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Because I can. And it is still less cheesy than this guy:
… In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit.
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Throughout “Transcendent Man,” Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.
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“Well, I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean,” he replies. “I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.”
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Mr. Kurzweil is the writer, producer and co-director of “The Singularity Is Near,” the tale of Ramona, a virtual being he builds that gradually becomes more human, battles hordes of microscopic robots and taps the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz for legal advice and the motivational guru Tony Robbins for guidance on personal interactions…
[…] By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.
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Yes, I am sure the future will be weirder than we imagine. But a future where Alan M. Dershowitz and Tony Robbins discourse eternally to a bunch of frantically networking MBAs — under the supervision, no doubt, of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin — brings a whole new flavor to the term ‘dystopia’, doesn’t it?
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bkny
By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil
that was a great x-files episode, written by william gibson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_%28The_X-Files%29
Fencedude
Figure 17 was fantastic.
fucen tarmal
i envy this man, his self esteem….what he does with it, alas, is the great equalizer.
aldous huxley, had he lived, might have come to see much wisdom in “the brave new world” approach,our tennessee wingnut convinces me.
Chris Johnson
He made a really nice electronic piano in the Kurzweil MicroPiano. I still have one.
Pity about the intellectual wankery :)
wobbly
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_kyrgyzstan_unrest
Americanadian
Perfect weird shit to keep me going. I got back early and was convinced to stay up until the end of Algeria-Slovenia, because it’s college.
Americanadian +5 and a bunch of caffeine.
Skepticat
Brings a whole new flavor to the term “nucking futz” as well.
MattR
For one more reason why soccer has not taken off here in the US – the best thing for the American team is if Algeria vs Slovenia ends in a scoreless draw.
Scott
I don’t even know if anyone would care… but Brick Oven Bill is now commenting at Wonkette. At least this promises an eventually epic smackdown…
ericblair
The Singularity is the Rapture for nerds. Vernor Vinge has written some good singularity and post-singularity novels, but I don’t think it gets anywhere near to his Fire in the Deep and Deepness in the Sky novels.
I kinda have my doubts we’ll be disappearing into our own navels anytime soon, since our understanding of consciousness seems to be at the level of an 1850 physicist trying to understand how a Macbook functions. He’d figure out how to turn it on and off and what parts of it are critical for functioning, but there are so many basic concepts he’s missing that he can’t get anywhere near how it actually works.
However, way down the road assuming we don’t elect Palin and terminate the planet in a massive explosion of suckage, the Singularity looks like a lot more likely model for the future than Star Trek.
electricgrendel
I really hate the “mental immortality” schtick. Even if you don’t believe in the soul, then you have to admit that each individual is in possession of a discreet thing called consciousness. Copying my neural firings into a computer is not copying me. I don’t care if there’s a copy of me puttering around the internet when I’m dead and gone. *I* am still dead and gone. Now- if there were a way to transfer consciousness, perhaps it would be immortality. Instead it’s just distribution.
And you want dystopian? Imagine 15 copies of Sarah Palin each developing differently from the time they were copied, growing and diverging and then forming a council.
Horrifying.
electricgrendel
I really hate the “mental immortality” schtick. Even if you don’t believe in the soul, then you have to admit that each individual is in possession of a discreet thing called consciousness. Copying my neural firings into a computer is not copying me. I don’t care if there’s a copy of me puttering around the internet when I’m dead and gone. *I* am still dead and gone. Now- if there were a way to transfer consciousness, perhaps it would be immortality. Instead it’s just distribution.
And you want dystopian? Imagine 15 copies of Sarah Palin each developing differently from the time they were copied, growing and diverging and then forming a council.
Horrifying.
efroh
My favorite commentary on the Singularity.
SiubhanDuinne
Ugh. The local NPR host of Weekend Edition just gave the Atlanta weather forecast for later in the week: a “cooling trend,” which he defined as “highs around 90.” I haven’t been outside yet this morning, and have a fan blowing on me, and even so I can feel the oppressiveness of this looming day. Ugh, I say, and again Ugh.
@Scott #9: I think some other BJ commenters have mentioned BoB sightings at Wonkette but I never could find them (I have small patience for reading through pretty much any comment threads except here). So thanks for the link. He sounds exactly the same, and I’m happy for him that he’s found a new home.
fucen tarmal
@electricgrendel:
an i’d prefer death panel?
unrelated:
i just had to lay a smack down on a former sports broadcaster who trotted out the tired beckian trope about how barney frank talks funny. this is a guy who ran out of places in town to hire him as a sports yak, and opened a blog about local sports and other stuff, way right nuttery…
any way, small market media guy, small guy physically, small mind apparently who went back and forth with people for over 100 posts asking about where barney frank’s teeth are….it was fun, i needed a cigarette when i was done.
SiubhanDuinne
@ericblair #10:
Velocirapture?
Cat Lady
@SiubhanDuinne:
Fixt.
scav
@SiubhanDuinne:
is that when deserving bicycles are lifted away to their final reward while the rest are left abandoned in the rack with their wheels bent and missing? ’cause that’s already happening.
gurglebleg
It’s a little more like this:
“Oh Jebus, F*ck! PORKCHOP SANDWICHES!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLnWlLTqu4Y
matoko_chan
/sigh
Salient Insight of the Day:
Old people do not like Avatar or the Singularity.
Kurzweil is an Old Person that is probably not going to live to see his beloved Singularity in action, but at least he isn’t out to ruin it for the rest of us.
:)
@ericblair: Vinge invented the term Singularity as applied to the technological singularity. I loved both those books, tales of the Queng Ho, extreme spacefaring capitalists…but the Queng Ho slept between the stars. My favorite now is Richard Morgan and his D.H.F. Envoys and deCom command-heads and altered carbon.
The Vinge books are out of print i think….had to buy them from a reseller.
fucen tarmal
does this mean i can tell them to kiss my bionic left behind?
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
/sigh
Salient insight of the day:
Matoko_chan makes overly broad generalizations about people of certain ages.
sounds like techno-Randianism to me.
Linda Featheringill
I was hoping for a more organic future.
I’d like an organic death, too. Messy is okay, if it isn’t too painful. Definitely should be real.
SiubhanDuinne
@arguingwithsignposts:
Good morning! How is my dear Lady Smudge today?
BTW, congratulations on the new apartment. Hardwood floors sound great for the Smudger.
J.W. Hamner
Just watching a little Slovenia/Algeria… and man is this some bad soccer. If the US doesn’t obliterate both sides I’ll be kind of pissed.
Bob
http://www.theonion.com/video/sony-releases-new-stupid-piece-of-shit-that-doesnt,14309/
Americanadian
@J.W. Hamner: The Slovenes now have us (and the limeys) by the balls. If we don’t win on Friday we’re in deep shit.
arguingwithsignposts
@SiubhanDuinne:
Lady Smudge is in my boxez, claiming them as her 0wn.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: nah….there will be two sub-species: homo sapiens transhumanicus (altered carbon variant) and the homo sapiens originalis.
The originalists will want to stick to the unimproved genome.
They are going genetic galt, if you like.
The originalists will occupy an antique genome reservation, and police their own genome, fiercely guarding against genetic engineering improvements….like say, anti-senescence engineering.
It will be remarkably similiar to Jesusland in Morgan’s Black Man (Thirteen).
The two subspecies will diverge until they are no longer capable of interbreeding, and then homo sapiens originalis will be left in the evolutionary dust as homo sapiens transhumanicus moves off planet to conquer the stars.
;)
SiubhanDuinne
@arguingwithsignposts #28:
Awww. Kittehz ‘n’ boxez, always a good (nay, inevitable) mix.
slightly_peeved
Quick version of the singularity:
1. Massively increasing computer power
2. ?????
3. Sentience!
sukabi
sounds like someone’s got a touch of derangement syndrome.
Morat
All this talk of Singularity, and no one mentions Accelerando?
Anoniminous
The relationship between neural firings and higher cognitive functioning is obscure. Meaning: we don’t know WTF is going on. How does memory “work?” We don’t know. How does the brain associate sensory data with other brain functions once the data passes beyond the Hubel/Wiesel network? We don’t know. How much of schizophrenia is degeneration of axion terminal’s ability to manufacture neurotransmitters versus electrical signal degradation ? Dunno that either.
And the Brain is the best understood part of the Brain/Mind Unity.
Kurzweil is a mighty good marketer and salesman. He has created a science fiction niche for himself cleverly detached from scientific and engineering reality.
fucen tarmal
@matoko_chan:
you do realize that most of the improvements will, should it come to pass, center around larger penises and bigger breastices, which due to the in vitro process will still acomplish intermating.
you can’t fight human nature, no separate species for you.
mclaren
Hilariously, none of the Singularity wackos seem to have noticed that Moore’s Law has crashed and burned for CPUs (since 2003) and for RAM today. In 2003 the fastest CPU ran at 3.2 Ghz, today the fastest CPU runs at 3.2 Ghz. Multicore and parallelization turned out to be a bust. As the head of the HP quantum information lab has pointed out, static and dynamic RAM are about at their limit now and they’ve run out of room for further density because the structures on our densest RAM chip are so close to one another that the electronics tunnel through the substrate between conductors now. The only area of computers in which Moore’s Law still works is in disk storage and we’re rapidly heading toward physical limitations there too.
And then there’s the ongoing software crisis. 68% of all large software projects are abandoned as unworkable today. If engineers built skyscrapers and bridges the way programmers build software, we’d all be living in caves banging rocks and eating dirt.
With crapware like Windows 7, today’s computers run slower than they did in 2003. Moore’s Law ran into Wirth’s Law (software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster) and has now shifted into reverse and is blacksliding. Meanwhile, speech recognition has hit a brick wall and cracked up and AI of course bit the dust long ago, around the time the CYC project blew up and fell apart.
How long before Kurzweil starts making claims for yogic flying? Or breatharianism? Or that he can perform psychic surgery?
Steeplejack
@matoko_chan:
I just bought and read the Vinge novels in the last year, so I think they are still in print.
. . . And available at Amazon even as we speak.
mclaren
Incidentally, Vernor did not invent the concept of the technological singularity. Vinge ripped it off from this guy, who actually came up with the idea of superintelligent machines exploding in intelligence in an exponential progression to the point where they far transcended human capabilities, back in 1962.
Vernor Vinge didn’t even invent the term “singularity” — the mathematician John von Neumann first used the word singularity in 1958 to describe the runaway progress of technology beyond which human existence would become unrecognizable.
Vinge invented nothing. He came up with nothing. Other people came up with the ideas Vinge proclaims as his own, 30 years and 40 years earlier than Vinge (just as Richard Feynman actually created the idea of nanomachines and nanotechnology in his December 29th 1959 talk “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology, not K. Eric Drexler).
Dan
As an evil reductionist materialist, the Singularity is a weird… err … movement. Obviously these people are not stupid, but for the uninitiated, it kinda is the Rapture for the Nerds… :)
So yeah I kind of like the utopia through tech and science, and it beats supernatural religious claims by far, in that it may actually be feasible.
Still no guarantees, stuff like nanotech may be allot more limited (I don’t think it is completely impossible like Smalley claimed) because of the quantum fuzziness at that scale etc.
One thing we are gonna do is the brain simulation thing, newsflash the brain is just a bunch of molecules interacting people. But by 2030!? i don’t think so… We don’t even know all the neurotransmitters in the brain and how anti-depressants work, but we are getting there. So yes if we link up all the super-computers in 2030 we MAY have the theoretical computing power, but not the software, it may not even be close.
But the way neuroscience etc. is progressing definitely… by 2100 :). If that will lead to exponential intelligence, who knows?
matoko_chan
@mclaren: pardon but Von Neumann’s definition has nothing to do with the modern concept of the technological singularity. The “knee in the curve” of technological advances. There are many kinds of singularities in mathematics. For example there is a singularity point in the interior of a black hole.
And as for Strong AI, the friendliness problem for strong AI is proveably unproveable.
For mathematicians that is extremely hopeful.
And let’s wait for the Singularity Summit before you old ppl pronounce Strong AI dead, mmmmkay? I think you are a bit dated.
@Anoniminous:
well, the Penrose view, in the Hameroff/Penrose Model of Orchestrated Quantum Consciousness, is that you can always jump out of the system by utilizing trans-Turing noncomputable cognitive primitives, implemented by quantum-gravity state transitions in the entangled microtubules.
And in view of our recent advances in creating synthetic life (which means we can build better nano-assemblers) reverse engineering brain functions has become an order of magnitude simpler. :)
@Steeplejack: i got mine a couple months ago this year from an amazon reseller….praps i was just buying cheap, or they were out of stock. ;)
I loved Vinge’s xenomorphs…..the tines and the spiders are purely gorgeous.
matoko_chan
ahhh, moderation again.
well, im sure no one cares anyways.
Dr. Psycho
@efroh: That thing about computers overtaking humanity, changing the world in ways we cannot foresee ahead of time? That already happened.
And the thirds of the world without electricity? They’re still without electricity.
Kinda bites, I know. But don’t presume that it won’t happen again, only more so.
Spaghetti Lee
Why would I want to enter a new transcendent existence when we can’t even get this one remotely right? Oh yeah, people will be able to live forever, thus retaining their ability to affect world events to their liking forever. Can’t imagine what sort of people will be attracted to that, nope nope.
I can see why the right-libertarian crowd is attracted to this nonsense, but I don’t know why a liberal would be. Seems like a big chunk of it is a desire to stomp on the non-materialists of the world.
matoko_chan
@Spaghetti Lee:
this is why.
forevah young
matoko_chan
we don’t need to die, if we can rule our genome.
The Other Chuck
So the ocean is computation, eh Ray? What are the inputs and outputs? What is the information?
Or could it be you’re just another hippy-dippy new-ager who just has technology as his shtick? Golly.
It’s hard to believe believe there was once a time I took people like him seriously.
slightly_peeved
Wake me when there’s anything remotely testable in that. Actually wake me when there’s a testable definition of what consciousness is. There wasn’t the last time I talked to consciousness researchers.
That’s a nonsense statement. The whole point of Alife research, as articulated by one of its fathers – Rodney Brooks of MIT – in the 80s, is to study intelligence by starting small and building up. Trying to reverse-engineer brain functions is the exact opposite approach, and the focus of the GOFAI crowd. The two problems require entirely orthogonal approaches. And building nano-assemblers is a engineering problem, and completely sidesteps the issues of biological computation vs. silicon-based computation. It’s an almost entirely orthogonal problem. You’re conflating three entirely different areas of research and pretending like they’re “leveraging synergies” or something. Not only aren’t they, I don’t think they could.
AI isn’t dead – considering how planes now fly themselves, and cars will be getting close in a few years – it’s actually starting to earn its keep at last. But consciousness research hasn’t even begin to start yet – at the moment it’s all just wankery without a scientific foundation.
Actually, this idea is used by Searle as a refutation of the idea that a computer can be conscious. If the same patterns that are in a brain are in the ocean, but the ocean is not conscious in any appreciable way, then patterns of information cannot be sufficient to define consciousness. People making this statement are probably unaware they’re undermining their own argument with it.
matoko_chan
@slightly_peeved: oh snap, peeved is right! Its all impossible, so lets give up!
i guess we ought to just give up and go back to the stone age like Kass and the bioluddites want.
ever thing humanity really needs to know is in the bible after all.
:)
Stop lecturing me, crankyoldperson, and go back to your nap.
grendelkhan
@mclaren: “Singularity wackos” didn’t notice Moore’s law “crash[ing] and burn[ing]” because it didn’t happen. Moore’s law refers to the increase in transistor count, not clock speed; it appears to still be in effect–the additional transistors are being used to increase parallelism by adding extra cores. I’m unsure why you think that “multicore and parallelization turned out to be a bust”, either. (Storage capacity is described by a similar-though-separate guideline called Kryder’s law.) I think your cranky-old-man-ism may be getting in the way of your facts.
@ericblair: It’s rather popular to consider the Singularity to be a “Rapture for Nerds”, but it’s more facile than helpful; it’s a convenient way of pushing the idea off and not thinking about it. It’s your right to do so, of course, but “if I don’t think about it very deeply, it reminds me of Christian eschatology” isn’t exactly a show-stopping counterargument.
@electricgrendel: You’re stipulating when you say “you have to admit that each individual is in possession of a discreet thing called consciousness”, and some thought experiments make this position untenable. You postulate that because there’s no physical continuity, having your brain disassembled and replaced by a computer would destroy your consciousness. Fair enough. But what about a Moravec transfer, where each of your neurons is replaced, one-by-each, by mechanical equivalents while you remain fully conscious and aware? If the end result of each procedure is the same–your experiences, personality and memory emanating from a mechanical device and insisting that it’s really you–what’s the difference? While I’m not saying that a simple thought experiment can show that consciousness is an illusion, it certainly raises some pretty confusing problems with traditional notions of consciousness and individuality.
Onihanzo
Riiiiight when it’s actual, verifiable and not limited to Gedanken-experiments/ transhumanist porn.
You cognitive theorists always have such a hard-on for “what could happen in the year 3000!”, with absolutely no foundation in what can be proved in the present.