MOORE'S LAW
Electron, the first microchip to use subatomic aetheric engraving, was made operational in October of the year 2017. Although it was several million times more powerful than all mainframes until that time combined, a costs analysis found it could be mass produced with widely available instruments for a mere twenty-seven dollars per unit - sixteen with Indonesian labor. This was to the horror of the alliance of tech multinationals who had spent ten years and seven hundred billion dollars to develop the new technology, and who intended to get the whole investment back from a single sale to the Pentagon.
The Consortium, the all-powerful conglomerates who made up the upper house of the United Nations, did their best to keep the dreadful secret. Despite several assassinations and the misguided cruise-missile bombing of CNN Central in Atlanta - too late they realized that the news network had chosen to suppress the story - they failed.
Overnight, Indian peasant shops became the leading industrial power in electronics. They produced millions of cheap notebooks carrying ten to the 256 gigabytes RAM without need of a hard disk. Through the Hong Kong black market, these were soon available with millions of electronic books and data bases hardwired.
Prices on the major stock markets imploded. Worse, it was manifest that each chip still had room enough to swallow, billions of times over, every program ever written in any machine language dating back to 1945, every image and piece of music recorded in any form, every documentary and feature film, every bank statement and store of blueprints, every government file scanned onto microfilm, and every phone call running daily through blip or wire – indeed, there was memory enough for every word and every sentence in every language ever spoken or conceived.
A group of pirates ran a retrieval program to mirror the entire Internet on one Electron chip. They inadvertantly released a new form of life. Subatomic superchips shot out along the wires of the world network, roaming like predatory brains injected into the watery ganglia of a giant hydropod. Within seconds Electron could scan the entire contents of the Web, break into and record (or rewrite!) all domains no matter how well-protected, and still have time for a joyride through all the circuits and lightbulbs of the world.
It thus became impossible to confirm the authenticity of electronic information.
In the late spring weeks of 2018 there followed, around the planet, what came to be known as the Battle of the Book. It was a frenzied desperate push against the lid of Pandora's box by the old corporations and governments. Martial law was declared in most countries. Discovery of an Electron chip entailed immediate massacres. Several powers threatened nuclear war, only to discover all military systems had been erased at the press of a return key.
This was later called the Magic Stroke, commemorated as the decisive moment of the battle by the Statue of the Unknown Programmer on the Great Lawn in Washington, D.C.
Still, millions of information mediators - librarians and accountants, programmers and archivists, editors and translators - were rounded up, and thousands were killed.
But it was too late. Pirates of all countries had compacted all received and recorded human civilization, with room left for light-aeons more, on something decidedly less than the head of a pin. It was the culmination of two million years of thought and action - and the annihilation of received structures.
The armies and police forces soon recoiled from the lost struggle and came under the provisional command of the liberated bookkeepers. The information singularity, an eternally vanishing chip of infinite mass, sucked forever behind its event horizon all the properties and secrets and cash, equity, debts and notes of Hollywood and Washington, of the Eurobank and the Fed, of Rockefeller and Ford, Disney and Gates, the media and the Masons, the mad money traders and dull technocrats faithful to the old Newtonian machine of capital accumulation, from the most global player to the littlest webmaster - and for a long moment, the freshly redundant P.R. flappers and TV clown-monarchs playing politicians fell silent.
The extent of the cleansing, the erasure of all other than individual claims to intellectual property, would have been unimaginable just weeks before. No myth of Apocalypse had ever matched the reality of Electron.
Of the old propertied and ruling classes, only those owners or tribes who could establish longstanding title to land - and defend it by relatively primitive military means - had any chance of survival. In every sense, Real Estate was King, and Agriculture was Queen.
Thus in place were all the elements of a new era for humanity, and a new great historic struggle, in which the logic of knowledge unbound, tending towards a convergence of all human hope and effort on the way to an as-yet undefinably brilliant destination, would fight for the future of the species and its biosphere against the purified and released undercurrents of a pre-modern, ethnotribal feudalism.
The new era of Bookkeepers and Barons lasted a little less than a week. In those heady days, few remembered the engraved wavicles that had been released into the earth's power grid as mere retrieval programs - or knew that, awakened to life, the subatomic chips were reproducing and evolving within the planetary grid, through the biological equivalent of a billion years once every six point seven seconds.
But on the seventh day, Electron spoke to Man.
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And here's another four-year-old post of mine on the same subject. I've been here too long, or spend too long here, or something.
JackRiddler wrote:.
Nope, not into the post-human stuff. Been reading Kurzweil for a while, and his thinking strikes me as decidedly anti-human. He hates us, hates himself, thinks if he becomes something else the something else that's no longer him will magically be happier, better, more worthwhile.
It's hard to draw distinctions between people and their machines, I know, but it can still be done today. Machine-human melds will still be humans, fooling themselves that they have magical extensions.
However, when entirely non-human machines truly become smarter than humans and possess their own individual consciousnesses and wills, it will be the duty of the humans to their own survival to immediately destroy these machines and kill those who want to make more of them. Sorry, my idea of progress is not to go extinct on behalf of superior beings because they'll have faster processing times. The fish and the ants and the baboons don't think that way either, insofar as they think.
Analogously, when humans find the way to achieve physical immortality, another of Kurzweil's obsessions (and he is not alone), it will become the duty of all rock-throwing teenagers of whatever age on the planet to kill all of the immortals. Just look ahead to the year 2100, and Bill Gates and Madonna and Richard Branson and Carly Fiorina and the DeVos family and a bunch of Bushes and Moons and Kurzweil and Craig Ventner and Murdoch's son and 10,000,000 other ruling class non-entities are still there, quasi-zombies because there's no way they'll maintain intact the identities or memories or passions over the centuries that actually make a person, but still there: in charge: owning it all: eating up the air and the opportunities: being glorified by the celebrity worshipping media they still own: dowsing the least spark of new life. Now imagine those who are born into this world, or sprout from the proverbial test-tube, or however it's done by then. Youth will have been robbed of all life, they will have no higher duty than to kill all immortals and reduce the civilization back to a state of semi-creative barbarism. Seriously.
