[Schadenfreude]

Civilization is coming to an end.
I heard that.

A lot of people are going to die.
Yeah, I heard that too... 4-5 years ago.

It's hopeless.
Yeah, I heard you the first time.

You're in denial if you entertain any other notion than The Great Die-Off and The End Of The World As We Know It.
Well, sorry, I just can't concentrate my mind to the exclusion of everything else for more than about 4 years at a stretch. So my mind is starting to wander.

What's your mind wandering to?
To Ray Kurzweil's thesis that the Law of Accelerating Returns will lead Inexorably to the Technological Singularity within a couple of decades.

A pox on thee!


New York Times: "The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least"

Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns

Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.

“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.

He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first. ...

[web]http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/singularity[/web]

IEEE Spectrum

[thylacine]

I saw Kurzweil interviewed on some programme I was watching a few weeks ago. He came across as a desperate old man. Desperate to cling on to life. He chomps his way through 180 to 210vitamin and supplement tablets a day in the hope that he can extend his life long enough to see The Singularity.

It's an interesting idea, but I still reckon we're more likely to see economic collapse and die-off than the Singularity.

What will I feel when I read in the next 20 or so years that Ray Kurzweil has shuffled off his mortal coil? Schadenfreude perhaps!

[kjmclark]

"He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first. ..."

Except that Kurzweil's exponential upward curves aren't the only ones we have to deal with:


From "Fermenting the Food Supply".

[Byron100]

I saw Kurzweil interviewed on some programme I was watching a few weeks ago. He came across as a desperate old man. Desperate to cling on to life. He chomps his way through 180 to 210vitamin and supplement tablets a day in the hope that he can extend his life long enough to see The Singularity.

It's an interesting idea, but I still reckon we're more likely to see economic collapse and die-off than the Singularity.

What will I feel when I read in the next 20 or so years that Ray Kurzweil has shuffled off his mortal coil? Schadenfreude perhaps!

If he's taking that many frickin' vitamins a day, he'll be dead from various toxicities long before he dies of natural causes!

I can't even take a single multivitamin for a week without feeling a bit "spacey" from the overloading of "B" vitamins...if I took that many for any length of time, I'd be reaching immortality alright...with my body long gone as my mind seeks escape elsewhere in the universe...LOL.

[eXpat]

That´s nice, we just have to have patience and faith and all will be ok. And i thought that actually we should do something...

[keehah]

The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two

wiki

Perhaps the technological singularity comes whent his proposed intellegent supercomputer realizes the earth is being destroyed by a human plague and creates and releases a killer virus?

[Revi]

The world is going to change. That's for sure. Solar will gain ground rapidly, but there will be people who are left behind. We will see change happen. With the price of oil pushing upwards, out of reach of most people we are going to need to do something.

Most people don't know anything about solar. They don't know how easy it is. It's the lazy man's way. Once they figure it out it could take off.

[Schadenfreude]

The world is going to change. That's for sure. Solar will gain ground rapidly, but there will be people who are left behind. We will see change happen. With the price of oil pushing upwards, out of reach of most people we are going to need to do something.

Most people don't know anything about solar. They don't know how easy it is. It's the lazy man's way. Once they figure it out it could take off.

I don't think solar can lose. Everybody should dollar-cost-average a few bucks into a some solar stock every month.

I don't know whether or not the Singularity thing will ever come to pass, but I thought it was impressive that the IEEE would give it so much limelight in their online rag.

I'm one of those who thinks that the human talent for innovation and ingenuity really kicks into high gear when the going gets tough. And its undeniable that the world is in the midst of a technological boom anyway - even without any severe hardship.

So I am expecting to see an intense and prolonged burst of innovation as energy become more expensive. And I have way too much humility to make any claims as to certainty about the how the future will unfold. So I watch with interest the bleeding edge of technology. Others here seem to have quite a lot of contempt for it.