Engineering News

From Discover | Technology:

Futurist Vernor Vinge predicts that human brainpower and computers will merge to form a race of techno-geniuses, all in the not-too-distant future. Is your overflowing e-mail in-box a herald of the next stage in human evolution? Those e-mails represent just a small sample of the vast amount of digital information being generated by the gigabyte every minute. If we can cope with this rising flood of information, we are likely to be on track for using technology in the creation of superhuman intelligence, according to Vernor Vinge, futurist, best-selling science fiction author, and retired professor of computer science. Machines will become far more than just tools; they will physically merge with us, seamlessly endowing powers that are currently beyond our imagination. And all of this will happen in our lifetime, Vinge says. DISCOVER asked Vinge about the consequences of living in a networked world that generates and distributes more and more data every day and how to cope with information overload. Do we have access to too much information? Almost any amount of information about reality could be useful if it were correlated. When a person gets into the farther reaches of what we in 2008 talk about and imagine when we talk about information overload, 99.99 percent is stuff that should be handled by automated processing. In the olden days that would mean you'd need a staff. For the average person today, that translates into figuring out how to use automated tools.

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