Inventing Is A Lot Like Surfing: You

With The Increasingly Important Role Of Intelligent Machines In All Phases Of Our Lives--military, Medical, Economic And Financial, Political--it Is Odd To Keep Reading Articles With Titles Such As Whatever Happened To Artificial Intelligence? This Is A Phenomenon That Turing Had Predicted: That Machine Intelligence Would Become So Pervasive, So Comfortable, And So Well Integrated Into Our Information-based Economy That People Would Fail Even To Notice It.

My View Is That Consciousness, The Seat Of "personalness," Is The Ultimate Reality, And Is Also Scientifically Impenetrable. In Other Words, There Is No Scientific Test One Can Postulate That Would Definitively Prove Its Existence In Another Entity. We Assume That Other Biological Human Persons, At Least Those Who Are At Least Acting Conscious, Are Indeed Conscious. But This Too Is An Assumption, And This Shared Human Consensus Breaks Down When We Go Beyond Human Experience (e.g., The Debate On Animal Consciousness, And By Extension Animal Rights).

The Telephone Is Virtual Reality In That You Can Meet With Someone As If You Are Together, At Least For The Auditory Sense.

By 2010 Computers Will Disappear. They'll Be So Small, They'll Be Embedded In Our Clothing, In Our Environment. Images Will Be Written Directly To Our Retina, Providing Full-immersion Virtual Reality, Augmented Real Reality. We'll Be Interacting With Virtual Personalities.

Time Would Become Meaningless If There Were Too Much Of It.