Freeman Dyson *and* Jared Diamond, sharing the same
room at the same space-time instant. How could
their brains not explode from critical mass?
Man, when pop-science literary agent John Brockman
throws a dinner party, he really hauls out the
ol' digerati glitterati. This goes beyond all known
schmoozing. This is like some kind of virtual-intellectual
conspiracy-in-restraint-of-trade.
"Billionaire's Dinner." Includes Naomi Judd. Huh?
Attendees: Pam Alexander, Alexander Ogilvy; Chris Anderson, TED; Chris Anderson, Wired; Jeff Bezos, amazon.com; Jackie Bezos, amazon.com; Adam Bly, Seed; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Sergey Brin, Google; Patti Brown, New York Times; Steve Case; Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Claremont; Steffi Czerny, Burda Media; Susan Dawson, Sapling Foundation; Ariane De Bonvoisin; Dan Dubno, CBS News; Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein Assoc.; Nancy Etcoff, MIT; Daniel Gilbert, Harvard; Alan Guth, MIT; Katrina Heron; Kevin Kelly, Wired; Seth Lloyd. MIT; Pam Omidyar, Omidyar Foundation; Pierre Omidyar, eBay ; Larry Page, Google; Steve Petranek, Discover; Ryan Phelan, DNA Direct; Tom Rielly, TED; Forrest Sawyer, MSNBC; Eric Schmidt, Google; Martin Seligman, UPenn; Megan Smith, Google; Paul Steinhardt, Princeton; Cyndi Stivers, Time Out New York ; Linda Stone; Steven Strogatz, Cornell; Leonard Susskind, Stanford; Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal; Yossi Vardi, ICQ; Alisa Volkman, Nerve; Eva Wisten, Bon Magazine; Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair
*And what do they talk about over the canapes, these
people?
"We agreed that quantum internet searches are a few years off. I had spent the afternoon in Jeff Kimble's lab at Caltech contemplating the first node of the the quantum internet – a single atom trapped in an optical cavity, capable of exchanging entangled photons with any other nodes, as soon as they are brought into existence. But when the quantum internet has only one node, containing one bit, Q-Google (Quoogle?) is not yet necessary. Sergey and Larry and I noted that when it is up and running, the quantum internet should offer all sorts of wacky possibilities for quantum internet search. Searches could be made significantly more efficient, for example, by using quantum parallelism to explore every node of the quantum internet simultaneously. Problems arise, however, from the fact that quantum bits can't be cloned. I cannot go further into our discussion as that would involve proprietary information concerning quantum internet protocols (e.g., Q-TCPIP)."
*Maybe John Brockman's right – maybe it really *is*
a third culture.
