Friday night. I try out the Google Goggles application with some friends by taking a picture of a T-shirt that has a logo made to look just like Pabst Blue Ribbon's. Sure 'nuff, up comes a series of Google results for PBR.
"How'd it do that?" we all ask, then dive into the nachos.
Saturday morning, at a hospital event. Chatting with a colleague (who was also there Friday night) about a music video featuring an Abba song. When we tried this with a Bangles (remember them?) song, YouTube immediately recognized the song and created a "Buy This" link through iTunes.
"How'd it do that," we ask, simultaneously.
Sunday morning. Reading today's New York Times before cleaning the gutters (yes, it's an exciting life). There's a story on the cover of the Business section about "The Singularity Movement" and Singularity University (SU -- take that, Orangemen).
According to its website:
SU hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges.
This story is either alarming or invigorating (and, incidentally, just one reason The Times is still worth six bucks on a Sunday -- another is to read mostly intelligent comments on a newspaper website.)
This paragraph stopped me cold:
“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”
OK, the guy sounds like a whack job. But I remember reading Future Shock by Alvin Toffler as a nerdy teenager and thinking "wow." (Yup. Maybe it was something else, but the book still had an impact.)
Under the influence of nothing else this morning, except two cups of coffee, and I'm saying, "wow."
And we're asking, "How'd it do that?"
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