Thursday, February 5, 2009

2009 Edge Question

This year's question, answered by hundreds of professors, scientists, writers, etc.: "What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live and see?"

Some pretty interesting answers. My favorite is Alison Gopnik's "Never-ending childhood." He predicts that a new information economy will result in a longer period of learning because people will be well-off enough to just spend time thinking about stuff: "universal and extended schooling means that the period of flexible learning and dependence can continue until we are in our thirties."

1 comment:

Peter H of Lebo said...

I was getting really nervous with Kevin Kelly's New Kind of Mind. The growth of interwebs AI, "it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it...it will be faceless...Are we searching it, or is it searching us?" But my fears were dispelled when I realized that this AI was going to be one giant porn virtuoso. So even if it did achieve world domination the post-apocalyptic world would be pretty awesome.