C.A.R.P. Ch. 06 - Sex Stories

C.A.R.P. Ch. 06

... has accelerated things by decades. And it's only going to get faster. Much faster. Take, for example, the computers in the computer lab. They weigh, what, 20-30 pounds? They're going to be small enough to hold in the palm of your hand within a couple of decades, and they're going to be way more powerful. Think of the ripple effects that's going to have."

"It's not just computers," Alice said. "Telecommunications is going to leapfrog off that. Everyone thinks it's remarkable that today you can make a phone call across the globe, but within ten years' time, we won't have to using wires connected to walls. It'll all be floating around us, and we'll be using little terminals the size of a glass of water. They'll get even smaller. Miniaturization. Micronization. Smaller and smaller and smaller. Faster and faster and faster."

"That's what I'm worried about," Kevin replied, spinning a globe on the table. "Think of it this way - the world's acceleration rate has always been partially determined by the speed of information transfer and exchange. Things developed in one part of the world, they have a chance to get refined and improved upon for generations before they get spread around, or if they aren't good, they can fall over and die in the crib, long before they have to chance to get to anyone else. We're not going to get that luxury moving forward, and a lot of bad ideas, a lot of junk thoughts, they're going to spread, much further and faster than we'd like them to. ...

... That's... that's pretty fucking dangerous."

"More than dangerous," I told them. "Ideas are... they can be like a virus. Or, more like an organism, I guess. Sometimes it's, fine, beneficial even, for both sides. A symbiotic balance. But other times, these ideas can feed upon their host, cause it to damage itself and others. Ideas...stories... the things we put into the world, they're going to live well past us, and we are never going to understand all the ripple effects they cause. But that can't keep us from trying to invent new stories, put new things into the world," I said. "We've just got to use some basic fucking care."

It was the spring of 1999, and while the rest of the world was panicking about Y2K, we'd just foreseen the coming of the atom bomb like impact that the Internet and social media was going to have on our lives, nearly five years before Facebook even launched.

From here, I started to figure out one of the ways Dr. Igarashi was keeping the university afloat - our conversations were fueling investments. You know how I know that? We started doing ourown investments. Chelsea, Julia and I spent loads of time talking about what we were all studying, and based on the sorts of things that the alphas were predicting, we started laying down money at key investment opportunities, planting seeds that would slowly but reliably bring more and more money into our lives as we found ourselves needing it.

Lots of people claim they know where the future is heading, but we ...