Every (hu)man is an island

Slashdot has a post on NVIDIA’s Tesla Personal Supercomputer – 4 TeraFLOPS on your desktop for under $10,000. Moore’s Law continues. 

For all the attention given Moore’s Law, it’s surprising that nobody has yet come up with a similar function to describe the rate of change in the capacity of the individual to inflict violence. After all, if there’s two things technology’s delivered over the last fifty years, it’s both phenomenal computing power and phenomenal killing power – both delivered into the hands of smaller and smaller groups, and increasingly into the hands of the individual. 

The confluence of Moore’s Law and…well, let’s call it AntiMoore’s Law…vest any single individual with a great deal of power. Arguably as much power as a minor state might have had in a pre-gunpowder age. Toss in the emerging move towards personal manufacturing, and you can see the outline of the next fifty years. Is it any wonder that nation-states everywhere are pushing against the boundaries of individual liberty?