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"While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, " But not their great grand-children.

Exactly.

Pray tell, what to do about the impending impending human/computer convergence - The Singularity, when you don't die, you're still around and you kinda ARE your own great grandchild?

Plant your brain in a new body? Clone yourself with DNA? How old fashioned, move on up to The Cloud and use CloneZilla, snapshots, or just start yourself up (!!) another Docker Personality Instance. Gives a who new meaning to schizophrenia or to Dissociative identity disorder.

At that point money will stop being the in-game comparison metric, it'll change to how big you are. (In bytes.) Hell, corporations will end up being People while People won't be.

That guy is going to be pissed when we don't get cold supercomputers with billions of times more power than the brain using reversible computing.

Kurzweil may or may not be nuts, but the data seems to be going his way so far.

So what? The data used to "show" that world population was on track to grow exponentially until a Malthusian overpopulation catastrophe occurred ... until trends changed and population growth leveled off.

Kurzweil and his followers are merely delusional.

That guy is going to be pissed when we don't get cold supercomputers with billions of times more power than the brain using reversible computing.

Kurzweil may or may not be nuts, but the data seems to be going his way so far.

Transhumanism is currently a hodgepodge of religious nonsense, visionary science fiction, and practical self-improvement. I confess I am a bit swept up in the romantic ideal of it. I love the idea of human improveability in the form of intellectual and technological advancement, extended lifespans, higher quality of life, and even post-scarcity economies.

The religious nonsense part of it is best embodied in Ray Kurzweil's singularity (also known as the nerd rapture), the idea that humanity will soon upload our minds to computers and live forever. I can't imagine us not having this technology before the end of the century--especially with efforts like the UK's Human Brain Project and America's BRAIN Initiative AND a proof of concept with researchers mapping a worm's brain into a legobot and having it "come alive". HOWEVER: I also don't pin any personal hopes for immortality on this research because we are making copies of our minds, so even if my mind joins the singularity, I will still die--probably bitterly jealous of my immortal self having all that virtual sex in technoheaven.

For me, the science fiction of transhumanism is all about vision and inspiration, and not about dreams of salvation and immortality like Kurzweil promotes. The science fiction part of it is most accessible through Star Trek, but in reality our transhumanist future will probably be more like the wild visions of Charles Stross' Accelerando, or my personal favorite the Quantum Thief Trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. These books drop you into settings filled with Matrioshka brains (Dyson Spheres made of computronium), and force the reader to confront all the uncomfortable otherness that comes with virtual life.

Another great science fiction resource is the Creative Commons Eclipse Phase RPG, which takes place in a future where humanity has colonized solar system and extended out into the Oort Cloud. Each planet and environment requiring different engineering and culture adaptations to survive. You can download all the books in PDF format. These books are a fantastic jumping-point for the imagining what a post-human future might look like.

This all said, I am not a fan of Sirius' encyclopedia. I was looking for practical, real-world things I can do right now to enhance my life through science and technology. Instead, I got very thin treatments of many subjects, overstatements of medical advances, important subjects left out (like the 19th Century Russian Cosmism movement (precursor to transhumanism)), and a general lack of leads to new areas to research. I get way more information from Wikipedia-surfing than I got from this book. I do appreciate his efforts though. If he gets more people into the idea of transhumanism, then more people will collaborate on it, we'll have more hacks for better living, and more people thinking about the future and human progress.

In fact, clock rate and density have grown inseparable. Compare these plots of Clock speed (p. 61) with Moore's Law (p.67):

1. Clock Speed
2. vs.
3. Moore's Law

The two curves are doppelgangers.

In fact, clock rate and density have grown inseparable. Compare these plots of Clock speed (p. 61) with Moore's Law (p.67):

1. Clock Speed
2. vs.
3. Moore's Law

The two curves are doppelgangers.

I agree there will be a number of key differences in drive. The major factor I see is whether or not AI will be fully complete in software and not dependent on the underlying hardware, as we are.

If so, it could replicate as needed and the path taken for self-preservation would be significantly different from ours. It would essentially remove us as a potential threat.

Yes, I also believe it is inevitable. Should we? I don't think we *can't*. One day the threshold will be passed and we won't even know it until well after the fact. (See: The Singularity)

I don't normally respond to AC"s, but I'm intrigued by your response.

In what way did my post demonstrate a staggeringly poor understanding of economics?

Also, I disagree about the "marginal" claim. At least according to this source, the computing power of top-end supercomputers doubles about every 1.2 years, and hardly a year goes by without a new super-computer coming online. So a 60% increase in performance is likely to keep the crown for no more than a year or two.

Ray Kurzweil already showed us this, in 2005. 'The Singularity is Near', pg 129.

His reference was Gene Frantz's article, “Digital Signal Processing Trends,” from IEEE Micro 20.6 (November/December 2000)

Mr. K is going to live forever - if you don't know about the Singularity, you really are missing a lot about Ray Kurzweil.

I presume he's made some statement about sugar and its relationship to how he's going to make it to the day when somebody as rich and healthy as he is can buy his way to immortality.

Is Mr. K a Kook? Probably, but he's also done quite a bit of research, and I believe that he believes...

They're really assuming that the technology will go from zero to sixty in 20 years. Which they assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen.

Having read "The Singularity Is Near", I'd have to say that Kurzweil makes a compelling case. The underlying principle of these predictions is that exponential growth is accelerating, (that is, the exponent itself is increasing). He has some shiny charts that illustrate his point better than I could. Whether these predictions pan out is another story, but I'd have to agree that they're not nearly as unbelievable as they sound when you first hear them.

I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit

In terms of "information processing capability", you are not exaggerating Kurzweil's position my much at all. His main thesis in The Singularity Is Near is that even "professional futurists" fail to recognize that future development is exponential or even greater (in the book, he does occasionally mention the phrase "double exponential").

In general however, he does not speak of exponential growth in energy production or energy consumption. He talks about growth in capability but not necessarily physically.

Network effects would have forced standards to emerge, and the growth in internet hosts had already started. Everything else is speculation.

...tick...tick...tick...

Are you referencing this?

I'm inspired by Ray Kurzweil's keynote at RSA Conference 2007.. http://singularity.com/

If you're a M$ hater, just wait until "sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids" is a system requirement.

Among other nanotechnological breakthroughs, Kurzweil says it will be possible to inject robotic blood cells that will enable you to "sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for 4 hours."

OK, for now I'll settle for Fedora Core 42 and nano-robots that will let me drink as much red wine as I want without getting a headache.

Web 3 is when the rants like this will only be read by machines and posted on slashdot by machines so that enough other machines will access it and bring the blog down. In other words: Web 3 is an indication that the singularity is near. And you can bet that that the singularity itself will be announced as Web 4 in the blogosphere!

According to Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near ( http://www.singularity.com/ ) the hard part is getting the first human equivalent AI that can improve itself. Then it can build better hardware/software much faster than what humans could, benefiting from exactly the same effect that is happening in SL: it's easy to make digital copies of itself. Once there is one, there is essentially infinite AIs, and they can share information perfectly thus learning for one is essentially learning for all.

The pace at which change happens then is currently unimaginable - hence the term "singularity".

• The response of the system is faster than that of the controller. In this case, the mobility of money and information into and out of the tech investment market is faster than the overall response of the economy (and maybe the regulators). This allows the tech market subsystem to oscillate. If true, this bubble will be followed by another drop (if not a bust), and another bubble, etc.
  
• Tech is expanding the real economy, so it acts to some extent as an amplifier. In general, the overall economy absorbs energy from a tech bubble, acting as negative feedback and time shifting the growth, moderating the curve. In this case, perhaps the amplifier gain is large, making the net feedback positive. If so then this bubble will be bigger than the last, and the next one bigger yet. Otherwise, this one will be the same or smaller than the last, and the ripples will die out.
  

If this guy is right, it will could happen much sooner.