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BT Futurologist On Smart Yogurt and the $7 PC

Posted by kdawson on Wed Sep 27, 2006 12:10 PM
from the i'll-be-back dept.
WelshBint writes, "BT's futurologist, Ian Pearson, has been speaking to itwales.com. He has some scary predictions, including the real rise of the Terminator, smart yogurt, and the $7 PC." Ian Pearson is definitely a proponent of strong AI — along with, he estimates, 30%-40% of the AI community. He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015. As to smart yogurt — linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli — he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."

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[+] Something in Your Food is Moving 378 comments
Dekortage writes "The New York Times has a report on probiotic food: food that has live bacteria in it. From the article: "[for Dannon's] Activia, a line of yogurt with special live bacteria that are marketed as aiding regularity, sales in United States stores have soared well past the $100 million mark.... Probiotics in food are part of a larger trend toward 'functional foods,' which stress their ability to deliver benefits that have traditionally been the realm of medicine or dietary supplements.""
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  • by DaveM753 (844913) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:13PM (#16216629) Homepage
    I can't seem to open the containers without some of it splattering all over my glasses.
    • by Tackhead (54550) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:15PM (#16216675)
      > I can't seem to open the containers without some of it splattering all over my glasses.

      And if you were a hot chick, we'd demand proof.

      [ Parent ]
    • by Andrewkov (140579) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:18PM (#16216731)
      I can't seem to open the containers without some of it splattering all over my glasses.

      I used to suffer from the same problem. Try opening the container from the other side.

      [ Parent ]
      • Re: (Score:3)

        Hmmm, that's an idea -- I usually swing the yogurt container before opening it, so the centrifugal force clears it off the rim and lid, leaving nothing to spray.

        See, that's why I'm an optimist about technology. Human intelligence should be able to keep one

      • by Hillgiant (916436) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:21PM (#16217845)
        From the inside? How do I get in there?
        [ Parent ]
          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            I tried to open it from the kata side and ended up an hour before I bought the yogurt.

            That's it, I'm sticking with ice cream.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        Try opening the container from the other side.

        I tried this, and it just made things worse. First, I had to get a knife to cut through the bottom side, then all the yogurt fell onto the floor.

  • Futurologists... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:15PM (#16216665) Journal
    So his portfolio has outperformed the S&P, I take it?

    *ducks*
  • Right. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PHAEDRU5 (213667) <instascreed AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:16PM (#16216695) Homepage
    And New York was going to need 100,000,000 telephone operators by the middle of the 20th century.

    Get a grip, for God's sake.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      New York has 100,000,000 telephone operators. It's just that most of them aren't human, they're little bits of refined sand.
    • Re:Right. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Coeurderoy (717228) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:31PM (#16218081)
      Well it was around 10 M and not 100M and yes it did, of course the real trick was to convince all the operators to work for free, but it worked and each telephone owning new yorker is his or her own telephone operator.

      That is the role of the "automatic" part in the modern phones :-)
      [ Parent ]
  • by nystagman (603173) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:16PM (#16216709)
    We already have people that are as dumb as computers. I say leave well enough alone.
  • I know some people that aren't any smarter than my current computer. Heck, in terms of chess, I'm one of them... my computer can kick my ass at chess. Right now we have computers that can feign intelligence, i.e. use the internet to pass a multiple-choice test, but this is not a true measure of intelligence. If in 2015 a computer literally breaks out of a research lab and starts a mission of doom, then I'd say we might have one as smart as a person.
    • by Nascar_Geek (682890) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:27PM (#16216871)
      Your computer didn't beat you at chess, a programmer did.

      When you have a computer that can beat you at chess without having a chess program installed, it's time to be concerned.
      [ Parent ]
    • by tambo (310170) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:38PM (#16217025)
      I know some people that aren't any smarter than my current computer. Heck, in terms of chess, I'm one of them... my computer can kick my ass at chess. Right now we have computers that can feign intelligence, i.e. use the internet to pass a multiple-choice test, but this is not a true measure of intelligence.

      Intelligence is like terrorism (or pornography), in that it's definable only with broad, nebulous, debatable borders. Chess is one kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are excellent here. Art is another kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are terrible here.

      The problem with modern AI (and the flaw in Ian Pearson's predictions) is that we really don't understand many kinds and elements of intelligence. For instance:

      • Spontaneous thought: Why do we think? What motivates us to keep thinking when we don't have a task to solve, or a logical process to follow?
      • Associative memory: What element of our memory structure allows us to make prescient associations on the fly? Not just "green is a color, and so is blue," but "this song reminds me of one time when I was eating ice cream?"
      • Creativity: Why are we good at coming up with surprising and unexpected insights? Modern AI tries this by billions and trillions of fumbling attempts to introduce randomness - but most of them are rubbish. But this is like evolution - which takes thousands or millions of years to innovate (randomly, clumsily) - and not like creative engineering.
      • Emotion: We don't understand emotion at all. We've identified regions of the brain in which emotions occur, and particular hormones and hormone receptors that are involved. That's about it. The neuological basis of emotion remains a mystery.
      These are just a few things that any human-competitive intelligence would need, but that we don't understand. Accordingly, it's completely impossible to predict when we will be able to model it, since we don't even understand it yet.

      Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you their book. ;)

      - David Stein

      [ Parent ]
      • by Quino (613400) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:27PM (#16217973)
        Very true, I found this bit from the article silly:

        The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.

        At minimum he's misrepresenting "the other side" of AI. As one professor (in the only college class on philosophy I've taken, btw) recounted, in the 60's a universal human language translator was inevitable and right around the corner. The problem is that these predictions were being made by technologists and not linguists -- people who didn't understand the problem. And language, on the surface, is a simple problem: languages have rules, exceptions to these rules and vocabulary that can be exhaustively enumerated -- a custom-fit problem for computers, right?

        Turns out that machine translation from one language to another was a tad more complicated -- all due to a lack of understanding of linguistics. It's a problem for a linguist to solve, not a programmer or "AI Researcher".

        We'll first understand how our minds work, and then we'll be able to create strong AI. A shrink can better tell us when this might happen than a technology futurist (and of course, there's plenty of good arguments that this will never happen).

        IMHO, you're very right in pointing out that you run into basic problems once you start out trying to define what we mean by human intelligence; in fact, there's a very good argument to be made that when you start peeling away layers, a lot of what we understand as human intelligence is innately biological. As in, no strong AI in 100 years, no strong AI ever -- not created by human intelligence at any rate.

        This doesn't seem to be a popular view of intelligence with technology-minded people: we seem to assume that the brain is the hardware and that our mind is the software -- so all you need is the right program running on your 386 and "poof" you have human intelligence.

        That's how I felt myself actually; the prof's arguments didn't make sense to me until after a few years after I got my C in his class during an discussion of AI that I finally understood what he was saying all those years ago ...

        [ Parent ]
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      A really smart computer would break out of the research lab and start a religion.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I'm sure I'm not the first person to have thought of this, but what if we just simulated a biological human in software? Computers are already pretty good at simulating chemical reactions, physics, even as far as protein folding . . . why not learn to bui

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      You're confusing intelligence with several other factors. One is what effectors it has available, i.e., what mechanisms could it use to "breaks out of a research lab and starts a mission of doom". Another is motivations. Why would it want to do that.

      Not
  • $7 PC: Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:21PM (#16216771) Journal
    There will never be a $7 PC in the future, for the same reason there isn't one now: when technology improves, people want to spend the same, but get a better computer, and manufacturers cater to this. No one ever says, "Hey, maybe we'll use technology that isn't the latest and greatest, but instead make it much much cheaper and just as good as they were in the recent past."

    Well, no one except Nintendo.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      In some ways it is accurate though. I mean back in 1950 you no doubt had futurists predicting that you'd get an ENIAC in the palm of your hand for $10 and look at what kind of calculators you can buy these days that are considerably faster than the ENIAC.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        OH I think there is a market for a dirt-cheap PC, people would buy one (or maybe 20) of them and find uses for them readily enough. No, the problem is simply that the manufacturers have no desire to make the PC or the parts for it because the profit-margin
  • And flying cars and moonbases (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BadAnalogyGuy (945258) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:21PM (#16216787)
    When futurists look into their crystal ball to predict the future, they typically try to find the common themes of the present age and using their own special multiplier they derive some kind of super-present with basically the same things we have now, only bigger or faster or smarter.

    The problem is that they can only detect trends and can't really predict real things. So when you see a futurist going out on a limb and claiming that X is only 10 years away, they are hedging their bets that you will forget they ever made such a silly prediction 10 years from now. If they do manage to get something right, you can bet they'll be working overtime trying to get grants from RAND and MITRE for more futurism.

    However, the reading of trends is a very important role of sociology. Only by accurately predicting what sorts of stresses and issues we will face in the near-term future can we sufficiently prepare ourselves for them. The Rand corporation has a list of 50 books for thinking about the future. (http://www.rand.org/pardee/50books/) These offer insights into the past and present and into the minds of successful futurists.

    The one thing you will notice about successful futurists is that they don't go overboard predicting killer electronic e coli yogurts. Rather, they outline the likely changes in society and provide suggested remedies for foreseeable problems as well as suggested directions for societal growth.

    The area of futurism is very interesting and a strong futurist school of thought is vital to our success as a society. Cranks who like to come up with doomsday scenarios do the entire field a disservice.
    • Re:And flying cars and moonbases (Score:4, Informative)

      by tambo (310170) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:47PM (#16217211)
      The problem is that they can only detect trends and can't really predict real things. So when you see a futurist going out on a limb and claiming that X is only 10 years away, they are hedging their bets that you will forget they ever made such a silly prediction 10 years from now.

      Some of these trends are predictably reliable, though. Moore's Law is by no means perfect, but it's extremely likely that computers will continue to grow in processing power at a steady, exponential rate, at least for the next few decades.

      The problem is that some - including the typically brilliant Ray Kurzweil - believe that AI is limited by computational power. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that AI is limited by a woefully primitive understanding of several components of intelligence. It is impossible to produce artistic, emotive, sentient machines by applying today's AI models to tomorrow's supercomputers.

      Reliable predictions:

      1. Computers will continue to scale up in power.
      2. AI models will continue to evolve.
      3. Thanks to (2), We will eventually succeed at modeling the individual components of intelligence.
      4. Thanks to (1) and (3), we will eventually produce truly intelligent machines.
      That's the most any futurologist can tell you about AI. Anyone who promises more is trying to sell you their book. ;)

      - David Stein

      [ Parent ]
  • by aldheorte (162967) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:25PM (#16216847)
    Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.

    I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Couldn't agree more with the parent. I used to work in the AI department of BT's research labs, and this guy was a constant embarassment to us with his ill-informed drivel. We'd try hard to build some kind of reputation in the field, and this moron would u
  • This is the KICKER (Score:3, Funny)

    by us7892 (655683) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:26PM (#16216863)
    [...] in around 2015-2020, you could say that we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job.

    Maybe not, but I'll have the job debugging all the mistakes the androids will have in their code. They'll be outsourcing debug work to us humans.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Probably as long as programming has been a profession, someone has predicted that in 10-15 years, programmers wouldn't be needed anymore.

        And the funny thing is that no one realizes how many times it's happened to different degrees.

        "You'll just describe
  • Man's a fool (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Srin Tuar (147269) <zeroday26@yahoo.com> on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:28PM (#16216891)
    This quote FTA:


    The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as
    clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.


    Tells me all I need to know about this guy's predictions.
    He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.

    They may be nothing special about the human mind, but what ever the case is, we certainly havent figured it out yet. It's more likely that we'll have cold fusion by 2015 than AI.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.

      How does he misunderstand that? All he's saying is that there isn't any sort of magical power
      • Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MindStalker (22827) <jlarsen@@@fsu...edu> on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:22PM (#16217869) Journal
        Personally I think genetic style programming will show the most promise in AI. Whats funny about it is there is a good chance that once we achieve self-aware AI, we probably will understand its programming about as much as we understand the human mind.. We will be able to see.. AKA not so much. Sure we might be able to trace its paths and figure out its logic, but we might still not have any clue as to what really makes it self-aware and conscious.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          Hopefully it would be able to tell us.
  • Lollipop! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Azul (12241) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:31PM (#16216927) Homepage
    in around 2015-2020, you could say that we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job.


    Uh, I thought that, explaining what you want to a computer, is precissely what programming is all about. Isn't source code a program's best specification? What are programmers doing if not explaining what they want from the computer?

    When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      What's even worse, this concept has been tried, and it failed miserably.

      Clearly, between this, and the AI prediction, this guy is completely unaware of computing history.

      Only a fool would try to predict the future with no knowledge of the past.

      Dijkstra dis
  • "Futurology" is bunk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:35PM (#16216965) Homepage Journal
    Asimov thought the internet would be in a single computer called "multivac" and that robots would be a hell of a lot safer, and that the self-driving car "Sally" would be in production long before 2020.

    In 1955 Heinlein, in Revolt in 2100, had the protagonist heading to "the Republic of Hawaii", not able to forsee that fpur years later it would become a state.

    Roddenberry had automatic doors, cell phones, and flat screen monitors 200 years in the future rather than 30 years later (now). His writers had McCoy give Kirk a pair of reading glasses in Star Trek IV, not forseeing that twenty years later the multifocus IOD would be developed.

    This guy says we'll have six hundred million androids in ten years. He doesn't understand computers, or that AI is just simulation. "I'm in the 30-40% camp that believes that there's really not anything magical about the human brain." But he doesn't see that it is analog, and that thoughts, memories, and emotions are chemical reactions while digital computers are complex abacuses working exactly like an abacus (except it ises base 2 instead of base 10).

    He talks of that Warwick guy - "Kevin isn't really the first human cyborg". Nope, he isn't. Vice President Cheney is a cyborg, as he has a device in his heart. I'm one, as I have a device in my left eye (the aformentioned IOD). People have artificial hips and knees. "Captain Cyborg" isn't really a real cyborg, he's a moron like the writer of TFA.

    Nothing to see here - at least, nothing for anyone intelligent to see here.
  • Self-Programming Computers, HA! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:35PM (#16216981)
    we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job.

    Boy have I heard this one before. It just used to be that computer languages would become so simple that the profession of Programmer would disappear because everyone would just be able to write their own programs. Sure hasn't happened yet.

    Someone once famously said: Computers are useless, they can only give answers.

    The problem here is, even if you had a computer like the one described here, you still need to be able to understand your problem well enough to cogently explain it to your computer. And that's where most people will fail. They don't understand their problems in the first place, and have no idea how to communicate the solutions they actually need.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Yup. Besides...
      you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you
      ... don't we have this now? Isn't it called a compiler?
  • $7 for a computer - outrageous (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alchemar (720449) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:51PM (#16217277)
    $2.75 at office depot

    item# 172008

    http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=17 2008&x=0&Ntt=organizer&y=0&uniqueSearchFlag=true&A n=text [officedepot.com]

    A lot depends on how you define a computer, but think about what this would have been like in 1970?

  • Smart Yogurt (Score:5, Funny)

    by rlp (11898) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:05PM (#16217499)
    Yogurt may not be smarter than me, but it has more culture.
  • Strong AI is total fantasy. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Theovon (109752) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:59PM (#16218625)
    First of all, I am a student of AI. I'm currently working on my Ph.D. in AI, studying, among other things, knowledge-based reasoning, machine learning, agent systems, and HCI. Also, I believe that strong AI is _possible_, in the sense that I believe humans are machines that function according to the laws of physics, so theoretically, a fast-enough computer could too. (Indeed, computation speed is the least of our problems.)

    The problem is that people who want to build strong AI are trying to do in decades what took nature billions of years. Certainly, directly engineering something is usually faster than evolving it, but even orders of magnitude speed up won't have strong AI systems any time soon.

    Since the dawn of computing, people have been assuming that once computers got fast enough, the AI problems would just solve themselves. The problem is that we're talking about very hard problems. Things that are easy for us (walking, visually recognizing objects, etc.) are hard for computers. Things that are hard for us (math, data processing, etc.) are easy for computers. Why? To do things that are hard for us, humans have developed, over thousands of years, detailed and exacting formalisms. Math has axioms, a syntax, and a set of mechanical processes to carry about. Even complicated proofs involve an extraordinary amount of simple symbol-pushing that a computer could do easily. Computers are based on exactly those same formalisms, so it makes sense that it would be easy to program a computer to do those things. Computers are NOT, however, built anything like how the human brain works, and that's why AI researchers use neural nets and genetic algorithms for so many things.

    Long before we're plagued by computers thinking for themselves, demanding rights, and taking over the world, we'll simply continue to be plagued more and more by increasingly catastrophic bugs introduced into increasingly more complex applications. Far from having autonomy, our bug-ridden software does exactly what it was coded to do, right or wrong, and we'll suffer from it. And all along the way, the blame for the problems will fall squarely on the human engineers who made the mistakes in the first place.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I think he is onto something there. A few of his predictions align with what I know about my field, so I think they deserve some moderate credibility. One helpful idea that I use is the comparison of now to 15 years ago, and see what is different. In 19
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Yep, that skycar has been only a few years away from your dealership...for nearly three decades now.
      • by KillerBob (217953) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @12:48PM (#16217223) Homepage
        I'd prefer to think of that as the realist camp. It's not that I think we'll never build computers that can match the processing power of the human brain, it's that I don't think most AI technologists realize just how much processing the human brain is doing in real time. If nothing else holds back computers, I doubt we'll be able to approach the memory bandwidth to handle all the data that we get from our 5 senses. Do you realize how many millions of pressure sensors there are on your body? How many millions of hot/cold sensors? How many millions of optical and light/dark sensors there are in your eye? How many millions of taste sensors you have? How powerful your conscious sense of smell is? Your unconscious sense of smell (pheromones)?

        Like I said... I don't doubt that eventually we'll develop a computer that can match the processing power of the human brain. But I doubt it'll be soon. It *might* be within my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath on that one... The brain isn't magical, it's a trillion-core symmetric computer with a staggering memory retention and bandwidth, and a programming so complicated that we're nowhere near matching it. Oh, and that's not mentionning that the brain doesn't work in binary switches, either. It works in chemical switches, with about 50 possible states running in parallel.... Some day, we'll beat out the human brain with a computer. Humans are just too arrogant to believe that we can't, and so somebody will eventually do it. But it's not going to be tomorrow.
        [ Parent ]
    • by tpjunkie (911544) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:04PM (#16217481)
      I think you're making a pretty bold statement saying that there is no possible way to create true human level AI. Who's to say that 25, 50, 100 years from today someone doesn't figure out a way of programing a computer/entity/whatever-sort-of-electronic-device -you-like with the ability to actually learn, process information, and even re-write its own programming in such a way that it achieves a level of I/O processes that perfectly emulate human intelligence and conciousness (which would be the definition of Artificial Intelligence)?

      Frankly, making broad statements like that sound an awful lot like insisting 640kb of RAM ought to be enough for anyone, or that a computer will never be smaller than a gymnasium, or that man will never fly or travel to the moon.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Unless you've got equally effective opposing nanotech, which I suspect there will be some research in.

      The confusing thing about all of his "yogurt"-preditctions is that they are internally inconsistant. At first he discusses how electrically-active bact

    • by rewt66 (738525) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @01:45PM (#16218365)
      It's more than just that technology doesn't advance in the direction that people expect. People (many of them, anyway) intuitively feel that all problems are about the same level of difficulty.

      But solving something that's NP-complete is not "just a little more difficult" than writing a word processor or an OS. It's so much harder that we need a totally new theoretical framework. Faster processors aren't enough to get us there. And the theoretical breakthroughs come a whole lot less frequently than processor speed increases.

      Flying cars? You know, we could probably do that today. It's just a personal STOL aircraft, basically. We can solve the technological problems there. What we can't solve is the rest of it. Between the power requirements (cost) and the driver knowledge needed to operate it, the market size is too small to be worth the effort to create such a beast.

      AI? We have the computers that could run the code (maybe). We don't know how to write the code. We probably won't know how next decade, either, or the decade after that.

      Smart bacteria? We could perhaps create them. Making them spy on keypresses? Possible. Finding the data you want in the stream of data coming from a trillion (or quadrillion) bacteria? He seems not to have addressed that one.

      Sending cans to other parts of the solar system? We've done that. Permanent colonies? It's a lot harder than just sending a bigger can with more stuff in it.

      We have breakthroughs in one area (CPUs, for instance) and people assume that other, related problems must be "only a little harder" and therefore about to be solved. But problems differ enormously in difficulty; the level of breakthroughs that we have now is nowhere near what we need for certain problems.
      [ Parent ]
        • Re:The Color of America? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Guppy06 (410832) on Wednesday September 27 2006, @08:05PM (#16223219) Journal
          "From my point of view the US is lost to the latinos, asians and other peoples - the only white nations left will be the original European ones."

          You do realize how fluid the definition of "white" is over the decades, right? A century ago, most of Europe itself wasn't considered "white," especially the southern and eastern bits. When you get right down to it, the only reason Italians, Pols, or even the Irish are considered "white" nowadays is because their emigrants have made a name for themselves in "white" countries like the United States.

          Immigrant-friendly "white" countries have taken in plenty of disparate newcomers, far removed from the populations they tried to integrate into, and instead of these countries ceasing to be considered "white" (as many xenophobic contemporaries have always feared), the definition of "white" has simply expanded.
          [ Parent ]