There’s something new in the air at high tech conferences. It has nothing to do with business. It’s not something you can put your finger on. But you can sense it. It’s between the lines in press releases and in the body language of the CTOs. It’s buried in PowerPoint presentations and camouflaged in the flat, colorless speech of engineers. Like good reporters, engineers let the facts tell the story.
The fact is nano-technology has come alive. Progress in molecular-level circuitry has accelerated past our ability to understand, adopt or regulate. Engineers are now so far out in front of the legal system that they find themselves in unexplored territory, unconstrained by convention, untethered from the world as we know it.
This is a world where nearly anything can be created. Where nearly everything seems possible. Nobody is able to throttle back this accelerated progress - even if they wanted to. How will it mutate? What form will it take? Nobody can foresee. This technological acceleration is not just in electrical engineering or materials science. It’s across the board. Our very nature and humanity seem to be changing.
What are we to do. I think we should go with the flow while keeping a level head and common sense. We live in interesting times. Let’s enjoy them.
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