Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Apocalypse Now

I have been hearing a lot of Dire predictions of Doomsday scenarious in recent times. And just thought I'd like to share a few scary thoughts for you to chew on.....
1) The Large Hadron Collider - The brainchild of CERN - the European paricle physics reseach institute's newest particle accelerator - what used to be in the good old days (when I was in high school studying physics) called a Cyclotron, is a behemoth of unimaginable proportions and when it is switched on in a couple of weeks - a lot of people have said that it will result in a Singularity/Event Horizon - in simpler terms - a blackhole - something which can swallow our planet and end our civilization. Though this may sound far fetched - if you know (personally) any particle physicist and ask them what do they hope to see when two interesting sub-atomic particles collide - The answer is "Something interesting" but meaning "No Idea". Yes, these people crash two things together and see what the leftover pieces are made of. And you shouldn't (atleast they wont) be surprised if we end up with a blackhole in Switzerland. Now if you dont call that irresponsible... I don't know what is.
2) A.I. - Aw shucks I hear you crib- Not The old Terminator Movie/Skynet artificial intelligence thing again. But please stop and think a minute. The only thing stopping us from developing Artificial Intelligence right now is not the software- its the Hardware -which is failing to measure up - Moore's Law, Anyone? Come to think of it- with all its inherent hardware deficiences and glitches - we already have a highly diversified, planet-wide, distributed network with Quasi-(self) awareness available to us - Called the Internet. We are just a step away folks....
3)Robots - Again something from Sci-fi stories, you think- but stop a minute to think about your latest handheld mobile communicator with so much computing spare power, impressive isn't it? and Mobile phones only took off in the last 10 years. Think what Nokia could do or God Forbid, Apple could do in say another 20/30 years if Robots really took off as a best selling consumer technology?
4) Finally - The Loser Climate Change - Seriously I don't think climate change is going to pose much of a challenge to humanity as Al Gore thinks - we have/will have most of the technology we require (in the near future) to beat climate change easily and restore our planet to equilibrium- regardless of the pessimists.
Anything else I left out? please feel free to comment....

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