Faster babymaking?

February 20, 2009 at 11:26PM

"Of course, not everything is accelerating. If a cat catches a bird, that action is no different today than it was 30, 3,000, or 3 million years ago. The gestation period for a human is still nine months, just as it was 30,000 years ago. The trends ... do not appear to be on a path to change these natural processes. But don't assume that even these are permanently immune to change, as accelerating forces continue to swallow up more pieces of our world."

THE FUTURIST, WWW.SINGULARITY2050.COM

Like opera to a flatworm

"It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond this event -- call it the Technological Singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm."

VERNOR VINGE, SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR WRITING FOR WWW.KURZWEILAI.NET.

We're all philosophers now

"Philosophers have long noted that their children were born into a more complex world than that of their ancestors. This early and perhaps even unconscious recognition of accelerating change may have been the catalyst for much of the utopian, apocalyptic and millennialist thinking in our Western tradition. But the modern difference is that now everyone notices the pace of progress on some level, not simply the visionaries."

JOHN SMART, PRESIDENT, ACCELERATION STUDIES FOUNDATION

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