“We live in strange times, in case you have not noticed. Here we are with our home computers and other high-tech appliances, living what we regard as a normal life … The world we are living in ─ a world that couples Homo sapiens with fast-paced hypertechnology ─ is strange to us because sometimes it feels like what it is, a transient dream  ....  We are dreaming a strange, waking dream; an inevitably brief interlude sandwiched between the long age of low-tech humanity on the one hand, and the age of human beings transcended on the other. We are living in the latter days of humanity; cybertechnologies will quickly replace us. Just inches of time away exists a speedy reality bearing down on us that we may sense, but do not show on our faces  ....  While one may be made uncomfortable by the thought of a truly strange 21st century, there is around us an impending sense of arrival ─ a strangeness in the air, an uneasiness, a feeling that deep down, things are starting to change in swift, fundamental ways too fuzzy to put a finger on. More than just the onset of the third millennium, it is the quiet before the storm. The products of technology are becoming more curious ─ a little too smart, a little too fast. It’s downright unsettling. And, hey, people aren’t dumb. They know that we have just begun to build smart dumb machines; soon it will be dumb smart machines. Where will it stop? If we continue to build machines smarter than the last ones, and then one that is smarter than that and so on ─ well, you do not have to be a particle physicist to see that the machines cannot keep getting smarter and smarter, yet forever remain dumber than us. Garry ‘John Henry’ Kasparov, chess Grand Master, lost a championship game to a machine for the first time in history this year. Perhaps someday, we’ll hear the battle cry of humanity rallying in desperation: ‘Remember Deep Blue’…” 

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Publisher and/or Author and/or Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc