This is what started it all. By bring­ing some inter­est­ing philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions to the table, this dis­cus­sion got me seri­ously think­ing about what impact not fol­low­ing a struc­tured and con­tin­u­ous per­sonal and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment plan can have on both my qual­ity of life and that of the world directly around me.

The FAQ on the Mean­ing of Life is an inter­est­ing con­cept and con­tains ideas from many diverse schools of thought. How­ever, it’s not writ­ten for a wide audi­ence: a sci­ence back­ground — and specif­i­cally, one in com­put­ing — is ben­e­fi­cial, pos­si­bly required, to under­stand the con­cepts discussed.

So what is The Mean­ing of Life? I won’t spoil it, but suf­fice to say that it’s not actu­ally 42, and the Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity will be the key moment in the evo­lu­tion of our world.

Lam­bast­ing nan­otech­nol­ogy and advo­cat­ing intel­li­gence enhance­ment through an increase in research of both Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Tran­shu­man­ism, it’s an inter­est­ing and thought-provoking read whether you believe none of the con­clu­sions, some of them, or believe it devoutly…

If we could recon­fig­ure our neu­rons and upgrade the sig­nal prop­a­ga­tion speed to around, say, a third of the speed of light, or 100,000,000 meters per sec­ond, the result would be a factor-of-one-million speedup in thought. At this rate, one sub­jec­tive year would pass every 31 phys­i­cal seconds.

The FAQ raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions and will make you ques­tion — if only for a moment — where you’re going wrong (if you are at all) and what you can improve (if any­thing). The most impor­tant thing is that it makes you think.