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The US has again taken the lead in supercomputers with the new Summit computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It isn't so much the computer, but our ability and imagination to use it in new ways. With the super computer race heating up around the world, it will be far more important to see the trickle down effects this new technology will have and how long until it is obsolete. The ability to drive down cost while increasing functionality and applications by the semi/nanotech industry at an ever increasing rate is fundamentally causing disruption on a scale that is almost unimaginable and our slow moving social/administrative/economic systems are ill prepared for. It is past time that we chart our path for our social/administrative/economic systems as fast as we develop our technologies for the mismatch is becoming larger ever year and the rate is increasing. We are truly getting to the point that the unintended consequences of accelerating technologies disruptions will override our ability to cope with disastrous results. If we don't start planning and actually taking this into account instead of benefitting, we could end up with an everyone looses something, if not all mess. Developing new technologies can no longer be done in a vacuum that doesn't take the ramifications into account. Most of the readers of this so far are on the winning end of things, but must take this into consideration if we want to live in world we have helped create. With power goes responsibility and with absolute power goes absolute responsibility. We must learn to deal with the "Great Acceleration".
Comments, thoughts and additions welcome and solicited
This particular machine is not a harbinger of the apocalypse. The things it is used for are not in mainstream of the changes which will upset society. The changes in society are more from the removal of neighborhood from your neighbors in cybespace, which encourages all of us to form exclusive societies of the like minded (or cult minded), up to the diffusion of tracking and recognition which allows all public interactions to be monitored. Summit will hum along happily simulating nuclear warheads or whatever it is that ORNL needs it for, things which are not going to matter unless the other changes all go wrong.
Society is changing very fast, our lobster is being boiled and we all day be day do not feel it happening, until we wander into a discussion thread with neo-nazis or read the news of automated surveillance in China and get that reality check of how much we are diverging from past behaviors. Not that the past is a shining example, as it had its own problems and people who are glad it is gone number in the billions around the world.
I do agree with power goes responsibility. There is a diffusion effect if most of us are trying to create a better world than what we started with. We certainly are better off with the democracy of personal responsibility, than with expecting a central authority to make us better.
This particular machine is not a harbinger of the apocalypse. The things it is used for are not in mainstream of the changes which will upset society. The changes in society are more from the removal of neighborhood from your neighbors in cybespace, which encourages all of us to form exclusive societies of the like minded (or cult minded), up to the diffusion of tracking and recognition which allows all public interactions to be monitored. Summit will hum along happily simulating nuclear warheads or whatever it is that ORNL needs it for, things which are not going to matter unless the other changes all go wrong.
Society is changing very fast, our lobster is being boiled and we all day be day do not feel it happening, until we wander into a discussion thread with neo-nazis or read the news of automated surveillance in China and get that reality check of how much we are diverging from past behaviors. Not that the past is a shining example, as it had its own problems and people who are glad it is gone number in the billions around the world.
I do agree with power goes responsibility. There is a diffusion effect if most of us are trying to create a better world than what we started with. We certainly are better off with the democracy of personal responsibility, than with expecting a central authority to make us better.
Summit will not deal with mainstream technologies, but change science to the point it changes our whole concept of being, which is the type of technology that doesn't change one thing, but staggering changes that change the entire game. Examples would be radically altered power sources, materials, bioscience, new distortions in physics that could alter our entire world to the point of creating entire new realities.
