Singularity May Be Real, But Kurzweil’s Still A Jerk
Ray Kurzweil. Photo: Michael Lutch.
SYSTEM ALERT: Don’t listen to Ray Kurzweil!
He is dead wrong … just not how you think he is. If anything, his seemingly crackpot notion of Singularity — namely, that man and machine will be indistinguishable no later than 2045 — is so prescient and precise, to borrow a term from Battlestar Galactica, it’s frakin’ scary.
Look around you; we’re awful close as it is. From insulin pumps to robotic limbs to the chips embedded in Parkinson’s patients, an albeit fledgling Singularity is already here. And with IBM’s Watson having bested both Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy!, this inert, bipartisan Mr. Smith came to Washington earlier this month and quickly disposed of Reps. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Nan Hayworth (R-NY), Jared Polis (D-CO), former Rhodes Scholar Jim Himes (D-CT) and trained nuclear physicist Rush Holt (D-NJ). For heaven’s sake, we’ve got robots in Japan, right now, that can…
Ray Kurzweil: No Energy Or Water Shortages, Climate Change Is No Problem
Ray Kurzweil. Photo by Michael Lutch. Courtesy of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
Lauren Feeney elicited some gems from futurist Ray Kurzweil in her interview for PBS. Among his predictions:
- “In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar.”
- Life extension technology is about to take off — meaning far greater life expectancy.
- There will be no water shortage as we use the abundant electricity to convert polluted water.
- We are going to have plenty of food from “vertical agriculture, where we grow plants, fruits, vegetables and meat in computerized factories by artificial intelligence; hydroponic plants tended by intelligent robots to create fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloned meats, basically just cloning the part of the animal that you want to eat, which is the muscled tissue.”
- We shouldn’t worry about climate change — the new technologies we’re developing will beat it.
Crazy stuff! I’m not sure I want to eat cloned portions of animals grown…
Newton’s Third Law – The Coming Collision
The Singularity by Ken Vallario.
“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.”
In watching the coming collision collision between one individual and the world’s mightiest government, we are about to see if these forces are in fact equal, or if these laws will soon be broken.
The Good News
In the light of the latest Wikileaks events I have been thinking very deeply about citizen empowerment and how technology enabled a small group of people to threaten the legitimacy of the most powerful government the world has ever known. And surprisingly that same government has yet to find a legitimately effective response against this very big pie in their very large collective face.
As many of us have done, I have attempted to fill this void with my own speculations about the retaliatory…
Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Movie Crashes A Computer
A funny thing happened when they tried to screen The Singularity is Near. After the lights went down, a computer crash prevented the movie from starting! “Ray Kurzweil got back on stage…and good-naturedly reassured us that the technology was getting better. A couple of minutes later, the movie started…”
The new documentary is a clear rendition of the ideas in Kurzweil’s book, including nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, “with Bill McKibben in the role of the friendly flat out opponent, Bill Joy playing the reasonable but worried man, and Mitch Kapor doubting the technological possibilities… K. Eric Drexler, MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, desktop manufacturing guru Neil Gershenfeld and many many more are woven in to support the idea – and the more hopeful potentials – of accelerating change leading to radical alterations in life (itself).”
The movie includes a second fictional narrative showing the future, “and – one of them, at least – is rather…
Ray Kurzweil on U.S. Counter-Bioterrorism
This article appears in the new Winter edition of H+ magazine:
In a new interview, Ray Kurzweil reveals that he’s working with the U.S. to develop a rapid-response system for bioterrorist attacks. “It took us five years to sequence HIV; we can sequence a virus now in one day. And we could, in a matter of days, create an RNA interference medication based on sequencing a new biological virus.
“This is something we created to contend with software viruses. And we have a technological immune system that works quite well….”
And he also has an interesting perspective on the media. “I do think decentralized communication actually helps reduce violence in the world. It may not seem that way because you just turn on CNN and you‘ve got lots of violence right in your living room. But that kind of visibility actually helps us to solve problems.”
Kurzweil pioneered scanners, speech recognition, and synthesizers, and…
