Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ARTHUR C. CLARKE
If I were to tell you that in one minute, you could transport yourself to any other spot on planet earth, would you believe me?
Imagine if you were talking with friends in 1912, and someone told you that they could take a heart out of a person that had just passed away and put it into the body of another person who desperately needed a heart replacement, in order to live, would that not seem equally impossible?
I’m sure as Christopher Columbus and crew were traversing the Atlantic ocean for the first time, if someone had told them that in a few hundred years, people will be able to fly across that same ocean in five hours, would that also not seem equally impossible?
It all distills down to where current technologies and understandings of those technologies lie, in order to assess whether or not something is seemingly possible or not.
Do you remember watching Star Trek and seeing the tricorder scan the human body and find anything that was wrong within it?
Or the robotic surgeon technology in the movie, Prometheus, in which a solo robotic device is able to perform a highly complicated surgery.
As the world progresses, science-fiction prognosticates all of the most likely, and some of the highly unlikely concepts to spark the human imagination. As quickly as those thoughts are stimulated, an inventive mind starts to conceptualize and formulate the appropriate steps for how such a seemingly miraculous event could, in truth, be accomplished.
As a child, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and was transfixed by the idea of a video phone call from a vehicle not even on Earth. Decades later, my team and I were working on exactly such an invention. You never know which idea will spark a revolution in the mind of another person.
Science and science fiction have been inextricably intertwined from the very beginning. As the sci-fi authors postulated traveling to the moon and beyond, others were already contemplating how such an astronomically ambitious undertaking might be approached.
When we look to the future, and we are taking into consideration that artificial intelligence will be capable of solving many of the anomalies that have stupefied our greatest minds, we might begin to visualize how, and where, this exciting new chapter of human history may lead us.
From there, we must access all of the intelligence that we can possibly leverage in order to liberate the most ambitious ideas from science fiction and convert them into science fact.
Happy Tuesday!
https://brianweiner.com
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