trends during the next decade.

4 WAVES, 3 FACTS
It is useful to think of technical change as having come in four waves since the 1800s, brought about by a sequence of “general purpose technologies” (GPTs). GPTs are best described by economists as “changes that transform both household life and the ways in which firms conduct business.” The four most important GPTs of the last two centuries were the steam engine, electric power, information technology (IT), and artificial intelligence (AI).

All these GPTs inspired complementary innovations and changes in business processes. The robust and most relevant facts about technological progress have to do with its pace, prerequisites, and problems:

• Technological change has been getting quicker. While the pace of invention may not have accelerated, the time between invention and implementation has been shrinking. While average implementation lags are difficult to measure precisely, it would not be a gross oversimplification to say that they have been cut in half with each GPT wave. Based on the evidence, the time between invention and widespread use was cut from about 80 years for the steam engine to 40 years for electricity, and then to about 20 years for IT (Figure 1). There are reasons to believe that the implementation lag for AI-related technologies will be about 10 years. With technological change speeding up and first-mover advantages as big as they have always been, the need for large and coordinated investments is growing.  READ MORE..

What About our Future?

Why is next Tuesday different from Amsterdam's Central Station?

Next Tuesday is off in the future. It hasn't happened yet, and you can't say what it's going to look like. Maybe it will be like today. No big deal. But maybe you'll get hit by a falling meteor on Monday and be in the intensive care ward. Bummer. Amsterdam's Central Station, however, exists now. It's just over the Atlantic Ocean, and even as you read these words people are there, scurrying to get their trains or milling about buying weird Dutch fast food (try the greasy fried rice balls ... yum!).

So Amsterdam Central Station already exists. It's just at a different point in space. But next Tuesday, which is at a different point in time, doesn't exist.

What is up with that?

For physicists like myself, this question of the difference between space and time is rock bottom, fundamental, super important. We can't really do physics without starting with some kind of theory of space and of time and of their relationship.
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Newton's giant leap forward, 400 years ago, was to think about space and time as two totally separate domains. Space was the unchanging stage on which the drama of the world played out. Time was a river that flowed at an unchanging rate through every point on that cosmic change.

The power of Newton's conception changed the world, opening the floodgate for the mechanical era and the Industrial Revolution. There was only one small problem with this idea of a separate, absolute space and time.

It was wrong.

Of Albert Einstein's many great achievements, his most profound might be the recognition that space (the location of Amsterdam Central Station) and time (the location of next Tuesday) cannot be so easily separated. And that is why next Tuesday may already exist in the same way as Amsterdam's Central Station does.

Let me tell you about your "world line."

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the drama of the world is "played" out not on the 3-D stage of space with time acting as an unchanging metronome. Instead, reality is composed of a four-dimensional space-time. There are three dimensions of space: left/right, forward/back, up/down. And there is one dimension of time: past/future. Just as every location on the surface of the Earth already exists in space, every event that has ever happened and ever will happen already exists in space-time.

To see how freaky this idea really gets, let's consider your life for a moment.  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS CONCEPT, CLICK HERE...

Time's Mistress

 Age had time

as its mistress,

lingering not

in the past

or the present,

but with speed

towards the end.

10 May 2021

It appears to the layman that life is bound up in layers of confusion that seldom gets sorted out until the end of life approaches and/or the mind becomes so incapacitated that we simply have no idea what it going on...  Both of these possibilities happen but there are a lot of other possibilities as well most of which deal with coming to grips with the reality of life in that life does not happen as a result of the choices that we make but happens because it has been willed to happen that way long before we were given our first breath of life.

Are we then looking at a religious awareness or understanding in our later years?

No...  not at all...  and while religion is not at the heart of life like many religious followers perceive it to be, there is a CREATOR and there is no doubt in my mind that this is a fact; however, all our other religious beliefs and concepts were given to us by extraterrestrials who visited earth in the early years of our existence...   and, who altered our DNA to the point that human beings became the creatures that they are today rather than moving in another direction that might have kept us in the same realm as apes or monkeys who share similar DNA structures.

Our lives...  we thought and/or perceived, were created so that we could worship the Gad who had given us life.  and, while there is some truth to that belief, our lives were really created for us to learn to survive and not just survive with other human beings but with land animal, water animal, air animals as well as the environment.

Our arrogance has taken us into a different direction and that direction will take us into space and once in space, we will eventually meet the extraterrestrials who were responsible for giving us life...  and perhaps our CREATOR as well.

To this end, our lives have been pre-determined that is to say that if one exists on the edge of the universe and has the ability to look back or down or across at earth, they will see that spacetime on earth moves faster than the spacetime where they are located moves.  Knowing that relationship and dynamic, those who dwell at the edge of the universe can see our future happening before we experience it

Since they know what our future is going to be like, then they can make adjustments should they desire in certain events in an effort to alter or change that future and then can witness the new realities unfold just like the old realities unfolded.

After many years traveling through space and coming into contact with different knowledge, we too will one day have their same level of awareness and can evoke our wills onto other civilizations just as they have done to us...  and, no doubt that is our future.

Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to get to earth...  so past light illuminates our present, allowing the past and the present to happen at the same time which logically should not happen at all.  And, the only way that it it happening is when we compare the light from the sun relative to its arrival on earth...  knowing that it is traveling at the speed of light.

Similarly, our future relative to whoever is living at the edge of the universe is their present which logically should not happen either, but it does which is why they can see our future before it happens to us relative to our present.

Only a CREATOR can create a universe where these kinds of things are happening on a regular basis...  we are not the byproduct of evolution although human being have experience evolutionary changes in their bodies...  And, these changes happened faster than they should have happened which leads us to believe that someone altered our DNA.

SO...  does death as we understand it...  really happen?

TIME: Past - Present - Future

Time is a commodity that is limited in its nature especially for all living things but time is also conceptualized with a PAST, PRESENT, and a FUTURE; although, we never see the past living in the present that always seems to lean more directly into the future...  since time moves forward not backward; and, we accept the past as what has been simply because we can read the records.  BUT, time is somewhat elusive in that we can never see what just happened and what just happened is never behind us even when we are walking backwards into our future...  so where did our immediate past go?

The breeze that blows by...  comes and goes but as it touches our bodies is all we know of its existence other than what we may observe but where it came from has disappeared into our past never to be seen again so we do not know for sure if the conditions that brought the breeze to us still there...  or perhaps the past goes into some kind of holding dimension.

Using telescopes we can see where space came from and where it is going but that ability stops as we observe the life we are living.  There will always be cars behind us on the interstate but we are all moving forward at the same relative time and even though we see a landscape behind us as we drive by, the conditions of that landscape are different than when we were just there...  just as every millisecond of our present is different so too is every millisecond of our past.

SO...  again...  where does our past go and that it goes so fast we cannot return?

A jet stream is a visual reminder and the actual past of a fast moving aircraft as it moves into its future pausing less than a nanosecond in its present; however, the physical aircraft's past is never seen as if it never been there in the first place yet we see its reminder as it floats behind eventually dissipating.    

Grave Stones are a reminder of someone's past but that is not exactly what I am talking about...  I want to know where our immediate past goes when we are still alive always moving into our future...  this is the question that bothers me and to which there is no easy reply and only speculative proof and our existence in our future that it actually happened at all or why we can never return.

Living in the PRESENT

We are the sum total of our memories or so the experts have told me...  and, these memories start from an early age and in come cases can recall, perhaps not so vividly, the moment of birth along with other moments of our childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age, and our older retired life, if we are the kind of person who feels the need to retire from work.

However, in my case, I have no such memories...

• I remember not my early childhood or adolescence
• I have vague memories of my deceased parents
• I remember only bits and pieces of high school and college
• I remember almost nothing of my time in the military
• I remember fragments of my working career

One would think, especially in my case, that this is the reason why we take photos with cameras or with our phones so that we will have many memories from which to recall our adventures both positive and negative and all those that we might classify as neutral...  but there are no photos in my phone from which to draw...

NOW...  while this may seem an unpleasant revelation to some, for me it is exactly what was intended to be all along...   intended, to force me into the PRESENT, and not dwell upon the past because that is exactly what the past is...  GONE FOREVER...  perhaps, mistakes can be repeated and even parts of the past...  but, what's done is done...

Where did a moment ago go?

I cannot look back upon it to relieve it again...

I can delete the words I just typed

but I cannot relive the moment those words were first typed...

We are CREATURES OF THE PRESENT and that is all that we have and the only concept on which we can count...  not even the future can predict what we will do until we get there and it is done or not done.

A BIG Think

The block universe theory says that our universe may be looked at as a giant four-dimensional block of spacetime, containing all the things that ever happen, explained Dr. Kristie Miller, the joint director for the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney.

In the block universe, there is no "now" or present. All moments that exist are just relative to each other within the three spacial dimensions and one time dimension. Your sense of the present is just reflecting where in the block universe you are at that instance. The "past" is just a slice of the universe at an earlier location while the "future" is at a later location.

Block Universe diagram. Credit: ABC Science

And...

while this may be true...

I mean...  after all...  it is an idea put forth by a PhD.

BUT...

what if she is wrong and the past, present, and future is not in a block?

What then?

Let's suppose...

that we have a past because we know we did something yesterday,

and while that is all fine and good,

suppose yesterday vanishes...

once it happens, it is no longer there...

just like the BIG BANG,

once it happened, it was gone and our universe appeared

but everything that happened before had disappeared.

What if...

all we have is RIGHT NOW...

NO PAST

and the only future is that which we experience next...

until there are no more futures.