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Kurzweil Argues Technology Improves The World, Compares DNA to Code (geekwire.com)
Futurist Ray Kurzweil told a Seattle conference specific ways in which technology is already improving our lives. For example, while there's a general perception that the world's getting worse, "What's actually happening is our information about what's wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes two of Kurzweil's other interesting insights:
"We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
Several months back there was a call for questions for Ray Kurzweil. https://features.slashdot.org/...
Whatever happened to the answers?
Please login to access my lawn
Has he even been in the Netherlands ? This place IS crowded. We do not have ANY unused space, there is no such thing as "out in the boondocks" here. Even the bits that appear unused are actually carefully managed pieces of 'nature'. Not a single tree there is allowed to fall over without it being discussed in a meeting somewhere.
I have news for Mr Kurzweil. Crowded is not defined in terms of how much more people you can shoehorn in. Crowded is defined in terms of how easy it is to escape the other assholes in case you do so desire.
Google's Director of Engineering, inventor of optical character recognition, inventor of the digital music keyboard and lots of other stuff - his Wikipedia page is quite lengthy...
10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped. If 1 million people moved into the all that mostly empty land between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where are they going to get water?
In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.
Determining how much land is required support each person has actually been studied. 2-9 acres is one range; there are a lot of variables.
10 million people may live around Los Angeles, but they *off of* a lot more land.
Who are you to ask us that question?
Who are you, and why should we care?
What is the point, why are we here?
Just ignore the biggest problems (oil dependence and climate change), concentrate on everything else, and say it all looks good! ...).
Technology needs an imperial fuckton of energy (mostly from oil, gas and coal) for sometimes dubious results that don't do much, if anything, to improve our quality of life (Pokemon Go, Bitcoins,
Let's not forget that technology isn't science, and that we shouldn't do everything just because we can.
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
""We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
Not in the US, or most of Europe, or a good chunk of Asia. Not used for housing or urban sprawl isn't the same as not used. And no, it's actually changing much - communication isn't the only issue, access to stuff (physical goods) is also important, as is access to experiences. And neither have markedly changed if you live in the actual boondocks. (I find most people who live in big cities have little idea what conditions are like outside of the metro area.)
When will computer geeks grasp that most of the human race actually enjoys the company of others and that there are actual economic reasons why people cluster?
'A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it'.
In 1916? Really? World War I aside, anywhere you'd have heard about it in 1916 I suspect you would today. It wasn't the Middle Ages.
If you really want to compare DNA to software, please at least also make reasonable timeframe comparisons... A 100000 year-old piece of code is not "outdated" if the original software is 4 billion years old. In fact, it is actually brand new. But to Kurzeil's defence, let us all admit how hard it is to represent such durations in our feeble minds, who already have trouble thinking about what will happen in 10 years...
He pops pills thinking it will make him immortal, he promotes ideas like the "singularity" where people will upload their minds into computers and other such nonsense. The hubris is so great he'll probably die by having a heart attack and his autopilot Tesla will plough straight into picture of a sunset.
We get information about the world wide slide of the west into a dystopia, where every single country is passing more laws designed to 'keep us safe' which roughly translates to 'give politicians more power to control us'. You can almost see the politicians high fiving each other in the background as they deceive us with some new outrageous lie.
We get information about how world wide mega corporations suction the wealth of nations into their ever increasing profit books while introducing 6000 page monoliths of trade agreements to governments around the world and refer to the laws of countries designed to protect their people as 'obstructions' to trade as they complete the conversion of citizens rights into capital.
We get information about how spy agencies around the world increasingly capture record store our personal information as they move from covert to overt intelligence operations.
We get information about the world wide destruction of ecosystems, species collapse, combined with global warming and all of the political and social tactics used to stop any progress because if you can deny the carbon externalities then all the rest of them must be bogus as well.
It is what is implied by the better information, that the hidden autocrats controlling the reigns of global power aren't going to let go any time soon. The old powers control the wealth of the world and we all do not and they will not let go. That is the 'implied' information from this better information.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Kurzweil (on the one hand) and all those people thinking the terminator scenario will happen (on the other) feel like theists who try to quash their theism by force, but it just pops up elsewhere in another shape.
Kurzweil's "we're all going to be immortal and the singularity will bring plenty to all" is: technology will let us make God and we will all go to techno-Heaven.
The terminator/golem scenario with the out-of-control superintelligences turning the whole world into computer material is: technology will let us make God and we will all go to techno-Hell. The more you get into the really bizarre end of the theology, the more obvious it is.
People don't just live in the cities because they want to be around other people for work and play, cities are also handy in that all sorts of crucial services are nearby. There's a reason cities developed as trade hubs to begin with: people are lazy and would rather walk a couple hundred meters and take a subway to go fetch their laptop from the shop rather than driving long distances for it. Likewise, being close to emergency services is something that only cities can offer. Here in Finland the average response time of an ambulance in cities is about 8-10 minutes in emergencies, whereas up north in Lapland it can easily be an hour even with a helicopter. Libraries, schools, hospitals, post offices, drug stores, etc, all of these and much more are something you can find in nearly every part of any larger city but you might have to travel a couple hundred miles to out in the countryside.
I'm not saying Ray's wrong overall: it's true that living out of cities has become more viable with technology, but it's a bit shortsighted to assume that the only reason people are concentrated into cities are social reasons and entirely ignore the benefits provided by the kind of service infrastructure that cities offer and sparsely populated areas do not.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Sounds like nonsense; just because there aren't houses on it doesn't mean it's unused. There's a lot of farmland in, for example, central North America, or outside the larger European cities.
Also, forests, for example, might be called "unused" by some, but I'd argue that they are useful just as they are and if we raze them all for farmland and housing we'd be in a bad way.
For example, forests are repositories for all kinds of specialized DNA (refererring now to the 2nd quote in TFS), and to stretch the DNA-is-code analogy, it's rarely a good idea to discard forever any when storage is cheap.
Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Physicalism is about as scientifically sound as any other fundamentalist religion-type view. Its proponents claim to be anti-religion, but they are doing basically the same thing and with about as much scientifically sound evidence.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is. In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
He is a stellar example of an idiot with no understanding of science and a big ego. Kind of like a politician, but without the PR training and the power. As such he can be used as a negative example. I do not see any other use knowing about him would have.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hows DNA outdated? Thats like claiming we humans are outdated.. DNA is current and perfectly suited to job at hand. We humans should not try beat nature in engineering of DNA... After all its nature that has unlimited resources and unlimited chances to progress.. We humans tend to make mess.
Now, not believing the future he sees is another thing. I don't believe most of it, but he makes some good points. Do I believe in some unseen singularity that will merge man and machine and boom all will be good? No, just as I do not believe in a mystical sky being who's son's blood is wine.
But, his statement that while things seem worse, they are not is very true. We live in a society that thrives off of BAD news. It sells. And we can get it instantly. Even if there is less of it to report, it seems like there is more.
Do I think that AI and automation will surpass us one day? Yes. I do not think it will be in my lifetime, but it will happen. And, I have no predilection as to whether it will be a Butlerian Jihad moment or the saving of mankind. Why, because I know that it is impossible to see the future. Otherwise I would have my fusion powered flying car by now.
Silence is a state of mime.
It looks like you have written words, but I can find nothing intelligible in what you have said.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No intelligible information in your pile of gibberish, either.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> ry taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with.
Hah, try that in most of Europe: building a house in an area not appointed to housing even if you own the land. The police will be very quickly to tell you that is not allowed and if you don't remove the building yourself the state will do it for you and send you the bill (unless you are very rich and influential). In The Netherlands there is even hassle about people owning vacation houses who live there permanantly (which is not allowed but sometimes ignored by the local authorities).
Many people here have no choice but to live in a city.
It’s one of life’s great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God watching everything, you know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
You know you could just go and look it up.
For instance:
So, it's been around too long for him. What we appear to have with crediting Kurzweil with inventing OCR is a moving of goal posts to accommodate his tech instead of the fundamental idea and implementation.
A search on "OCR inventor" yields the name Emanuel Goldberg as the inventor of Optical Character Recognition (1931).
So Kurzweil moved it into a more modern computer, he didn't invent OCR per se.
This statement:
Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is.
Contradicts this one:
it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
If we don't know what intelligence is, how can we know whether or not it's possible to create using computers? The very fact that our brains do not comprise more matter or energy than the universe is evidence that what you're saying can't possibly be true. You're basically putting forward the age-old "God of the gaps" argument, and it holds up just as much as it ever did. Just because we don't understand something now is not evidence that we'll never understand it.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
In particular the statement "inventor of the digital music keyboard" is provably false. The Kurzweil K250 was definitely a top-flight instrument at its introduction, but there were already a number of other digital synths available at the time. I'm sure Jon Appleton and John Chowning would get a chuckle at the claim.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is.
I'm curious if there are different types of consciousness. For instance aside from size, the difference between dolphin, elephant and, human brains and the way they work. Does that make for a different type of consciousness? Or is consciousness the same and awareness is what is different?
You look into the eyes of an animal and you can see a conscious awareness. Apart from wanting food, sex and sleep what else is going on in those consciousnesses? A fast constantly aware consciousness of a dolphin whose brain is always half asleep and half awake to a slow type of conscious awareness of an elephant that isn't threatened by much of anything. It also seems that emotions are constants and that an animals experience of emotions is similar to ours (or ours to theirs), after all we seem to forget that we too are animals. But that stuff seems to be the chemical experience of life.
In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
What if the universe is consciousness? Not conscious, as in aware but actual consciousness. Simulations of reality would have to end somewhere and what if the explanation of the creation of the universe is only missing how consciousness relates to it. Our individual experience of reality is consciousness, but what if the manifestation of the universe itself came when consciousness became aware, and then aware of itself?
What if consciousness is not a function of complex systems in the universe and reality is the other way around. What if the universe and complex systems are a function of consciousness manifesting into reality? What if the 'big bang' was the universe saying 'I am' and every living creatures experience of reality is the universe observing itself?
Just a thought.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm glad there are still people who think like this, especially in California.
"...there's a general perception that the world's getting worse..."
Well, yeah, amongst people lacking any historical perspective. And maybe amongst politicians, although I'm not always certain they actually believe what they're demagoguing about. I mean, there are people - many people - who think that crime is worse today, when it's actually at record lows. Whether it's you, me, or Kurzweil saying it, these people's minds won't be changed. Let's face it, most people are not all that educated, and get most of their knowledge about the World through the television.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I automatically disregard anything he says. He desperately needs to learn some science before he spouts rubbish about it.
Why are all you people with gloom as your default setting not in Philadelphia right now with your comrades? This is a nerd forum. We're the people you despise until you need us to get something done.
He loses a lot of credibility with this statement. What I guess he means is the land is not occupied by people. But if you take a look the land is heavily used for grazing, timber, mining. I've flown over and driven over the US quite a few times and it really depresses me. The Mississippi is turned into a big drainage ditch. From the ground I see cattle grazing everywhere and they have huge effects on the original ecosystem. The ranchers that have been protesting out west about grazing on government land have gotten in trouble for burning native shrub so it can be replaced with grasses better for cattle. Even historically there has been much fighting over land in the west, they were called the range wars. Montana was the most famous, but there has been lots of other wars over water, fences and sheep vs cattle.
Well, he does have a B.S. from MIT, the Grace Hopper Award, and the National Medal of Technology. So to say he is an idiot is more like ego stroking for you and not a true statement.
Obama has a Nobel peace prize, if you have a point then make it
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Almost all land in Europe is used, but it's not settled.
It takes about 60 years for a forest to grow, farming is needed for food and interim areas are needed for plants to prosper.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
He's a frequent Slashdot contributor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People want to live forever. Once they realise that the afterlife is a lie, they'll put their hopes in even a slim hope like technology that doesn't exist yet but may one day be possible, like uploading or cryonics.
Sure, the chances of waking up again after the dying an freezing is one in a million. But the chance of waking up from the crematorium is zero, so clutch at that straw and hope luck is on your side.
Farming every tiny itsy bitsy pieces of flat ground, herding goats and cows in the slopes strewn with rock, making one wonder what do these goats eat? rocks? There are no untouched pieces of virgin forests left in India. Not in significant quantities.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Look at you, discussing 'likelihoods' with simple matters of fact. If you care, look it up. If you don't, don't opine.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Considering that exactly a century ago those battles were actually happening (Poziers etc) and were reported on the opposite side of the world on the same day it's really bad and insensitive timing for that "grandpa was a flat earther" shit.
Other things - "99% of the land" - the guy may have stuff worth listening to but he's wrapping it up in utterly ridiculous bullshit.
Yes it fucking is you tool. The PopSci-lite dumbed down suggestion that all you need is genes to entirely describe an organism is a metaphor and not reality.
Not so much.
I'm not sure why a futurist telling us the obvious is worth posting?
-Styopa
Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
On one side you have wishful thinking, and on the other side you have people actually doing research to make things happen. Even if the promises of either side never pan out, one is quite a bit better than the other.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Well, it takes about 40 seconds for a supercomputer to perform the same number of computations a human brain does in one - a giant waste of computing power, but it's actually been done.
Interesting datum, but, at the moment we don't even know what the brain is doing with its computing power.
Let's check the calculation. The brain had 100 billion neurons, each with an average of 7,000 synapses, so that's 700 trillion synapses. Each neuron fires at a rate on the order of 1/7 Hz (close enough), so that's 100 trillion synapse firings per second. The fastest supercomputer is a little under 100 petaflops, so the fastest supercomputer does 1000 floating point operations for every neuron firing in a brain over the same time.
If only we had a good idea of how many floating point operations were in one neuron firing, we'd know something here. But the problem is that the brain is massively interconnected, while a computer is very simply interconnected. How many operations does it take to simulate a massively intereconnected system with a simply interconnected system?
"We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used..."
This sounds like the perspective of a city dweller. In the US at least, unless you are going out west and talking about desert the land is actually much more populated than even 20 years ago. More and more it's becoming like most state/national parks, a thin screen of trees creating the illusion of being out in the wilds while the next camper is just on the other side with no real private space.
Physicalism is about as scientifically sound as any other fundamentalist religion-type view.
The view that the mind is what the brain does (materialism) is supported by evidence. Tons and tons of evidence. So.... you are wrong.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is. In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
You seem to be arguing that there is something magical about the human brain. It is an information processing machine. It's a poorly understood one, but your claim that it is somehow impervious to physics is absurd.
It's possible to make a machine that does what the human brain does. Might be wetware, might be hardware, might just be software. We may not be smart enough to build it, but that doesn't mean it cannot be built. Brains exist already. That tells you something. They don't need gigajoules of energy either.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I predict that we are in a natural (non simulated) universe. Bold prediction eh? If there are parallel universes I expect natural ones to outnumber simulated ones.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Kurzweil is getting worse. He wants to be taken seriously, but then he says things like "99% of land is not used". That's pretty fucking stupid, Ray.
Couple of years ago he said all you need to make a brain is the few bytes you find in the DNA. Uhhh... No, Ray. Embryology. The brain has to interact with a real environment in order to develop. So it takes waaaaaaaaaay more information than the DNA code itself.
I've no doubt he is/was a smart guy but he keeps talking shit.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I looked it up. They're not his inventions. Get f***ed.
Technically, not inventor of the concept but one of those who improved it over the years.
Ezekiel 23:20
But Tauschek's OCR machine was patented in 1929 already.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's probably because neural networks were crap when Kurzweil was working on OCR, so he didn't use them, so why would he be mentioned in a neural net textbook? Likewise, it's more likely than not that he didn't use machine learning either, at least not in a way that we're using it today (he quite possibly did some "traditional" model fitting, but if you include that in machine learning is up to you).
I think the problem here may lie in the fact that Kurzweil was one of those people who brought OCR into the realm of personal computing, thus making it usable for a very wide audience that was previously unaware that such thing had even existed before. It's probably the same as with the fact that computer virtualization is "the new craze" but not all people are aware that it was invented at IBM in mid-1960s or so. It's just new in PCs, not new in computing in general. Similarly, in the US and western countries in general, often local inventors or discoverers are favoured in public consciousness over non-local prior art; the examples are numerous here.
Ezekiel 23:20
It must have been a very poor EE college if it didn't have a Tesla coil for fun! ;) (Or maybe just a very depressed one?)
Ezekiel 23:20
You wish. The evidence does say no such thing. Only if you to assume Physicalism first, then you can prove .... Physicalism! That is the same meaningless nonsense that any other religion does (and Physicalism taken as truth is nothing but religion).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, I'd argue that Marx and Lenin invented that one, not Kurzweil and the ones like him. Checkmate, Americans!
Ezekiel 23:20
It does not. The problem is on your side and it is invalid assumption of truth of certain things that are most decidedly not proven to be true. Just like any other religious fundamentalist.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Are you seriously comparing merit-based science and technology awards to the f**ing Nobel peace prize?
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh, he didn't make it to more than a B.S.? Figures. The rest are political things, no reflection on skills or insights.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here is a hint: The problem is on your side. And it cannot be fixed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Kurzweil is not only a moron, his "accomplishments" are fake. Hint: Do not look up "Kurzweil", look up the things he claims to have invented. Just another fraudster living big because of stupid fanbois.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So basically failed terror-management. Pathetic. Incidentally, we do know absolutely nothing about whether there is an "afterlife" or a next life waiting for us. We do know that some people use stories about one to defraud us (most religions, but also the Cryo-Freeze people and the "upload into computer" people and the like), but that does say nothing about the validity of the idea itself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is a sucker born every minute...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
..and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software..
You stupid son of a bitch, we are not anywhere near the point, knowledge-wise, and especially wisdom-wise, to 'edit' our own genomic 'software'. Some of you make jokes about a zombie apocalypse? This is the arrogant mindset that will bring about the equivalent of that! GMO foods are bad enough: I don't even say anything about them anymore because the horse has already left the barn: it's out in the wild now, literally in the wind, and nothing can ever change that. Screwing with our own DNA on the level he seems to imply? No. Just, No.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Neural networks ARE machine learning.
No argument against that from me!
OCR IS Neural networks.
Now that is debatable. Or, you know, it actually isn't - there's no identity between the two. It's not even a case of one being a proper subset of the other, they merely intersect.
Ezekiel 23:20
You forgot the most important question: Where shall we have lunch?
Ezekiel 23:20
Good point. I was making a convenient overgeneralization, conflating their intersection (which is significant) with identity.
Most of all, I appreciate that your link shows the technology was invented by an Austrian in the 1930's.
#NotAllAustrians ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
The world population is around 7.4 Billion people most of it in china and India. But in not too many years, say 100 years, the population will be 11 billion, 100 years ago it was about 1.8 billion. The problem is not now, but it will definitely be coming. Imagine having 3 times as many people next to you. twice as many cars and longer lines everywhere as people wait to get what they need. The world is really not enough room, that is why there is a big push to get to Mars, not fast enough I'm afraid.
It doesn't keep me up. Even if we are cosmic accidents (and I happen to believe we are, though I suspect life, mainly unintelligent, is widespread throughout the universe). There's no "why" to the fact we are here, beyond explaining the biochemical origins of life and the peculiarities of hominoid evolution that lead to the rise of genus Homo. We are here, and that's what counts, and to my mind, the fact that we are the end result of a series of many probable and equally improbable events makes human life incredibly precious. Without some big sky god who can do it all again any time it wants to, it means if we wipe ourselves out, we may be wiping out something that is rather rare in the universe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm particularly troubled by these comparisons of DNA to source code. First of all, any programmer that would create code as sloppy and filled with junk sections would probably be canned. While the analogy works in simple terms, the way DNA and RNA encode and then transcribe that back into proteins is far far more complex than how a computer runs code. In some ways, DNA is far superior, because it tends to be a lot more fault tolerant, but in other ways it is much less efficient and tends to be much more error prone (which is a good thing, those transcription errors are one of the major ways in which life evolves).
Ultimately the analogy fails because cells are not computers. They do not function like computers. DNA could almost be more compared to something like a printing press, except that on occasion letters get inserted into the process, sometimes even entire sequences, and on other occasions letters go missing, not to mention the odd occasion where another press's sequence of letters get transferred.
It is a useful analogy for introducing certain concepts surrounding cellular activities and protein production, but it remains an analogy only at that basic level, and fails on the details.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You can't be serious: you have just been served information containing the posters opinion of Kurzweil. The post is clearly stated too, not gibberish at all.
I agree that Kurzweil spouts rubbish about things he don't understand. Religious people often do.
You are wrong and extremely so. What have been simulated in supercomputers are tiny slices of simple animal brains, taking orders of magnitude longer than your 40:1 ratio. Simulating a human brain? Never been done. There aren't enough data to even begin simulating smaller parts of the human brain, one actually have to know about the system one want to simulate to do it!
Even so we don't even know what level of abstraction is necessary when simulating a brain to get something working like in nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Is God watching or will God (that is the singleton) emerge and be present latter in the progress of the Universe. Perhaps we have it all backwards... Are you for or against the singularity? Your position on the matter may determine where your essence spends eternity.
Either life is rare and we are one of the few if not only intelligent, self-aware entities in the universe or due to the immensity of the universe life is common and rather prevalent though out. Either possibility is mind blowing.
Are you seriously comparing merit-based science and technology awards to the f**ing Nobel peace prize?
I don't take any award seriously absent a reason to do so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think life is probably fairly common. Intelligent life very likely much less so. Even on Earth, intelligence is a solution to the problem of survival used by only a small fraction of organisms, and even among the organisms that use intelligence as a solution, that intelligence doesn't have to be at the level exhibited by a rather small number of tool-using animals.
But it's going to be a long time before we figure out whether intelligence is rare or not. I don't think SETI is the answer, since incidental transmissions (like TV and radio) only propagate out a few light years before they become indistinguishable from ordinary background radio sources. No, I actually think we'll ultimately identify other civilizations through advancements in optical and radio telescopes which will betray tell-tale signatures like pollution in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets. That's still many years away, but eventually we're going to build large scale space-based interferometer array that will be sensitive enough to image continents and oceans on exoplanets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wooosh!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
So basically it's like when we read that Bill Gates "invented" BASIC in the newspaper.