What’s The Big Idea?
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
The Edge, a fantastic online science and culture publication, released their annual 2009 World Question. This year’s question is “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live and to see?” The answers, as usual for this site, are fantastic and thought-provoking.
Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired, writes that it will be large-scale artificial intelligence:
When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won’t even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?
Howard Gardner, he of the five kinds of intelligence we all learned in Ed Psych, writes that it will be an unlocking of the nature of genius:
For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having ‘a rage to learn, a passion to master?)
Timothy Taylor, archaeologist from the University of Bedford, writes that it will be what it always is for us- our love of things and what these tools can do for us.
Major change often comes stealthily. Its revolutionary effect may often reside in the very fact that we do not recognize what it is doing to our behaviour, and so cannot resist it. Often we lack to words to articulate resistance as the invention is a new noun whose verbal effect lags in its wake. Such major change operates far more effectively through things than directly through people, not brought about by the mad, but rather by ‘mad scientists’, whose inventions can be forgiven their inventors.
Tuck yourself in for this one. It is a feast for the brain. 
O'Hare Arpt., IL
A breakthrough in AI seems very likely. I read that last year a software engineer in Canada built a robot girlfriend for himself that speaks, reads, and makes sandwiches. What he used to make this android could probably be modified by more experienced robotics scientists to make all sorts of human-like robots.
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