You go, Jan!!

>To build a machine you need physical material, which means you need lots of capital for digging up the atoms and factories for assembling them together.

Or, you need physical material, which means buying a refill cartridge for your deluxe 3d printer and downloading your favourite arm from the web.

To build a machine you need physical material, which means you need lots of capital for digging up the atoms and factories for assembling them together. The amount of capital in the world is not growing as fast as Moore’s law, even though it’s growing at an exponential rate. The information processing capabilities ten years from now will be thousand (if not million) times what we have today, but the amount capital will only increase 2-3 times.

You can see this if you look at a 30 year old movie and compare with what we have now; cars, buildings, household appliances and furnitures pretty much looks the same, but when it comes to information related technologies there have been a mind blowing progress, i.e graphical user interfaces, desktop publishing, mobile telephony, 3D games / virtual environments, GPS services, digital music/movie/TV/book production, electronic trading, search engines, wireless networks, online encyclopedias, mobile payments etc.

To put it briefly, a software developer can make an improvement to a program and it can be copied to millions of people within a few hours, at almost no cost at all. The same cannot be done with a new electronic arm, brain implant or exaskeleton.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515104500.htm

Generally speaking, I do think there’s a lot of institutionalised linear thinking within the scientific community. Whilst these people are experts in their fields, we shouldn’t automatically assume that they’ll be equally as expert at predicting the future (even in their chosen profession).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5IW9wK_HNg

If you had the option, as an able bodied person, to replace a limb with an artificial replacement that was even more capable than the current biological one you have now would you? Lots of interesting debates about this may start when the tech becomes fully mature.

It never ceases to amaze. All these highly educated researcher are always so pessimistic in their projections. Above all other people, they should be the first ones to get The Law of Accelerating Returns. Computer power will double six times in the next nines year, and seven times in ten years and a half. That will give 64 times or 128 times the present computing power.

With that much processing power, a quadriplegiac will wake up in his own bed and command his household robot with a thought to unplug itself from its charging station and come get him. It will take him to the toilet, bathe and dress him and put him into his exoskeleton so he can drive himself to the supermarket or the mall. But his exoskeleton will make him so tall he’ll have to drive a convertible or an old fashioned step-van, like UPS truck…or he can get on his Harley and go back to his favorite biker bar. (Maybe that’s how he broke his back in the first place.)

But then again, as quickly as medical research is advancing, in ten years or less he could be treated with stem cells to repair his spinal column.

Either way, people will be walking again.