Name : _________________________________________________

From the book The Singularity is Near, read the Prolog, "the Power of Ideas" (pp 1-6), and Chapter 1, "The Six Epochs" (pp 7-34), then answer the following questions.

• What lesson did the author say he learned from readng the "Tom Swift" books?
  
  
  
  
• The author say he has come to appreciate "an important meta-idea; that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating". What does he mean by this?
  
  
  
  
• Arthur C. Clark's third law states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Using your knowledge learned from programming computers, comment on the Author's discussion about the Harry Potter books.
  
  
  
  
• Which of the authors 6 Epochs do we live in today? Are we close to entering a new epoch? Which one would the author argue we are quickly approaching.
  
  
  
  
• Read carefully page 10, and study the graph there. Does the knee of the kurve look like a knee? Now look at the graph on page 18. Can you find the knee of the curve there? What event cooresponds to the knee in that graph?
  
  
  
  
• Read carefully the parable about the weeds and the watern front lake owners dilema. If the owner left on the first of the month, and the lake was 1% covered with weeds on that day, and the weeds double every 2 days, on what day is the lake more than 90% covered? List the coverage of the lake, for the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, etc. day, until you reach 90%.
  
  • day 2
  • day 4
  • day 6
  • day 8
  • day 10
  • day 12
  • day 14
  • ...
  
  
  
  
  
• On pages 25-29 the author talks about a number of principles. Choose one of these principles, and relate it to something we studied in the Fall or Winter quarter.
  
  
  
  

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