Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF

prostoalex writes "The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0.""

Comments

Futurists... feh

[gowen]

Man, I wish I could get a job making untestable hypotheses, and talking in stunningly vague terms about a vast morass of unrelated ideas.

But I don't want to be a futurist, and I don't have the time to study for the priesthood.

Re:Futurists... feh

[Irashtar]

You have to study to be a priest? I thought they just took every relavent scientific debate, and twisted it up.

Re:Futurists... feh

[Anonymous Coward]

Stunningly vague notions that look irrational, far fetched, crazy, insane, off the wall -- you don't like them?

What if rather than being 0 intelligence, their value approached infinity? -- yes, what if you need fuzzy to approach infinite intelligence?

fuzzy notions allow us to trace our singular history through billions of years.

the pathetic abilities of the intellect give us a little bit of room to navigate in time and space, sure, but try modeling the next greater thing, something 5 dimensional like intentionality and you fall flat on your face.

hey, i'm neither a futurist nor a priest, but i'm smart enough to realize that the world and universe has not ripped itself apart, that there's no urgent need to patch short-sighted messes, that basically the entire thing is disinterestedly benevolent and of infinite intelligence.

uh, and that we have almost no clue about how it works.

and no, i'm not taking sides in the cosmology debates either; but you are.

polarized to the what? 300 books you've read and mastered you believe that you know sh*? that you have something special with a few hundred points of IQ/EQ...

good for you. perhaps next time you wind up with your head handed to you by life you pause to ponder if the magnitides of complexity from which you're trashing cr*p outside of or invisible to you is really just 0 intelligence.

There's more unconscious to us than there is conscious. Based on this insight (which you must deny and visciously attack right now should you want your tiny brain to not explode!) its safe to say that we're on the stupid end of the stick.

but hey, if to your microbrain the ideas of some other man look like a vast morass of unrelated ideas .. might it be possible that you're just not smart enough to spy connections?

if you think you're god's gift of brains to the world and someone else is integrating and corellating ideas for fun; doing things that you can not possibly track because you lack all ability to calmly reason with bit ideas....

then yeah, you can amuse the rest of the monkeys.

but human, you're not. you're acting like a sub-human degenerate who shows no appreciation of art or of the values generated by dreamers and seekers of that intellectual vastness.

I mod you +1 for extinction.

Sure, your self-righteousness will probably see to it that you have arms and a willingness to kill, but so what.

Its the folks that can mentally cope with crazy untestable hypotheses that enabled you to trash and deride them to begin with. Like they cared for small minds. They might even think nicely of you; I'll just mod your ilk for extinction if that's ok by you.

anyhow... remember that kurzweils cr*p s about approaching infinite intelligence.

Of course its safer for you to call that all deluded mystic/religious/fuzzy bullsh*t and go on your merry way.

As denial's easier than dealing with dilettantes, Kurzweil would probably approve of how you defend and self-define your self into the bucket of retrograde intellects marked for extinction.

But sorry, I'm repeating myself. This is probably not news to you either. All around you there are smarts-limited bright people agreeing with you and for the moment you have the safety of numbers.

Heh, but watch what happens when you face life in the raw. without the veneer of rationality, you will eventually come to wish you had cultivated good relations with the irrational vastness of the infinite intelligence bounding your little bubble.

Some of us actually help pathetic lost ones like you. Find us.

Cheers Monkey. You can go back to rolling in sh*t and trashing people that have minds capable of dealing with subtlety.

ramona !

[maharg]

Me: hi - your website appears to have been slashdotted

Ramona: <silence>

Re:Kurzweil is one of those geniuses

[agraupe]

Not to mention that you spelled "genius" with one o too many. I think that pretty much disqualifies you.

Futurists Are Funny

[Vagary]

Futurists are just like science fiction writers, except instead of being entertaining by combining prognostication with insight into the human condition (cyberpunk) or appealing to our mythological archetypes (space opera), futurism is entertaining by making you laugh in either pity or amazement at their naivete. So they're all doing their part to make the world a better place...unlike priests.

Re: This is news?

[Black Parrot]

> Is it news when somebody takes a bunch of existing documents and creates a PDF out of them?

It's a step toward the technological singularity...