A smarter universe?

Technology #3: The Smart Universe

Technologies exist for “smart” homes today. These homes utilize wireless signals and complex programming to maintain energy efficiency. Thermostats can be set to maximum energy efficiency (colder in the winter, warmer in the summer) when residents are not home or asleep, while motion sensors work to detect whether lights are needed in occupied or unoccupied rooms. This design has led to cars that can communicate with each other and local receiving devices.

Managing all of that information, however, could be incredibly tricky unless you had someone watching over that data at all times. As a virtual human, the uploaded minds of Technology #2 need no sleep or food and could easily take on this and other Smart World tasks. Organizing communicative data from multiple devices would not be difficult from the vantage of a virtual person. These individuals could quickly become the programming that controls many of the current automatons in the world, such as automated watering and fertilizing systems in agriculture, traffic flow systems and satellite guidance, just to name a few.

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With less need for complex programming, this kind of technological milestone can lead to a Golden Age. Computer science will no longer be devoted to constructing the programs that control these and other systems, but to facilitating the control by a conscious, human mind. Expansion of hard disk capacities will be required for growing and learning minds, while processor speeds will need to be increased to allow for greater access and control by these minds. Already computer processor speeds are reaching the barest minimum of human thought, though they will need a little work before becoming human-like. Developing this processing power will become the primary concern for the creation of a Smart world. Once a 100 million MIPS (million instructions per second) processor is possible, though, it will not be long before even more powerful processors are created. This will allow the virtual humans the ability to think and reason faster than current humans can possibly imagine.

This Smart design need not extend to only aspects of the world we currently know. Creating a virtual mind is the first step to exploring many of the mysteries of the universe that human beings lack either the endurance or the lifespan to see. Sensitive electronics can be submerged to the bottom of the sea, sent to nearby planets and even shot far out of the solar system, all to report back the information they encounter. A biological being increases the demand for space and resources to a point of infeasibility. Having a human intelligence separate from a human body will allow fully intelligent exploration of these places. The ability to copy a brain rather than transfer it, destroying the original, means that the expert designing the device and seeking a particular piece of information can send his or her own psyche to do the exploration.

The Smart Universe is the final technological leap, as humanity uses computers and the internet to gather, store and interpret information from around the world, solar system and, potentially, universe without leaving the comfort of home.