And So It Begins…
I mentioned in my The Fork in the Road post in July that one of the likely outcomes of the increase in computing power and connectivity was the overwhelming of present government (and, I forgot to add, military and corporate) power by individuals using the ‘Net and its connections to gain abilities far out of proportion to their status in 20th Century society.
We are presently witnessing the birth of this world. At the present time, a group of criminal crackers are in the possession of a distributed computer network of between one and ten million computers that they have seized (without the owners realizing it) with a program called the Storm Worm.
Assuming that most of the machines that this program are controlling are gaming-type computers, the individual or organization that presently controls these computers has more computing power than the ten largest supercomputers on earth combined.
Please note horrible math on the part of the Washington Post–the total computing power of the diffuse array is actually 1-10 petabytes, not 1-10 million petabytes as the article states. This lower figure still puts them in the same class with the currently most powerful non-governmental and hopefully non-evil entity, Google, which has between 20-200 petabytes of RAM.
Hired experts have not been able to get a handle on this botnet and shut it down because its creators (no doubt using a bit of their new-found power) have been changing its rules faster than they can counter them.
This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the next level, please roll 1d6 for additional hit points, your new geek masters will be here shortly. This kind of progress is also why I refuse to concern myself overly with elections, except for the need to delay the governmental power grab long enough for that seizure to be futile.
Added note: Here’s a lovely article on the rest of the power currently on earth. Please note that this blog, my writing on it, and any YouTube videos that I embed are all powered by Google. This is true ubiquity. If there’s a Great Programmer, I imagine that he/she could very well be employed by Google in the OverVerse.
Tom
Comment by kittent on 5 September 2007 at 3:44 pm:
My head may explode. We have seen the future and it is us…this is one of the things I have been freaking out about because there is too much to absorb…it was hard to keep up with 2 newsgroups (usenet ruled) in 1991.
Library Science has changed in 30 years….
Comment by Augur on 5 September 2007 at 6:54 pm:
Kitten: I would love to read a guest post by you on how Library Science has changed in the last 30 years, and your opinion of how it will change in the next 30.
Yours always,
Augur
Comment by Augur on 5 September 2007 at 7:01 pm:
Tommy – I owe you 2 blog ideas:
#4
It is a little too easy for you to make sweeping predictions about the indefinite future and what a radically different world we will have in 40 years. While this might seem radical to some, part of your vision seems plausible to me (but not necessarily likely). It might help some readers if you were to push yourself a little harder and lay out a time line of what you anticipate changing to get us there in:
1) six months
2) one year
3) five years
4) ten years
5) twenty years
6) thirty years
If you could give us a rough roadmap/ timeline of innovation and social response it might make this vision much easier to grasp, and it might make for a magnificent outline of a book. You could break this into a series of articles.
#5
Why do we still need porno production rates to be so high. Shouldn’t there be enough old stuff to relieve our collective tension? I’m no expert, but to the best of my knowledge societies taste in pornos hasn’t been changing that much in the last few years to justify the increased supply. Do you think the old stuff just isn’t marketed and branded past first production? It seems a company could be very profitable just buying the rights and repackaging old stuff and rebranding/ selling it.
Your buddy,
Augur
Comment by tet on 5 September 2007 at 8:59 pm:
*chuckle*
You know, Augur, if you look at the inside cover of Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow you’ll find a timeline running from 1939 (the year in which he wrote Lifeline) through to about 2255 or so.
So, this has been done already, sixty-six years ago by the author that some readers of this blog are tired of hearing about. However, I like a challenge and just might give it a shot. Keep in mind, though, that part of the reason that it’s called the Singularity is that what happens once you reach its horizon, nothing can be understood about what happens next.
Actually, the more I think about this idea, the more I like it. We can call it, My Past Through Tomorrow. I’ll get right on it.
Porno *is* being recycled. There’s a very famous young woman named Anna Marek who was 18 or 19 when a series of photos were taken of her in Poland in 1992. I still run across them in interesting places.
The classic films like Insatiable and Up and Coming still have quite a following, too.
Tom
Comment by Kit Fenderson-Peters on 6 September 2007 at 8:18 am:
Augur – The reason that so much new porno is being produced is simple. People think there’s money to be made in it.
Comment by kittent on 6 September 2007 at 9:19 am:
Augur…I’ll work on it and get back to you…don’t know how long it’s going to take as I am booked to the max (took a 12 hour nap yesterday)