from the Guardian UK, via CommonDreams:
Published on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
2006: A Vintage Year For Ideas That Will Change Our World
Thanks to some truly original thinking - on subjects as diverse as the web and global warming - mankind stands on a glorious threshold
by Will Hutton
When words fade, it is the great ideas and arguments that move the world on. John Maynard Keynes couldn't bear the 'practical' men and women who forged economies and societies by getting their hands dirty and mocking the thinkers. All, he said, were, in truth, slaves to some intellectual, theorist or philosopher (usually dead) who had given them their lines. He was right. We need an intellectual compass to make sense of reality around us.
And yet the ideas that illuminate and change our lives are hard to spot among the turkeys. Arguments need not only to be insightful, but they have to be useful. After a year of reading, watching and listening, here are five ideas that meet those criteria, all produced by people very much alive and kicking. They are five ideas that I think have moved humanity forward in 2006.
Youtube and the new web community
Predictions that the net was going to change everything have proved wrong - until now. So argues influential web guru Tim O'Reilly. Web 1.0 was the first phase when we used it as little more than a vast library and efficient messaging system. We surfed from website to website and sent emails to each other.
But now we are in the era of web 2.0. A new architecture is emerging, which allows people to connect with each other in revolutionary ways. Hence blogging or YouTube, where users post and exchange videos they have taken themselves The mushrooming of participative and enabling sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, Skype, Flickr, Facebook, Second Life and so on are all part of the same trend.
This is but the precursor of web 3.0, when the architecture will become yet more sophisticated. Search engines will no longer list data; they will answer your questions. Web 3.0 will mean that the web becomes a permanent part of our consciousness, conversation and cognition. Ultimately, a chip in our brain will connect us in real time to the entire web, adding immeasurably to the power of memory.
Immortality is on its way
If web 3.0 stretches the limits of the possible, inventor, entrepreneur and author Ray Kurzweil goes into realms of apparent fantasy. Moore's law (named after George Moore, co-founder of Intel) predicts that computing power will double every year. Kurzweil pushes the logic to its conclusion; chip power is growing so exponentially that by the late 2020s there will be sufficient cheap computing power to reproduce every single minute function of the human brain. Kurzweil sounds crazy, but his track record of predictions over 20 years has been eerily accurate.
Machines and human beings, he argues, are on a convergent course. Machines will increasingly assume human characteristics and humans the facilities of machines. Kurzweil even dares to believe that via three 'ibridges' - bio-engineering, artificial intelligence and new foods - human beings will keep death at bay. Chips in our brains and bodies will freeze the ageing process and via the successors to web 3.0 ensure that everyone will be at the frontier of knowledge. ......... (more)
The complete article is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1226-22.htm 
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