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Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF

Posted by Hemos on from the a-little-something-to-read-on-the-holiday-weekend dept.

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.""

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Kurzweil by dnoyeb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I always get confused by Kurzweil reader. My mother who is blind had a device that would scan and read books for her years ago. It was called a Kurzweil. So when I hear Kurzweil reader...

    I wonder if there is a pun in there somewhere? I'll have to read some of this stuff and find out.

  2. Kurzweil, Borg of the Now. by torpor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.

    To me, there is little between the ideologized mind/computer monstrosity and '"God is Dead" is my Co-Pilot'.

    Can someone explain to me why his sort of thinking is safe to have going on in this world? Do we really want future generations of fascist to be raised on and inspired by such militant technologism as trans-humanism?

    No thanks. If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
    1. Re:Kurzweil, Borg of the Now. by Shihar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You are entirely misunderstanding Kurtzweil if you think him a militant or a fascist. Kurtzweil talks about inevitability. Humans advance knowledge. Nothing short of some sort of anti-technology fascism is going to halt humans from advancing knowledge. Certain societies might choose to abstain in fear of a 'trans human' era, but unless those societies are willing to wipe out societies that choose not to abstain, there is an inevitability to Kurtzweil's line of reasoning.

      Kurtzweil's line of reasoning is simple. As we amass more knowledge, the speed at which we amass knowledge grows greater. Further, he says we will come to a time when we build something that can begin to produce its own knowledge, and that this thing will create a singularity. That is to say that once we have machines that can amass knowledge and improve on themselves with that knowledge, technology will explode so rapidly compared to today that you can't even begin to comprehend life in this post singularity world. Such a technological singularity could appear so quickly that it might be that no one knows it happened until after the fact.

      A lot of futurists believe all of the above. They argue against a human centric world as seen in most sci-fi. The idea of a crew of a few thousand running a ship as seen in Star Trek is silly to them because they argue AI will one day be able to do it better. I personally tend to agree.

      What might be rankling you is Kurtzweil's take on whether or not having humanity eclipsed is a bad thing. Kurtzweil argues that humanity's eclipse is all but inevitable, but not necessarily a bad thing. People tend to take a dim view at having one's species wiped out, or at least rendered inconsequential. Kurtzweil argues that perhaps this eclipsing won't be such a bad thing. While having humans wiped out might be one possibility, a Garden of Eden created by appreciative creations might be another, as could the possibility of merging/joining with said creations.

      A Garden of Eden to play in for as long as I desire or transcending to a higher plane of existence doesn't sound all that bad in my eyes.

      Kurtzweil isn't a militant technologist. He is an optimist. Could you argue his optimism is naive? Sure. I personally take it as a welcome change. We have a morbid view of the future some times, especially in a future where humans have been eclipsed. It seems like everyone argues for a Terminator/Matrix style future where it has to be man Vs machine. Kurtzweil just offers up a little optimism that the future might not be all that bad and that it might be man with machine, or man carrying on merrily while machine goes off and does whatever.

  3. Kurzweil is not just a computer scientist... by SenorCitizen · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Most keyboard players hold his old Kurzweil Music Systems products in high esteem. The K250 (introduced in 1984) was one of the first affordable samplers that was actually any good (no, the E-mu Emulator wasn't all that good)...

    From Vintage Synth Explorer's Kurzweil K250 page:

    One of the first keyboard samplers, it was great then and still good today. It has an adjustable sample rate of 5kHz to 50kHz which means 100 to 10 seconds of sampling time, respectively. Its sampler was also 16-bit. Many other samplers of this time had much more limited sampling/digital audio specs which made this synth a very prominent keyboard. By todays standards, however, this synth has many limitations such as samples are stored directly on Apple Mac disks only. But it had extremely modern features that make this synth easy to use and quite versatile.

    It has a 12-track sequencer, chorus, transpose, tune, 36 ROM sounds, 96 pristine quality acoustic instruments, 341 presets, 12 voice polyphony, 2 LFO's per voice, variable sampling rate, truncation, looping, velocity crossfading, full 88 weighted keyboard, MIDI and more! Of course the newer K2000 series is supposed to be better, but the K250 still seems like a major contender even in todays modern synthesizer era. It was also available in keyboardless Expander (pictured above) or as a rackmount module.

    It has been used by Stevie Wonder, Sean Hopper, Richard Wright, Patrick Moraz, Paul Shaffer, Lorin Hollander, Michael Kamen, Kitaro, and John Carpenter.

    Check out the rest of the range: http://www.vintagesynth.com/kurzweil/

  4. Ray/Ramona by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is the same guy that does "live" performances as "Ramona", his virtual 22-year old female rock star alter-ego, complete with motion-tracking and voice-transformation. And he doesn't think that there is anything weird about that. In fact, he says that in the future, everyone will do that kind of thing.

    I'm just saying, grains of salt....

  5. Charlie Stross's Accelerando also downloadable by FleaPlus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    On the topic of downloadable literature about rapidly-accelerating technology, Charlie Stross's newest novel is available for free download. Here's the relevant info (from another one of my slashdot submission attempts):

    Programmer-novelist and Hugo nominee Charles Stross has gotten permission from his publishers to make his newest novel, Accelerando, available as a free download in several formats. As described by one reviewer: 'Accelerando fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity. As the novel can be somewhat dense in novel technical ideas, I've started a Technical Companion on wikibooks to help provide more information on the relevant concepts.