The upcoming video game features an entire suite of music production and editing tools that were developed during the past 40 years, including MIDI (both for triggering and recording data), tone generation, digital effects, sequencing, looping, arpegiation, and even a DAW-like interface a la Cubase or ProTools.
Check out the demo for GH4:
No one would have ever predicted that these music technologies would eventually be used in video games -- and that's what makes technological convergence so exciting and scary at the same time.
Stanley Schmidt, author of The Coming Convergence and editor of the science-fiction magazine Analog, has shown that convergence can lead to disaster. He claims that our ability to construct skyscrapers, along with the rise of mass air transport, arguably paved the way for the tragedies of 9/11. Again, an outcome that couldn't have been reasonably predicted.
More optimistically however, converging technologies could also improve things in a very dramatic way -- particularly in the sphere of human performance. This is the so-called NBIC convergence which would involve the synergistic effects of molecular nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive technology.
Read the NSF's NBIC 2003 report for more information.
1 comment:
"He claims that our ability to construct skyscrapers, along with the rise of mass air transport, arguably paved the way for the tragedies of 9/11."
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky referred to this line of reasoning as the "Giant Cheesecake Fallacy" - an inference along the lines of "The ability to make cheesecake is a function of intelligence, and powerful machine intelligence is a likely future development. Whoa, the future will be full of giant cheesecakes!"
The point, of course, is that power/ability doesn't imply motive.
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