Posted on 12/27/2012 7:12:33 PM PST by SeekAndFind
A lot of what they build in Silicon Valley these days is pretty mundane: sexting apps, social games, and new ways to "share" things over the Internet.
So it's pretty exciting when you hear about someone who has some really crazy ideas for what the future might hold.
One such person is a new Google hire named Ray Kurzweil.
The geeks among you already know who he is.
But I only learned about him from a Bloomberg BusinessWeek story by Ashlee Vance.
In it, Vance writes about Kurzweil's plans to
Bring his dead father back to life.
Help humanity live long enough to live forever and "transcend biology."
Engineer the "singularity," which is in Vance's words, "the moment when superintelligent machines light up with something approximating life and either destroy humanity or carry it to unimaginable heights."
At Google, Kurzweil will have funding to pursue all these ambitions and more.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
And how’d that work out? They made themselves Law Zero.
As I said, Asimov’s bots made themselves a Law Zero, allowing them to kill individuals for the good of Humanity (and they get to be the arbiters of that).
Screw that. I’ll pass.
How do you know God doesn't want them to "play god?"
Help him build the Tower of Babel, then.
Thanks. Then why would someone waste bandwidth to start a thread from a known pack of liars, The Business Insider, on some employee Goggle hired? Short of news?
I think it was on the new version of "The Outer Limits" where they had a story of a guy that was cryogenically frozen after he died.
Years later the body was brought back to life but without a soul since the soul had left following his death.
Without a soul the guy was pure evil and started killing people..........
You’re the one avoiding his words. Where did he advocate destruction? Advocating an event that could lead to destruction, or in another direction, is not advocating destruction. Otherwise, advocating free elections would be the same as advocating for Obama to be president.
As for “what others did”, I was simply trying to illustrate that this is a commonly understood idea amongst people that think about these issues, because you seem to have misunderstood it. That’s why I’m not “reading his mind”; anyone who talks about the ethical issues of intelligent machines is well familiar with the kind of scenario he is talking about, because it’s a textbook problem.
The real future is always stranger than we can imagine. Aging or rather the causes of aging are being identified, and we may be the last few generations to involuntarily die by time itself. Freezing is just a very expensive funeral choice if you disbelieve in coming back to life, but the technology for the frozen to come back is certainly less expensive than those that have been burnt...LOL.
Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, but AI singularity is probably unavoidable. When machines develop the capability of self evolution, Moore’s Law will decrease from 18 months to something significantly smaller. My guess would be in the range of the difference between chemical reactions to electrical ones... like milliseconds to nanoseconds, give or take a few orders of magnitude. Moore’s Law dropping from 500 days to half a day for a doubling would not be out of the potential realm. After a month of doubling what would the machine AI be thinking? Good luck!
Aubrey de Grey is on the cutting edge of aging, and he believes it is not impossible for the next generation to live a LONG TIME.
>>De Grey argues that the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine mostly already exists, and that the science is ahead of the funding. He works to identify and promote specific technological approaches to the reversal of various aspects of aging, or, as de Grey puts it, “the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us<<
Very true. The future is full of twists and turns that will happen but no one will predict. Will the nature of patents mean that India and China will take a lead on the issue? Do we even have an idea what a self evolving AI is? What can be the timeline be like and what will be the identifiable milestones? That’s for good science fiction writers. Science historians will have another take.
DK
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.