Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science
November 20th, 2008Can Kurzweil’s consciousness be raptured into one of those things now?
Via: Wired:
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.
When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before.
That link reminded me of a brief dialogue I had with Jaron Lanier some years ago, in which he told me “think for yourself and you won’t fuck things up”. Then I found this.
My worldview on that matter has substantially changed in the space of a few hours. The techno-libertarian approach might not be practical then; my friends at the IEET want to take a “social” approach which I think is really dangerous (NWO technocracy ect.) – maybe there’s a third way. Sterling, the speaker, is critical of the view that we can all simply revert to simpler living, I’m somewhat on the fence about it. Anyway, your worldview just got +5% market-share in my worldview portfolio.
My worldview on that matter has substantially changed in the space of a few hours.
Ahh, youth.
Sterling, the speaker, is critical of the view that we can all simply revert to simpler living, I’m somewhat on the fence about it.
I don’t see it happening on any scale. Not on purpose, anyway. The zombies will claw and scratch at their undead reality for as long as they can animate their carcasses.
Permaculture is never going to be the Hollywood “it” thing. There’s no BIG money payout. It empowers networks and subverts hierarchies. It’s just bad, all around, in terms of the status quo. (Not to be confused with Al Gore’s Soviet Green Machine with matching iPod case.) The zombies take most of their orders from that idiot box. So… Look for more of the same on the Death Star.
Individuals may make drastic changes, but it’s flyfart noise level stuff. Look at Farmlet. There’s virtually no interest in that stuff. Sure, a few people come by to check it out, but people, in general, don’t want anything to do with a lifestyle like that. For me, it helps knowing that there’s nothing to go back to.