Having access to information and actually having assimilated it are two entirely different things. Hainv Wikipedia wired into your brain will allow you to check cursory definitions and article-introductions near instantly, but your interlocutor must wait a couple of minutes for you to read and understand. That time will vary depending on how enhanced your intelligence is and how much you are already acquainted with the topic at hand. It might grow enormously if, say, upon meeting a lesswrongian for the first time, you're forced to make a wiki walk through their archives just to be up-to-date with them (seriously, this habit of peppering articles with links to other articles when they aren't strictly necessary for the understanding of the texts should stop, it creates an unhealthy in-house feeling and forces new users into month-long ermitatges trying to close the exponentially exploding army of tabs!).
Given the fact that History is in constant acceleration and that things are more and more inter-connected, I assume there'd be a state-sponsored effort (if not an entire industry) of developing digest history books and other introductory material, not for Dummies, but for Thawees (we should get a better name than that for the Resurrected... we should also get a derogatory one, because racism and priviledge: "The Walking Dead"? "They're History"? "Time-Skippers"? "Dinosaurs"? (Cue jokes about blood in amber and the prophesized Dinoday),
Having access to information and actually having assimilated it are two entirely different things.
Indeed, this is what I was talking about with the Cyc project, just having the information isn't enough, it needs to be integrated, to have meaning.
Still, it seems many of my pub conversations are already changing with wireless mobile internet access as what would have been a large discussion about whether or not something was real, or what it did, or when it was, can be quickly checked by a source both people would agree is better than anyone physically p...
So, the usual bet is that the GAI, both F and UF will be created at around that time at the latest. I'd like to set a novel, a thriller, right at that critical moment where everything could be lost or won, and humanity is in the balance. But human societies and the way they interact with each other will have changed a lot by then. So, well, I haven't read throughly enough here to understand how far we are anticipating what will happen. Not just the friendliness of AI development, but our own impact in the world, and how it will react when it finds out about us and our goals, and takes them seriously.
So I was wondering if you'd help me out here with some brainstorming. I'm looking for some seminal ideas for how the world will look like by then. We don't need to be 100% precise, although keeping the pieces of the setting vague by avoiding Burdensome Details is a way of avoiding glaring mistakes, and gives a Lord Of The Rings, Ruins In The Distance feel of false depth. Don't hesitate to suggest seemingly weird but actually reasonable ideas: the future I want to build is a Weirdtopia. The point is to frighten, wonder, and suck the reader in.
Let's see, for a start: cryogenics and cybernetics are a solved problem, and people's heads are being resurrected and put on mechanical bodies by default (they could ask for recreated biological bodies, but usually after the first tantrums... they don't ^_^). The audience can be given someone to identify with through a Temporal Fish Out Of Water, one of the resurrected Human Popsicles. The funny part is that, even though that person happens to be a transhumanist AND a singularitarian, they hadn't surpassed the Shock Level (I think that's what Yudkowsky called it when you were enthused with an idea because you don't think of it as normal yet?), and they are only marginally less freaked out by the world they find themselves into than the normal sci-fi fan readers (or even the mainstream ones, if this ends up so good as to have any).