This is a prediction few doubt, although there is not consensus on what it means. The common implication is that computers will thus be as “smart” as us and then 18 months later twice as smart. It will be the end of humans as the dominant life form on earth, soon to be reduced to pets for the machines.

I don’t think it means anything like that. In fact, I don’t think it means anything. If at one point, say in 1885, someone said that in a few years, cars will move faster than humans, would we worry they would become human? Or replace humans?

At its base, this idea would suggest that our brains are simply computers. And that once computers match our processing power, they will become like us.

But I don’t think our brains are anything like computers. Their ability to match our “processing power” is no more significant than if they matched our weight or skin tone.

I am not a computer. I am self-aware. There is no evidence that awareness comes from processing power. Yet, this is always asserted by those who claim processing power is material. You are conscious, but you don’t know how. A colony of ants has an emergent intelligence. It is smarter than any individual ant. It is smarter than all the ants put together. You are made of cells which know nothing of you, don’t know they are part of you, and yet you are aware of them. Why do we think computers will be emergent? They are mechanistic in a way I do not think I am.

There are those who say this viewpoint is archaic, superstitious, antiquated or self-serving. Maybe they are right. Really. The point is that no one really knows. We are all making our best guess. Yet I am qualitatively different than my laptop. We are not the same thing. No matter how fast the PC is, it will never be aware of itself.

Note, the photo is from Jeffrey Stephenson’s site: http://slipperyskip.com/page17.html. He takes old radio cases and other artifacts of the early 20^th century and masterfully fills them with computer components. He combines the best design of the years past with the best technology of the present to create works of art.

Written on the back of this photo is “The first light-picture ever taken, 1839.”

This is believed to be one of the first photographs made in America and is the oldest known photograph of a person. It is a portrait of a man named Robert Cornelius, taken in the yard of the Cornelius family’s lamp-making business in Philadelphia.

Let’s look back to 1839. My native Texas was a nation at the time, the Battle of the Alamo but three years in the past. Revolutionary War veterans were still around, probably grumbling that the young generation “lacks gumption.” The span to that era seems so long from our current age, and yet it was a blink in time. Civilization took thousands of years to get organized enough to make a camera. Then less than 200 years later, we find ourselves here. This photograph feels like an inflection point in history. Technology moved relatively slowly until about this time, but since then, everything has happened so quickly.

The perspective of this is interesting. No one had ever before seen an eruption of a volcano from above, and I guess I should add, “and lived to tell about it.” Here is a photo of something we might never have seen.

I draw no lesson from this other than how wonderful a thing serendipity is.

You have probably heard of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. One of these was the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, located in modern day Turkey. The Temple was burned down by an arsonist in 356 BC. You may ask how one burns down a marble temple. It turns out that the roof was supported by wooden beams.

When asked why he burned the temple down, the captured arsonist replied that he wanted to guarantee he would be remembered in history and that this was his plan – to burn down the Temple of Artemis. He was executed and it was ordered that his name be erased from all records and that no one could ever mention his name again, under penalty of death. However, his plan worked, for we do know his name: Herostratus.

From this we have the term “herostratic fame,” meaning fame at any cost, which we see much of still today, not the least of which is in the form of reality TV.

Legend is that Alexander the Great was being born that day and Artemis, knowing of Alexander’s destined greatness, was too preoccupied with the birth to save her burning temple.

I include this to remark how appreciative we are of excellence. Random inequalities aside, life is a meritocracy. People love things that are truly great. The reason so many people want an iPad is because the iPad is great.

Greatness is attainable by everyone. I don’t say that as a pep talk, but as a simple fact. Big great things (like the iPad) are only attainable by a few people. But small or even tiny great things are attainable by everyone. A flowerbed can be great. I believe people are happiest when they succeed in greatness, regardless of the scope. Whatever you do, do it with greatness. Choose what is attainable to you, but be great.

We have reached a point in our technology where we don’t really know how it works and cannot repair it. It wasn’t so long ago that if your car broke down, you had a pretty good chance of figuring out what was wrong and then fixing it yourself.

Our intrepid pilot could do this in 1936 (we hope), but could any of us repair a Blu-ray player?

We must expect ever more of this. We should expect technology ever more complex. This is not a bad thing. The fact that it wasn’t so long ago that a person could comprehend the technology around him simply shows how primitive civilization was. Not that we are making astonishingly complex tools today.

Incidentally, there is a lot of debate as to whether or not this photo is real. Within the online discussion threads, people point out that his hair and clothes do not appear to be moving and the differing shade of the shadow of his silhouette compared to the plane wing.

The Spotmatic camera (shown disassembled in McLellan’s work) was introduced by Asahi in 1964 and was the first successful camera with “through-the-lens” light metering. The camera was entirely mechanical apart from the light meter. The system became the workhorse of many professionals of the time.

Look at the complexity of it! Apart from having to assemble one, imagine designing one. Imagine sourcing the parts. Imagine making each of the parts: mining the iron ore, smelting it into steel, machining the steel into camera components. Just think about that! This is a great example of the division of labor, an almost mystical force, which allows things to be made that no single human knows how to make.

This is from my book “Golden Age 2.0” where I write about the division of labor:

Earlier I said that trade and the division of labor have historically been the great drivers of increased prosperity. I have spent the last few pages discussing trade, how it increases wealth, and some of the ways the Internet promotes this. But I would be remiss not to discuss the division of labor in some detail, for the process is almost miraculous.

Imagine if you had to create everything you wanted to use. Imagine if you were the only person on earth. Face it – we would almost all be naked, walking around with sharp sticks, picking berries until we got so hungry that we started eating grub worms.

And yet, our lives are nothing like that. I have never so much as tasted a grub worm. Instead, we are surrounded by things we could not create ourselves. Not in one hundred lifetimes could I make a car. By “make a car,” I mean really make a car. Dig iron ore out of the ground, smelt it to steel, wildcat for oil, find oil and refine it into gasoline, and so on.

Forget a car. I could not in a hundred lifetimes make a working electric lamp, even knowing what I know now. If I were given ten thousand years to live and were left on a planet with nothing but natural resources, I could not make a light bulb or microwave or helicopter.

So how do these things get made?

Leonard Read wrote an essay in 1958 called “I, Pencil,” written from the pencil’s point of view, about how no one on the planet knows how to make a pencil. No one. From beginning to end, making a pencil involves mining the clay to make the lead, milling and processing wood, lacquer applied to the wooden shaft, a rubber eraser, and a metal band holding the eraser to the yellow paint; no one person knows how to make a complete pencil.

And yet pencils get made – over a billion of them a year – and they are essentially given away. It requires the labor of thousands to make a pencil and yet pencils are so inexpensive as to be almost free.

How can this be? It is because of the division of labor. When a person learns to do one thing and specializes in that one thing and makes that one thing his life’s work, he gets really good at it.

In 1776, Adam Smith wrote a book called “The Wealth of Nations.” It is the defining work of the free enterprise system. He writes about the pin industry and the division of labor:

“To take an example …the trade of the pin-maker; [in which] a workman … could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on…[o]ne man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; …I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed…Those ten persons…could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.

Smith says that if a person tries to make pins by himself, he might make one per day. But if each of ten people specializes on just one-tenth of the task, together they can make 48,000, an increase in per-person productivity from one pin a day to 4800 pins per day. In this efficiency that is generated by specialization, wealth is created.

It doesn’t matter that the person selling pencils doesn’t know how the pencil is made; he only needs to know how to sell them. And it doesn’t matter that the person who paints the pencils doesn’t know how the paint is made, for his job is simply to paint them.

So wealth is created from gains in efficiency from specialization and from trade. This is why cities are such powerful economic units; cities bring people together in proximity to each other and facilitate specialization and trade.

When the Eiffel Tower was built in 1886, it was supposed to last only twenty years before it would be torn down (many in Paris at the time thought it was a terrible eyesore). Wanting his monument to last many years longer than the twenty allocated, Gustave Eiffel credited his tower as a scientific laboratory for meteorological and astronomical observations, physics experiments, an optical telegraph communications point, and a beacon for electric lighting and wind studies. All that, plus the tower’s use as a radio antenna, saved it from demolition.

With regard to lightning in particular, there does not seem to be a large concern about tourist safety from lightning strikes in Paris. The “weather” page on the Eiffel Tower website makes no mention of closing for approaching storms. The tower has been struck a number of times.  I mean, how could it not be?   It’s a giant metal pole.  Would your mom let you go out in a storm carrying that thing?

As seen in the photo, the tower is equipped with a lightning rod at the top, which moves the energy safely to the ground. And while it might seem that a tall metal structure is the last place someone would want to be during a lightning storm, that metal structure is very similar to a Faraday cage, which actually protects those inside from the lightning.