Ray Kurzweil predicts the future..

Didn't know he's viewed as the smartest futurist on Earth..

But I like what's behind him:)

[YOUTUBE]cc5gIj3jz44&feature=fvw[/YOUTUBE]

He obviously didn't see the documentary "Idiocracy."

-Mc

p.s. I know it was a comedy, I'm kidding...

Can he predict when the next K series is out???

Caught a good interview with him in Playboy's "The New Human" series, I believe it was. Within 30 years, we're going to be able to print healthy organ tissue. Also, medical nanobots will be cruising around your bloodstream, keeping you healthy.

we won't let Idiocracy happen- we Transhumans will insure the masses will be augmented and repaired/reprogrammed- hopefully we will be benevolent and then return self-determination and freedom back to the upgraded masses - but you humans are rather annoying- we might be looking at a period of theocracy where we will be the human's ruling gods for awhile- hopefully not though-

BTW- here is a great interview of Ray by Michio Kaku- where Ray thoroughly dismisses the main criticisms of the Law of Accelerating Returns:

http://huffduffer.com/Clampants/6296

Our last Ray Kurzweil thread (started by me)

I picked up "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for free (the org that was sharing our office building had a big book giveaway), along with a couple of other books.

Pretty entertaining read. Dunno how our minds are going to be uploaded into a machine though - I don't think we're going to achieve that level of technology by 2029. I suspect it will take us a lot longer than that - about as long as it would take to develop the tech for faster-than-light-speed interstellar travel (by portable wormholes, Planck space, or whatever).

Another scifi writer presents a future in which humans never get around to uploading their minds. His post-humans are beings who evolved themselves out of the human gene pool, probably with the assistance of bioengineering. They can teleport at will, assume any physical form, and do other god-like feats. They created the trans-humans ("decanting" them from DNA samples and other stored data) to serve as living CPU nodes for their massive computational projects. The trans-humans weren't really given any other jobs to do, so they eventually devolve into lazy party-goers, forgetting how to use their Functions (detect other trans-humans, "fax" themselves anywhere on the planet at will, interface with the biosphere, etc.) and even how to read books. They eventually think of themselves as the old-style humans, until the real old-style humans make an appearance towards the end of the story. There are the robotic beings, made out of organic and mechanical parts but are oddly more human than the post- and trans- humans due to their avid study and appreciation of human art forms (novels, plays, TV shows, poetry, etc.). The post-humans also connected the Noosphere (evolved from the Internet) to the Biosphere (the planet's living components) to form a new Super-Noosphere and gave it self-awareness - but it's just another character in the story. Thus, we have an entertaining story in which post-humans, trans-humans, robots, planet-wide entities, and regular humans co-exist. It's not a Utopian future - most of the post-humans end up devolving in their own way due to too-human traits such as greed, hubris, pettiness, the well-meaning planet-wide entities do some messed up things for the sake of "defending" the planet and its inhabitants, the trans-humans are slaughtered by the score by out-of-control machines until they learn how to make primitive weapons and fortifications (and they still get f-d over badly), and the robots are left to figure things out and try to clean up the messes.

Considering what he's talking about in this video, it's a little creepy to think what other possible civilizations only a few hundred or so years beyond where we're at right now might be capable of, let alone thousands of years. This whole universe is probably a garnish is some hyper evolved creeptopuss's cosmic martini, us being projections of said creeptopuss into the microcosm of the martini so it ourselves can experience drinking us itself. All under the direction of the...

[YOUTUBE] [/YOUTUBE]

I wasn't looking for this but it came up on Digg:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327231.100

This guy is a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield. He doesn't believe the human mind is computational (can be replicated in a computer, not even a quantum one). I guess those of us still alive by 2029 will see who's right.

Girevik, what's the title of this book you're talking about with the trans-humans and all? I wanna read it!

I think he has developped teh most amazing voice and picture recognizion programs there are.

For example a camera that can read a book or sumthing.

Ok its nice to know all of this but my question is...

" Can he predict when the next K series keyboard is out? "

Cheers,

OFM.

Yah, but it sounds vaguely similar in many ways to the modern Battlestar Galactica series, doesn't it?

I definitely give my props to Mr. K for inventing the first OCR device and his other cool inventions.

I posted the title and its sequel in the "Read anything good lately?" thread but didn't say it here because, well, I did give away some spoilers. For example, the trans-humans starting out thinking they're the old-style humans - I really thought they were just like us until I got to the scene in which the mysterious old woman they meet teaches them how to use their "proxnet" and "allnet" functions.

Does anyone else think that predicting the fall of the Soviet Union or victory of a chess-playing computer over a chess grandmaster was not that much of a stretch? Methinks there is as much P.T. Barnum in this guy as there is intelligence. I am still hoping his prediction comes true though and that I live to see it; it should be interesting.

Glad I'm not the only one. I think he's a very smart guy and he has a knack for seeing where technology is headed, but (without having read the book) it almost seems like he's ignoring the substantial social headwind such technology would face even if it were developed within the timeframe he's talking about, which sounds pretty optimistic in the first place.

After the fact, it seems obvious. The prediction that a computer would beat a human chass master seems trivial now because computers do everything now. But in the days before computers were doing everything, it was quite a stretch, I think.

I think the "singularity" idea is kind of obvious, too. I mean, of course technology is increasing faster and faster. And when I think about it, it seems obvious that the change will become so rapid that what lies after the change would seem incomprehensible to us now.

AI/robotics professor Noel Sharkey argues along these lines in the article I posted.

All I know is that my DSL is 100x faster than it was 6 years ago... Computers are a lot faster too, its hard to count how much without doing tests, but there is usually 4-8x as much ram in same price range computers.

In 40 years... computers might be incredibly fast.

Too bad that each new Windows OS runs just as fast/slow as the previous OS on the PC technology when they were released. Windows Vista is incredibly slow with my 1GB RAM. Though I should upgrade it's ridiculous it runs slower than Windows 2000 did with 128MB RAM.

Yup, M$ is doing reverse Moore's law, their OS get more power consuming, suckier and expensive every year.

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computerhistory.html

if anyone is curious how you can realistically upload yourself into a being of pure software:

by the 2020s we will have direct computer-brain interfaces- either pharmaceutical nanotechnology [nano-RFID-like tags embedded in neuroproteins with carbon nanotube antennae mixed into energy drinks you can by at a GNC like tech store at the mall- or something like that] or 4D ultrasound from Japan- so that our petabit/petaflop smartphones/iphones will have wireless read/write access to our minds by triggering/suppressing/reading our neurons individually- a 'bluetooth' for your brain-this will mean a Singularity unfolding during the 2020s as humans create and explore more-real-than-real virtual worlds- expand their consciousness and knowledge through direct connection through the internet to databases and other minds- share/edit dreams and memories- copy neural states into the network and thus 'upload' out of the body and back in- or to other bodies/robots- and thus begin a mental diaspora into new species of mind and new worlds- in the 2030s the Virtual and the Actual will be indistinguishable- and mind will be completely plastic and free of the flesh and of any limitations- this will be the manifestation of SAI: brains who have expanded themselves- mind gestalts and direct data bases and digital computation into omniscient super-beings-

the 2020s will herald the return of the Dreamtime- we will be able to be gods of our own virtual universes- live for subjective aeons in just seconds of computer time- duplicate/copy our selves- change ourselves- our bodies- share ourselves- at first it will just be the adolescence of the internet as we replace our screens with minds-eye views and virtual interfaces- but as we start to share memories and edit our thoughts and sensorium- we will experience the full social upheaval of the Singularity- in a very short amount of time after that the new artilects will Immanentize the Eschaton- again by transforming all the hierarchies of structures built from matter/energy and the quantum vacuum itself into conscious/intelligent/telepathic network processing nodes-