Manna, the fall of America and the Australia Project

zanglang@gmail.com (Jerry) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:42:13 +1000

Read: Manna – The Book

One Slashdot poster linked to a multiple-part science fiction essay by Marshall Brain, entitled “Manna”, short for Manager. The story starts off eerily similar to what we (or at least, the Web Two Point Oh evangelists) have been envisioning all this while; distributed web operating systems with intelligent agents, machine automation… the topics you see scientists writing in Springer-published books and miscellaneous white papers. Interesting view on what a developed robotics future will bring us. But perhaps more intriguing is the end, where the open source world’s bazaar model is used to design the ultimate utopia to defeat capitalism… Viable? Perhaps?

This sounds chillingly similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, doesn’t it? Just yesterday, the web went abuzz as Amazon was revealed to have filed a patent for “a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist a computer to solve particular tasks, allowing the computer to solve the tasks more efficiently”. How long until we hit the AI breakthrough to make Manna 1.0 possible?

Remind self to buy at least 2 shares of 4GC in 2015.

libcoffee.net: Manna, the fall of America and the Australia Project

Manna, the fall of America and the Australia Project