Roger Andre is doing some guest posts on Webby’s World. He’s doing a few posts about future tech. He also writes on ZDNet UK.

Are we approaching a point when machines may wake up and become self or seemingly self aware? Vernor Vinge in 1993 seemed to think so.

He refered to this event as the “technological singularity”. The point is that with machines being made to design machines, they will be able to do this a lot faster than we can, eventually reaching that magic point of human inteligence and then beyond.

If I may throw in my own two cents worth here, we may find that AI hungers for knowledge to the point of analyzing the physics and chemistry it finds itself surrounded in and organising the matter to its own artificial preferences. The details of this theory can be found in the article by Vernor Vinge. If we want to avoid disasters such as AI becoming to big for it’s boots, then we need to hardwire into machines that they must always ask humans for permision when they want to patch themselves together.

This concern arises from the fact; that as machines/computers are used to design other machines/computers, at some point this process may begin to spiral out of control, aided by those humans who are capable of learning the complex ways of fusing chips to neurons and optic nerves etc. and combined with genetic manipulation and control. It’s possibly only a matter of time until we end up with a situation where machines start trying to give naive post graduates advice on what’s best.

Of course it would be easy to think that this is just pure science fiction but just consider what can happen if vast networks of machines that are capable of aquiring knowledge start to meld with biological systems. At the moment, we are dealing with Moore’s law, which may or may not have a natural limit depending on the point of view you subscribe to. If we move on to other forms of computing, which I believe is inevitable then the sky (read cloud) really is not the limit as computing power could become trans-dimensional. It seems likely that as much as we may find moving away from transistors difficult it would be no problem for a machine designed by machines from past generations to figure out. We really don’t know whats around the corner.

Of course the growth of “sky net” (yes I did just say that) and the “rise of the machines” (and that) will be aided by us curious humans, it couldn’t happen on its own. At least not yet. So as far fetched as this may seem, now is the time to introduce failsafes and manual overrides as it were. If those pesky people keep trying to infect systems with viruses and other nasties, this may have the effect of “upseting” networks that are becoming self aware and causing great danger for humanity.

© Roger Andre 2009

I’ve used the Internet for about 10 years and I’ve had a website for about 8. I’m sure many of my memories are similar to other webmasters.

I decided to share some of the most interesting, and most embarrasing, memories of web ‘design’ and general use of the web which I have.

I think it demonstrates the progress I, and webmasters in general, have made that we’ve stopped some of these barbaric practices.

• Remember when you used a WYSIWYG editor? I used one called firstSite, which you can’t even buy on Amazon marketplace today. It was pretty user friendly though, having simple FTP as well as more complex facilities such as the ability to insert applets! Eventually, I progressed onto Dreamweaver and finally onto dynamic CMSes which didn’t even require an editor!
• Remember when you used your ISP’s free web hosting? I used NTL’s for quite a few years but I eventually needed more webspace and the ability to use PHP etc.
• Remember when you searched for free hosting, after you stopped using your ISP’s? I did, and I remember the number of ads I got. On the whole part, these free webhosts were pretty unreliable with the exception of Bravehost, who unfortunately filled my sites with lots of adverts.
• Remember when you used to have a guestbook? I had one which was always full of lots of spammy compliments which I naïvely believed!
• Remember when you tried to make a form for the first time? I do, and I remember wondering why it didn’t work. If only I realised I needed formmail, and a button why simply said ’submit’ wouldn’t do unless I made it POST.
• Remember when, after giving up making your own form, you turned to a site like Bravenet? I do. I remember using Bravenet for everything from site search to polls to guestbooks. The amazing thing is that Bravenet are still about, but now they call these ‘widgets’. How very 2 point oh of them.
• Remember when you used to use Blogger? Perhaps not, if you’re a blogger who started on WordPress.com, but I remember Blogger. Amazingly, it was probably much more flexible than WordPress.com but even self-hosted Blogger didn’t compare in flexibility to self-hosted WordPress. In all honesty, a CMS with pretty much no support for anything dynamic is bound to fail. I remember detesting Blogger’s comment system, as it had no Gravatar or TrackBack support, so I had to turn to HaloScan. Poor Azhar still uses it.
• Remember MovableType?
• Remember your first comment? Honestly, I can’t and my comments were lost in my MovableType to WordPress switch
• Remember when TLA worked? Before nasty Google started to penalise?
• Remember using blogging traffic exchanges, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion? A bit embarrasing, I know, but I came across Azhar, Paul, Danette and Sarah there… so it isn’t all bad! In all honestly, traffic exchanges gave me the initial readers I needed.
• Remember when some of the top blogs around were members of 9rules? Remember when Mashable, Rev2 and Paul Stamatiou were?
• Remember Solution Watch, which at one point was one of the most prestigious Web 2.0 blogs online?
• Remember when you used a desktop blogging client? For some reason, I thought it would be wise to do this until only a few months ago. Looks like I wasted $20 on ecto.
• Remember when you tried to get OS X running on your PC… back when Macs were PowerPC based.
• Remember before OS X existed and it could be argued that Macs were inferior to PCs?

Please excuse this awfully punctuated post, but if you have any similar memories feel free to add them to the comments.

Excuse the punny title but this post is supposed to be about reasons I pity the average computer user. Why? Well…

1. They use Norton or McAfee. I can’t stand Norton, at all. I find AVG provides me with sufficient protection and doesn’t hog resources in the same way Norton or McAfee do. If I was to use a non-free anti-virus package I’d probably lean towards NOD32.
2. They use Hotmail. Why oh why oh why?! Gmail is much better and every Hotmail users I’ve converted so far agrees
3. They use Internet Explorer… sometimes even IE6. Why not use Firefox or another gecko-based browser which are generally considered more customisable and secure?
4. They attend novice IT classes and read novice IT books. I learnt nearly all of my computing skills from trial-and-error. My relatives often attend courses or read books which generally just confuse them more as they learn how to do things in pieces of software they lack or different operating systems.
5. New computers come with Windows Vista. I’d much rather use XP (or even better a Unix-based OS) and as much as the average Joe (and indeed myself) love eyecandy in their operating system, Windows Vista’s eye candy isn’t equal to its performance and I’d rather have the latter.