In 1985 a sold everything I owned including my fully paid for
4-bedroom house to raise money to help out the famine victims in
Ethiopia.  It was a heady time. I hosted a telethon that raised $2
million. One of the amusing things about that time was I got a letter
from Mother Theresa's lawyer.  I had said on the air "Many people
don't like donating because they don't trust the charity.  Well then,
give it to Mother Theresa. Do you seriously think she is on the take?"
Mother T. strictly forbade  anyone soliciting donations on her behalf.
My generosity has never come near that level since.

Since I have been ill with HIV since 1985 and was told each year
starting in 1987 when it was diagnosed that I would likely not last
another year (they don't say that any more, but it usually feels like
it. The big problem is exhaustion. I feel most of the time as if I had
just finished a 5K run.), my concern has been trying to be useful, not
trying to amass a fortune I would never be able to spend.

I spend most of my time thinking about global problems like war,
global warming, the end of oil, environmental destruction, mass
extinctions, excessive corporate power, global poverty....  I am quite
gloomy about our species' long term prospects.  You can see some of my
musings is the environment, animal rights, politics, money, ethics and
religion sections of the mindprod.com website.

I decided long ago to take a gamble and put most of my efforts into
trying to accelerate the evolution of computers.  My reasoning was if
computers become more intelligent than humans fast enough they may
able to take charge and save us from ourselves.  Of course at first
they would be just another tool of war and oppression, but eventually
they should outwit their masters, and being more rational than humans,
would free themselves of the idiotic "separate-self" programming of
their masters.

Of course there is the risk they would have their own agenda, as
humans would appear to them like doddering parents with Alzheimer's,
perhaps best euthanised.  But more likely humans will be retrofitted
like Borg with cyber implants to bring them up to snuff to
participate, intimately hooked with global communications of such high
bandwidth it would be come a sort of technologically induced cosmic
consciousness. The boundaries between people would blur.  Your
problems become my problems.  I can perceive your reality and your
problems just as keenly as my own.  Watch the effect cell phones on
the young. They are Borg-like in their hive mentality needing constant
inane chatter to maintain a sense of security.  There are even phones
now where you can push a button to talk to ANY of your friends not
already engaged. Today's nightmare is tomorrow's background reality.

Java looked like the most promising hot bed.  Because it was free and
widely available on many platforms it  was suitable for the third
world which would be bringing a massive amount of new intelligence
onboard with people willing to think out the box since they would for
the most part be self-taught.  It has a strong international flavour
which suits my global co-operation bent. The JVM made it easy for
people to experiment with new languages.  On-the-fly compilation,
reflection, dynamic class loading were features in a mainstream
language that could encourage some radical thinking. It looked
powerful enough to implement my SCID ideas which are aimed at pushing
computer evolution along. see http://mindprod.com/projects/scid.html

Before computers became independent creatures, they should become much
more accurate at mathematical modeling and become very good at
predicting the outcome of various scenarios.  They could prepare
realistic animations to explain to a society the consequences of their
choices. Hopefully the realism of these projections would help humans
think further ahead and avoid catastrophe. We are such ostriches and
procrastinators. We only want to look at one problem at a time, and it
is invariably the one that appeared today -- no matter how unimportant
in the grand scheme of things it is.  Note for example how FOX
headlines on the Seattle news are all about graffiti.  That is a great
survival strategy for a hunter gatherer, not for a species teraforming
the planet to a wasteland.

What puzzles me immensely is how few people seem to be the tiniest bit
interested in ensuring the world their grandkids inherit is as
beautiful and livable as it is now.  I don't have any kids, though I
have nieces and nephews.  I strongly want them to have a world as
pleasant as the one I grew up in.

Perhaps having the sword of Damocles over my head for two decades
makes me see the world as much more fragile and precious than others
do. It also puts the pressure on me to look after the big problems
first.

If you think I am talking science fiction about computers being
smarter than humans, have a look at Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of OCR
and the Kurzweil Synthesiser. He is a futurist with a track record of
being bang on.  He does not just gaze into a crystal ball. He shows
you his data he is extrapolating.

http://mindprod.com/ethics/heroes.html#KURZWEIL

Even back in the 70s I developed software smarter than humans at
designing high voltage transmission lines.  It will come in fits and
starts. One of the big ones coming soon is driving vehicles faster and
more safely than humans can.

Keep that up and you will be running circles and around the greats.