What will make a difference two hundred million years from now?
• Advances in supercomputing hardware and artificial intelligence. • Advances in computing hardware and software programming techniques. • Advances in cognitive science, neurosurgery, neuroimaging, and neurosilicate interfaces. • Deregulation or capital flows which make the above work easier. • Advances in science and technology in general. • Advances in the computing industry and the Internet in general. • Preventing riots, wars, and other disruptions to civilization. • Providing essential infrastructure and manufacturing for the world economy. • Providing fringe infrastructure for the world economy. Using this list, we can see that the Microsoft antitrust case had roughly a thousand times as much cosmic significance as the Clinton impeachment trial. Likewise, Intel’s latest chip architecture is more significant than all the celebrity scandals that occurred during the 1990s. This particular list assumes a particular sequence of technologies leading up to the Singularity, said sequence
