From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu Apr 26 2001 - 23:43:36 MDT
John Smart wrote:
>
> In my observation, the increasing speed of technological change is causing
> an ever shortening human planning and attention span. This emergent
> phenomenon is itself being widely recognized, and causing a bifurcation,
> pushing business people into two camps.
>
> There are those that recognize we are less and less able to make credible
> long term plans and try to understand and respond to this in their own way
> (Brand, Moore, etc.). These "business futurists" are ripe to understand the
> singularity. Then there are others who remain entrained within the vortex,
> and feel they can't really afford much time to think about these things. But
> even this latter camp acknowledges, ever more each day, that the new
> planning environment is disturbing to say the least. And these individuals
> are also looking for emergent trends to make sense of what's happening.
>
That clicks. And it confirms for me that these upcoming Singularity books,
especially the Kurzweil one (since I hold that it will likely get some
serious publicity) should effectively pick many of those ripe business
futurists into the Singularity basket, along with a growing number of the
harried "everyday workers". I wish I knew when these books were going to
hit the street. If you don't mind me asking, how's yours coming along John?
-- Brian Atkins Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.intelligence.org/
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