Are their any downsides to all of this? I'm very concerned about the downsides. We have existential risks already -- the potential to wipe out all of humanity with nuclear weapons. But now we have new existential risks -- the ability to design biological viruses. The tools and knowledge to do this are far more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an atomic bomb, and the impact could be far worse. In my book, I said the last thing we'd want to do is put the genome of dangerous viruses on the Web, but that's exactly what the Department of Health and Human Services has just done with the 1918 flu virus.

What's really, really far out? In the 22nd century, we will have saturated the ability of matter and energy in and around the Earth to support computational processes, and intelligent computation will spread out to the rest of the universe. Whether this spread to the rest of the universe happens quickly (another century or so) or slowly (billions of years) depends on whether or not we can circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information. I believe it is likely that we can.

Sidebar

Timeline: the future

-- 2010: Computers become invisible.