Posted on 12/29/2005 5:16:31 PM PST by sourcery
Praised as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century, Ray Kurzweil was selected as one of "16 revolutionaries who made America," along with the great inventors of the past two centuries.
Forbes magazine called him "the ultimate thinking machine" and The Wall Street Journal dubbed him "the restless genius." Kurzweil is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, With 12 honorary doctorates and the world's largest prize for innovation - the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT award. Kurzweil, now 57, published what is arguably the most blogged-about book of 2005, a 640-page blockbuster: "The Singularity Is Near," a road map to "a unique event with singular implications," or some form of immortality for those younger than 50 today.
Burwell's latest futuristic tome is the sequel to his last bestseller, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence," which posited that the ever-accelerating rate of technological change would lead to computers that would rival the full range of human intelligence. He now takes his readers to the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the fusion of human brain and machine. Thus, "the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will merge with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations."
The event Kurzweil envisages - the "singularity" - is when technological change becomes so rapid and profound that our bodies and brains merge with our machines. Singularity depicts what life will be like after the brain-machine fusion takes place and our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality.
This moment that Kurzweil sees coming 20 years hence is when our intelligence becomes non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. What this will mean for humanity is that aging can be reversed, pollution eradicated, hunger solved and our bodies and the environment transformed by nanotechnology that will also overcome the limitations of biology - and death.
Kurzweil takes human evolution far beyond today's most optimistic forecasts. These hold that anyone born today will live to be 130 and productive to 110, and those born in the 22nd century will live to 250. The glass-half-full-and-filling geomancers of the human genome research world can perceive "immortality" in the 23rd century. Kurzweil's sees the same evolution achieving a similar breakthrough for the children and grandchildren of the post-World War II baby boomers.
Bill Gates praises futurist Kurzweil and his "Singularity" as "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." He has a 20-year track record of accurate predictions. Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, is filled with foreboding about the perils of humanity's technological future. But Joy still concedes "The Singularity Is Near" is "a clear call for a continuing dialogue to address the greater concerns arising from these accelerating possibilities."
What worries Joy in his book "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" is that "we are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes."
Joy has a point. There is a growing abyss between the economic, scientific and technological knowledge of the masses and their representatives on the one hand, and, on the other, the knowledge that is required to make logical, rational and moral decisions.
Kurzweil writes that "as we reverse engineer our bodies and brains, we will be in a position to create comparable systems that are far more durable and that operate thousands to millions of times faster than our naturally evolved systems." The computational capacity needed to emulate human intelligence, he says, "will be available in less than two decades." Once a computer achieves a human level of intelligence, "it will necessarily soar past it." A key advantage of "nonbiological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge."
Nanotechnology, now 10 years ahead of predictions and still shooting ahead, "will ultimately enable us to redesign and rebuild, molecule by molecule, our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact," Kurzweil writes.
Kurzweil the inventor developed the first omni-font optical character recognition; the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer;
the first music synthesizer capable of re-creating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments; and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He has also founded and developed nine businesses in music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, medical simulation and cybernetic art.
"Singularity," John Casti of Nature wrote, is "a mind expanding account (that) is nothing less than a blueprint for how to shove Homo sapiens off center-stage in evolution's endless play...if you buy into Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns - and all empirical evidence currently available supports it completely - then the replacement of humans by machines as the primary intellectual force on Earth is indeed imminent."
George Gilder wrote, "Kurzweil's ideas make all other roads to the computer future look like goat paths to Patagonia."
Ping
Kurzweil is too optimistic: it won't happen in his lifetime...or mine (dang it).
One point, though. I heard Kurzweil tell Charlie Rose that he (Kurzweil) has the physiology of a 40-year-old. That may (or may not) be true, but he doesn't look like a 40-year-old; he looks like what he is, a man in his mid-50's. Genetics are hard to overcome.
In its current state, Artificial intelligence is just a bag full of interesting tricks (neural networks, expert systems, genetic algorithms, the semantic net, statistical speech recognition, computer vision) without an integrating core that coordinates them all to simulate intelligence. Another big piece (perhaps the biggest) that is still missing is an understanding of how memory works. How do we generate, attach meaning to, and store memories so we can easily recall them? How can we associate one memory with another in a meaningful way? How can we derive new (creative) concepts from networks of existing, rules, memories (images, facts, and observations)? All of these are really deep, hard problems that we will probably not crack in our lifetime.
I read an earlier book by Kurzweil. I seem to recall he associates intelligence almost exclusively with computing power. For the reasons stated above, I think this misses the point.
This idea is more properly an object for fiction.
Ken MacLeod does it better by far than Kurzweil. Start and end with The Cassini Division.
As far as I know, some sci-fi author came up with this idea first...lemme think here, Vernor Vinge. Everyone else basically is riding his coattails on this one.
How do you program a soul?
If it is run on Windows XPeee, it could be a bunch of artificial crushing dummmmiesss.
If it works indeeeeed, we could recall all the muSlimes terror-ists and replace them with kinder frendlier artificial turbanites.
I wonder: Will this sort of thinking affect the appallingly wide influence of The Most Deadly Meme, or is it a logical consequence of it?
You can bet I will consider this at length. I'd like your opinion too.
Yep. Kurzweil is "famous" for a half-baked idea that isn't even his.
Too smart by half.
The theory of Evolution in the Darwinian sense doesn't have all the 'reverse engineering' and intelligent input of Mr. Kurzweil or his predictions. He is the god of his laboratory universe, so to speak.
While he indeed has prodigious accomplishments in numerous fields, what he develelops has nothing to do with 'evolution' but is more along the lines of R&D, Intelligent Design or Creation. The term 'evolution' is wrongly used here.
"The term 'evolution' is wrongly used here."
EVEN AS A THEORY!
I wrote a thesis about this in 1985. The title was MANIAC.
The competitive pressure to couple a machine directly into the brain will be overwhelming. It is therefore a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, when the human considers himself to be a thinking machine, subject only to supposed "logical facts," such a union becomes unstable, because the ubiquity of communications and access to essentially infinite supporting data will assure that all will inevitably agree upon the same "logical facts." Such a system is inherently unstable, simply because it lacks diversity of approaches among a sea of unknowns. When boundary conditions change, catastrophic errors will inevitably result.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" is a must read. Maybe more so than any book since I read "Atlas Shrugged" in 1975. If not for anything else but for the possible mind-boggling implications on all of our lives it forces you to consider.
Is he an optimist? Sure. Pollyannish? Not really. He sees technological advances affecting us like those in the past. All have their upsides and downsides(i.e. nuclear technology) and he chooses with evidence to believe that mankind will find some way to utilize it without destroying ourselves.
I found his new book incredibly thought provoking and one that I will review in my library over and over in the coming years.
By the way, for those who are interested, Kurzweil will appear on C-Span2 this coming Sunday morning at 7:30 AM CST for a 1:15 presentation.
Happy 2006 to all!
"He now takes his readers to the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the fusion of human brain and machine."
Unfortunately, most human brains will thereafter be unable to avoid pop-ups, en-mail spam, and virii.
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