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Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near"
popo writes "The Wall Street Journal has a (publicly accessible) review of "The Singularity is Near" -- a new book by futurist, Ray Kurzweil. By "Singularity", Kurzweil refers not to a collapsed supernova, but instead to an extraordinarily bright future in which technological progress has leapt by such exponentially large bounds that it will be... well, for lack of a better word: 'utopian'. "Mr. Kurzweil... thinking exponentially, imagines a plausible future, not so far away, with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual), vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today), other miraculous machines (nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt) and, thanks to these technologies, enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today)." On one hand its fantastically (even ridiculously) optimistic, but on the other hand, I sure as hell hope he's right." Got mailed a review copy; I'm not finished yet, but I agree - optimistic perhaps, but the future does look pretty interesting.
You can sell more copies of a book that talks about how we will all be rich and immortal than you can of one that predicts more of the same.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
it's now the 21st century and I'm still waiting for my Jetson's like flying car.
For those of you who enjoy fiction, Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the best fictional treatments of the Singularity I've had the pleasure of reading. In Accelerando one of the characters refers to the Singularity as the 'rapture of the nerds'. Great stuff.
Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'? I'm sure that a person from the 19th century, when confronted with the complexity of life today, would contend that the Singularity has already happened, but this time is still (largely) comprehensible to us. As time marches on, and things become steadily more complex, won't humans, augmented by increasing levels of technology, maintain at least a cursory connection?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yes, but all of his wonderful technology could be used by people that want to preserve their own power and wealth. Why does he assume that it will be used for "good" purposes? Look at nuclear energy, for example. It's a powerful source of energy but the same technology is used to make nuclear weapons.
Bradley Holt
extraordinarily bright future in which technological progress has leapt
This really sounds like one of those "In the year 2000, people will be..." If this type of thing were remotely true, I'd be driving a hover car to work right now. And yes, I know they exist but I don't know a single person that has even the remotest possibility of owning one.
I guess you have to come up with this kind of thing to sell books or articles. I would imagine nobody would be buying a book envisioning the year 2025 as pretty much the same as today with more hard disk space and faster CPUs.
I'm a big tall mofo.
aren't with the technology. We have "utopian" level technology compared to 80 years ago right now. The problem is with the people.
Look at Russia. Rampant alcholism, suicide, murder, gansterism, etc. Yet it is perfectly capable of sending off spaceships and creating high level technology.
I appreciate and welcome all the anticpated advances- but unless we create a worldwide civil society that is robust, honest, and representative; it won't make a dime's worth of difference.
The battle has been "won" in that "nanotechnology" has been repackaged to refer to "really small stuff", rather than to Drexlerian nano-assemblers. I'd be interested in reading what Kurzweil says (although I give the benefit of the doubt to chemists with empirical data over "futurists") but it's not like anyone has successfully demonstrated anything approaching Diamond Age proportions.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The kind of naïve optimism in the article is always better and more constructive than being cynical.
I sure miss the optimism and belief in the future that I've seen in texts from the 60s. Granted, I wasn't alive then, but when people under much heavier constant threat of nuclear annihilation appear to beat our time in optimism, something's wrong.
Yes, I'd much rather be plowing fields daily and walking by foot in the snow to the store. Oh yea, things may seem suckey, but only in comparison to your wishes. Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
From what I hear, the "peak oil" crisis stands a decent chance of obliterating human society as we know it before any of this wonderful stuff can happen. I would love it if someone would make a good argument why this isn't the case, but I've yet to hear one.
There's no way to say whether the current period will look revolutionary until hundreds of years have passed. I don't think we're currently in a period that resembles that between 1450-1700.
Unfrortunately this will only be accessible to the super mega ultra rich.
:-)
I really have no idea why people keep holding to this idea. The "super mega ultra rich" are by no means the powerhouse they once were. Today's society instead revolves around the needs of the middle class. If the middle class will be unable to afford it in the near future, the "super mega ultra rich" aren't going to be able to afford it (or even have it available) now.
Sure, the "super mega ultra rich" can afford nicer stuff than you and I, but they certainly don't have much that you and I don't have. A quick comparison list:
They have -> We have
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car
$3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone
Jet Plane -> Cessna
Mansion -> Spacious Home
Ming Vase -> A Vase that you can use
The world isn't what it was in the time of H.G. Wells. I seriously doubt you'll be seeing the "poor" eating the "rich" anytime soon.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The accompanying graph is staggering but only shows five points of data. Its top point shows a life expectancy of 77 years in 1999 or so, which of course is not human life expectancy. Human life expectancy is about 65, ranging from about 43 in poor countries to 79 in the richest country. Kurzweil's statement only applies to the wealthy; in much of Africa, life expectancy fell dramatically during the 1990s.
And since he's clearly talking about life extension, the reader should be aware that there is no exponential curve at the top of the lifespan. His numbers gained mostly from improvements in child nutrition and antibiotics, and there aren't any continued improvements to be made in those (quite the opposite, actually). If we look at the average continued life expectancy for Americans aged 75, between 1980 and 1985 they gained 0.2 years; 1985-1990, 0.3 years; 1990-1995, 0.1 years; 1995-2000, 0.4 years; 1997-2002, 0.3 years. This is good. But it's not exponential lengthening of lifespan.
Oh, and the "decade" within which he promised we'd be ahead of the curve is now half over. The above quote is from 2000.
The main logical error Kurzweil makes is simply that he thinks computers will get smarter because they get faster. Readers who believe the one has anything to do with the other need to go back to Dreyfus' 1972 classic What Computers Can't Do. From there, start reading over the painful history of what is now called "strong A.I.", and what used to be just called "A.I.", to see how necessarily limited our efforts have become. Kurzweil elides over this distinction in the worst way. He starts by saying that computers are now as smart as an insect -- which is unrefutable because nobody can quantify what that means -- and proceeds to predicting that they will be as smart as people once they get n times faster. No, I'm sorry, all that means is that they will be as smart as n insects. Whatever the hell that means.
Mostly I wouldn't care. Fantasy is fun. Except that Pollyannaish predictions of paradise-yet-to-come persuade people that the problems we create for ourselves are irrelevant. If you think the Rapture or the Singularity is going to make all currently conceivable problems laughable, little things like massive extinction and global warming turn into somebody else's problem. They're not -- and our grandchildren, with their very fast and non-sentient computers, and their non-300-year lifespans, are going to be kind of ticked that you and I spoiled the planet.
The whole premise is actually kind of simple I think. There's three basic components to everything that we use in our lives. Raw materials, Energy, and Design. Stuff needs to be thought up(design), it requires ingredients to build(raw materials), and it takes energy to make/use/operate it. Some things, like digital media, have negligible raw material requirements, but they still fit the mold.
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
We also need plentiful energy. If this whole fusion power thing ever pans out, we'll have that.
Raw materials are a little harder. Making things just out of dirt is a bit simplistic. because there's lots of different minerals and such present in dirt, and they're not all suitable for any purpose. There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like.
Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
I guess the point is, design and energy are almost like a switch. Either we'll have a couple big breakthroughs that'll bust those two wide open, or we won't. But even if we got cheap brains and cheap energy, the raw materials issue seems like it'd be a harder problem. If you're looking for a long term investment, land would probably be a good one, because it's the hardest thing for us to make more of.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
" Things have pretty much sucked up to this point."
Yea we still have thousands of children with Polio in Ironlungs...
Actually the world is a pretty good place in most developed countries. It is even a lot better than it was 50 years ago in the developing countries.
The correct way to look at it is not that the present sucks, but how can we make the future better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
i guess you haven't seen the statistics on the steady decline of the U.S. middle class since the 1970s?
I think we have differing definitions of 'middle class'. I didn't think I was poor, but let me add my family to the list: I have Ancient car that has to be resuscitated every year or so Serendipitously discounted cell phone, normally $100, but I got it for free Eh, we've never vaguely considered getting our own plane Tiny home Tupperware Maybe society does orbit your 'middle class', but that's still pretty far above me.
Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
Exactly. Without a significant shift in human cultures any utopia cannot happen, whether we have the technology or not. We could never agree on what utopia should be like, and would fight about it.
It didn't happen.
Fast forward to the 1970's at the advent of the personal computer revolution and read magazines like "Byte" or similiar. The coming of age of the PC was to free us from mundane tasks, make work easier, give us more leisure time because things were simpler.
That did not happen either, even if Byte and others were correct in saying that the computer revolution was here to stay.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
Or, if you prefer, back to the PC analogy: PC's have made things like spreadsheets, memos, etc., far easier for the average office worker, but instead of being rewarded with more leisure time, more spreadsheets and memos etc. are expected instead. In other words, instead of making life easier, more work has been created and now we are more or less enslaved to the technology that it is done on.
History is rife with examples of this: cellphones, for example. Now you cannot get away and work goes with you everywhere, all too often 24/7. Enslaved to the never-ending communication, instead of better, we got more.
George Santayna said those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. True. And history here will repeat itself. Technology will make things easier, and when they are easier it will be expected that more of it will be done.
And, as anyone who has sat on a beach with only a cool drink and the waves to contemplate, more work, no matter how "easy" is not Utopia.
Rich guy:
$500,000 for a course of cancer treatment.
Poor guy:
Vitamin C and prayer.
Who do you think is going to live longer?
What are you on about? Let me guess: you live in a gated community and you and your other nouveau riche friends occasionally take your Cessna down to Mexico for the weekend. While there you stay in a secure resort, safe from any undesirables. In your Calvinist world, decent people are well off and if anyone has to struggle to pay the bills, you're pretty sure it's due to moral failings. And like any decent American, you would never call yourself rich. You're average! Middle class! "I buy vases you can use, not like those RICH folks with their ridiculous Ming vases! HA HA HA!!"
Wake up. You're upper class. We will eat you.
*cough* so... yeah, crazy weather lately, eh?
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.
That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.
There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.
You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.
Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Johnny Cash: "Satisfied Mind":
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
(this is what Bud was listening to in his trailer in Kill Bill 2)
WTF do people WANT? There are people who all they do is go to parties all day, being chauffered around and catered to at every turn who are MISERABLE. Conversely, there are people who literally shovel shit all day who are happy as clams. Jesus H. Christ, Kurzweil has absolutly no clue what a 'utopia' would be like.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I'll tell you a secret: The world produces enough food to feed everyone.
But some of that food is fed to livestock to create other food (which isn't an efficient task). And a lot of food doesn't get to where its going because of corrupt governments and economic factors.
Which is probably the problem right there -- we have the technology to make the world a pretty nice place. But we don't. Magical future technology is unlikely to change our behavior.
I really have no idea why people keep holding to this idea. The "super mega ultra rich" are by no means the powerhouse they once were.
Oh, just wait! Another decade or so of Republican control and we'll get there.
They have -> We have
Let's just add a couple, shall we?
1)
Complete access to health care -> Weak/expensive health insurance
2)
Self perpetuating wealth (via tax loopholes, offshore accounts, etc) -> Constant taxation and standard of living cost increases
2 is the kicker, really. Once you attain a certain level of wealth, there are many financial vehicles available that can maintain the money, and even grow it a bit. Eliminating the estate tax will make this possible in perpetuity, effectively creating an aristocratic class in the US. Once this is accomplished (and it's only a matter of time with the Republicans in charge of everything) we will have the era of the "super mega ultra rich" back again.
As William Gibson remarked (quoting from memory), "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
We will never run out of oil because we'll switch to something else first. What will that be? I have no idea but I know that it will be better than oil, just as oil has been better than horsepower. Why am I so confident? Because we managed to make the transition from horses to cars without the end of the world happening. I'll bet that if you go do the research, you'll find predictions of how human society would crash because there simply wasn't enough space to grow the hay to feed all the horses needed to sustain society.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Wisdom comes with age (at least for some), and one thing we learn is that the next generation is not so different from the last as they would like to believe.
Regarding the guy born in 1750, I'm guessing a healthy, well-educated Thomas Jefferson would do a bang-up job making decisions on stuff like the Internet. Yes, to meet my standards he would need an enormous change of heart regarding slavery and racism, but I believe that's possible. It doesn't -have- to wait for the next generation.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
The people of 1505 might have been rather impressed by societal change through 1755 (development of stock companies, the scientific method, the reformation) -- but the people of 1755 would be absolutely floored by the world of 2005.
While people may be living a bit longer than they used to, I'd argue that it's only because we're preventing people from dying prematurely, rather than actively extending life span in general.
Say that the average lifespan of a human body under optimum conditions is 90 years (a figure I just made up, bear with me). By getting people to stop smoking and eat better, we're simply getting closer to those "optimum conditions" whatever they are.
But no amount of non-smoking and eating well is going to get you to live to 150. That would require fundamental breakthroughs in medicine and, as such, is entirely unconnected with historical life expectancy figures.
From what I can gather, we'll be lucky to avoid living in CAVES in 500 years. (I do think the Olduvai Theory can be avoided - but it'll take the likes of Kurzweil inventing sustainable technologies and a decimated human population to do it.)
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And all of the avionics advancements made in the pursuit of advanced flight, and all of those computers developed in the process of trying to get to moon colonies.
What a world we would have if people never strived for lofty goals. I'm sure everyone remembers half a dozen quotes along the line of Kelvin's "heavier than air flying machines are impossible" line, Duell's "Everything that can be invented has been invented" line, Millikan's "There is no likelyhood man can ever tap the power of the atom" line, and even a Roman commander (can't remember his name) insisting to the Emperor that he should cancel funding for new weapons development, as weapons had advanced as far as they were ever going to
So, apart from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
o We can't go faster than the speed of sound.
o
Any time you say "can't", sorry, you're likely to be wrong.
So here we go with another round of "The future's going to rock"/"The future's going to suck" debate. The utopian idealists versus the eco-depressive fetishists. If there's one thing I'm sure of, if we do someday go through a Singularity-type event, someone somewhere will be whining about how the benefits of it aren't distrbibuted with perfect equality.
Let me speak as someone who actually has read the book, which I would assume sets me somewhat apart from most of the 'reviews' in this thread. Kurzweil's good and well worth reading if you want any idea at all as to where things will probably eventually go. I say probably because, of course, there are no guarantees (we could all get smacked by a massive comet tomorrow--this is not a forgiving universe). And I say eventually, because like so many others, I think Kurzweil's timeline is a bit optimistic. But when I say a bit optimistic, I mean by perhaps a decade or two, not centuries or millennia (Kurzweil addresses this all in depth in the book, and many of the comments on this thread make the very mistake he's trying to educate people out of--thinking in terms of linear progression when we're actually seeing exponential growth across a massive number of fronts). I think Kurzweil is being optimistic on a personal level due to his own age--the man's in his fifities, and no doubt worries about the odds of personally surviving to see such the radical shift that he is prognosticating and anticipating.
What intrigues me most is the prospect for human enhancement. I consider this to be the most desirable, and perhaps even most inevitable, course towards the Singularity. We already have implants to allow deaf people to hear by tying directly into the auditory nerve (cochlear implants). We will follow that eventually with similar implants for vision, and eventually for other aspects of the brain itself. What will start as a humane effort to return normal function to those deprived of it will eventually permit us to merge with powerful computer systems, and gain the advantages that will come with that (imagine that your very imagination is augmented to include a high-powered CAD system, along with perfect memory recall, should you wish to use it). If we're smart, we can work to hone the best aspects of our humanity (our imagination, our sense of wonder, our empathy) while minimizing the worst of our nature (the primitive bloodlust that we carry as a result of our mammalian nature). Yes, yes, it could all go very wrong, but to those who point fingers towards nuclear weapons as evidence of our incorigibly beastly nature, I'd point out that they have been used only twice, and since the horror of their consequences have sunk in, they have not been used in anger since. Most people are good, decent folk. The eco-depressives strive to convince you otherwise, though the lack of mass suicide among the green folks is perhaps the best evidence that even they don't believe things are as utterly hopeless as they say. Yes, we have problems. No, they are not insurmountable, even with the technology that we have today, to say nothing of the technology we will have tomorrow.
Enhancement of human intelligence also allows us to avoid most of the whole "Is Strong A.I. possible?" debate. By working to increase both the scope and scale of human intelligence, we're already working with a source of 'I', and are layering in the 'A', seeing what works and what doesn't. An evolutionary approach, if you will. Ultimately, I don't really know if it will be possible to transfer my thought processes from biological neurons to nanocircuitry, but besides the notion of a 'soul', I really don't see why it couldn't happen. As thinkers on the subject have pointed out, you lose brain cells all the time (even if you don't consume as much beer as the average engineering student), and yet you retain a sense of continuity with your past self. If you were to imagine a process that replaced your existing brain cells one at a time with artificial neurons that were functionally identical to the cells
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth
We "put plow to earth" because it turns out that burying your children who starved through the winter is not so much fun after all.
no amount of technology will bring it back without a funndamental shift in our culture.
If you want it back that badly, you can have it easilly. Go deep into the mountains of Asia or Africa. Leave everything, including your clothes, behind you when you go. Enjoy the three or four weeks you manage to survive in your primative utopia. I'll just stay home and watch TV, thanks.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side."
Well, not to undo your argument, rather to add to it, even people haven't managed the "smart enough to live on a planet" phase. We're not too hot on protecting our habitat. Even without tinfoil hat on, it's easy to see we're pretty sloppy, and given our ever increasing numbers we could get into real trouble on a number of issues.
One very optimistic view would be that maybe computers would have the smarts not to saw off the branch they're sitting on, in other words, help us steer clear of our more obvious flaws when doing all those wonderful things with nano whatnots.
Since everything we make gets used more or less evenly for good and for bad (not to put too fine a point to it, and feel free to make your own balance), the potential to screw up at very fundamental levels will grow exponentially as well. Any help with that, even from pinhead-sized computers, is welcome indeed...
Cheers
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Technology tends to help offense more than defense, especially combined with an open society. A defender doesn't get the luxury of knowing time or place.
Consider, for instance, 1945-era technology: a Hiroshima-type device. The difficulty of constructing and moving one into position is far less than the difficulty of figuring out who's built them and where they are. Sure, you can use radiation scanners and searches to achieve near-100% coverage of containers -- if you're willing to bring international shipping to a crawl, and hire vast numbers of screeners. On the other hand, an attacker only needs to move a single device into an appropriate position to have an impact, rather than invest in defenses at every point of entry. The construction or acquisition of a nuclear device may be difficult, but is simple compared to the defender's task...
And we've had 60 years to work on the technological means for preventing nuclear attacks. During that time, the principal defense relied on the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, which is only a meaningful defense if (a) you can identify your attacker, which is a lot easier with an land-based ICBM launch
(or even SLBM, considering that the SLBM-capable club is fairly small IIRC) than a smuggled device, and (b) your attacker would seriously object to his own destruction (or of something else that you can destroy).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I think if a computer was smarter than all of us, it'd become godlike in it's watch over humanity. It would stop any of our research related to longevity, improving old age life, curing disease, etc. These are all nature's ways of making sure we don't fill this planet to the brim and live miserably as a result.
They have -> We have
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car
$3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone
Jet Plane -> Cessna
Mansion -> Spacious Home
Ming Vase -> A Vase that you can use
I'm solidly middle class right now (or at least my family is, I'm in college and helping to bring them down at the moment. It all gets paid off, assuming a few engineering jobs remain in English speaking nations) I have a beat up old truck, no cell phone, no plane of any kind, a dorm room with a roommate, and no vases at all. A cell phone is probably within my price range, but I'd rather buy a few cds or a video game every month. I supose you are so middle class with your fine suburban home and I don't know how you manage with only a Cessna. You're rich, man, and you don't even realize it. I'm probably better off than a lot of people myself. I get to go to a public college, and that is beyond the reach of a lot of people from my high school. You are fairly close to the ultra super mega rich yourself, compared to a lot of people.
SAILING MISHAP
You are damn right. So much technological progress but we know almost nothing about our brain. We understand how 20 million transistors work together to form a computer but we do not have any idea what makes us love or hate each other.
It is only the environment that changed in the past 100 years not peoples lives. Just take the following basic stuff: love, work, power, friendship, kids, getting old, etc. Now people have the same problems, or similar problems in different context. Technology does not really change our lives, it changes only the circumstances.
Just like hoping to get your favourite pancake in a nicer packaging next year. Lets say easier to open box, instant delivery... is there anyone out there believing this would mean a significant change in his life? Yes, unfortunately...
Except they don't have all the same things... at best they have one of those things, usually with some sort of sacrifice involved.
It doesn't matter. Viewed as a whole, the middle class is still a larger economic power house in all of these areas than the "rich" are. The fact that one man choses a plane, while another man choses a sports car, while another man choses a 2000sqft home near a city still adds up to more $$$ than the upper class puts into these areas.
Luxury goods are directed to those with lots of disposable income, which, IMO, does not typically include the middle class.
That doesn't seem to stop a large portion of the population from purchasing an SUV they don't need, a home entertainment center they don't need, a boat they don't need, and hundreds of other luxury items that they don't need. The middle class has some disposable income. They key is that they have to decide which things they really want with that disposable income.
It really is the same for the rich, except that they are looking on a more lavish level. Sure, they could afford all the same stuff middle class people do, but that's not necessarily what they want. Thus their $10,000 suits, $500,000 Exeleros, $10,000,000 private jets, and other nicities that can drain their bank just as fast as it can drain yours or mine. That's why many of these rich folks are attached these nicities as part of their position. i.e. They can't really afford a private jet, so their company pays for them to have one.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You know, it used to be that people who wrote books like these were called science fiction writers. Only they added an intersting story, and usually used concepts they themselves had thought of. And if they did a near-future extrapolation, they usually thought of the good, the bad and the ambiguous (ie everything).
/..
This guy has just ripped a few idea's from popular sci-fi, penned them down in a 'this will happen' fashion, and is now raking in the bucks. But then again, he is a futurist.
I'll have to explain that last thought. I've seen a few clips from futurist presentations. A couple of the more enlightening ones come from futurist conventions (where the best and brightest futurists speak, so I assume). These guys are freaking aura-loving, really-bad-motivational-speaking, awfull-presentation giving hippies of the most hazy, fingerwaving, dressed-up-in-wierd-shit stripe.
And I like hippies, too.
It just saddens me that a loon without an idea of his own beyond what has already filtered down to the public meme through the likes of Micheal Chrichton (Chrichton, for chissakes! Not Stephenson, Brin or Bova...Chrichton! [I liked Jurrasic Park as a book, ditto Rising Sun...but...I think you know what I mean here]), that a rip-off artist like that can pen down widely known concepts (without even a decent narrative), add nothing new or of value and then get plugged on
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Be careful. If farming's more reliable at preventing, say, a whole tribe from extinction and increasing its overall size, farming passes evolutionary muster. That doesn't mean life isn't, overall, shorter and nastier for most of the individuals in it. They might be able, for example, to feed more children - indeed, need them - to keep this whole farming pyramid scheme going. But with diseases and a social structure that demands stratification - chiefs to count grain, soldiers to steal grain from other tribes and repel invaders - you might need those extra little hands to weed and feed chickens so you don't all starve.
So, yes, farming had to yield some benefits immediately, but benefiting the gene pool as a whole could still mean overall suckage (shorter, nastier lives) for the majority of individuals in the system.
I thought that the most interesting idea in Guns, Germs & Steel was the suggestion that writing was primarily an invention designed to steal from the farmer class. In fact, if you look at the main things social conservatives of all religions are "for", it amounts to supporting this stone age social structure. Have lots of kids, be fearful of your lord, keep the young folks locked up until they can be indoctrinated in the system, don't question any of this or we'll knock the shit out of you. Actually, large parts of the world still work this way.
I wouldn't say your average 3rd world farmer is better off than a stone age hunter-gatherer. But I am.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
When minds are ported to machines, we will soon network beyond recognition as individuals. Kurzweil is a digital immigrant with uncommon powers of imagination, but he doesn't understand even the sands now shifting beneath him.
Digital natives already live in an editable world. From fan fiction and remixes to wikis and wares, we claim and respect less individual ownership than our elders. This is equally true of all property, creation, and ideas. We blab ever more freely to the entire online world ever more intimate details of our "personal" lives, our personal and professional lives are ever less separate, we expose ever more details of our presence, our purpose, our thoughts, ourselves.
We give in unprecedented amounts and haste to relieve the suffering of millions we would never have met in a world of just five years ago. I'm a boy from 1970s Ohio; my neighborhood was defined as the distance my two feet could take me. "Long distance telephone calls" were themselves prohibitively expensive. An unthinkable two decades later, our neighborhood is defined as the distance our thoughts can travel, streaming freely (and with incredible clarity) in Google Talk. The billions living in Asia are as much a part of my community as anyone, anymore. More than half my colleagues in the U.S. are from the other half of the planet, and my next job might very well be on their turf. I hear the weather's great in Bangalore.
We can publish anything, anytime, to anyone anywhere, and I'd rather not be the only author. I'd rather not pay for access to others' thoughts and creations, and I'd rather not charge for access to my own. Let's talk about profit. I suppose profit is something you get by lying to whomever pays you. You convince them what you offer is worth more than truly it is, and then you profit. Sounds like the ancient, barbaric oppression from which humanity is emerging; sounds evil. No thanks.
Let's metaphorically say that on the order of 10,000 years ago humankind first effectively wrote, recording thought extrasomatically for posterity on tokens representing commerce between ancient farmers. 1,000 years or so ago, we effectively published (in 1041, movable clay type was invented in China). 100 or so years ago, we jumped into cars, we recorded real images and audio and video. We left ever more of ourselves behind, expressed ourselves and learned and experience ever more extrasomatically. We began living ever more through machines. It took thousands of years for us to realize what began 10,000 years ago, hundreds of years to realize what began 1,000 years ago, and it took decades to realize what began roughly 100 years ago.
10 years go, we began "browsing" and the world hit the Web. Critical mass for this as a publishing medium was achieved almost "instantly," let's say within the course of one year. Finally, 1 year ago, GOOG hit the ticker, and one day later, /. began whorring full-force for Google :)
Seriously, the point is we are less somatic than ever, and the latest jump (here on the Internets) happened in less than one generation. Thus digital immigrants like Kurzweil are on the slow side of a huge leap away from ancient human nature. This generation gap gapes unlike any generation gap before it.
We are merging already, with only a minority of the world online and only Riemannian Sums of shared experience among the connected. When we are online, the integral of connectivity will swiftly overwhelm whatever remaining essence of the ancient, the organic, the fragile, human individual.
Lifespans of 300 years will be suffered only by the relative Luddites who insist on their intellectual independence. Their inferiority will ensure both their irrelevance, and the irrelevance of any concept of "lifespan." These trends are easily visible now, to anyone whose mentality is digitally native.
Yes, at 38 years old I am years past being tired and ultimately disgusted of these pie-in-the-sky predictions of techno-utopia.
... while the purported future arrives, carrying a massive load of unintended consequences and also-rans.
... all of which will have to be done in the morning to prepare to go to work, before leaving his mineral-and-wood home. And YOU will be long dead, exactly in line as Humans have always died.
People hiding in air-conditioned buildings with their huge bank accounts and expensive toys and entertainments tend to think technology is so wonderful that it will change the world in radical ways "just around the corner".
But we've well seen that technoprogress contains huge problems that Humans cannot handle, balk at, and ultimately either reject or get remarkably deformed by it.
Literally, futurists are almost completely ignoring the Human factor in the equation of history. At best, the futurists lower themselves to labeling anyone who points this out, and the term "Luddite" is never that far behind when that happens. The futurist essentially turns into an inadvertent snake-oil salesman who sells his tapes, books and videos
I've read Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix" stories and although they were well thought out, they do represent an impossible future. Humans require orders of magnitude more social stability than that offered in the series. Constant future shock cannot be sustained. Technology cannot shatter society since society readily rejects such forces.
The bald fact of the matter is that technology cannot produce a utopia or even anything that smacks of it. Tech brings as many problems into society as it solves.
In short, in the year 2100, you should expect your great-grandson to eat land-grown food, be warmed by hot liquids and metals, and wear pants
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
... many of the international folks cant just simply get their hands onto a great man products sold in the u.s. of a. so it would be grate if someone could actually scan the book, do some ocr and post it on some site, in some p2p network or something like that.
any hints of electronic availability of this interesting book yet?
thank you.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."
The suffering part is much more true than they would have intended. Without the bad times, the good times in your life seem like the same gelatinous goo as the times you don't remember. You define happiness by your previous unhappiness.
You own a computer. You can read and write. If we're playing "teeming masses", everyone posting on here is gonna get eaten. I'm sure you think you're middle class as well, etc., etc.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Ray Kurzweil is a reknowned "futurist" who has accurately predicted the future literally hundreds of times. He sometimes is even responsible for it happenning, i.e. he created the first synthetic instruments, first electronic book reader for the blind, the first robot that creates truly original art, a robot that writes poems inspired by other poems ( from what I understand, he really just uses an elegant markov chain), and he is currently one of the industry leaders in Artificial Intelligence research. He owns like 12 corporations and is a millionaire not because he is a crazy lunatic, but because he is often accurate and good at what he does. In addition to the above, he is often paid hefty sums of money to do consulting at Lockheed Martin and some other major companies. This guy is no joke, take what he says seriosuly.
Regards,
Steve
The second point is related to the fact that humanity doesn't have centuries of time ahead of it... ...A few decades after we mostly stop dying we will ascend to the posthuman level...
Up until right around here, your argument was fairly sound. Then you had to throw your religious dogma at us.
All this "posthuman" "transhuman" "neo-human" crap is downright silly. I don't look much like the men who built the ancient city of Ur, and even less like their great-grandparents, but I'm still human. Likewise, my descendants might (for all I know) choose to engineer themselves into flying, genderless, half-robot people who communicate telepathically and compose artistic works directed at senses that I don't even have... but they will also still be human. Besides, they might not. They may very well conclude (again, for all I know... and for all you, for that matter) that those people who built Ur are actually the highest ideal of humanity, and genetically build their way back to being just like them, cheerfully living in little huts in the desert and eating off pottery they made themselves.
The one thing we can be fairly certain of, based on all forcasts of today which were made by people in the recent past, is that most (if not all) current pictures of what the future will be like are almost certainly wrong.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"Look at the proportion of the world's population living on less than a dollar a day, or the local equivalent thereof. It's lower now than it has been at any point in history. Ever. "
By "any point in history ever" I assume you mean "since 1985" when this meaningless statistic was invented by the World Bank to justify neoliberal economic policies.
The relative price of the cheapest commodity foodstuffs increases at a different rate than average inflation. This $1/day statistic assumes that the poor spend their $1 on the same ratio of items as is common to the economy as a whole. So as the price of airplane tickets, cofee, long distance telephone calls, television screens, automobiles and consumer electronics imported from China, become cheaper, we deduce that fewer and fewer people live on less than $1 a day. Of course none of these poor actually got $1 in cash today or ever (but it is based on relative purchasing power of income compared to $1.08 USD 1993). However, the poor living in the poorest countries in the world do not benefit from the importation of cheap manufactured goods from China (compared to expensive american made goods), because they can barely afford to eat (in fact they can not afford it) let alone buy manufactured goods made anywhere whatsoever.
So is a person living in a third world country today with access to the equivalent of $1 USD (or $1.08 1993 USD to be precise, as this is the currently used standard) actually able to eat the same amount of food as he would have been able to in 1993? well... if he took his food in the form of coffee, tobacco, clothing manufactured in a sweat shop or some other locally produced product he probably would be able to. But since he is more likely today to need to import his food from a richer country in 2005 than he would in 1993 (let alone 1905) I am a bit skeptical.
In the meantime the export of manufactured goods produced by the inhuman exploitation of labour has helped push US prices down, increased the apparent value of $1.00 american, while the simultaneous virtual cessation of local food production in third world countries (in favour of cash crops as mandated by the IMF/WTO in exchange for assistance to corrupt local governments who strangely have a tendency to be propped up by the CIA before being accused of human rights violations and deposed as soon as they disobey their american patrons) has increased the local cost of foods, giving that $1.00 much less food purchasing power than in the past relative to purchasing power for goods in general.
And this says absolutely nothing whatsoever about the relative wellbeing of countries as a whole (only the critically poor), and also says nothing whatsoever about the wealth of those third world nations 100 or 200 years ago.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Yes, Kurzweil has the uber tech credentials to lend legitimacy to his predicting endeavors. However, He ignores many, many aspects of our current reality that will definitely impinge his utopian dreamworld.
1 138883/qid=1128375836/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002- 2835979-1699208?v=glance&s=books
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First off, the current fossil fuel based economy needs to be quickly and with as little disruption as possible, moved to a new and low polluting fuel. For the business side of his predictions to take place, this will have to be addressed. There are plenty of opinions about this, including this one:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/087
Perhaps we could look at what many biologists are saying is only a matter of time. A world pandemic, similar to what happened in 1918.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038
Last but not least, when technology gets to the point of enabling humans to live several hundred years, who gets to enjoy such benefits?
No, I think a combination of Kurzweils book and Bill Joys Why the future doesn't need us is more likely.
Let's not forget Murphys Law...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The problem today is that "People Skills" are more important than academics. If anything, academic study is becoming a waste of time.
The more that becomes available the more that they want and as all ways the only way to achieve this is by taking it from everybody else. When you have 10 million why strive for 100 million and then for 1000 million and then for 10,000 million etc. , regardless of how much harm they do to society in achieving those petty goals.
Even when the real measure of their achievment is the harm and disruption that they cause to society as a result of their individual greed and their need to have more than anybody else (the celebrated sociopath). Of course the internet might yet create a change as we do get the oppurtunity to mock those individuals regardless of the amount of money that they can spend on self promoting PR, they need to because deep down the guilt and shame are still there (hello bog balls ballmer and wee willie gates ;-)).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I have NO problem with living to 125-300 years....I just don't want my body to look and feel like I'm 125 to 300 years
I think you stumble upon an excellent point. Thinking logically and assuming the technological advancements are possible, isn't it possible that a matrix-like reality lies in our future? We already see people adopting this idea in a very primitive sense where they play these online MMORPGS, escaping from reality. But what if we could literally shape our reality through such technology and reside in it in a reletively permanent manner? A matrix-like reality with indistinguishable sensations from normal reality, save from a set of rules which would promote somekind of utopia, possibly unique to each individual. Not only that, but in consideration of any needed technology being possible, you could simply have it so that the machines keep your body in as perfect a state as possible (in contract to the atrophied and controlled state depicted in the Matrix film). This would allow for close-to-true immortality, barring the idea of course of somesort of natural disaster destroying your "sustainment pod" or whatever would be the technology. Imagine what kind of world it would be if it were exactly the same, save for two new rules: You cannot be harmed, and you are physically incapable of harming anyone else. With virtual reality something like that might be possible.
Well, it's all fine and dandy to dismiss arguments about posthumanity by claiming that "they will still be human", but this is pointless, unless you provide a definition of what a human is. If you consider "flying, genderless, half-robot telepaths" to be human, that is great, but not very helpful for the discussion.
You see, I was making a point that posthumans (whom you may still consider humans) will be able to avoid boredom of extended lives. By "composing artistic works directed at senses that youn don't even have", for example. If you agree with this point, it doesn't really matter whether you consider them human or not. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
However, it's just easier to use different labels for different objects. We do not call people "children" after they live for about 20 years, because they change so much, even though that change is gradual and they retain most of the essential features of a child to some extent. We call them adults. Similarly posthumans will be sufficiently different from modern, unmodified biological humans to warrant a different word.
P.S. And calling my argument "dogma" was unnecessary, especially since your disagreement appears to stem primarily from terminological differences.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.