[Kurzweil admits the potential perils of a cyborgian future. He cites the 2000 essay,] Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, ... We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. |
Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge. |
As far as I know we also almost bought Apple once. We almost merged with Apple two other times. |
I think Unix is a great system -- especially for running data centers -- because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java. |
In a world of millions of devices, what you want to be able to do is send new bits of code and have them interlink. Ideally, the code would have flexible linkage -- flexible linkage is, in fact, the hardest bit of the job. C and all the programs related to it don't solve the programming problems of this world. They did not anticipate a world of millions of devices. |
It gives me a lot of hope. |
Jini is different from the PC because there's no central control, no monopolist pulling the strings. |
Jini's different from personal computers because Jini's simple. It's only 35,000 lines of code. |
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). |
My goal in 10 to 15 years is to have a $10 device everyone can have. Whether people find the time and have the mentors to use the information and education themselves is another question, but the phenomenon is on the way. |
The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable. |
The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way. . . . However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there. |
There were six very close encounters. |
We envision a world of personal networking where Jini is the infrastructure, |
We had an agreement, but it fell through. |