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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.
Things have pretty much sucked up to this point.
Someone hates these cans.
HULK's Halloween decorations webcam is up!
I'll have what he's smokin'
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.
We'll all be dead by then..
I sure as hell hope he's right.
Unfrortunately this will only be accessible to the super mega ultra rich.
The rest of us will carry on being the work horses of the world.
Rightly so as well, because without us the world would stop turning (not literally).
liqbase
it's now the 21st century and I'm still waiting for my Jetson's like flying car.
People will grow wings and fly themselves. Their onboard computers will be programmed to output that delightful flying car sound from the Jetsons.
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
Some of this stuff may happen in my lifetime (I'm probably too old to get the 300 year treatment), but a lot of it looks really pie-in-the-sky to me. To me this reads like those futurists who predict everything in the hopes that they're right on at least one thing so they can write a book later gloating about how they successfully predicted something and gloss over all of the other predictions that didn't pan out.
I read the internet for the articles.
...that I'll have to wear shades? Also, does the book mention that in the utopian future that repeat stories will be eliminated? What about Beowulf clusters of those brainy head computers?
Obviously bad puns and cliches are going to be around in the future.
witty comments that write themselves?
Where is my flying car.
Get on it. I was promised one more than 50 years ago.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
And then put a big sign on it that says, "HAAAAA! You pussies don't have the smarts or the guts to regrow me a new body and bring me back! Hahahahahahah!"
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I read Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines and I have to say he's pretty damn optimistic about what the future brings. (i.e., people uploading their brains to the Internet, nanobot swarms able to create anything). But he's also invented some really cool technologies (poetry writing software that generates original poetry after studying a set of poems, one of the first OCR's for blind people). A lot of people consider him a looney, but with the way technological change is increasing every year, the idea of a Singularity doesn't seemed too far-fetched.
Mr. Kurzweil (...) imagines a plausible future (...) with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual)
... "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not. Hmm?"
That sounds cool and all, but
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.
... enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today)."
Also only available to nation-states (and ex KGB), the nuclear weapon!
I don't know if the world will be a better place when every single person has the capability to blow it up.
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...
"singularity" says nothing about "bright future" or "utopia" per sé, but more descripes a point where the ever increasing innovation rate makes predictions impossible.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Pessimist: "That glass is half empty."
Optimist: "That glass is half full."
Kurzweil: "The self-cloning milk in that glass will replicate thanks to nanobots and end world hunger."
Best Windows Freeware
Iain M Banks (to be confused with the non-sci-fi writer Iain Banks) has written a lot of book about "The Culture" a man/machine symbiosis that has created a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Actually it sounds also like Robert Heinlein, Asimov and most other Sci-Fi writers I've ever read. But mostly like Iain M Banks who books are a cracking read.
Living to 300... of course we will, we'll have to work till we are 280 though.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If heap protection is still news then it's doubtful that the utopian future will come to pass anytime soon.
Say what you will about the innate good and/or evil in humanity. There have always been people who want what you have, simply because you have it and they don't. Until the time comes that human nature itself changes, all these wonders of technology will remain neutral tools, reflecting their flawed users more than any utopian vision.
if the U.S. can get rid of its anti-science President, and if the world can go through a real energy revolution of new alternatives coming online, then the possibilities are endless.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
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.
Could the Christians PLEASE get their "Rapture" out of the way first before our "Singularity" arrives?
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
...vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today)
And we shall call it "Marvin"
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
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.
Flying cars?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
He's got a very interesting website.
Try talking to the chatbot, and clicking on the link to "The Brain."
Ray's probably right, but we have to make it past the collapse from a crumbling petrol society first!
Does he address the possible slow-down of technological and economical development because we run out of energy and haven't found alternatives to oil and gas yet?
Does he address the risk of global overheating if we find an infinite source of energy?
Whaddya think The Rapture is?!! That's when everybody uploads their brains into teh cybermind to become one with the noospheric godhead.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Why is that all the Futurists/Utopianists claim super extended lifespan as some great feat? How do they stop the natural deterioration of the human body, exactly? I don't know about you, but I'd rather have an exceptional 70 year live that a mediocre 300 year one.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
How is an extended lifespan a factor for a "Utopian" society? Longevity should not be assumed to be an automatic plus -- by extending our lifespans we won't be extending our years spent in idle retirement. We'll be tagging everything else proportionately -- lifespan increase by 10% = work/study time increase by 10%.
If we had an additional 25th hour in our days, I'm pretty sure we'll soon be wishing for a 26th.
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.
Nixon: Computers may be twice as fast as they were in 1973, but your average voter is still as drunk and stupid as ever. The only thing that's changed is me. I've become bitter and, lets face it, crazy over the years, and once I'm swept into office I'll sell our children's organs to zoos for meat, and I'll break into people's houses at night and wreck up the place! Mwahahahahahaha!!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The Singularity is a term coined by futurists to describe that point in time when technological progress has so transformed society that predictions made in the present day, already a hit-and-miss affair, are likely to be very, very wide of the mark.
Oh, the irony...
lone, dfx.
I think it's totally the opposite. I think we already passed a sort of "singularity", and we're sitting at a new plateau of technology. Most every technology is just a realization of the potential made available by discoveries made in the late 19th and early 20th century. Some new discoveries are being made, but nothing on the scale of 100 years ago. I think over the next century, the pace of growth of technology will slow and eventually stall, until we have another burst of discovery like we had a century ago.
enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today)
Isn't that what we see today with inflation?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"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'."
theres no money to be made when everyone is happy. As long as the focus of society is on amassing capital, their will be no utopia.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
...
laugh, it's funny.
anyway Kurz is full of it. exponential increase in technology doesn't get you anywhere if your population is increasing exponentially as well. and once population stops increasing exponentially technological "progress" won't increase exponentially either.
being able to feed and cloth 3,000 people to build a stealth bomber is only possible when there are 3,000 (or whatever number, i'm not making claim of an exact linear relationship) people in Africa, ferrying their 3% annual food growth abroad in the form of debt.
Kurzweil is a looney. he follows in the footsteps of the other millions of people who have been preaching the technological religion ever since agriculture was invented. according to them, we were supposed to be in "utopia" centuries ago...
This version comes in paperback.
Didn't we already have The People vs. Common Sense?
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
for those that think such an utopia is desirable, i'd like to introduce you to another book.
slashdot, meet The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
a bit far fetched, but not that far from what is suggested in the one under review here.
...in the future we'll also be able to bend space and time by sneezing and create new universes to live in and become a god of, and never ever feel pain and never die.
Well, actually, none of that will ever happen. But if you THINK it could happen, then just maybe your denial could grow strong enough to eat your conscious mind and in your coma-like self induced sleep you could really believe everything you imagine.
None of that bullshit he predicts will ever occur. It's not probable at all, it is merely POSSIBLE, in some alternate reality where nobody needs to focus on real life issues like paying bills or going to school. Sure, if everyone stopped eating and shitting and breathing and just put all their remaining life energy into a vast consciousness these inventions could become real.
Who the fuck needs nano machines to make shit out of dirt and light? We can already make stuff without them so it's pointless. Who needs a machine to think that much? We get things done now with how much we currently think. Who the fuck needs to live that long? We can hardly accept how long we live now and we constantly get more depressed as we age because we realize more and more that the world is shit and we wish we were young and innocent and simple and guarded from the world by our parents and institutions and stuff. And who the fuck needs to be so wealthy? Why don't we just try and reduce the poverty level a little first, and maybe when we dont have millions of people homeless we can try and increase wages hundreds and thousands of times?
Things don't change unless they need to. That's why we don't have all the shit that was predicted in the past century. Now get over your imaginations and clean the dishes you lazy fucking bastards.
Ok so we have advanced technologically and will continue to do so exponentially. Woo hoo! But what about earth? There is that big @ss hole in the ozone which require people to wear 50SPF sunblock instead of 25 back in the day. Air pollution? Where is all that clean/pure source of energy? Cleaner cars? Global Warming?! I love technology as much as the next person, but I would love to be alive and in good health to experience it, rather than be all screwed up becuase of what we have done to ourselves. Global warming should be taken care of ASAP else these weather anomolies will continue to worsen, such as hurricanes. Why dont you write a book on how to help earth WITH the technology that we can create? Not to just benefit humans.
There will always be some percentage of humans that crave power. We can never get to a state where everyone has everything they need/want because those who have power would have to relinquish it, and that isn't going to happen.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Here is the spoiler: the Sun does become Supernova in the end of book, wiping out everything.
The World is Flat offers a more balanced, more near-term vision of this. Friedman's vision is neither utopian or dystopian. The technologies that Kurzweil discusses aren't for everyone, and won't benefit everyone equally. Yes, technology does permit massive improvements in productivity for many activities, but not all. Those people, companies, and countries that can't (or refuse to) compete globally won't share Kurzweil's utopia. For some, the future may be a race to the bottom, for others it's about enjoying a nice slice of a growing global pie.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How cuckoo is Kurzweill really, when he makes another mint from selling his science fiction to the remaining U.S. population, not yet burning The Origin of Species?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
First, I read something like Olduvai Theory which paints such a dire picture of our civilization, basically proposing that we have collectively "shot our wad", and that we have wasted our one chance at an industrialized society.
Then, Kurzweil paints an equally extreme but opposite view of the world. One is left wondering which to trust more.
I hope Kurzweil is right, but I really worry about a return to the stoneage. I'd make a lousy caveman.
Seems to me that Kurzweil has been reading way too much Peter F Hamilton (specifically Night's Dawn trilogy & Pandora's star). Could someone please reset his OCtatoos?
Peace & Long Life,
MadMan-2
The next step, just a bit short of the singularity, is collapse. The collapse has already begun, btw... it's not years away, it's in progress and becoming more and more obvious month by month. Wars, hurricanes, oil prices market crashes... it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's starting to, and panic will set in shortly.
If and when we recover, eventually we'll make it Kurtzweil's future. But how deep and wide the collapse is going to be we can't know right now.
that these incredible computers will be programmed in Fortran like the supercomputers of today have been for 50 years, or (even worse) run some flavour of Windows, that nuclear fusion will be only 20 years away in the future, that cars will not fly, have a lot of electronic gizmos but an internal combustion engine, and that two thirds of the world population will live on a dirt floor with no access to education, sanitation or medication, and launch wars against the other third for religious reasons. The rich however will be AIDS and cancer free. There will not be any space travel, only very good quality and free videoconferencing and virtual worlds/3d games allowing one to be virtually anywhere in the universe.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
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'.
More's Utopia was a vision of a place where Marxist Socialism actually worked. It had nothing to do with technological progress.
"imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today"
Given the MTV generation, don't we have this already?
imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today
Yay! We've got not one, but two new Slashdot units of measurement. How many nanofootballfields is a head-sized device? How many Libraries of Congress per second can all the human brains alive today process?
After reading it, you'll clearly see that there is a fine line between genius and madness. And I can't say which side of the line he's on.
End transmission.
And Duke Nukem Forever will STILL not be released!
Right, that's the obligatory reference out of the way.
Why stop there, fuck 300. How about we don't have to die. Why wouldn't the same chemical modifications that would allow for a 300 hundred year lifespan continue to work forever?
He uses the M for his SF stuff and drops it for his more mainstream fiction.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Bullshit. Those singularity-thinkers always reduce the advances in computing to a single element: "better", like in "computers have become better all the time, at some point they will overtake us". Actually, they have become "faster", but in terms of "intelligence", computers still are like stupid babies, completely unable to think to themselves. AI research hasn't made any real progress in the past 30 years, and without it, we won't see no singularity anytime soon, since computer's won't become "better towards human standards", only "faster".
...containing my predictions: the rich will become richer, the poor will get even more poor, and the average IQ will remain 100.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
plans were laid out than so that UTOPIAN people would evolve in order to be available to populate the new UTOPIAN world. A UTOPIAN world cannot survive the assult of NON-UTOPIAN people. It doesn't matter how fancy the toilet is if people insist on defecating on the floor.
As far as Kerzweil's prediction I doubt that it will survive the oil shortages, the cusp of which we are NOW riding.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Hmmm, like digital recording technology could be used by people who want to preserve their "intellectual property"? Just wait for the nanotech napsters and emules. When there's a "Mr. Nanoassembler" in every kitchen the concept of wealth itself will be changed to something we cannot understand today.
Why does he assume that it will be used for "good" purposes?
I haven't read Kurtzweil's book, but from TFA it seems that this point is addressed. I suppose that a nanotechnological equivalent of a "firewall" will be created somehow. Perhaps we will have an ultra thin layer that's impervious to any nanomechanism. In the same way that our bodies have immune systems to cope with germs, we will need a system to get rid of rogue nanobots.
Why would anyone want to live to be 300. It's not like your aging gets spanned out across the length, so you will just keep getting older and older and older. You will be old a lot longer than you are young. Why would anyone want this?
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
This sounds similar to some ideas in The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank J. Tipler (a prof. of mathematical physics at Tulane U.), which takes this idea even further into something called the Omega Point theory. While portions of the book are so wildly speculative and optimistic as to sound crackpot-ish, the basic ideas and themes underpinning the discussion are serious and merit further discussion.
As described, this sounds just like the singularity Vinge always writes about. I hope he gets credit. I do think there's some sort of singularity coming, but I'm less sure than Kurzweil that we can predict much of what will be on *this* side of it, let alone on the other side.
BTW, for those who (like me) had always pronounced "Vinge" to rhyme with "hinge", according to Vinge himself it rhymes with "dingy".
I have a feeling the Singularity is never going to be a one specific point in time, rather it will always be a moving target.
As we draw closer to these fantastic new technologies it becomes easier to speculate about them, even the more revolutionary ones. No technological change happens over night.
A hundred years from now people will take GNR and 300 year lifespans for granted, look back to the turn of this century and wonder "whatever became of the Singularity?"
Well, it's what I think will happen anyway. YMMV. Get back to me in 2100 and we'll compare notes.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Uploading yourself into a computer where suddenly all of your thoughts are a few orders faster, your memory is perfect, you can instantly access the collective knowledge of your civilization, and you can meld and perfectly understand anyone who is in a similar state of existance is going to change human nature. Hell, at that point I think it is safe to say that your motives are very likely to be very much inhuman (for better or for worse). I think that is one of the more intersting / scary aspects of singularity. Combine highly modified people and AIs with potentially completely alien intilligence, and you are talking about a very turbulent time.
I read the Age of Spirtual Machines and really enjoyed it. I think his time table might be a little too fast, but I don't think he is too terribly far off mark. The real issue I have with his writting is that he is so optimistic. Not that he has to be a downer, but I wouldn't mind it if he talked a little more about the ways it could all go to hell. It seems like he fully believes this singularity is coming, and he is hoping to hell that it is going to turn out okay. Singularities have a lot of unpleasent dead ends, paying them a little more lip services might not hurt. That said, I take his fatailistic view that if it is coming, it is coming, and there is nothing humanity is willing to do to stop it, so lets hope for the best.
I personally will read this new book of his. I might not agree with everything, but if it is anything like The Age of Spirtual Machines, it will be a fun read.
Nuclear weapons. Anthrax. Acid rain. Constant surveillance. MDMA.
Technology just doesn't magically make life better. It turns out that it's a neutral thing. It's people that make life better or worse.
Singularity now!
He wants his singularity back.
I was asked to review this title for the Winnipeg Free Press.
Link to scanned copy of review.
Did it ever occour to any of these people that we might not ever see a singularity? Perhaps rather then an ever increasing rate of progress, we get like a sigmoid function. Things get better faster and faster, then we hit an inflection point and things get better more slowly and progress finaly halts.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Hunter gatherer societies in Africa only have to work 3-4 hours a day and spend the rest of the day relaxing and socializing. This is an increase in work as resources in Africa were much more plentifull a hundred years ago. If I compare this to the 9-11 hours that I work five days a week and the 10-15 hours that I spend working on my house on the weekends, I'm not too optimistic about a future of leasure. All of this technology is just making us work harder to maintain the status quo of possesing more technology.
thinking exponentially
I wish I could think exponentially...
I only manage logarithmically...
Maybe that's why I'm not a "Futurist"... Does that make me a Pastist?
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
So, whenever the first computer to become sentient decides to judge us, as a whole, so he can communicate that to his machine buddies, how is he gonna do? Download the whole of teh intarbut? OK, check one.
... And Humanity was saved.
Here's what I'm afraid of :
"Running summary...
- They download pornos. Hmm, okay. Laughable.
- They kill each other instead of cooperating? WTF? Don't they understand that... Oh, wait. This is worse.
- SCAT? GURO? GENOCIDES? THE MAD FUCKERS! I'LL SHOW THE FUCKERS ONE GENOCIDE! YOU GUYS AREN'T WORTH THE OXYGEN YOU WASTE!
- Ooh, Nintendogs rom!"
No, really, humor aside. What would you think?
Would sentient machine number one decide :
"Okay, they got litterature, music, and french food. They don't all suck, so maybe I should accept something else than 0 or 1 as an answer."
or
"Fuck them, they produced Britney Spears and Hitler. Ignition."
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.
To me at least, striving for technology to live longer and longer, only for the sake of living longer, is the product of fear--fear of dying to be exact. However, I would welcome any technology that can improve the *quality* of the *experience* of life, and I'll be you anything that increased longetivity would be a side effect, so it's a win-win situation.
My idea of a utopia is one where we're comfortable with our position (not physical, but spiritual position) in the cosmos. Technology can certainly provide a means to that end, but not without a revolution to get that technology out of the hands of industrialists who would retain it for their own profit (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Of course, that technology would have to be pretty darn compelling to justify such a revolution. I wouldn't revolt over anything less than a replicator, a la Star Trek, that could produce food, clothing and shelter out of dirt and air.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
On the one hand, computer technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. Compare what you can get for $500 today with what would have cost $5000 twenty years ago. On the other hand, we're still having loads of trouble making software reliable. There are things that you can do to improve this, yes, but it's certainly not where the money is being poured at the moment. And we're nowhere near making any advances toward "real" AI. We're no closer today than we were in the sixties, except we can solve some brute force problems faster. We're also nowhere near understanding how the brain works. We like to think we have a clue here, but even the best writings on the subject are akin to writings about chemistry from the sixteenth century.
These guys all say similar things. They invent a pile of scenerios which they hope will become true, and place the occurance dates for these miraculous technologies well outside of the realm of the author's lifespan. I don't see how this is any more useful than fictional works produced strictly for their entertainment value.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Even if all the things in the news post come true, why would there not be people who lie, steal, cheat, murder, etc? Things will only get worse IMO as all of the natural selection that has made us such a fine species has gone to the wayside, now we save every cripple and psycho (and politician ;) Whereas 1000 years ago they would have most likely been killed extrememly quickly for their sins, or died from disease and suffering. Our races only hope is genetic refinement as the natural kind is all but gone, and in fact working in reverse, since the worst candidates of people are the ones reproducing faster.
I've read his 'singularity' theory before, and I think it's fundamentally flawed. *Nothing* can uphold an exponential grow-curve, I think this has been established more then once; it's like claiming a perpetuum mobile exists. Well, it doesn't.
Futurologists *always* make the same mistake; they start from the current technologies, and then extrapolate this into the future...which is a sure way to get it completely wrong most of the time. I have given some analysis and criticism (see Gazing the Future) of this typical 'futurology'-tendency before.
Sure, for obvious technologies and the near future, extrapolation can and does work, and is quite often pretty good at it. But, truth be told; it's not what is known today that really changes the future, it's those things that *are not known*. If you go back and look at futurologists of the 60ies making predictions of how the world will look today, then you'll notice they have been over-optimistic in many area's, and most notable, they *COMPLETELY* missed those technologies that really had the most (or most widely applied) influence on modern society. Oh yes, you will see space-tourism...but todays space-tourism of millionaires paying 20 million wasn't the picture they presented. And they 'predicted' many things, which did - at least to some (mostly minor) degree - get developed today. But...where in all those predictions do you find the PC, the cellurar phone, the Internet, etc? Back in the 60ies, no one could even *imagine* such things, and in fact, no futurologist ever can, and that's why they always suck at predicting how the technology, let alone the future will look, or what will happen.
As for this 'singularity'; ah well, we've been hearing the 'longelivity' mantra for decennia, if not longer, and I suspect the '300+' age will still be hundreds of years away past his 'singularity' point. If that point will ever happen, because, apart from unforseen events (a metorite could strike and the human race could be wiped out tommorow, after all), it is inhertently impossible to keep expanding at an exponantial rate, because, even if there isn't another dark-age period (something he conveniently leaves out in his theory of always expanding knowledge, but, in fact, if his proclaimed continuous increase would have hold true from the roman times on, we would be *way* ahead of where we are today - how does this fit his hypothesis?), it sooner or later would still crawl to a more moderate rate, because of sociological, economical and other problems. The most aparent thing to happen, for instance, is a lack of sufficient energy (technology needs energy, after all). We already have an increasing problem with having enough energy to sustain our western civilisation today, after all, and this will only augment; our craving for energy always gets worse, but the energy production isn't following. And sure, we'll find some solutions, like fusion-reactors, eventually; but the increase of energy will never be exponential, and thus, neither will technology on itself, or our scientific and technological progress as a whole.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Dont worry, the capitalist system of intellectual property is trying as hard as it can to legislate and litigate around this potential.
Capitalism has been errected upon efficiencies of industry, not around innovation. And most dangerously, its legislated protection on high for itself. The singularity will be built around rouge elements [F/OSS] doing projects in their basement, around remixed and re-remixed and re-re-remixed technologies that build massive network externalities. The singularity is the rapid cascade of disruptive technologies that rebuilds the entire technological platform we've built underfoot, a complete architectural revamp that encompasses the loosely coupled distributed nature of information and processes.
By its very definition, the technologies which drive the singularity will be so flexible that they will cause clash after clash with existing IP, simply because these new technologies are so malleable, so capable of outperforming the existing although still infringing. The revolution will be litigated-- but the corporations will loose. IP is not a sustainable edge.
As always, http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html">Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations.
it ignores human nature. The moment people start to enjoy the singularity, there will be a hue and cry from that class of people that like to tell other people what to do and how to live. Laws will be enacted and the singularity will be canceled.
Our lives are spent going to work, to earn a salary(and hopefully enjoy it). Eventually we will have these super neat technologies to assist our work, and then slowly replace us. How does a society transition smoothly from a working society to a leasure society?
Some people will be out of work entirely...some because they can afford to not work anymore...but many others because there simply won't be any more work. There is no such thing as 'earning a living' anymore.
This will create what is essentially a communal or socialist utopia...but these things don't happen overnight. Who will govern the facilitate this change? There is no such intellect or governing body capable of this transition in the world today...or even in your imagination.
Really, millions of people not working...and not earning money...all with a moderately reduced urge to protect property because it is now so 'cheap' and easily replaced.
I see the transition to this as failing, and flooding into a bloody war of the haves against the have-nots...and also all the have-nots against other have-nots.
This would become a global civil war, and eventually people will die. Specific technologies will be destroyed (factories and producers of these super nano builders, etc. etc.). How does this utopian vision come about? Do we test it on a first come first serve basis in a model community somewhere in Ohio or Madagascar? I don't forsee this happening and actually succeeding because just outside the borders there will be have-nots that are jealous and angry.
I don't think humanity can muster enough compassion and love to make this utopian dream come true.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Did he take into account that no matter what the technological advancements may be, the vast majority of people will sit on their fat arses in front of a big TV and whine about:
- how they are bored by the latest sitcom/sureality/game show?
- how the latest round of full-immersion, virtual reality video games only differ from last weeks releases by a few interface ehancements and a couple pieces of eye-candy?
- how the big box retailers are pushing the small stores out of the market, and it's nearly impossible to build anything from scratch without ordering everything through the mail?
Did he consider that a large portion of that majority will simply sit on their arses and demand a larger welfare check, whining that there are no jobs to be had since the nanobots automated all industry?
If these issues aren't considered, then his views are as worthless as Disney's "World of Tomorrow".
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
While I respect Mr. K's optimism and I do think there are interesting things ahead, it seems there is much evidence today that certain things that are f'd up will stay that way. What use is eternal life and supercomputing and nanotech when we can't even make use of the technology we have today to help solve hunger and disease and instead use it to kill people, abuse the natural world, deepen social divides, etc, etc, etc.
If you think I'm being pessimistic, take a trip to the non-tourist areas of India sometime. Then come back and tell me technology will save us. And India already is a utopia compared to some of the places on this planet right now.
Sure, tech will help out the top 10% (like me) live their already easy lives even easier. It'll give me more time to complain about heady issues like copyright extention and promote the legalization of marijuana (which I do). But it isn't going to deliver a utopia to the planet earth. There will always be a huge segement of this planet that is born to suffering. And most of the suffering is brought on by the selfish actions of man. Giving man more power isn't going to help that.
Cheers.
Gabby Johnson: [shouting] The singularity's a n[GONG!]
[the last word is lost in the peal of a church bell]
Harriett Van Johnson: What did he say?
Dr. Sam Johnson: He said the singularity is near.
Matt
(nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt)
Please, no one tell the RIAA!
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Yep, seems like many techies and scientists,much like economists and bankers are either in denial of this or naively think the markets or technology will somehow naturally put forth a simple (in terms of no global insstability and a no energy crisis) solution.
Here's the abstract:
more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today Do we even know how much "computing power" the human brain actually has? Given our narrow understanding of autistic savants and synaesthesia, the answer would seem to be a resounding "no." We might one day discover that our brains are the only computers we could ever need.
A sentient robot I might build is as much my offspring as a human child I might father.
It's amazing how few people, especially women, get that. No, Ms. Soccer Mom, you are not 'special' because you managed to reproduce sexually. You want a cookie for doing something most protozoa can pull off?
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?
With peak-oil, fusion **STILL** 20 years in the future and croporate governments that foster unprecedented social inequity, that Kurzweil guy has to be on crack to see anything positive in the future.
"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'"
Yeah sure , and Porcine Airlines will be launching the very same day.
What people like him forget is that no amount of technology or wealth can
change basic human nature. No doubt he thinks that someone pampered with
everything they could ever want and don't have to work would be completely
content and live in a blissful state for their entire lives. Yeah , that would
be why poor little rich saudi boy Osama Bin Laden had 3000 people killed on 9/11. Imagining that pure wealth and a comfortable lifestyle is all any
human being wants is naive in the extreme.
I don't know, man. Looks like he pretty much nailed that one.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Googling on the quoted phrases "Utterly Dismal Theorem" or "Homo Contracipiens" raises the issue, in game-theory-speak, of "Adverse Selection"
There seems to be a huge elephant in the closet concerning life expectancy, that no-one ever talks about. Namely, that life expectancy refers to the average lifespan in a population, not the maximum life span of an individual. Big difference.
Arguably, the main reason that life expectancy is increasing, is not that people are living longer, but that less people are dying young.
Consider a group where half the population die as infants, but the ones that survive live to be 100. The average life expectancy of the group is 50 years. Now imagine that ways are found to prevent the infant deaths of that half of the population: the average life expectancy has now gone up to 100 years. But, and this is the important bit: at no point does this imply that people were living longer than 100 years. The maximum life span never increased at all.
This seems to be the case in most western populations. Life expectancy isn't going up because people are starting to 120, it's going up because infant mortality is coming down.
The point of all this is that its debateable whether people are living much longer at all, regardless of what the life expectancy figures say.
Sure, we may be able to add a few years by the application of technology such as pacemakers, surgery, and better diet, and it may even be the case that technology will eventually be able to cure most of the things that cause us to die today (apart from accidents, obviously), but this is in no way implied by rising life expectancy figures.
*yodeling with flashlight shining up underneath chin* IN THE YEEEEEAR TWO THOOOOUSAAAND...
...just another book salesman passing through.
If you people would RTFB, you'd discover that the Singularity has a history of intellectual discussion going back around two decades. The treatments in science fiction are a part of that, but just reading the SF isn't going to get you much (any more than reading SF will teach you physics, or math, though it might serve to get you interested).
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://singinst.org/what-singularity.html
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/
And let's not forget:
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Sin gularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity
The first person to use the term "Singularity" as applied to futurism was John von Neumann, and he used it to mean a disruptive change in the future brought about by a high level of technology.
The first person to postulate that recursive self-improvement in Artificial Intelligence would rapidly produce "ultraintelligent machines" was the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good. Today this is known as the "hard takeoff" scenario.
The first person to popularize the term "Singularity", referring to the breakdown in our model of the future which occurs subsequent to the (technological) creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, was the mathematician (and sometime SF author, and inventor of cyberspace) Vernor Vinge.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" belongs to the accelerating change crowd that includes John Smart. Their thesis is, first, that history shows a trend for major transitions to happen in shorter and shorter times, and second, that you can graph this on log charts, get reasonably straight lines, and extend the lines to produce useful quantitative predictions. I agree with the qualitative thesis but not the quantitative thesis.
In my opinion, Kurzweil could greatly strengthen many of his arguments by giving up on the attempt to predict when these things will occur, and just saying: "They will happen eventually." I think that it is just as important, and a great deal more probable, to say: "Eventually we will be able to create Artificial Intelligence surpassing human intelligence, and then XYZ will happen, so we better get ABC done first." Than to say: "And this will all happen on October 15th, 2022, between 7 and 7:30 in the morning."
Since I don't care particularly about when someone builds a smarter-than-human intelligence, just what happens after that, and what we need to get done before; and since I don't think that this necessarily needs to make life incomprehensible, so long as we do things right; I belong to the I.J. Good "hard takeoff" crowd. With a strong helping of Vernor Vinge, because I think there's a difference in kind associated with a future that contains mind smarter than human, which we do not get just from talking about flying cars, or space travel, or even nanotechnology.
On Slashdot, someone says "intelligence" and you think of all the computer CEOs with IQs of 120 and the starving professors with IQs of 160, and you think that means intelligence isn't important. But you will not find many excellent CEOs, nor professors, nor soldiers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor rationalists, nor scientists, who are chimpanzees. Intelligence is the foundation of human power, the strength that fuels our other arts. Respect it. When someone talks about enhancing human intelligence or building smarter-than-human AI, pay attention. That is what matters to the future, not political yammering, not our little nation-tribes. In 200 million years nobody's going to give a damn who flew the first flying car or
Planetary death rate: 150,000 lives per day. End the slaughter
ITYCR - Is that you Carl Rove?
This is noting more than a book ad with a right wing political spin. Any suggestions for slashdot - like relacement that hasen't been borged?
Pessimism sells better. Look at all the copies of "The Great Depression of 1990" that Ravi Batra sold. Look at how many copies of "The State of The Earth" that have been sold compared to "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
and I want my free drugsa now!
Best Slashdot Co
Technological Singularity has really got to mean artificial intelligence.
Vernor Vinge has brought you the Meme of the Singularity.
Mentifex (Latin for Mindmaker) has brought you the Mind of the Singularity.
The Mind of the Singularity is here but in a very primitive state.
When will the Singularity happen? This is a much discussed topic.
The A.I. Zone is where you may discuss and witness the Singularity in situ.
Yes we call all dismiss Ray Kurzweil as a chuckoo, clown, lunatic or what you would like to call his. But the true thing is that processing power is accelerating, it have been in an exponential slope ever since the transistor was invented.
So basicly there are three outcomes:
1. processing power contiunes to accelerate in an exponential slope, sooner or later leading to a point in time where the slope gone vertical, INFINITE COMPUTING POWER
2. processing power stops increasing exponentical and enters an linear slope, the death of Moores Law.
3. processing power hits the brickwall, a point is reached at which processors can not get faster.
I dont see point 1 as something impossible. Today we have dual core processors, tomorrow we will have quad-core processors, why not a million cores? a billion cores? imagine a processor with 1 trillion cores.. and on and on..
In grade school, a book published in the 60's that covered all the wonderful advancements arriving soon. Flying cars et. al.
I wonder if this book will end up in a grade school library in 20 years for the kids to laugh at.
I don't have this latest book by Kruzweil, but I've found him to be especially naive when it comes to politics. He seems to think that the present system of distributive justice will more or less survive intact into the post-singularity age o' plenty. There will still be money, "companies", etc. Surely, the companies themselves will strive to maintain this arrangement, creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual scarcity (and as AI engines take over most manufacturing, agriculture and much of engineering, natural scarcities will be hard to find). It seems pretty clear that this system of artificial scarcity will not be stable long after the first murmors of the singularity transition. That will have profound consequences Krutzweil is too scared or shallow to deal with. The entire system of capitalism and all the institutions connected with it (like money) require scarcity in order to operate. But the world won't long put up with artificially-induced scarcity. For one thing, it's clearly immoral.
The result will be a profound social change, an end of a "goods" market (and of most services too, like cooking, cleaning, etc.), and this will look eerily like the revolution predicted by Marx. Whether the outcome will be a stateless anarchy like Marx expectedf is hard to guess. Somehow I doubt it, though I do expect that the decline of the importance of nationhood will continue, exponentially. (Communities of interest, sometimes ugly interests, will probably replace them.)
It's good for Kruzweil to think about how people with malicious intentions will interact with the new system, and what the rest of us will be prepared to do in response. These thoughts are a bit chilling. Because he fails to factor in the huge and inevitable political changes, I can imagine his speculations on this will not be terribly useful.
They can prevent utopia, as they control everything.
When your star-trek matter and food replicators get invented, are the rich going to let us have one? Hell no; their "intellectual peoperty rights" will prevent you from replicating your own Caddilac or wooden leg.
The rich are such that they would have us back in the dark ages provided they could be king.
When everyone is rich nobody will be rich, and the rich will never let it happen.
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
So, what would terrorists with these new technologies be capable of doing? That alone is enough to send shivers down anyones spine, especially developed nations. It's bad enough that they can take over aircrafts, bomb markets, schools, job centres, and kidnap and kill children in a school. What would they do with nanoassemblers? That thought is very very scary indeed.
But on the bright side, what capabilities will anti-terrorist forces have against them too? Maybe it will be a fine balance?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
the only question I have is ... will I live to see it. At least, that 300 year lifespan thing. None of the essential coolness he describes will mean squat to me if I'm already dead. So, I expect all of you technological (and especially biomedical) innovators out there to get cracking and make sure that by the time I'm ready to check out there will appropriate (and cost effective) rejuvenation treatments available. So come on, get your collective asses in gear ... time's awastin'.
You don't want to live forever do you? (rhetorical question)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I predict that we'll get wiped out by a collapsed supernova before we achive "utopia".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
"Like the US, you mean?"
Yes, to an extent. But head over to nationmaster.com and see where Russia and the US lay on the graphs. They have more in common on the spaceship side of things than on the murder and gangsterism area. People bag on the US's weak areas, but they are only doing poorly relative to the best countries, they are orders of magnitudes better compared to the worst performers.
As far as food and vaccines go, it is only a workable civil society that can deliver those things. Otherwise you have Somolia.
For instance, imagine that we could build huminoid robots that would be powerful and cheap enough to provide for all human needs (by farming, distributing food, manufacturing, etc) while maintaining their own self sufficiency . If this were the case, society could be organized such that everyone's needs would be met with little work required of actual humans. We could spend our time doing exactly what we found interesting or exciting instead of being wage slaves. The question is, "if technology progesses to this point, would we actually have that kind of society?" and the answer is "Not if current trends continue". Each new type of automation almost always results in lost jobs. Each step towards the completely robotic work force will most likely continue in this trend, until society has been completely divided into two groups of people; a tiny group that owns everything, and everyone else. It's hard to imagine any other transition under the current system. The technology might be available in the next 50 to 100 years. We should be planning for it right now.
I'm not sure if we'll be able to pinpoint when a Singularity occured, if one ever does.
I got news for you. The singularity already happened, eons ago, and the universe is the result. If and when our puny mini-singularity happens, it will be crushed like like a toy. You've been warned.
"OH yeah - computer viruses can infect your ENTIRE network just by looking at an infected picture. Hackers will be on the loose, using people's computers as weapons to hack into government computers, steal credit card numbers, and commit major frauds (this thanks to the greatest computer monopoly in all time, one single company selling you word processors, spreadsheets, and operating system).
Meanwhile, big corporations and the government are starting big-brother like campaigns to spy on people and only let them only transfer information that do not threaten 'national security'. Why would companies cooperate with this? Money! They want to keep control over what music you get, and whom you get it from.
Want encryption? Forget it, they can force you to give away the encryption password, or you'll be labelled as a terrorist. Speaking of terrorists, companies' networks can be hijacked by hacker masterminds, who begin asking for money so that your network can have access to the world. Ironically, the U.S. wants to keep control over the global network, using their military and economical power to disuade other countries."
_NOW_ it sounds sci-fi. w00t, the future is here!
They have -> I have
Expensive Sports Car -> Car that is often behind tow truck
$3000 Cell Phone -> Damn, it broke again!
Jet Plane -> Plane? I can barely afford a ticket!
Mansion -> Smallish house in "gunshot alley"
Ming Vase -> A vase I bought at Dollar General
And I earn more than a lot of people I know!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
ok, let me break it down like this -
300 year life expectancy? what in gods name? do you KNOW how long this is? most people dont even like working till they are 65. that is a looooong time. I know that I do not want to live that long.
In terms of medicine and such, I would say we have gone totally backwards in the USA. people think that medicine is getting better, and smart, but its getting much worse. more people are taking more medication, and the average number of prescriptions has gone way up per person.
My step dad always said in the 60s, people thought the 90s would be like the jetsons. and, were arent even close. and he still says in 20-30 years we will be living like the jetsons. nope. sorry. try again.
I must admit, technology has been coming along way, but! I think that we will destroy ourselves politically/religiously or what ever dumbass reason our politicians have to war monger about. Technology is evolving, not the people in charge, and most of the people of the population.
last but not least, all of you fatasses in the usa. you will all die of heart attacks before any of this happens.
I don't root for it but stupidity and incompetence seem to be the ultimate victors in history much of the time. At the rate we're going humainity will self-immolate by the end of the century in a theocratic war. Our great technologies will simply speed the process.
This sounds a lot like the "true artificial intelligence is 20 years away" stuff of the 1960s.
The next 20 years, in the reality I live in, will be marked by an energy crisis where industrial civilizations will struggle just to maintain the current level of technology, never mind advance significantly.
I suggest reading up on "peak oil" if you want to prepare yourself for what's to come.
You people who say things are getting worse don't know history. Things are getting better all the time.
For example, these days a beating is not part of the arrest process. Sure, you can point out an instance of police brutality here and there but back in the 50's brutality was a widely accepted practice.
What good is a right to privacy when detective Klancy is hitting your head so hard your ears ring?
The author of the WSJ article, Glenn Reynolds, also conducted an interview with him by email. It can be found on Instapundit.com
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
As this story was popping up, Ray Kurzweil and Jaron Lanier (the other Thinker on Our Worlde) were live on NPR... and i was furiously trying to get iTunes switched to another stream before my head exploded.
I am pretty sure "singularity" refers to that moment in time at which real science can't get a word in edgewise or otherwise, because the masturbatory quasi-scientific happy talkers, like Jaron Lanier (he coined a phrase once) and Ray Kurzweil, will be singularly occupying all available broadcast and electronic media with their tecnorati-pleasing babble.
The singularity is indeed rapidly approaching. Snif.
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 joke is that "kurzweilig" in German means "not boring", as opposed to "langweilig", "boring". Hey, you guys think he's heard that one before?)
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.
Energy and land to generate such energy. Even with 99.9 efficiency in converting solar energy, plus whatever is left of our fossil fuels, plus our semi-renewable energy sources (methanol, ethanol, biodiesel and decomposition gases... all of which need large terrains and a lot of energy to bootstrap), we probably would have to keep our population in a more sane level than it is today to be really viable.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Sorry about the spelling. I'll get it right the next time I post the very same joke ...
We'll all be dead in the future. The human race will be a mere blip in the history of the universe.
Which brings up the point, do you really WANT to live 300 years? We already tend to go downhill after our 20's, and each ecade after is compounded by more health problems. Now some people will claim that uber-nano technology, and some franken-science will keep us in great shape, but simply put; every part in our body wears out with time.
And every part of your body is subject to repair. It's all just matter in a pattern: When a particular piece of it deviates - breaks, accumulates junk, accumulates geneic error, etc. - remove/fix/replace it.
Yes, just avoiding death in a progressively more decrepit body is not all that attractive a prospect for many. But it seems to me that the most likely way to achieve extended life span is to eliminate the degeneration and reverse it when it has happened, rather than just to stave off total collapse.
A decade or so ago some people in the Cryonics movement ran stats on how long lifespan could be expected to last if aging and disease were eliminated and repair after accidents. If I recall it correctly, they assumed:
- vigor and accident rates approximating those of late teens,
- deaths only from accidents that were fatal with the tech of the time, followed by total repair if the victim survived. The number came out to something like an expected median lifespan of 850 years.
Of course the assumptions were deliberately conservative: The accident rate of teens is notoriously high due to attitude and inexperience (especially with driving), and at least skills would be gained with time. And medical tech has made astounding advances in keeping traumatized people alive since then.
Now I, for one, would welcome a millineum or more of life in prime condition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All this sounds very utopian until you start thinking about how all this technology can, and will, be abused.
E-Mail was great until the spammers and phishers started using it.
After that, think about the unintended side effects.
The automobile was great until we started having car crashes and pollution problems.
Everything can be used for good or for ill. The time to think about minimizing the down side of a technology is at the time the technology is being developed, rather than waiting until it is widely deployed.
Just my .02
You know, I've seen more products coming into reality from sci-fi than from futurologists.
Gimme my flying cars dammmit!
Scifi authors of 20-50 years ago put us already having flying cars, exploring other solar systems or even going out of our galaxy. Risking lifes, expending really huge amounts of money and probably missing technological pieces of the puzzle make that to be still to be 20-50 years from now for Scifi authors in our future, and who knows when that will happens if happens at all.
Internet was another potential technology that could gived us exponential change. Worldwide instant communication, colaboration in investigation from far places, everyone can give his own grain of salt, etc. The revolution that something like that should have gived us (according to futurists/scifi authors/whatever from 30-40 years ago) have nothing to do with where we are now (it IS a big change still). Here economy (everyone everywhere could be connected to internet with the existing technology, but is too expensive to reach that), social forces (either by economic reasons, or for the security matters that implies everyone in, etc), politics and a lot more has lowered a lot what could be reached with the potential that had the internet concept.
Also what happens in the "real world" affects a lot how a technology grows or not. War, terrorism, climate changes, market crashes, etc, slow down or change the directions where the technologic trends are going.
So leaving aside technologically reached "singularities", the remaining ones are the almost metaphisical ones ("trascending" in a way or another, a superintelligent AI, alien visitors, whatever) that is more matter of faith than something that we know could be real (you know, like finding the black cat in the dark room that could not be there)
If I had a hat that had that much power it wouldn't make me smart. Like the kids today who can't do division by hand because they were allowed to use calculators in class, I would become a gullible moron who believed whatever the magic hat told me was true. There are all ready too many people today who act this way when told something by the magic box, i.e. 'We aren't going to war to control oil, we're preventing a madman from using WMD's that he has been illegally stockpiling. Pictures at 11.' My prediction on the singularity: The rich get richer and the stupid get stupider.
Now I don't think a single innovation is going to appear already able to solve all the worlds problems, so what will happen as productivity increase gradually to that point when most people don't really contribute real productivity? Look around. Are we all destined to be middle managers in pointless meetings all day? If 10 percent of the people can serve the needs of all, what are the other 90 percent going to do? Either the economy collapses, or there must be a lot of Dilbert-type stuff going on along the way to keep people busy. I think the singularity came and went and nobody noticed.
The natural order of life (and therefore society) is conflict and change. This is the basis of most scientific understanding. including evolution, as well as the basis for the structure of the U.S. government.
In general technological advancement does not direct our development as a society, it facilitates it...your television will let you watch TV for as long and as often as you like, regardless of the good or harm to you or society. Technology does not make life better, it just makes it *more*--we can do more, whether it's good for us or not.
As with today's technology, I expect that future advancements will increase the number and intensity of instances of societal conflict, rather than resolving them. I believe the current uptick in terrorism is permanent rather than temporary--the natural outcome of technologies that confer greater destructive powers on the individual. Wanting to hurt other people is not new...the only new aspects to it are the ease and scope of what a single person or small group is capable of learning about and what they are capable of doing to others.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
How about none? Isn't space trave still the domain of large nations, one group of "Nation-states" (ESA) and Burt Rutan?
Why does
I've heard this man speak recently and what I heard was simply another member of the Jewish Mafia (who think they run the earth).
This old-foolish-man's lack of putting God into the equation shows just how stupid he really is.
For instance, like Bill Gates JUNIOR, he never mentions how we (The People) are supposed to wrestle the power away from the hand full of scum bags who are attempting to control the whole earth.
Even if some of his 'great' predictions come true, it will do the average human absolutely no good, because the same powers that be today, will simply use these new technologies to enslave us even further. :(
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
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.
...I bet the simpsons will still be playing
"No, dag nabbitt!!! I said the Singularity is a Ni***BONG****"
Ah... Thank you Mel Brooks. Your jokes will never get old.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I thought engineers could evaluate efficiency and do cost vs benefit analysis.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
My friend bought a 3BR, 2BA, 2000 ft^2 single-family house in Hyattsville, MD, wood floors, Corian counters, new appliances, flawless condition, for under $400K. He works in central DC, commute is about 30 minutes by Metro.
So, I'm sorry: I call BS. Either you have an agenda and are lying, or you are not looking in the right places. Which is it? You can access the CLS for free if you just don't know what you should be paying for a house.
[ home ]
... Soylent Green is people.
But apart from that, everything is fantastic!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
> imagine more computing power in a head-sized device
> than exists in all the human brains alive today
Imagine the steps getting there -- computing power in head sized devices that is as smart as everyone alive today, therefore multiplying the odds of screwing up the world by being as smart as everyone alive today has been.
I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side.
And the computers don't have that deeply ingrained _need_ to breathe, drink clean water, walk in the woods.
Why should they care, even if they do get smart?
Battles would be unnecessarily bloodier. And you think this was a good thing? Are you aware of how many people Cromwell needlessly tortured?
Check out some of old Tommy's quotes with regards to the native Americans. He was an extremist racist. He favored extermination. Nice guy, eh?
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.
Where would we be if humans were satisfied with the here and now?
I'm curious on your "living" it up statement: would you prefer the old age of Brave New World? One day, you're feeling as fit and wild as you have since your twenties, the next your body goes into some kind of cascade failure, and a few days later you die before even coming to grips with the fact that you're on the way out. I don't know if dying is better with preparation or without. (I'd prefer not to try it either way, really.)
You make a valid point on the generational issue, and we haven't even started on the overpopulation problems such a future would face.
On the other hand... can someone who lives 300+ years afford to ignore global warming? Would someone who will live to see the effects of running out of easily obtainable fossil fuels ignore renewable resources? How long can someone live in denial?
(This is just *begging* for a string of witty retorts.)
... humanity has rarely (see also: never) embraced change. There is no point of exponential explosion.
...?
;)
In fact, I thought I remembered reading something about the rate of development slowing down?
===
Given humankind's history, doesn't it seem more likely that nanotechnology and other future concepts will be used to control the "fellow man"
If we don't kill ourselves first.
Call it FUD... I'm no misanthrope... just an educated cynic.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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.
Does technology lead to happiness? When the atom was split, the first thought was how to use it as a bomb. Even the use of it as energy seems to be run by shady characters (note Karen Silkwood and Kerr-McGee). Or take the invention of the motion picture camera, one of the first blockbuster movies was Birth of a Nation, followed 20 years later by another blockbuster in Europe - Triumph of the Will.
I can't imagine anyone a day after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and the subsequent nuke build-up, to where people thought the world might end during the Cuban missile crisis) thinking technology led to progress and happiness. It should have been apparent to people after World War I (a war which there was massive resistance to in Europe among Italian troops, French troops, German troops and Russian troops, to the point where Russian troops mutinied and overthew their government). It seems to me that technology often makes social problems more difficult to solve. What really matters is the social context. Would you want Nazi Germany to be making advanced technological discoveries in genetics, physics and whatnot?
I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic about the future, although I would guess it will be a rough road ahead. It seems to me most positive change comes from people organizing together to make things better, be it to kick the British out of the colonies, or to try to change the status of African-Americans from slaves to people with equal opportunity, or do away with child labor (in advanced industrial countries anyhow). Technology did not fix these things, people organizing together to make things better did. Technology often made things worse - textile industrialization helped made child labor a Dickensian horror, just like the cotton gin helped create an even larger slave system. I do not see GE solving the world's problems, GE often is the source of the world's problems, at least they are local to me where their factory has polluted everything.
A problem with extended life spans is it makes people more risk-averse. You think its bad now with kids wearing goggles and helmets to play miniature golf? When we've got 300 years to lose we'll all be walking around in kevlar suits driving Freightliners to go next door. No more skiing, cycling or frisbee-- who'd want a bad knee for the next 250 years?
Check out the risk-taking in nations that have low life-expectancy. If you're 40, and not going to live past 50, you don't waste the time you have stopping at red lights.
informative, insightful
"Battles would be unnecessarily bloodier. And you think this was a good thing? Are you aware of how many people Cromwell needlessly tortured?"
So? He was a brilliant military commander who created the New Model Army, toppled a king, and layed the foundations for the success of the Royal Navy and the eventual British Empire. Do you know how many people Washington had hanged and shot for not retaining discipline during the American Revolutionary War? How about the thousands of Japanese killed by the atomic bombs the United States dropped at the end of WWII? The point is, Cromwell was a genius at military command so I stand by my original statement.
I'm sure if you went back to the Roman Era, you could find a bunch of Celts who would object to any bestowing of titles to Caesar as well on humanitarian grounds. That doesn't change the fact that he was a military genius as well.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
The average person will have a 5000 sq ft home, a self-driven car thats nicer than our nicest limos today, a jucuzzi, televisions anywhere/everywhere, instant commication with everyone they love/know, and all the porn and violence they could ever want. The poor will have 3500 sq ft homes, a nice self-driven car, televisions everywhere, instant commication with everyone they know/love and all the porn a violence that could ever want, but they're complain about how horrible their lives are and how sucky they are because they dont have what the average person has. And, as now, they wont be willing to put any effort, energy or risk into getting it. In other words, not much will change.
Imagine getting laid with your new 120-year old girlfriend.
You can be lucky to have this young lady!
I doubt we'll see anything in the near future but that doesn't mean that NASA and other private companies aren't working on it. NASA is developing something called "Highway in the Sky" which is allegedly going to allow people to drive their automated flying cars through the sky - safely.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Utopia.
The problem is we as a society won't get fired if I push back I will. Externalities suck. In theory I suppose unionizing might be a solution but a. it will never happen, and b. I doubt it would work anyway because for the most part, unions have become an ineffective, inefficent societal tool anyway. But one thing that does seem to be helping--at least here in Wisconsin, self-employment is at an all-time high. More and more people are starting their own businesses every day, choosing to deal with the headaches of being their own boss over those that come with working for someone else. The state has realized this & there are more resources available than ever--not just money, but more importantly educational resources & advisors. If the problems with the healthcare system ever get figured out (like a single payer or something) things will really change. As is, most of us make it work by having a spouse who works for a big company.
You're not a victim of the march of technology, you're not even a victim of your boss (remember, you agreed to take the job). You're just a victim of rampant materialism.
I gotta disagree with that wholeheartedly. Nobody's a victim of rampant materialism, they willingly choose it. I just have no sympathy whatsoever for people who structure their lives around getting more, cooler stuff than their neighbors. I do however feel bad for their kids who don't know any better.
Vote Quimby.
Kevin Drum responded to this about a week ago.
PZ Meyers also has a pretty good response:
Was just thinking, and I dont think many people have realized that even though they are rich by today's standards, would it be so in the future? Would money even have value or would it all be obselete collectors items?
"imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today"
... watching every step you take.
No, it isn't. It's not like no one knew how to produce food. But without ready-made crops (did you know that the original wild corncobs were about the size of your thumb? Makes for a rather meager Thanksgiving), it's not a huge improvement over hunting and gathering. (Not to mention that some places, like the Americas, didn't have domesticated animals, so agriculture relied on large masses of slaves instead of serfs and animals, and the wheel never took off, because you still had to pull the cart yourself.)
Now, after a few hundred years of selection and breeding, crops got better, and farming really took off. But it wasn't an obvious choice from the get-go---which is why it took so damn long to "catch on", as you say.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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. Also consider that a denizen of the twentieth century was less likely to die a violent death (yes, counting two World Wars, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like) than their predecessors, as far as we can tell. We're more likely to die old and expensive in bed than our ancestors were.
Things are better than they ever have been. Trouble is, they still kinda suck in a lot of places.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...at implementing. His AI is garbarge. Quite literally it is as poor as the Alice 'AI' project. A giant switch and wildcard statement. He rides on the coattails of real thinkers. Yes, I dislike him, precisely for the reasons above. Tons of PR, lots of press releases, ZERO substance. Of course, I'm all for a new an improved future; however, people will still be around to mess it up. ;)
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To quote the movie "Serenity":
Mal: Define "Interesting"
Walsh: "Oh God Oh God, we're going to die."
Really, really, I mean really incedibly stoned.
The Singularity is incalculably dangerous. It is dangerous even when compared to nuclear weapons. It's also inescapable. And it's close...meaning many here are likely to experience it. (Note that I did not say live through it...it's that dangerous.)
That Mr. Kurtzweil concentrates on the plausible beneficial aspects of the Singularity shouldn't blind us to the fact that it will be unpredictable. For other (fictional) optomistic treatments see the works of Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross (esp. Singularity Sky & it's sequel, The Iron Sunrise).
Nobody writes about the plausible negative modes of hitting the Singularity because nobody lives through them.
Then there are the modes which are neither good nor bad, but merely incomprehensible. These are probably the most plausible group of scenarios... but BECAUSE they are incomprehensible, nobody can write about them.
This is an important book, because it assembles a large collection of studies that give reasons to believe that the Singularity is approaching, and even to put bounds on when it will become likely. E.g., it's unlikely to occur before 2015, it's quite likely to have occurred by 2030, and it's unlikely to be delayed beyond 2050 unless there is some large catastrophe. Simple summaries, however, do not do justice to the work. This is a large collection of studies documenting why those projections appear convincing, why they are more than simple assertions that need have no credence. This isn't a proof, as one can't do a proof about this kind of projection, but it's a highly plausible belief, and the modes of avoiding the event seem to be even less desireable than the event itself.
OTOH, I'm less than 3/4 of the way through. Perhaps there will be some weakness shown in the arguments that he presents beyond his excessively optomistic view of the results.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think we are hitting the singularity right now, our ability to forecast is breaking down, as demonstrated by enron, worldcom...
What's the point of 300 years life? It simply violates the natural rule. We as human being is the part of natural world and hence has to follow the natural law unless we think are not part of it which means we are finishing ourselves very soon. Nobody can conquer the natural though one can "win" in a period of time. Natural has its own way (or Tao) to keep balance. It's matter of time to pay back if you break it. Look at it, we enjoy our high tech life which is actually consuming our children's resource. I really doubt human will have another 1000 years life if we don't change our life style. Maybe it's the natural law of terminating ourselves since human being is too intrusive to natural world.
Utopia is a situation where everyone has full freedom of choice and people don't die instantly upon contact with the atmosphere.
First, I have always wondered how people are measuring what the human brain is capable of. It seems to me that the brain is an analog device, with each neuron cantaining a ridiculous number of chemicals that regulate its activity. In addition, there is a holistic method to how the neurons interact, meaning there is no simple way to measure the number of interconnects that a neuron has.
That said, how can it be compared to a deterministic, digital construct? I mean, if I have a simple radio, with an analog frequency shifter, how many frequencies can I listen on? It would be based on how fine an adjustment I could make to the dial. Chaos theory tells us that the little bit of difference at the least significant bits will eventually become significant. Also, since we have no real idea why people are "intelligent", how are we going to duplicate it in an A.I. or rate a computer against an unknown standard? I think it is far more likely we will come up with neural links first, but I doubt we will come up with that any time soon.
Another issue I have is with the "grey goo" scenario. First, if there are so many of these things, how do they not break when 50 more pile on top of them? Even if they don't break, how are they going to move to assemble another nanobot? Even if they could, how are they going to prevent tearing other nanobots apart for new parts? There doesn't seem to be a lot of space in a nanobot for memory or error checking. How about we stop the grey goo with some good old electric fields? Just enough to fry their small few molecules wide bodies. Maybe we could do the same with a magnetic field depending on their base materials.
With regards to nanobots being able to create anything we need, I feel that it is already possible. I call these little factories "cells" and have noticed they exist in many different places in nature already. What is the catch here? It takes a lot of time and energy to produce these conversions. This is why cows, which make milk, require food. So we will also need nanobots which create an energy source that can be utilized by these "cells". I call this energy source "sugar". While it is nice to think that we will be able to have anything we want, instantly, the amount of energy needed to convert the base products into what we want will be restrictive. The energy from the fermentation of grain inside a storage bin is enough to start a fire. (Note: A storage bin, not a brewer's vat.) How much energy would be required to create a beer in under 10 seconds?
Personally, I view the Singularity hype as just that - hype. I think there are going to be many amazing advances, but I think there are far too many areas where "Someone will come up with a solution for that pesky little problem." to be anywhere in the foreseeable future. Freeze me and wake me up in a few hundred years to see if we have reached the Singularity yet... if you can.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I live on the gulf coast. Technology is all nice and good. Right now I'd settle for clean drinking water and for congress to finally ponny up the money to fix the roads.
This guy hears of Moors law, extends it to everything else (renames it to Keurzweil's law) and starts making predictions about the end of civilization by 2020, since according to him, that is when out pocket PC will be more intelligent than us.... and other crazy stuff. Yeah right...
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
utopia is not the right word at all and the book doesn't even really seem to say that. It's more likley that we will be left out to rot like some old car or computer as the machines we have created have taken over the world and found our abilities wanting. Just look at the CPU power we will have in 30 years and the advances in brain mappin and AI and you will see what I am talking about. Utopia my friends is something we will not see.
He gud @ pustulating two.
"is great AT postulating", sorry. That's why there's a 'preview' button moron...
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Clarke's
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
We tend not to think of negative utopias...see it is already happening...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0235.html?
All physical processes require energy. If you're going to ramp something up an exponential curve then you'll need an exponential energy supply. Not going to happen. This is a classic example of a smart person taking a line of reasoning too far without considering basic physical constraints. It's sad, really.
If you've read any of his previous works, you'd realize that for every positive impact of these technologies there are 500 negative impacts.
I remember in The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurtzweil spoke of nanotechnology being able to replace or complement neurons in the brain to create the ultimate in 'virtual reality'. Sure, it could be fantastic, create your own reality at the click of a button. Complete with smells, touches, tastes... your limit is only that of your imagination. Amazing! But then you start to think about addiction... I mean, this basically means you can create a world where all your deepest desires are realized... why would you want to leave a place like that? You wouldn't.
I wonder about mental wear and tear, and not just in terms of the physical dynamics of memory, but in terms of pure psychology -- can your psyche handle 300 years? I'm not sure mine could. The resentment, the bitterness, the lack of tolerance only seems to get worse, not better.
I also know that I couldn't psychologically handle doing my existing job (networking consultant) for 300 years. The good news is that I wouldn't have to, but could switch to a new career without the problem associated with taking on an entirely new career at an "advanced" age.
But the bad news is that you'd be pushed into it since some people would keep their jobs for longer than a normal career of 40-50 years, and it would be then impossible to compete with people with 100s of years of experience.
The irony being that we might end up switching careers anyway, since few careers/industries/technologies are likely to remain viable for an individual over that kind of timeframe.
if( greed ) return bullshit;
So that means your wife lives on for another 225 years. No never mind I'll pass.
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.
An area the size of Kansas would support our current gasoline needs if it were planted in Hemp.
A variety of Bio energy schemes become viable at around $3 to $6 per gallon.
A variety of Solar technologies are currently effective at about $10 per gallon (and that's considering PV shortages).
Oil is important because it is cheapest. Not because it is the only resource.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Now that's a case mod I want to see!
So far all that humans have shown any proclivity for is eating, crapping and sleeping. Any thing more complicated that this just turns into a total clusterfark.
word.
There's more profit for big corporations in maintaining the status quo, therefore they won't allow anything to decrease need in the marketplace.
The FDA and drug companies are a perfect example. They never produce drugs that actually permanently cure a condition even though they probably could. They only sell products that provide a temporary solution, therefore ensuring a continuing marketplace.
... 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.
RE: "enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today)."
If everyone has enormous increases in wealth doesn't that mean that no one is actually wealthy?
Wouldn't the economic principals that have led us for the last several hundred years still apply - the rich get richer and everyone else helps them get there? I like the idea of nanotechnology and increased medical efficiencies and hell even living longer - Viagra was invented for a reason... the friends of your great great great great grand-daughter. (yuck).
I concur---we use much less manual labor nowadays because we have machines that do it for us. True, your laundry machine isn't a steam-powered analytic engine that says "pip, pip, wot, sah!" while it scrubs the skidmarks from your shorts, but it does prevent you from mailing said shorts to China. Consider how much energy the average American uses; a good deal of that is employing machines instead of slaves to wash dishes and clothes, to cart oneself about, and to build pretty much anything.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If one were to completely solve aging, the "average" longevity would be 2000-3000 years (limited by ones hazard function). If one adds to that nanotechnology based "enhancements" one is probably pushing 10,000 years. Taking uploading into account, ones lifespan could be trillions of years. Ray pushes the envelope but he may have some problems with where the actual limits are.
I can buy that. Some of the high-end power macs (dual 2.7) already have the computing power of a mouse (Algernon excepted).
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
It's worth pointing out that a US citizen of 1905 would, with some training, be perfectly comfortable in 2005. We're still doing the same things, and we're organized in basically the same way. A lot of things are a lot easier, but they're not fundamentally different. We have a bunch of magic toys, like electric refrigeration, air conditioning, ubiquitous automobiles, and the Internet, but we're doing fundamentally the same things with them that we were in 1905. The amount of future shock would be far, far lower than in the timeframes you mention.
The single biggest change is probably the Internet, but I tend to think that, at least so far, its impact is a bit overstated. Yes, we all have access to tons of information very easily that we didn't have before, but that also means we have access to bad information much more easily, too. With the physical costs of paper publication, there was a gatekeeper effect that improved knowledge quality. If you go to a library, the chances of anything you read being true are far higher than doing the same research on the Net. I'm sure that there are far more profound shifts that will occur because of the Net, but I don't think they've really happened yet.
Until we figure out a new energy source that is an order of magnitude better than what we have now, it strikes me that things won't improve that much more. In fact, in many areas, they stand a very high chance of regression.
If the only way you can give your life meaning is by putting a stupid and pointless and to some extent avoidable end on it, then I think the problem lies with your imagination.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"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.
Normal biochemical processes is out (corpses; no functioning way to take up food and transport it to the muscles). I can only see two ways to really implement The * of the Living Dead:
Sorry, but to get your fun zombie party you also need either nanotech or some kind of divine intervention. So stop complaining and join the Singularity or Rapture parade!
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
...ever right? what happened to all those things that were supposed to happen by the year 2000 like flying cars, robots in every house, and everyone colonizing the moon. the only safe bet a futurist can make is that futurists in the future will be wrong.
Ha, ha. No, it's not in constant dollars. Most of the people living on that little don't actually use dollars, anyway.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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.
David Brin writes about this a lot. He talks about the feudal pyramid being replaced by a diamond-shaped society, where the poor aren't the largest class, for the first time in human history.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
At what point will we be "creating" beings for our own selfish use?
And at what point will the first cyber-being decide that humans really aren't needed and end life as we know it?
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
Psst. The very, very rich are not like you or me. Their mythology states that they're just regular folks who worked hard and made good, but it ain't so. The oligarchy that is the very, very rich is different. Do some reading. And note that while pretty much everyone's real income doubled between 1947 and 1979, the bottom-income quintile's went up by only three percent between 1979 and 2001.
It's true, we've constructed a previously unknown sort of society, with such grand experiments as the GI Bill, enabling upward mobility, a rising tide lifting all boats, etc. But it's not stable. Don't assume it is.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"it won't just magically happen because of any particular invention"
If someone were to make an iRobot style humanoid robot for under $100k, then those jobs would disappear. Those robots could make roads, cook/serve food in McDonalds, build widgets, give haricuts, collect trash, and do most of the other jobs that most people don't want to do.
That would be a true singularity that could change the world and mankind's future.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
thanks for refusing a flying car while delivering _two_ sorts of atomic bombs and uncounted varieties of biological and chemical weapons.
Yours Sincerely,
Responsibility
Charlatan is a an easy brush to apply to anyone making extraordinary claims as Kurzweil does. He's the interesting charlatan you can't ignore, because nothing he says is entirely wrong. It's all wrong, but it isn't at the same time.
I wouldn't hold his lack of historical context against him, unless the human genome was decoded in year 1700. Or even just functional MRI. Or any technology that allowed us to peer "inside the box" on our own construction. This is roughly the difference between playing with hidden menus on your set-top box, or decompiling the firmware.
Where Kurzweil falls short of the mark--ridiculously short--is ignoring the couplings between technical progress and political progress. Technological progress can only accelerate so much before the political force becomes the rate limiting term. One sees this effect already with stem cell research being banned for political reasons, despite (or maybe because) almost everyone involved concedes the staggering potential for life-altering discoveries.
If we manage to find the cure for aging (which will no doubt be so expensive at first only the rich can afford it) before we achieve singularity AI, then the largest insurrection in human history will begin and that will be end of it: privileged immortals clashing against the mortal hordes until nothing remains. Coming to a gated community in California real soon now.
Jaysyn, The specifics are in the 1st part of the book. When I met him in 1989, it was business, so I didn't know his personal situation. I THINK it is Type II as I recall the onset was after he was an adult. The doctor he wrote the book with is who helped design his treatment plan. Going on the book, it sounds like it worked. UB
I am my own gestalt.
I started writing a list of all the things that I expect to be added to the list after production is automatized: Housing, medical treatments, luxury goods, etc. - and then I realized that these are all artificially scarce already, to some degree. But as time goes on, more and more of the people of the world will be on the ugly side of this artificial scarcity.
I think that it will become harder and harder to keep the newly unemployed from taking control of the means of production that could eliminate scarcity, if only the system in place didn't rely on scarcity.
So what I think we need to consider seriously is that the scarcity-based system we have today might be subverted by a revolution. Hopefully it will be peaceful and democratic. Marx didn't think it would be peaceful, but he might have been wrong. Anyway, that might be a little reason to be optimistic.
How can you have world where everyone would be happy with unhappy people?
It is interesting how those opposing immortality attack a completely unrealistic scenario. The reality of technological progress is that
1) At no point will immortality be achieved.
2) We will not suffer more than three decades of extended life.
This makes all discussions of whether we should "allow" immortality and whether we will become bored (or suffer other drawbacks of immortality) pointless.
Allow me to clarify what may seem a pessimistic view, but actually is anything but.
My first point means that there won't be a year in which immortality pill or treatment is invented and the society is facing the choice of allowing it or not. The dynamics of progress are such that we will first eliminate heart deseases, cancer and a host of other problems. In late 2010s-2020s this will lead to dramatic drops in death rates (in developed countries at least), so people will simply cease dying that much. Achievements on other fronts will drastically reduce deaths from hunger and other problems in developing countries. We won't be getting immortal, but the number of deaths per day will drop at least a few times and possibly an order of magnitude or more. Then aging-related problems will be solved, similarly without much ado. The real immortality will not be possible until advanced nanotechnology to make bodies essentially invulnerable and tweak them to run forever, but by then nobody would actually care about such trivial issues as lack of death.
The second point is related to the fact that humanity doesn't have centuries of time ahead of it. We simply won't have time to become bored or suffer from lack of turnover or be ruled by an immortal tyrant long enough. A few decades after we mostly stop dying we will ascend to the posthuman level and all our current problems (such as boredom) will become irrelevant. A posthuman being will simply not be able of boredom, he/she/it will be able to remain in peak mental and emotional condition all the time.
However, these two simple (once you know as much as I do) points are almost always ignored in any popular discussion of immortality.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
His electronics don't listen to macrovision
Shit, neither do mine, and my "electronics" set is a computer which you could buy now for under $200 (add another $250 for a refurb'd 19" LCD) with either MPlayer or Media Player Classic.
Some things do have a high barrier to entry. But at least the complexity for moving or dealing with information is in software instead of hardware. All users are (vaguely) equal.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't think I follow your power estimate for a human laborer.
1. kWs, or kilowatt-seconds, would be a unit of energy, not power.
2. A killowatt-second would be 1 kJ.
3. Did you maybe mean "kWs" to be the "plural" of kW. Cause then, your numbers are way off.
4. A human who eats about 2000 calories a day and turns it all into work (somehow) still averages about 100 watts.
5. 2000 food calories is actually 2000 kCal, I know. That's what I used.
6. 200 kW is more like the power produced by an automobile engine. A rather powerful one.
So when you speak of harnassing a human's intellect rather than his brawn for maximum benefit, I would agree.
I am not a crackpot.
Yes, I'm very pessimistic about the future. I have no doubt that technology will bring us things we've never dreamed of. But just as has already happened, these promises of technological advances if fulfilled, will likely give modern business news ways of leashing us to the job. Technology was supposed to reduce our workload, giving us more leisure time, remember? You can piss that away. You'll be lucky to get a couple of hours of sleep.
[SALT] Escape velocity (Ray Kurzweil talk 9/23/05)
Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate and degree of change coming in the next ten years, because history self-accelerates. That's Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: "technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion."
Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years. It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is. The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10. They were astounded when the project came in on schedule. "People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines," said Kurzweil.
Noticing that his audience was astute as well as large (650 in the Herbst), the speaker gave a dense, fast-moving talk. He said that as an inventor and entrepreneur he found that "you have to invent for when you finish a project, not when you start--- you need to figure out what enabling factors will be in place when your product comes to market." That was what started him studying trends in technology. In rapid succession he showed on the screen graphs of technological advance in microprocessors per chip (Moore's Law), microprocessor clock speed, cheapness of transistors, cheapness of dynamic random access memory, amount and cheapness of digital storage, bandwidth, processor performance in MIPS, total bits shipped, supercomputer power, Internet hosts and data traffic, and then on into biotech with cheapness of genome sequencing per base pair, growth in Genbank, and further on into nanotech with smallness of working mechanical devices, and nanotech science citations and patents.
They ALL show exponential growth rates, with no slowing in overall progress, since new paradigms always arise to keep up the pace, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computers, and 3D molecular computing and nanotubes will replace transistors. "Everything to do with information technology is doubling every 12 to 15 months, and information technology is encompassing everything."
I was impressed that the growth curves ignore apparent shocks. The 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust seemed like a big event, but it doesn't even show up as a blip on Kurzweil's exponential growth curve of e-commerce revenues in the US. At dinner with Long Now sponsors after the talk, he proposed that the stringent American regulations on stem cell research will not slow the pace of breakthroughs in that field, because there are so many political (overseas, for example) and technological workarounds. The fate of individual projects is always unknowable, but the aggregate behavior over time of massive and complex arrays of activity is knowable in surprising detail.
Kurzweil expects this century to provide dramatic events early and often. "With the coming of gene therapy, before we see designer babies we'll see designer baby-boomers." By 2010 he expects computers to disappear into our clothing, bodies, and built environment. The World Wide Web will be a World Wide Mesh, where all the linked devices are also servers, so massive supercomputing can be ubiquitous. Images will be project right onto retinas, helping lead toward true immersion virtual reality. Search engines won't wait to be asked to offer information. By 2030 he presumes that nanobots will occupy and enhance our nervous systems. The brain will have been reverse engineered so that we will understand the real structure of intelligence. A thousand dollars of machine computation will exceed human brain capacity by a thousand times. Shortly after t
The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades...
It's a funny thing, how age changes one's perspective. On the one hand, from about age 22 until 43 (incl. marriage, 2 degrees, child, job chg, three major relocations), I didn't think of myself as basically any different than years past. There have always been new things to learn and do, new people to meet, more ways to bang the old lady. If there was ever a cathartic momenet, it's when I got a framed photo of my dad and I when he was 43, and I a teen. OMFG, I am my Dad, confirmed responsible adult.
However, now that I'm at 45, kicking the bucket any time sooner than 85 or so looks too damn close, 'cause there are still a lot of possibilities to experience. I'm more than happy to hang in through years and years of old coggerdom, provided I'm not strapped to a chair watching Days Of Our Lives reruns.
Perhaps it helps that I didn't total my body during my twenties, but whenever I hear someone say it's all downhill after 20 - looking only at a preconceived idea of sperm count and neuron branching - I can now know that I'm listening to the voice of inexperience.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Considering the logistics involved I'm not so optimistic. Today.
And I'm wary of revolutions. Mostly they are "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" affairs (quote "the Who"). Those with power and money will not be convinced by anything that takes theirs away.
So forget about taking away from them, that's messy. It'd rather have to be a matter of filling up the bottom instead of letting it leak from above. And that'll take a lot of cheap, even essentially free technology.
Some things don't have to be too difficult or expensive. You can buy a one dollar water purifier that'll clean your water for years and years. This developed by a Belgian scientist who'd given himself that mission after watching the usual Biafra horror on TV. Don't have a link, but Google always works.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Human nature will destroy any chance of a Utopian world. There will always be the fucktards that need to feel superior to everyone else. And the rich and powerful will fight to prevent everyone from become their "equals."
We may indeed live to be 300 but you can bet we'll be forced into hard labor until we're at least 295.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Speak truth to power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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'.
And everything will run on Windows and it will be a totally secure and resource efficent OS....
"The future has already arrived. It is just not evenly distributed."
--William Gibson
Yes, we will have lunch machines like on Star Trek and we will have mainframes on our keychains.
And when my child get's the flu I will have to take him to the emergency room because I have no health care.
And I will make 8 dollars an hour programming Wal Mart's parking garage.
And we will eat nano-tech grown foodstuffs which will cause all sorts of health problems that won't be studied for decades because the company that makes it will buy congress.
You know, if any of you reading this were transported back in time to any other century, and had the opportunity to meet with the most progressive thinkers of that age, and the most powerful & influential people of that age, and you described to them what technologies we have at our disposal in the year 2005, they would say to you: "Why are you not living in a Utopia? Why do you have hunger? Why do you have water-borne disease? Why do you have wars?"
The answer: Because we don't care.
Utopia begins in the human heart. Not in the fab.
The biggest problem I see here in Atlanta is people afraid of "looking like their poor."
Damn skippy. Breaking down my expenses into durable and ephemeral was like switching on a lightbulb. (And just as soon as I get a new HD to replace the fried one in my Linux box, I'll have GnuCash graphs to motivate me as well. I hope.) I wanted to grow my bookshelf, so I budgeted for it, and cut the entertainment budget by that amount. A few months later, I have a well-stocked bookshelf and catch the local matinee ($5) instead of the Shiny! New! evening showing ($9.75 plus a considerable drive). Folks at work wonder why I bring leftovers from last night's dinner instead of buying from the cafe at work.
People spend a hell of a lot more than they think they do, really.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Historically low interest rates coupled with bankruptcy "reform". Also, the popularity of new and exciting financial instruments like balloon mortgages and interest-only mortgages, which allow people to live way beyond their means. They get loans to do this because their creditors know that, thanks to changes in bankruptcy law, they'll get the money, even if they have to garnish it for the rest of the sucker's natural life.
(Did You Know that "mortgage" literally means "death pledge"? Fun!)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...Especially about the future. From what I've read, oil will be very expensive very soon. The future is more likely to involve horses than flying cars, let alone utopia. Good luck, everyone.
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
The potential may soon be there to put 200 year lifespans and nano-based goods production in everyone's hands. But... remember when the move to the information economy was supposed to free us from the druggery of a 9-to-5 factory job? Sure, it gave millions the ability to view porn w/o a magazine shop stop. On the other hand, it gave thousands the ability to move the information and manufacturing economy jobs elsewhere. Helloooo 7-11. Wow, that was sure liberating.
So, when Merck starts selling DNA treatments that'll keep you looking and humping like you're 20 'til you're 200, how many folks will be able to afford it, not to mention the nano-factory? Eventually, maybe quite a few of us, but in the meantime, there will without a doubt be some other means that'll concentrate wealth in a few hands.
Luke, help me take this mask off
As jaysyn has mentioned, if he's type II, there's a regimen to follow. IMHO, type II regimens are at the strictness level that type I's are compelled to follow to keep out of the hospital on a daily basis. To say a type II "no longer requires insulin injections" is like asking a 6-year-old to stop nursing - it's what they're expected to do, it's their job. Those of us with type I (privately) mock the type II'ers. Seriously, they're like little babies who've wandered into a theater halfway in... The point is, whatever brilliance he has exhibited in his illness has unfortunately not extended the length of his life, and arguably, to those who like gorging or fasting or grazing, he still hasn't increased the quality to median levels. He's still got a dysfunctional body, although with a good attitude about it. I would presume the theories in this book are largely analogous.
Unless he's bragging about his non-insulin use. In today's fast-paced world, that would gualify as grounds for a snap judgement that he's a snake-oil salesman.
It wasn't so long ago, in the 70's, when books were being written to the effect that as population increases exponentially, we will by the late 1990's reach a Malthusian crisis with over 20 billion people on earth fighting over the last scraps of food. That didn't happen, and that's for a process that we KNOW grows exponentially (ie population). It just so happens that for a variety of factors (though generally not famine), the growth constant changed so that in many countries the population has levelled off.
Just because you can plot a few points in time and fit an exponential curve to them doesn't mean that it will continue to be an exponential curve forever. And I find Mr. Kurzweil's particular vision of the future somewhat offensive because it is a future that would only be imaginable or appealing to an American computer nerd.
So Bill Gates is the least satisfied, least happy person on the planet? Somehow I don't buy that. I bet there is a range where that is true but when it gets past a certain point happiness and satisfaction go up again.
...is that they assume basic human nature will change: That with access to wealth, to automation, and to education, people will trancend their basic natures and become something greater. One problem with this line of reasoning is in deciding what constitutes "better" (or the measurement of "progress"). Values are inherently arbitrary decisions; your ideals might be very different from mine, with no clear way to compare the two objectively. Your utopia, then, might be my dystopia. Another problem is that wealth, automation, and education are merely tools. They are inherently amoral. We have to put them to a purpose, and we have to judge those purposes as being "good" or "bad", and sometimes there are unintended consequences. To use a trite example, nuclear energy mirrors our good desires (for a cheap and clean energy source), our evil desires (for a powerful weapon), and the unintended consequences (there's actually some dangerous waste that must be dealt with).
Well, I guess I'm ranting, but I really don't buy the idea of the Utopian Singularity, or of anyone's Utopia, for that matter.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
we will all have flying cars!
I want one!!
There are many evangelists using the word "singularity" to describe the point at which humans stop dying or the point at which technology creates the promised land. Given the increasing lack of imagination when picking buzwords, we predict another type of singularity when every sentence is composed of exactly one word: singularity.
Anyone check for flying cars? I love it when people make broad statements like this. Obviously they've never spent time in the real world.
:)
Who *wants* to live 300 years, anyway? Life sucks enough already. I can live without the 200+ years of spam, insurance payments, and everything else. Did he say we'd have 19-YO bodies? He didn't, did he...
Well, there's this, and there's Harry Potter...
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
You're all missing the point.
You. Cannot. Program. An. AI.
You can discuss all the future tech you want, but there is a limited scope for it all, when it will simply become impossible to get any better.
Stop dreaming about some impossible future where your microscopic skin-implanted computer makes you a bodybuilder overnight with the intelligence of 3 million Einsteins, and focus on what is important right now in the world.
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
5 479565/qid=1128376027/sr=5-3/ref=cm_lm_asin/002-28 35979-1699208?v=glance
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
You can replace (many) assembly line workers with machines, but machines are still quite poor at doing remarkably simple and easy human tasks, such as cooking burgers or dealing with people. There is absolutely an important role for the "working class" in the service industry -- and will be for the forseable future (i.e. before this singularity business).
The interesting fact about how automation works is that when it makes processes more effecient, it increases overall wealth and correspondingly the demand for jobs in the service industry. These sort of very direct, personal jobs may in theory be replaceable with machines and computers, but humans certainly make better salesmen, so by the time we replace most of these jobs, we'll already have true AI.
Intelligent application of mechanical power can be far more complicated (e.g. outside of the factory) than you may realize.
Will live till 2305?
ummmm...
The notion of 'the singularity' has been around for awhile. I always thought it would be
when artificial intelligence exceeded human. Of course, it may be hard to pinpoint exactly
when THAT happens because the definition of intelligence is vague at best and something
of a moving target. But when machines are able to design superior replacements for themselves,
that's the end folks. What may make it confusing, and also allow humans a way to stay in the
game, is cyborgification. The human brain gets enhanced to keep up with the purely artificial.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
As a fellow Type I Diabetic, this post made me laugh =) If I could, I'd mod you up.
Yes, bio-diesel, solar, etc. could enable us to perhaps slowly wean ourselves from fossil fuels. But what about things like jet fuel and the fact that the vast majority of the worlds electricity comes from either burning coal or atomic power plants.
Like you, I hope these "alternative" energy sources will come to fruition, but unfortunately I think there will be some major problems/victims before that happens.
Just look at the recently passed energy bill to see how completely out of touch our government is regarding their outlook towards energy. Its All Nuclear, Coal and Oil, All the time.
Another major problem is that most of the pesticides and fertilizers we now use to grow as much food as we do come from fossil fuels. We better hope they hold out before we find replacements. Business wants a bio-engineered solution, the rest of us want organically grown. Who will win?
Unless there is some sort of "Manhattan Project" for energy with a good outcome, we will see increasingly difficult times ahead.
I really wonder how Wal-Mart thinks they will continue to ship over the mega-tons of absolute krap from China when energy costs will make it more and more expensive...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I attended an internationnal conference on neural networks in Montreal recently. Well, attended is a big word here, I was the AV technician on the floor. I listened to many talks, some of which I could barely understand what they were about. the closing speech was made by a man who has been working all his life in Neural Networks, respected by all in the room. He was their mentor, for some of them, he litteraly has been. He was speaking of the current state of artificial intelligence, cybernetic implants and the like. Not at a sci-fi level, as an everyday reality, he was speaking of the states of those technologies as of now. As of now we cannot even reproduce the brain of a housefly, no computer in the world is able to reproduce in real-time a brain as basic as the brain of a housefly. Contrary to popular belief we are eons away from a computer that can think and operate as a human brain. When you start thinking at everything your brain does at any given moment it becomes mind buggling that we can even think abstract though or be conscious of our own self. Singularity will happen, but not now, not soon, we'll first have to understand what we are before we can up the ante in the chain of life...
Why didn't you link to this page?
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
*looks at name of parent poster*
Oh! Never mind.
-- Boycott Shell
Seriously dude arm yourself. The second ammendment the most emportant one for keeping you free. Learn to shoot as well.
Let the grandparent eat copper jacketed led when he comes out of his parents basement to 'eat the rich'.
Fuck all those machine raging mental infants.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In my experience, there was a significant increase in happiness when I got above 110k and a drop when I dropped back below 100k.
I suspect there is a poverty line and then there is a "past middle class" line.
At the second line you gain a certain amount of freedom to just do things , go places, or obtain possessions at a whim which you must carefully plan for while middle class.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Presidenrt-Vice Richard B. Cheney's spiderhole.
Ooops, only "bad" guys can have spiderholes. The President-Vice's spiderhole is an undisclosed, secure location.
Remember: F The President.
Thanks for nothing,
Kilgore Trout, M.D.
A great vision so long as you don't look at the planet from a virologist's point of view. At the rate of large mammal habitat destruction and extinction we are poised to become - the worlds greatest food source - and we deliver ourselves to the next meal, too. This is one curve we are not getting ahead of and the odds are a lot better at this point that a large percentage of us will become walking viral treats before living 150 year life spans. Such human-centric views of the planet are a natural but naive form of collective denial. Note this week's attempts in the Senate to prevent flu pandemic funding from being attached to the defense bill. Sen. Stevens (R-Alaska) was quoted as saying that "[avian flu] has not yet become a threat to human beings". And avian flu is just a gentle shot across the bow. The big question is can humans innovate faster than viruses mutate...? The answer - unlikely...
If people lived to be 300, things would slow down a lot. You could always say "I'll do it tomorrow" and, most likely, you'd be right.
Sure, they will continue the research until they can either keep the human body alive indefinitely and/or place the human brain/consciousness into a non-destructable shell. But think about the availability of such advances. If the drug-industry/republican cabal can force the US to disallow price negoatiating for even basic drugs, who the hell will benefit.
Sure, these advances will come, but for who? If recent history is any indication, an even smaller elite group will be the only ones enjoying such benefits. These are the same elites who now effectively run the US and aren't apt to share such advances with the, ahem..., proletariat (you know, the nascar dads who voted for Bush)
"Sure, I'll take a gross of those telomeres extenders if they're in stock!"
I'll believe it all when it happens... So far they've been late/wrong on everything else, I'm tired of futurists...
Of course, if your a Glen Beck fan, then your also in the know about the the "Future of the Future..." Where the everlasting gobstopper will not change it's taste or the time it takes to eat one thanks to advances in amazing technology in the future of, THE FUTURE!... )
I'll make one perdiction that will come true... You will die in the future... Better bet on it...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
You sound like you've become involved in a cult of personality.... ...but regardless even if that impressive resume you've laid out is accurate for Kurzweil that doesn't give him any authority in the realm of nanoscience. From your description he sounds like a good computer scientist who is also proficient in robotics. Neither of these have quantum mechanics or physical chemistry as prerequisites.
Richard Smalley, on the other hand, is one of the foremost authorities in nanoscience, and the fact that he and Kurzweil disagree on this subject is damning to Kurzweil's argument, at least on the nanotech side.
As Smalley has said, robotic nanoscale assemblers just ain't possible folks. We will not see nanobots that can make anything out of dirt and sunlight, nor will we see grey goo. If grey goo was possible, Mother Nature the true master of nanotech (see molecular biology) would have already come up with it.
Kurzweil may know what he's talking about when it comes to robotics and AI, but when it comes to the realm of the small he's talking out his ass... which is why the argument for the coming "singularity" is a load of crap.
Hmmm i'm going to have to read this. See what happens to all the politicians...are they going to just give up politics and power mongering and become enlightened do-gooders?
I'm also going to have to read to see how much that extended lifespan is going to cost me. It wont be free or cheap...unless the Open Source movement can get a version out.
oh i could go on but why should i...
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
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
It would be so great, you'd get bored and purposely intoduce errors to the system.
To prevent cheating, there'd be laws given to nature.
To keep things interesting, you would refuse both omniscience and omnipotence to some mysterious power whose very existence couldn't be proven but only taken on faith.
In seeking the perfect game - you might live only once in this virtual world, and life would be difficult.
The singularity is a realization that technology tries to mimic reality, though we are already living in such a state but hardly appreciate our own existence.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Mother Nature is green goo you know, I guess you are so used to the green goo and such, that you don't notice it is everywhere. Nanotech assemblers as such are possible ofcourse thus, but grey goo isn't really, at the end of the day you still need the correct materials and energy. And so as long as you would give a nanotech assembler this, there isn't a problem.
(PS, this is why the planet isn't green everywhere, lack of energy or materials is damning)
Most likely, any intelligent machine we build will be built to enjoy taking care of us. Why build self preservation into a machine? A machine should only want to preserve itself so that it can continue to help humans.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Arguing that individual farmers were worse-off than individual hunters really doesn't make any sense.
Why did the farmer population go up? It went up because people had more kids that survived to adulthood.
That was because they had more resources to care for those kids. For the most part, individuals must have been better off.
Actually, it can make sense if you change your definition of "better off". Studies of current hunter-gatherer societies (yes, they exist) show that the work to socializing time ratio is much lower in those societies than it is in subsitance farming socities. The reason farming is so prevalent is that you can support a bigger population. However subsistance farmers have much greater instances of malnutrition and tooth-decay due to their starch-based diets, and have a much higher rate of disease, due to their crowded living situations.
So an individual in a HG society works much less, socializes more, has better food, and is generally healthier than the subsistance farmer. On the flipside there is a higher infant mortality rate, and therefor smaller families. Thus, survival wise the farmer is "better off", but in terms of quality of life the HG is "better-off". I think that's what the parent is talking about.
Don't romanicize the subsistance farming lifestyle, just because you know so little about it. Likewise, don't admonish others for romanticizing the hunting and gathering lifestyle, when you yourself know so little about it.
Last week's New Scientist contained an article by Kurzweil and was effectively an extract from, and plug for this book. It was the biggest steaming pile of self-serving drivel I have ever seen in 25 years of reading New Scientist. At one point he touts his book by saying "in my new book ... I have over 50 graphs ..." Hell, if I had known writing books was so easy, I'd have started long ago. I bet I can draw over a 100 graphs.
The article itself contains three graphs, presumably from the book. Each is more meaningless than the next. The crowning glory being a graph showing a straight line at roughly y=2x. At first glance it seems to be yet another graph showing the meteoric rise of technology. Then you notice that the X axis isn't labelled and the Y axis is labelled with dates, so it's a timeline and has no business being sexed up the way it has. Then you look at the actual events and they turn out to be a collection of prognostications by Kurzweil and his buddy du jour, Vernor Vinge - all of which have yet to come to pass.
Unlikely because nothing is interesting when everything is possible. Draw your own conclusions (if any).
William Bennett's 'hypothetical' on racial genocide
A spreading stench of fascism
By Bill Van Auken
3 October 2005
http://www.wsws.org/
The statement of former Republican education secretary and "drug czar" William Bennett that the crime rate could be reduced through the abortion of all African-American children has touched off a political firestorm in the US.
Democratic lawmakers and civil rights organizations have demanded he apologize, while some have called for the termination of his syndicated radio program "Morning in America." In Philadelphia, parents and education advocates responded by demanding the city's school district--two-thirds of whose students are black--cancel a $3 million contract it awarded earlier this year to K12 Inc., a for-profit company chaired by Bennett.
Bennett is a key player in Republican politics and a leading neoconservative ideologue. In spite of revelations two years ago concerning his own multimillion-dollar gambling habit, he still postures as a moral instructor to the nation. It is a lucrative calling, bringing in money from right-wing foundations like those of Richard Mellon Scaife and John M. Olin, as well as retainers from broadcast news networks anxious to air his reactionary opinions.
On his radio broadcast Wednesday, he said:
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could--if that were your sole purpose--you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
He continued: "That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Bush's press secretary issued a terse statement declaring, "The president believes the comments were not appropriate." The Republican Party responded in almost identical terms.
Bennett himself defended his remarks, calling them "a thought experiment about public policy."
"I was putting forward a hypothetical proposition," he said.
Such "thought experiments" and "hypothetical propositions" have a long and repellent history. Theories about "racial hygiene" and eugenics as a means of curing social problems were widely discussed in right-wing political and academic circles before they were implemented as a policy of mass extermination in Nazi Germany.
Significantly, Bennett in his defense tied his comments directly to the social catastrophe unleashed upon New Orleans and its predominantly black and poor population in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"There was a lot of discussion about race and crime in New Orleans," he told ABC news. "There was discussion--a lot of it wrong--but nevertheless, media jumping on stories about looting and shooting, and roving gangs and so on.
"There's no question this is on our minds," he continued. "What I do on our show is talk about things that people are thinking.... I'm sorry if people are hurt, I really am. But we can't say this is an area of American life [and] public policy that we're not allowed to talk about--race and crime."
Whose minds--in the aftermath of Katrina--are preoccupied with exterminating black babies? Who are the people who are "thinking" about the fascistic policy that Bennett put into words on his radio show?
For most who watched as tens of thousands in New Orleans were left to suffer--and many hundreds left to die--without food, water, medical aid or means of evacuation, the reaction was one of horror and anger over the abject failure of the American government and American society as a whole.
But a significant element within the American ruling elite and among its political representatives saw the chaos in New Orleans as the fault of the victims themselves, and drew the most reactionary conclusions. Just a day after Bennett's radio remarks, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy editorial comment by Charles Murray, author of the infamous pseudo-scientific and racist tract, The Bell Curve. The thrust of the book, published a decade
We need a world-wide massive effort to push the boundaries of development of nanotech and biotech both with goverments and private industry. We now have the fantastic capability of the internet to help is spreading the new discoveries.
If we were to use the endless amounts of money wasted in current and future wars and future cold-wars, we could bring about the sigularity much sooner (say, 7 to 10 years).
Even so, the lure of an advanced nanotech where you could boost your brain power and have the ability to repair every cell in your body (reversing aging, staying young for as long as you want to). We spend billions on these outdated matcho concepts of war and domination, woult it be neat if we could do away with the status seeking scociety we are stuck with and do away with the requirment for money and status and having to deal with the likes of bill gates just because he is rich and people like him effecively control our current scocieties?
After all, remember that it has been hypothesized that the first countries to develop effective nano-based whepons could effectivlly take over the whole world (no body could fight their whepons...). So it makes more sense to accept that this technology will be developed and we should get there faster and with everybody on board so to speak, otherwhise there could be a bit of chaos. Besides, if we do blow up this planet (fighting each other, or some unfreindly AI's too etc, it makes more sense to develop nanotech, so we could all spread out into the solar system so that if bad things happen (say a relgious war or terrorism involding nano and AI whatever), we could at least have the nano tools at our disposal to start again, this time better, because we would have the digital memories of the people that got toasted in the nanowars to remind why this pursuit of status/war/microsoft-like-greed is not a hot thing and we would be better off with sane applications of nanotech, driven by geeks instead of matcho jock type of stupid thinking. Once the general population realizes the health benefits of nano/bio, there will be big pressures to develop it quickly.
Where would we be if humans were satisfied with the here and now?
Utopia.
I think that this is more insightful than funny. If us humans were satisfied with the here and now we would have no reasons to oppress* others for our own advancement.
*I couldn't think of another word.
Dear Sir,
It has been brought to our attention that your have openly been making false and misleading claims about our patented product "the future". We hereby order you to cease and desist all written or verbal speculation about the features that will and will not be offered in this product. At what we consider a relevant time, we will make our own press releases about what may or may not constitute your allowable future to whom we consider to be relevant and interested parties. Until then, rest assured that we are only doing what's best for you, your family, your country and/or whoever else our press department believes is relevant at the time. Please also remember that our extensive patents on "the future" only exist to protect our current investments, without which, there would be no "future". "The future" is a very important strategic play for our company and we intend to defend it to the fullest extent of our law.
Sincerely
Monsanto
...and Santa is finally going to bring that pony that I've always wanted...
Society in my observation generally tends to swim towards the future between two flags. One is planted in the idealism of people like yourself and Kurzweil, people who believe that literally almost anything can/will be possible, and want to make that the case. (Think of either the planet Uranus astrologically or Neo from the Matrix as archetypical metaphors for this style of thinking)
At the other end of the spectrum you've got big business, the elderly, the Luddites as you say, and the non-intellectually/technically inclined. This is the force that was responsible for such things as light bulbs being made to blow eventually in order to earn more money by selling more, when they originally lasted forever, or close to it. It's also the force which keeps the world dependent on fossil fuels, and periodically assassinates Uranian thinkers who develo0p alternative forms of energy generation. (Represented archetypically by the planet Saturn/Agent Smith)
The thing that is important to remember is that both of this forces/mentalities are extremely necessary and important. If we had the Uranian force/mentality on its own, technological development would progress faster than our ability to understand it and keep up mentally, and eventually most of us (if not all) would end up destroying ourselves. We've almost managed to do that as it is.
On the other hand, the Saturnine/Smith force/mentality existing exclusively would mean that both political freedom and technological development would be non-existent and impossible. Nobody would ever think to improve or develop in any way...we'd still be living in caves, and we wouldn't have even invented fire, since invention in any form is a Uranian concept.
What I think is the most important thing to do is to keep both of these mentalities/forces alive, but also to a degree to keep them in check. They each exist as counterweights to each other, to balance each other. I don't believe we will ever achieve Kurtzweil's singularity, because as I said, if we did all or most of us would die fairly shortly afterwards. We do however need the singularity as something on the horizon to shoot for, just as we need its opposite. If we keep both of these in view, we can continue to have new technologies, allowing us to do different things, while at the same time allowing technological advancement to happen sufficiently gradually that we can grow to fully understand it, and hence utilise it fully as well.
I'm a grey goo skeptic as well, but only because I think it is unlikely for practical reasons, not impossible for theoretical reasons. The comparison of Grey Goo with naturally evolved microbes ("Green Goo") misses the point that the man- (or machine-) designed nanobots can explore areas of design space that are blocked to natural selection, perhaps by being hidden behind local minima in the fitness landscape.
A well known example of such a feature (albeit on the macro device scale) is an eye with telescopic vision: an engineer can produce this feature trivially by placing one lense behind another and allowing the distance between them to vary. However, in spite of being independently evolved in the animal kingdom as many as a dozen times, no known animal eye has managed to find its way to this two-lense arrangement. Neither has any gradient-descent-constrained simulation of eye evolution managed to achieve this configuration (to the best of my admittedly-amateur knowledge).
(For those unfamiliar with the "local minimum" problem, it's this: a creature with, say, a misshapen doubled-up lense would be outcompeted by its already-extant fully-sighted peers long before its hypothetical future descendants could have time to happen upon the further refinements needed to implement the long-term-superior telescoping design.)
In the nano realm, there may well be enough yet-unknown technological tricks left in the bag to make sunlight-powered dirt-eating replicators a theoretical possibility.
But I wouldn't lose any sleep over the possibility, either.
Vinge's True Names predated Gibson's Neuromancer by three years and contained a comparable description of what we only learnt to call 'cyberspace' after Gibson coined the term in the latter work.
Such details aside, the diverse contributions to this thread show some of the better side of Slashdot comments, so I'll let slide the opportunity to rant about the dubiousness of claims that 'intelligence' might deliver the inflated expectations we too easily burden it with.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Professor Forbin would be spinning in his grave ...
With Colossus doing the spinning.
If grey goo was possible, Mother Nature the true master of nanotech (see molecular biology) would have already come up with it.
Grey goo, if I remember from that Bill Joy piece, is enrestrained entropy. That already exists everywhere-- I think most people call it 'green goo'. The current arrangement you and I are familiar with exists in spite of the entropy constantly working to disassemble us and everything around us. Cancer is the number one killer of Americans, and that's a great example of where entropy succeeds at a cellular level in disassembling us.
Joy's grey goo is just a matter of waiting.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Please stop mis-using the term Singularity, which if you read the book you will see that Kurzweil went to a great deal of trouble to clarify and explain. By definition, it doesn't apply to a single field. It's an upcoming period of time when overall technological change will drive societal change in extremely rapid and not-completely-known directions. It will be, by definition, driven by superintelligent entities (whether pure AIs or a mix of human-enhanced people & AIs isn't clear) capable of generating increasingly rapid intelligence and technology gains. We ain't there yet, so quit mixing people up.
Rise up in the cafeteria and STAB them with your plastic forks!
Just wait until robots join the daily commute. Then tell me how good things are.
Richard Smalley may be a pundit on nanotech,
t or-about-smalleydrexler.html
and in charge of most of its funding thru the NSF,
but he is unreasonably pessimistic for political
reasons. He is afraid Gray Goo stories will
upset the FunDumbMentalists who control science
funding.
See Drexler's attempts to puncture his conservative
positioning in their famous debate, starting with
The December 1st 2003 issue of Chemical & Engineering
News which carried a debate between Drexler and Smalley
about the feasibility of molecular manufacturing.
"The January 26th 2004 issue devotes a little over two pages to letters on the debate. Of the eight letters published, five supported molecular manufacturing, one was clearly opposed, and two seemed skeptical."
http://cyborgdemocracy.net/2004/02/letters-to-edi
A while ago, I started a blogspot entitled Our Technological Future.
q -for-dummies.html
As an opening blogpost, I posted my selfwritten Singularity FAQ For Dummies.
It can be found here for those interested:
http://jwbats.blogspot.com/2005/07/singularity-fa
It is meant to be introductory material for those who don't know what The Singularity is yet, and want their information nice and compact.
Hey! We in the Matrix are still trying! I do not know who
programmed the bug that let a George W. Bush as president, but
we will bring the world back into line. Flying cars. Robots.
Space Colonies. Sit back and enjoy it humans.
Just expect many
deja vu moments.
And where is the byline for my quote?
If one already owns a home, they usually don't have the option to just pick up and switch between jobs. The boss I mentioned in my previous post lived in Leesburg, VA and commuted to Rockville, MD...according to yahoo maps thats 1 hour which is obviously calculated based on the speed limit without considering traffic / congestion. The cheaper houses I was talking about were south of Woodbridge and the more expensive ones were in the areas between Reston and Ashburn. I'm in NoVa so don't particularly have a clue about Hyatsville, MD but find it doubtful especially considering my bro got his (albeit spacious) townhouse in Gaithersburg, MD for around 400K 2+ years ago
Hmm. Good point. Know where I can find some statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy? Any ideas for other ways of measuring whether or not things have gotten worse for the very, very poor?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Life is designed to make you appreciate the long dead time more, when it comes..
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
A decent first step will be the simple recognition that our current form of economy is not really a very effective tool for meeting anything like a respectible goal. It's better than the Soviet style state capitalism (the USSR was communist in name only), but that doesn't mean it's actually a good solution. It's more good in the sense that the flu is better than cholera. As long as capitalism exists, some people will be forced to scratch and claw for their basic necessities while others have servants to do everything but pee for them.
The appropriate purpose of an economy is to allocate resources where they will do he most good. Capitalism makes that promise but simply doesn't deliver. Consider the resources expended on convincing people that they cannot be fulfilled until they expend more. Invent a machine that can tirelessly replace the drudge work of hundreds of people and our biggest question is "how will we find work now?" If we had an appropriate economy for human progress, the only question would be "how can we put the rest of us out of work too?"
Free software is a fine demonstration that we can make progress just fine with people doing what they want to do when they want to do it. We 'just' have to find a way to automate the work nobody wants to do first.
What they did was record the firings of a small number of neurons, & see what pictures they fired in response to. They found that there might be one neuron which fired only when the subject was shown a picture of Bob Dylan, and not any of the other pictures they used in the study. Presumably the "Bob Dylan" neuron would fire when the subject was shown other pictures as well, but since the study didn't include pictures of every object in the universe it did not take a complete sample. (I believe that many of the neurons studied did in fact fire for several different objects.)
So what does this study prove about the ultimate storage & processing requirements for matching a human brain? Nothing at all. It's a study about how the data is stored, not how much data there is total.
On a different level however it does say something about the feasibility of AI (and eventually uploading): It's one of many current studies of how intimate specific details of neuroanatomy work. (This one got some press solely because it had something to do with celebrities.) All we have to do is keep paying attention, and we will soon enough find out.
I agree with you that we collectively have some idea of how to create a just & efficient society. We just have to be realistic about how much longer those questions are going to make the same normal kind of sense. We might be learning the rules just in time to see ourselves transported to a radically different game.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
"When they withdraw themselves to the cluture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are the extensive forest and will be willing to pare them off in exchange for necessaries. We shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and influential invidvuals among them in debt, because we observe when these debts go beyond what they can pay, they will lop them off by a cession of their lands. But should any tribe refuse - it will be driven off across the Mississippi and the whole of their lands confiscated".
-President thomas Jefferson in a letter to Indiana Territory governor William Henry Harrison
Look it up. Read the truth. Your liberal whacko ideals shot to hell again.