Interviews: Ask Ray Kurzweil About the Future of Mankind and Technology

The recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents, Ray Kurzweil's accolades are almost too many to list. A prolific inventor, Kurzweil created the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. His book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times best seller. and is considered one of the best books about futurism and transhumanism ever written. Mr. Kurzweil was hired by Google in December as Director of Engineering to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing." He has agreed to take a short break from creating and predicting the future in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.

Comments

Is Google's goal a singularity?

[Psyborgue]

Is creating a singularity a goal (immediate or long term) at Google?

let me fix this for you

[stenvar]

That should be:

A prolific self-promoter, Kurzweil claims to have created the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments

Most of these claims are actually rather dubious.

Re:Extraneous human population

[spire3661]

I fucking hate this. What do you mean 'not needed anymore'. My job is not my purpose in life. I exist to exist, not to work until i die.

Re:The Premise of Conflict in All of Earth's Histo

[kruach aum]

Out of interest? While I won't deny that conflict is a major innovator and force of progress, I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't come up with special relativity because of how much he wanted to embarrass Newton. Rather, he was interested in what simultaneity meant, and then started to think. I'm not sure why things would be different after the Singularity. It could even be argued that conflict is an inhibitor of progress in some cases: Darwin didn't publish his work on evolution for twenty years because of the conflicts he foresaw. It was only his discoverer's pride that stopped Alfred Russell Wallace from getting the scoop.

Re:Extraneous human population

[Golddess]

What do you mean 'not needed anymore'.

I believe pkbarbiedoll means that you've been fired and a robot has taken your job. Sure, your job is not your purpose in life, but you may now find it difficult to put food on your table and keep a roof over your head. So what, if anything, should society do for such displaced individuals? Are current unemployment benefits sufficient, or should we plan for some huge influx of people? What, if anything, needs to be done to avoid a new Luddite movement? Sure, we survived the first, and I am not claiming that we would not survive another. But would society have been better off if something* had been done to avoid the Luddite movement entirely? Should we just let a new Luddite movement run its course?

*Something other than stopping/reversing technological process.