Hoe omgaan met het internet van morgen: wat geven we prijs en tegen welke kost?

Editor's Notes

1. Hoe omgaan met het internet van morgen: wat geven we prijs en tegen welke kost? Ik zou het dan willen hebben over mobiel, locatie-/context-bewust, over genetwerkte objecten (het zogenaamde internet of things) en social media. Met strakke focus op mediageletterdheid uiteraard. Alle zaken die ik ga beschrijven bestaan nu al, maar zullen pas de komende jaren doordringen naar het bredere publiek (en sommige zijn al aan het doordringen, denk maar aan Facebook en het delen van persoonlijke gegevens)
2. Ik zou het dan willen hebben over mobiel, locatie-/context-bewust, over genetwerkte objecten (het zogenaamde internet of things) en social media. Met strakke focus op mediageletterdheid uiteraard. Alle zaken die ik ga beschrijven bestaan nu al, maar zullen pas de komende jaren doordringen naar het bredere publiek (en sommige zijn al aan het doordringen, denk maar aan Facebook en het delen van persoonlijke gegevens)
3. http://www.newsweek.com/id/197812 FUTURIST – 30000/speech - Ray Kurzweil – cyborg - a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream. Artificial intelligence / believes computer intelligence is advancing so rapidly that in a couple of decades, machines will be as intelligent as humans. Soon after that they will surpass humans and start creating even smarter technology. We need to become cyborgs just to keep up – superhuman computers – does not believe we will become dominated (battlestar) – They will love and honor us – we’ll be able to embed our consciousness into silicon = we can live on, inside machines forever… Kurzweil calls this moment "The Singularity," and says it represents the next great leap in human evolution, when humans will transcend biology by merging with technology. Datum: 2045 (hij zal dan 97 zijn  / its doable) Critics: P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has used his blog to poke fun at Kurzweil and other armchair futurists who, according to Myers, rely on junk science and don't understand basic biology. "I am completely baffled by Kurzweil's popularity = NEW AGE SPIRITUALISM began writing books, starting with The Age of Intelligent Machines in 1990, followed by The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1998 and The Singularity Is Near in 2005. Kurzweil also likes to make predictions, and he claims he's found a foolproof, data-driven methodology for predicting the future. In 1990 he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. In fact, it happened in 1997, when IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated Garry Kasparov. Kurzweil also predicted the rapid growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, and the ubiquity of wireless Internet access. Kurzweil also predict-ed that by 2009 a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 quadrillion operations per second (20 petaflops in computer jargon), the same as the human brain. In fact, the top supercomputer just broke the one-petaflop mark—though Kurzweil says he considers all of Google to be a giant supercomputer and that it is, indeed, capable of performing 20 petaflops. Kurzweil also predicted that by now our cars would be able to drive themselves by communicating with intelligent sensors embedded in highways, and that speech recognition would be in widespread use. By 2029 a computer will achieve intelligence equivalent to that of a human being, or so close that the two cannot be told apart. After that, computers will start engineering their own replacements, and the hockey-stick curve will soar upward. By 2045, Kurzweil estimates, we will use computers to enhance our intelligence, and "nanobots"—microscopic machines—to roam our bloodstream, stomping out diseases before they can spread. Maybe this sounds nuts. But Kurzweil points out that today doctors can implant a computer the size of a pea into the brain of a person suffering with Parkinson's disease. Why shouldn't we believe that in 20 years such devices will be the size of a blood cell? "The computer in my cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than the computer that we used at MIT when I was an undergraduate," he says. "That's a billionfold increase. And we'll do that again in the next 25 years.” What happens then? Once computers are a billion times more powerful than today—and we're all a bunch of cyborgs with brains like supercomputers and bodies that can't be killed by disease? For one thing, stuff starts progressing really, really fast. Imagine a thousand scientists, each a thousand times smarter than they are today, operating a thousand times faster. First thing these smarty-pants cyborgs will do, Kurzweil reckons, is make themselves incredibly smart. HOCKEY STICK. Eventually you've got scientists who are a million times smarter and a million times faster than they are today. Breakthroughs should be popping up all over. "An hour would result in a century of progress [in today's terms]," Kurzweil claims in The Singularity Is Near. Eventually, we leap beyond the boundaries of our planet, and every bit of matter in the entire universe becomes intelligent. "This," Kurzweil concludes, "is the destiny of the universe.” The goal of living long enough to experience The Singularity has taken over Kurzweil's life, turning him into a health nut. He's trim and fit, thanks to exercise, a careful diet and loads of supplements. The great thing about being a futurist, of course, is that you can't really be proved wrong. You can predict away, secure in the knowledge that no one is going to time-travel into the future and come back to tell the world that you got it wrong. Won't the Singularity tech-nologies be available only to people who can afford them? Won't that create a situation where the rich become "enhanced," and the rest of us become moronic muggles? Kurzweil says no, the price of technologies will come down so quickly that everyone will be able to afford them. OK, so what about natural selection? If we all stop dying, won't we mess that up? "Natural selection isn't significant anymore," Kurzweil says. "Technological change is the cutting edge of evolution." As for fears that computers will kill us, or keep us as slaves, Kurzweil insists the computers will want us around. Kurzweil took some serious heat on this last point during a panel discussion after the premiere of Transcendent Man at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. Some leading artificial-intelligence experts were in the audience, and they think we are racing toward a dystopian future.