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Douglas Hofstadter Looks At the Future
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this "detailed and fascinating interview with Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel Escher Bach fame) about his latest book, science fiction, Kurzweil's singularity and more ... Apparently this leading cognitive researcher wouldn't want to live in a world with AI, since 'Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid.' He also wouldn't want to be around if Kurzweil's ideas come to pass, since he thinks 'it certainly would spell the end of human life.'"
The short answer is that Hofstadter and Kurzweil are both wrong. I think Kurzweil's technological development arcs (all those need exponential curves) probably are disturbingly correct. And Hofstadter is probably right about souls being far more complex things than what Kurzweil believes.
So they are both right in ways and wrong in ways. The real rub is that Kurzweil's future is probably farther away but not for the reasons that Hofstadter thinks. The real reasons are probably based in bad technology decisions we made in the last century or two.
We (humanity) have made several technological platform choices that are terrifyingly hard to change now. These choices drove us down a path that we may have to abandon and thus suffer a massive technological set back. In specific the choices were oil, steel, and electricity.
Oil (fossil fuels) will run out. Steel (copper too) is growing scarcer. Electricity is too hard to store and produce (and heats silicon rather inconveniently). Data centers today are built with steel and located near power plants that often produce power using fossil fuel. That means even a Data Center driven life will be affected by our platform limitations.
When we start hitting physical limits to what we can do with these, how much of these supplies we can get, then we will be forced to conserve, change, or stop advancing. Those are very real threats to continued technological advancement. And they don't go away if you hide in Second Life.
Show me a Data Center built with ceramic and powered by the sun or geo-electric sources and I'll recant.
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