Hans Moravec "The Senses Have No Future" In Virtual Dimension, edited by John Beckman, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998, p. 84-94 Renowned roboticist Hans Moravec compares retinal function and the afferent axons of the optic nerve to the processing power, resolution, and MIPS- millions of instructions per second-of a supercomputer. Citing Moore's law, he suggests that the current processing power of computers, which currently 'matches the brain of a very small fish,' will grow exponentially to equal human cortical functions by 2030. Moravec further suggests that this process of 'technical evolution' far outstrips the human evolutionary time scale, and foresees the development of a robot 'ecology' in the near future. Mapping 'human' characteristics onto these robots, he lapses into futuristic tales of robot wars, expansion, colonization, competition, evolution, individualism, territorialization. He further meshes humanistic tropes with computer protocols by arguing that cities will be miniaturized, and the entire world population coded in 1028 bits: 'our essences will have become patterns.' In all of these premonitions, Moravec synthesizes his own knowledge of computer architecture and programming with fantastic and futuristic visions. Despite the apparent creativity, these visions are entirely humanist, always already anthropomorphizing hardware, and oddly capitalist, never deviating from an ideology of expansion, growth, and competition. L.E. Fazen