"Microsoft legend making software that writes its own code"

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/27/technology/intentional_software.biz2/index.htm?postversion=2007082813

Sensor-Net

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/13235/page1/

"Google Earth integrates with GPS and RFID systems to show the location of assets in motion directly on an actual image of the earth, eliminating guesswork."

"IBM on Thursday announced two major breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could increase computers' data storage capacity by a factor of 1,000 and decrease the size of computer chips to no larger than a speck of dust."

Barney Pell

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6051

Jurvetson

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6050

"Everyone will have a supply of nanites (microscopic robots) that will assemble themselves into whatever is needed for the moment — a bicycle, a chair, a kayak, a bed, a table… There will be little need for permanent possessions."


---

http://mindprod.com/money/work.html
http://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/1585423130/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5370534-1827051?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188351402&sr=8-1 -"The End of Work"

Macbook-"built-in iSight camera for video chatting on the go"

http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html

"Telepresence Market $1.25 Billion In 2013"

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9687655

Boston-MIT

http://www.xconomy.com/local-events/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobiotechnology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionanotechnology

http://www.verbatimsolutions.com/freetranslation.php

Brain upgrade

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047430.htm

Japan-RFID and Cell Phones-Ads

http://ubiks.net/local/blog/jmt/stuff3/

Physical Hyperlinking

http://www.semapedia.org/

http://www.centric.com/thought/2007/06/12/2012-calling/

Virtual Reality

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/24/2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openlaw

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/21/technology/3d_printing.biz2/index.htm?postversion=2007082209

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/1-0&fp=46cd699146ed9147&ei=CcDNRu7iOouUaPqm-dkN&url=http%3A//www.techtree.com/India/News/Google_Earth_Reaches_for_the_Stars/551-82909-580.html&cid=1119777280

http://singularpurpose.blogspot.com/

"Kurzweil is wicked smart."

3D Candy Printer

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/10/diy-3d-printer-utilizes-hot-air-sugar-to-craft-random-objects/

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047426.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_best+of+the+magazine

"The End Of Work As You Know It
- Increasing connectivity will change how and where we labor—even the very notion of an employer"

"India in Demand"

"A substantial number of companies are now also outsourcing hard science."
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2005/050224/full/nj7028-902a.html

"Other nations with greater populations are producing more and more scientists and engineers. "

http://ribonucleicacids.blogspot.com/2005/10/outsourcing-science.html

Second Life Princeton

http://etc.princeton.edu/sl/

"Today, major technological breakthroughs occur within just a few
years, which approaches the typical time scale for completing a Ph.D. thesis. For the first
time in history, graduate students may soon face a situation where the technical skills that
they learned at the beginning of graduate school become obsolete when they graduate.
This implies that future graduate students may not be hired any longer for their specific
technical expertise but for more general talents, including their ability to think, how fast
they learn, and how they find and disseminate information to solve problems. An
exponential growth of technology will also select for those individuals who have an
aptitude to constantly learn and adjust. If this is to become the new paradigm for hiring
decisions, universities have to rethink how to best prepare their graduate students for this
new environment."

"Robot Lawyers Set for Trial Against Humans. By Lesley Stones. Business Day (Johannesburg). November 10, 2005. "Next year the Buys legal firm will find out just how popular or unpopular its lawyers actually are, when it introduces robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing three robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to see if artificial intelligence can be as successful as the real thing. The robots will provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers early next year, says Reinhardt Buys. ... According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions. The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjort, says: 'Our intuition is that people won't mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues -- quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work.'"

2005-"Susskind predicts that by 2015 legal services will be largely commoditised and for most commercial purposes clients will get the bulk of their legal advice online from expert systems, maintained and honed to near-perfect reliability by teams of lawyers. In the corporate environment firms will sell their knowledge, first and fore-most, and the traditional hand-holding role played by lawyers will take a back seat. Solicitors at many firms would be faced with tough career choices: go into rainmaking and business development; focus on knowledge-building and support or quality-checking online services; stick to advocacy and representation; or re-train and find a different job.


Sounds like a scenario straight out of Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation.

Nobody ever gives this much thought... yet.

But what's going to happen when AI-systems and robots start taking over jobs of which we first thought that they required so-called 'human creativity'? What happens when AI keeps nibbling at the bottom of the job-ladder, and makes its way up to where humans start having trouble keeping up?

This is exactly what's happening right now.

For example, have a look at these autonomous cars.

If I were a chauffeur, or a pilot for that matter, I'd definately be worried about being out of a job in the coming years."

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:6FYJZTGKxu4J:webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/1998/issue5/rtf/nottage5.rtf+lawyers+replaced+technology+2020+susskind&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&client=firefox-a

2010-"Electronic monitoring virtually removes professional criminals from society."
-Arthur Clarke

http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2007/08/15/Hotmail-Hits-10GB-Paid-5GB-Unpaid/p1

"Skype for iPhone is now available"

http://www.media.mit.edu/research/

"3D printer will be $1,000 around 2012; is already $5,000"

http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page

http://start.csail.mit.edu/

"A computer prodigy, at age 28 Kurzweil invented a machine that could scan printed material and read it aloud to the blind, using synthesized speech. In 1982, he founded Kurzweil Applied Intelligence to commercialize his speech-recognition research, in this case using computers to transform spoken words into printed text. The idea was good enough to attract some big-name backers, including Harvard University's endowment fund and Xerox Corp.'s venture-capital arm."

http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/cm.html - Thinking Machines - company around the 1980s - MIT

http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/speakers/brooks/

http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/podcasts/yudkowsky/
* Why The Singularity Is "The Most Important Thing In The Universe" - around 29:00

http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/podcasts/omohundro/

"Yeah, a handful of people in Palo Alto making decisions [on the fate of the universe] is pretty scary."

"space hotel: 2012"
http://www.space.com/news/070811_space_hotel.html

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/index.html
- Open Courseware Consortium


http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=44581&PageMem=2

2009-
"The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments where you can meet people with full visual realism."

"Phones routinely include high-resolution, real-time moving images of the person on the other end."

-Kurzweil


http://www.ghandchi.com/iranscope/Anthology/Kurzweil-SM.htm

Kurzweil probably believes that financial analysts will be replaced around 2019.

"Once we have full-immersion virtual-reality environments incorporating all of the senses, which will be feasible by the late 2020s, there will be no reason to utilize real offices. Real estate will become virtual."

"Following Kurzweil’s forecast, we can expect to experience more change in the next five years than in the previous 20."

"Turn on any television in the world—Beijing, Chicago, Tel Aviv, Rome, Los Angeles, or Tokyo—and you will find Dr. Sanjay Gupta reporting on the latest breaking medical and health news.

As Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, Dr. Gupta is currently the most famous and listened to doctor on the planet. Millions of viewers learn daily about advances in medicine that can change their lives…

SG: “I think in the next couple of decades, we’re going to get to a point of practical immortality. It’s not true immortality, but practical immortality, meaning that we’re going to live much longer without getting sick, and as a result we’ll have many more functional years. It seems that we are going to get to the point where some people will be able to decide how long they want to live by doing some of the things that Kurzweil talks about. There is a lot of interest and activity around promising technologies such as exchanging body organs, rejuvenating cells, and even nanotechnology which will eliminate even a single cancer cell in the body before it can ever start replicating.

“For a lot of people these ideas are on the fringe, but frankly now that I have researched it and spoken to the scientists in the field, I believe that we are getting very close to realizing some of these fantastic ideas. I think that we’re going to be much further along in the next twenty years than ever before.”"

"An American lawyer has tapped medical experts in India to help with legal cases in the United States. Mike O'Sullivan reports, it is part of a growing trend in the outsourcing of professional services."

Outsourcing

"BU's school of dentistry is opening a medical center in Dubai with the purpose of improving dental care in the middle east."

http://plazes.com/
http://www.dodgeball.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenopolis

Christianity and the Singularity

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Uiqe-DtSHFQ

" “After 2015-2020, the field will expand to include molecular nanosystems – heterogeneous networks in which molecules and supramolecular structures serve as distinct devices. The proteins inside cells work together this way, but whereas biological systems are water-based and markedly temperature-sensitive, these molecular nanosystems will be able to operate in a far wider range of environments and should be much faster. Computers and robots could be reduced to extraordinarily small sizes. Medical applications might be as ambitious as new types of genetic therapies and antiaging treatments. New interfaces linking people directly to electronics could change telecommunications.”
– Mihail C. Roco, “Nanotechnology’s Future,” Scientific American, August 2006. (Roco is senior adviser for nanotechnology to the U.S. National Science Foundation and a key architect of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative.)"

"Hospital Manages Thousands of Patient Files with RFID"

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/1-0&fp=46b0c29303d0979c&ei=ZP2wRpW7BZXOowKUxsi8Bg&url=http%3A//www.rfidupdate.com/news/08012007.html&cid=1118787649

http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/upgrades-and-peripherals/motherboards-and-processors/news/amd-plots-16-core-super-cpu-for-2009?articleid=1754617439

E-Voting Machine

http://www.dailytech.com/Evoting+Triad+Objects+to+Voting+Machine+Criticisms/article8246.htm