Kurzweil discusses singularity in Wired
from the trend-analysis dept.
A short profile in Wired Magazine ("Kurzweil's Law," by P. Boutin) covers Ray Kurzweilís analysis of long-term technological trends. According to the article, "He'll lay out his conclusions next year in a much-anticipated book called The Singularity Is Near, in which (surprise) he'll argue that technology's increasingly rapid pace of change is fundamentally transformative, unstoppable, economically powerful, and cool. It's not just our optical networks that are getting better; according to Kurzweil, the capacity of human consciousness itself is expanding exponentially."
Kurzweilís analyses of these trends "aggregate progress into one big, constantly accelerating curve that flies off the charts at the point where its rate of change becomes infinite – mathematically speaking, a singularity. . . . In lay terms, the future beyond the singularity is completely unpredictable from today's vantage point."
You can find out more on Kurzweilís new web site, www.kurzweilai.net, which was recently covered here.
April 23rd, 2001 at 7:58 PM
Repent! The Day of Uploading is at hand!
From the end of the Wired article in question:
"Almost" be damned. It is religious.
Or, to be fair, it is how the message is recieved by a fair number of the true believers. The desire for transcendence implicit in a lot of the starry-eyed evangelism that passes for discussion on this topic may not be what Kurzweil and Vinge intended. Or maybe it is.
Whether Kurzweil or Wired is responsible for the wording of this, it represents a semantic trend amongst Singulatarians and unrestrained nanoprophets that is disturbing. It is a case of Orwellian doublespeak on a par with the propagandistic use of the phrase "free trade" at the conference in Canada at the moment. To paraphrase a famous spin doctor, "A glib misapplication of an emotive word or phrase, repeated often enough, becomes the truth." If you polarize debating positions on new technologies into two camps of "scientists" (new priesthood, supremely rational, miracle workers) and "luddites" (machine-smashing, blinkered, afraid) then it makes it harder to evaluate objectively the arguements of both sides.
April 24th, 2001 at 1:40 AM
Re:Repent! The Day of Uploading is at hand!
Reading over some of his other posts here at nanodot, I mostly agree with Iron Sun's thinking on this subject. There is a tendency for people get weirdly religious about this stuff. If technology gives us the ability to evolve in new directions hitherto impossible, this doesn't imply that utopia somehow magically emerges. The only thing that appears certain is that in solving old problems we create new ones. Exchanging the annoyances of the human condition for some sort of post-human condition only means that you get new annoyances. Superhuman intelligence, assuming it's possible, doesn't imply infallibility or perfection. It just implies a new set of problems to deal with.
April 24th, 2001 at 2:14 AM
Re:Repent! The Day of Uploading is at hand!
My comment is simple: I agree. Good comment. There's too much religious zeal…
April 24th, 2001 at 6:18 AM
Singularity comming?
I have the oddest feeling that the "Singularity" is an illusion, one that is always at a 15-20 year distance in the future, as we progress it recedes remaining 15-20 years in the future. IMHO G-MAN
April 25th, 2001 at 4:52 PM
Re:Singularity comming?
It is an illusion. I know people who work in neurobiology and they think that uploading is something that will come in the 22nd century, if at all. Using "biology" to make ourselves smarter is a whole other thing, and stem-cell therapies may become available starting in about 5 years. However this does not translate into automatic singularity mode.
Even if we can boost our IQ's to, say, 300, scientific research and technology development still requires experiementation and observation of physical phenomena. This, in turn, requires a certain amount of time that will never decrease regardless of how smart the experimenters are. The time required to do experiments, observe results, and to develop technology based on those experiments will become the limiting factor in progress. The problem with computer simulation is that of garbage-in-garbage-out. I do thin-film process development, and still don't trust most simulation software (although it IS getting better).
Biotech and nanotech are really process technologies. Process technologies are generally very difficult to model, and one still has to do the real-world experiments to make them work.
My other problem with the concept of a singularity is that the rate of change in our lives is actually less than it was from 1900-1950. Afterall, most Americans went from living in unheated, unelectrified, country shacks to the 'burbs during this 50 year period (in Asia, they're moving from the shacks to the urban condos). Even when we get biological immortality, it will not change our physical quality of life that much.
April 25th, 2001 at 7:08 PM
Re:Singularity comming?
Well said. Although MNT will allow streamlining of experiment design and equipment manufacture, there will still have to be a lot of grunt work associated with getting stuff off the drawing board. I intend to work in computational chemistry, both because I think it is really cool, and because my lab experience has convinced me that life is too short to spend appreciable amounts of time in close contact with organic solvents or cyanide (props to those who do!). But modelling will only ever be an adjunct to actually getting our hands/assemblers dirty and actually doing something, rather than just talking about it.