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To: NicknamedBob
Kurzweil is saying more than that. He is not saying that technology will augment humans making as you say the human to "appear to be unusually bright and resourceful.".

He is saying that intelligence will vastly overrun humans, on a scale and capacity trillions and trillions larger and more powerful than human civilization.

Humans will be to this post singularity intelligence as chemical molecules are to humans.

I found some useful quotes from Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology on the web page http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=13&t=7814&s= :


Epoch Five:
The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence. Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch. It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremely slow connections.

The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to act on our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.

Epoch Six:
The Universe Wakes Up. I will discuss this topic in chapter 6, under the heading ".. on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos." In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation (based on limits we will discuss in chapter 3) to spread out from its origin on Earth.
Like most trends, they start out seeming to be linear, then seem to become exponential, then cap off. It's the famous 'S' curve:

Overly timid prognosticators early in the trend project the linear growth, and undershoot. Overly optimistic prognosticators in the increasingly steep part of the trend project continuing exponential growh, and overshoot.

Kurzweil is a classic case of the overshooter.

106 posted on 04/23/2006 3:19:48 PM PDT by ThePythonicCow (We are but Seekers of Truth, not the Source.)
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To: ThePythonicCow
"He is saying that intelligence will vastly overrun humans, on a scale and capacity trillions and trillions larger and more powerful than human civilization."

Some of us find the force, direction, and intentions of our societies beyond our ability to predict or comprehend. I am sure it will be like that, but I don't quite see a qualitative difference.

Some may complain that the machine intellect will be soulless, and lack a controlling spiritual force other than driving ambition of some sort.

Others may be concerned that it won't.

107 posted on 04/23/2006 3:49:06 PM PDT by NicknamedBob (I don't want a World with empty dreams ... Dump the 1967 Outer Space Treaty Now!...Farm Mars!)
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