First of all, I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested to check out Kurzweil's 2009 predictions in his 1999 book Age of Spiritual Machines, rather than this Wikipedia synopsis. It puts his predictions in a much more accurate context. You can view much of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=ldAGcyh0bkUC&pg=PA789&#... Kurzweil also does a reasonably unbiased job of grading his own predictions here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Fari... Quite a few of your statements relate to technological adoption vs. technological capability, such as everyday…
That's right, whether we call it almost intelligence or asymptotic intelligence, or just plain artifice. There are reasons Ray Kurzweil used the term "spiritual" in the Age of Spiritual Machines. Among those reasons is that "spiritual" is much more difficult to define with any consensus among experts. And indeed, there's an inflection point coming. What this is, is not at all clear. However, I'd predict that the answer lies with the realization that, given the limits of conversing with LLMS and GPT, the implication is that there's a human-computer sensemaking…
I read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines when it came out and although it's low on specifics, the abstract concepts are solid. The main one IMHO being that once a chip can emulate the inputs and outputs of a neuron, then a human brain could slowly be replaced by silicon and the person wouldn't even be aware of when he or she became a machine. We used to say that artificial general intelligence (AGI) was 20 or 30 years away. Now it's more like 10. The main thing stopping it is the utter lack of exploration in computer science of highly parallelized/concurrent processing. So…
I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does. It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author. To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up…
I was 19 when this came out and this essay single-handedly changed my life and led me to Ray Kurzweil, Minsky, the Unabomber Manifesto, Naomi Klein, and then ultimately to spirituality through Hawking-trained-physicist-turned-cave-dwelling-monk Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time." The rest of my life quite literally flows from reading this essay over and over when it came out. Genuinely happy to see it here.
I wasn't clear. I'm talking about consciousness in general, humans, animals, octopi... I keep reading but haven't found an explanation that satisfies me. Ray Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about computers and consciousness in his "The Age of Spiritual Machines". I was skeptical about a lot of what he wrote when I read it many years ago. Now I'm not sure it matters. If people imbue their devices with intelligence and emotions then that's what they perceive. I've since learned about Tulpas. Some people have imaginary friends that seem very real to them. People will likely move…
Actually my mother is the one who introduced me to Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and she bought me the book for Christmas. My mother is not a scientist -- she only graduated from High School. She is also very religious and spiritual. So you might be inclined to stereotype or judge her (or other people's Mothers) and assume that you know their points of view on Ray Kurzweil, or science in general. But you might be surprised, if you actually got to know some of these people. I really credit my Mother with inspiring my interest in computers and science. When I was younger…
(Assuming you're not based in the US...) This has become a very common topic of conversation in the US (not just Silicon Valley) among engineers, tech-enthusiasts, and academics in the past decade or so. I think it has a lot to do with Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" -- at least that was around the time I noticed even regular people talking about this subject without fear of being labeled an eccentric. There are still communities where this topic is not openly discussed. A friend in the medical field told me once it's taboo to talk about radical life extension in many…
Ray Kurzweil talks about this in "The Age of Spiritual Machines". It probably comes down to human morality (as with just about everything) with regards to whether this singularity is a good thing or a bad thing.
"Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary" There have been predictions of self-driving cars for more than half a century. It's in Disney's "Magic Highway" from 1958, for example. There was an episode of Nova from the 1980s showing CMU's work in making a self-driving van. Researching now, Wikipedia claims: "In 1995, Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1600 km trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot…