Re: The next 100 months

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This was originally going to be in my first message, but hunger caught up with me and, sandwich making being such an intellectually challenging process, I forgot all about it.

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> July 5th, 2007: The Singularity Institute requests use of
> January's Planetary Computing Day. Since the Singularity
> Institute was responsible for the custom of PCD in the
> first place - donating all the spare CPU cycles on the
> planet to a charity on the eighth of each month - it *just
> so happens* that the people who run Planetary Computing
> Day are all Singularitarians. The request is granted, as
> it is every year.

By 2007 I'm pretty damn sure someone somewhere will have capitalised on the spare CPU cycles. We'll have a popular version of something like Spawn, where we can sell our spare CPU cycles for other spare CPU cycles or money. In the event that Joe Average can sell his CPU cycles for mortgage payments or 'kickass' FPS on Quake 8: Arena he's not likely to donate it to the Singularity Institute. You could argue that this isn't likely to happen within 7 years and, sadly, I'm inclined to agree but I think any long-term project that relies on those spare CPU cycles must acknowledge the chance that there may be no such thing in the future.

BM

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