Kurzweil: The Cloud Will Expand Human Brain Capacity

Nerval's Lobster writes "Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will eventually do more than store our emails or feed us streaming movies on demand: it's going to help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits. In a question-and-answer session following a speech to the DEMO technology conference in Santa Clara, California last week, Kurzweil described the human brain as impressive but limited in its capacity to hold information. 'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.' (Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk.) The solution to overcoming the brain's limitations, he added, involves 'basically expanding our brains into the cloud.'"

Comments

With apologies to Michio Kaku

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Ray Kurzweil is the biggest hack on the planet.

Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

One day, very soon, a chip in your head will instantaneously connect with The Singularity, which will transmit back images into your corneal implants which will show you why this is so. In the meantime, take it as The Received Word from the future.

Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku

[NEW22]

There is something kind of lame about taking a guy who has some interesting ideas, and performing some kind of hack psychoanalysis of him, and generating this air of "because this hack psychoanalysis does a good job of making him look crazy, obviously that discredits his ideas." "He doesn't have a rational basis for this, he's just wracked with guilt over his father" is the sleaziest kind of ad-hominem argument.

As for Lanier's 12 year old essay, I'm not even sure that half of his "cybernetic totalist" beliefs are necessarily held by people intrigued by Singularity ideas, without even going into whether those beliefs are reasonable or not. It's not that I'm even convinced by the Singulatarians, but that so many people who aren't convinced make these weird statements like "He's pretty much willing to throw away everything that makes human life worth living" as if Kurzweil is some kind of Cyber-Stalinist, rather than a guy who is trying to take an idea as far as it can go to see if there is anything to it.

Re:I don't know if I'd say "filled it up"

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This is a common myth. We do infact use pretty much all of our brains.

It must be the cloud, not a device

[PhamNguyen]

A PC or portable device wouldn't possibly work, it must be the cloud. Not because cloud is a buzzword.

Re:Reasons to be hesitant around Kurzweil

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Kurzweil seems to be following the proud tradition of very sharp people who have illustrious careers which then provide them the freedom to go a bit off the rails...

His speech and music synthesis stuff is solid. After he found nerd jesus and decided that he would live forever through the power of the internet...

Futurist

[Swarley]

Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?

Re:Oblig

[blackest_k]

Perhaps Ray is simply expressing himself badly.

Take the simple pocket calculator lets use it to multiply 2 numbers together say 8*7 = 56 now most of us would just do that in our heads but a slightly more complicated case say 113 * 58 and it becomes a more significant effort. Easy to do if you have a calculator or a piece of paper and a pen.

I am bilingual to an extent, I can converse in English and Polish how ever if I use google translate I can form more complex sentences and frame idea's and concepts that my poor old brain would struggle to produce in Polish. Google Chrome will with an extension let me say the words in English and translate for me and even say the words for me too. It isn't perfect but one thing i do notice is that my brain also caches some of the words I don't recall or even ever learnt before, so actually my Polish knowledge increases as I use the "cloud" to enhance my abilities.

Augmentation of the brain by the cloud, we are not the borg just yet but we do have access to the human collective more commonly known as the Internet. Is it so far away that I might wear an ear piece of some sort that listens to the voices around me and gives me the English translation. technically it could be done.
how about an app that listens to the conversations around me and lets me highlight key words and fetch me related information?

As an example this morning there was a conversation about the band Skunk Anansie googling this let me know they formed in 94 split up and reformed in 2009 also they released a video and new single three days ago.
I was aware of them from the 90's but I had forgotten pretty much everything about them. might it be possible to gather this information fairly automatically? say with a small touch screen device that can listen to conversation and allow me to highlight words and bring up additional information.

Is this the kind of thing that Ray is actually talking about? Arguably we are already augmenting our brains with the cloud as he puts it, We just don't call it that.