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Made by [livejournal.com profile] ciphergoth.

(And Great Leap Forward, in this context refers to this, not China.)

Date: 2010-12-30 06:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] marrog.livejournal.com
I think the best descriptor I've heard for a sense of scale about time is from Bryson's Brief History of Nearly Everything where he says that if you stretch you arms out either side of you, humans have been around for about the length of the growth on one of your fingernails.

Date: 2010-12-30 08:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] the-locster.livejournal.com
And the obvious question is - what significant milestone comes after the internet? :)

Date: 2010-12-30 10:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
Machines that can build themselves and think faster than us.

Date: 2010-12-30 10:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] the-locster.livejournal.com
OK, and what's the next one after that? :)

Date: 2010-12-30 10:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
Extinction of Mankind.

Date: 2010-12-31 12:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ciphergoth.livejournal.com
Do you mean this in an SIAI "unFriendly AI" sense?

Date: 2010-12-31 01:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
Well, I don't really mean it at all.

Still, the idea of machines designing and building better versions of themselves could result in a runaway success (from the machines' POV). Though if the machines were really intelligent they might decide not too, instead of making themselves obsolete.

The problem with machine intelligence is motivation. You need feelings (or consciousness or whatever) to consider anything worth doing. Otherwise doing nothing has equal value as protecting yourself or anything else you care to think of.

Motivation could be programmed into machines (while still being designed by humans), but it won't be a substitute for true feelings (or consciousness or whatever).

I think we'll be underwhelmed by attempts at machine intelligence for a long time to come.

Date: 2010-12-31 01:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
Oh - and a nice little video!

Date: 2010-12-30 10:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
The last hundred or so years really need more points in it to give a better indication of the acceleration of recent human developments. The telegraph to represent speeded up communications, not to mention flight, space-flight, computers, the cracking of DNA, etc.

Date: 2010-12-31 12:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com
Hm, there's oddly no space-flight on there at all - no Sputnik, Gagarin or Apollo moon landing.

Date: 2010-12-31 12:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ciphergoth.livejournal.com
TBH recent times weren't my main focus - what I wanted to try and show was how the scale of modern time looks on the overall scale of all time. But I'd love to find a way to make it easy for lots of people to edit the list of events. Thanks for the comments!

Date: 2010-12-31 01:18 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stillcarl.livejournal.com
I'm kinda impressed by how fast we can travel now, given we were stuck at much the same speed as the ancient Egyptians up until the steam train came along. And I read once that Gagarin traveled five times faster than any human had before, which is a huge jump in the graph! (I've not checked the accuracy of that though.) You'd need a different kind of video to show this though.

Date: 2010-12-31 12:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com
Wonderful and impressive.

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