Posted on 04/22/2006 3:47:09 PM PDT by Dark Skies
Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist, has stumbled on a discovery of earth-shattering importance. It is the arrival of "singularity," and according to him it will happen in 2045.
"Gradually," he writes at the beginning of "The Singularity Is Near," "I've become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the 21st century … the impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality."
Singularity, Kurzweil says, is a development "representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" and a "radical upgrading of our bodies' physical and mental systems."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
From his entry in the Wikipedia.
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.
I'll bet Ray 400 Quatloos it doesn't happen until 2050.
I like salads...with fava beans, bleu cheese and a nice crisp Chateau St Michel char.
let's see, in MY humble opinion, there was "Lady" and "Lorelei," which rocked. Straight downhill from there.
Hmmm. There's a spot missing from that graph: the one that predicts the date when consciousness is shown to be a computational epiphenomenon of brain matter that can be modeled succesfully by a Turing machine.
Upshot: Despite Dr. K's gnostic urge to transcend degenerate matter and exist as pure consciousness, there is no scientific definition of human consciousness, and no evidence that consciousness is something that can be simulated in a computer.
Dr. K can get back to me when he has a working definition of Mind. Until then, I'm going to regard everything he says as religious belief, not scientific fact.
OK. Thanks. Maybe he's on to something.
definitely one of the more relevant posts on this thread.
These folks are definitely NOT willing to die for their beliefs.
"Thank goodness my Mayan Calendar says we all take the big Dirt Nap come December, 2012! ;)"
Thats just great. I am scheduled to retire June 2, 2013.
Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.- Karl Marx
The singularity is about exponential increases in technology and wealth. If it goes off like Kurzweil predicts, the technology would be quickly available to everyone.
I'm still disappointed at never getting those flying cars in 2000; and even more so at not getting the 10-hour work week.
Who would be willing to upload their mind into a black box if the outcome is that uncertain.
Actually, right now it'd be a very simple task to find people willing to undergo the experiment: the terminally ill. The more important question is whether terminal illness will even exist anymore when total brain upload becomes viable.
Interesting, if somewhat myopic post. Why on Earth would you presuppose that exponentially increasing intelligence would somehow lead us away from God? To me, the result will be exactly the opposite. The more we know, the more we appreciate.
Even that would not be conclusive. Each person has to take the pluge for him/herself. It's like the believe of life after death, essentially. No way to prove it except by going through the experience yourself. All other information about survival of consciousness is second-hand. Even recall of human memories memory input to a black box could be a case of rote recall without consciousness.
If God exists, He certainly doesn't need a "human singularity" to do business here.
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