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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.
As technology advances particularly with regard to robotics and AI, we're going to find that a large segment of the human population simply is not needed anymore. In today's political environment I'm simply not seeing the global community embracing strict population control as well as socialism in providing for those who no longer have jobs and are simply using up resources without providing anything in return.
What do you recommend be done with these billions of people in the coming decades?
You invented lots of things that proved to be very useful to a wide range of people and industries. While the patent war is going stronger than ever, do you believe that you could have succesfully develop so many ideas in the current legal context?
It's been said that the first person to live forever has already been born. In what sense is this conceivably true? How would such a medical/technological advance affect society, and how on earth could we avoid something catastrophic from occurring? (If you've ever read the Red Mars trilogy, I think of what happened when the longevity treatment was introduced)
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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.
As mentioned on Slashdot before, Bob Gordon argues that there have been three Industrial Revolutions, the Steam Revolution in the late 18th century, the Electrical and Car Revolution at the turn of the 20th century and the Data Revolution since the 1950ies. Differently than the first two, which yielded immense productivity and wealth increases, the Data Revolution is not living up to its promises yet, though we have many of its aspects already in place, data processing power is at everyone's[*] disposal, a world wide communication network lets you reach a big part of the world population[*] for nearly zero cost, a tremendous source of information is readily available to everyone[*].
[*] everyone either living in the Northwestern hemisphere or being wealthy and influencial enough.
1) Do you agree with Bob Gordon's notion?
2a) If yes, why is that, and will it change in the near future?
2b) If no, where do you see the great increase in productivity and wealth, Bob Gordon is missing?