SSO
PARTISAN REVIEW
This one sequence called ALU is repeated three hundred thousand times.
If
you just compress the genome, based on its redundancies, with loss–
less compression, you get about
30:r
compression, which reduces the
genome to twenty-three million bytes of information. Half of that, or
about twelve million bytes, specifies the brain. That's less than
Microsoft Word. But the brain itself has millions of times more infor–
mation than that. So how could that be? How could the brain have
thousands of trillions of bytes of information iii it, when it is specified
by only twelve million bytes? The answer is not hard to understand. The
genome specifies certain processes. It will specify that in a certain
region, the interneural connections follow a certain type of pattern,
according to certain constraints, but within that the wiring is random.
Then, as the brain encounters its environment, it self-organizes to reflect
knowledge of its environment. Over time that knowledge becomes quite
meaningful. That accounts for the expansion of the brain's knowledge
by a factor of several million.
This exponential growth of technology reflects itself, also, in the
exponential growth of the economy. Recessions, even the Great Depres–
sion, are relatively small variations underlying exponential growth. And
it is interesting that when you have a recession, the economy snaps back
to where it would have been had that recession never occurred in the
first place. Private manufacturing productivity is growing exponentially,
and that's clearly due to technology. E-commerce is growing exponen–
tially, but you don't see any reflection of the manic-depressive cycle of
Wall Street. The underlying phenomenon is exponential growth. Human
knowledge is growing exponentially. This is one reflection of many: U.S.
patents, intellectual property, education expenditures.
By the end of this decade we won't be carrying around computers as
rectangular boxes. We'll be writing images directly to our retinas from
our eyeglasses and contact lenses. We'll have full-immersion visual–
auditory virtual reality. In a conference like this, we'll be able to see each
other and be together even if we're not geographically proximate. Elec–
tronics will be so tiny that they'll be in our clothing, in our environment,
in our eyeglasses. We'll have a very high bandwidth connection to the
Internet at all times. By
2029,
this technology will go inside our bodies
and brains. These little devices that go into the bloodstream, which
already are on the drawing board and actually are working today in ani–
mals, will be in full swing--certainly well before this date-augmenting
our immune system, but also augmenting our human intelligence. So, if
you want to be in real reality, the nanobots travelling in the capillaries
of your brain do nothing.
If
you want to be in virtual reality, the
