Lines are blurring between humans and machines

[Achilles]

A little bird told me that this clip might have an audience here.

 

 

For those of you that have never heard of Ray Kurzweil, you can catch a glimpse at the tip of the iceberg here.

 

Also, this makes MS Office look like a chalkboard.

 

Enjoy!

[tk102]

*chirp chirp*

 

I don't know how I haven't of Kurzweil until now.

One of the key points with Kurzweil it seems is the extension of Moore's Law to a more general Law of Accelerating Returns which has uses to both retrofit mankind's achievements prior to Moore's Law and extrapolates it into the future. Here's one of the few people who has vision enough to imagine what life might like in 2030. But he also expands this notion beyond just computing into fields of chemsitry, biology, and engineering.

 

The video Achilles posted starts off general enough with Kurzweil reviewing a events that explain the accelerating returns. And just like his law, where things start off slow but completely take off at the end, this video has some amazing predictions near the end. I'd say around 15:50 and onwards is just

 

Thanks for the lesson in transhumanism, Achilles.

[HerbieZ]

My Sovereign class is closer than i think...

[RedHawke]

My Sovereign class is closer than i think...

My Shadow Command Dreadnought is sadly a very, very, very long time off...

[Achilles]

"You should post this in Ahto" he says...[/mocking]

 

Hrrm, maybe the General Tech forum would've been better. ~tk

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

Wow. That video was pretty impressive, although Kurzweil held back a nearly infinite number of belches delivering his talk.

 

The "Law of Accererating Returns" does seem perhaps a little too aggressive a read on the statistics.... but it doesn't seem altogether outrageous either, does it?

 

Well, if we get past 2012 (* joins prancing Mayans and Hopis and New Agers *) I'd be thrilled to see it play out.

[Achilles]

The "Law of Accererating Returns" does seem perhaps a little too aggressive a read on the statistics.... but it doesn't seem altogether outrageous either, does it?

He spends a great deal more time on it in The Singularity is Near. If nothing else, at least he makes you realize the most people make the mistake of thinking of technology as a linear progression. Once you adopt the exponential view, you'll wonder how it is you ever could have thought otherwise.

[Gargoyle King]

"Lines are blurring between humans and machines"

 

but not to the point of Skynet machines in T3. The YouTube vid just seems like one guy's opinion to me, doesn't really reflect truth; however i suppose anything is possible in this ever changing world. for example it was once said that "Man Shall Never Fly", well we can a shove a big "told ya so!!!" right back to that twit now can't we! Intersting revelations by this dude though, technology could certainly benefit humankind (as it has always done) in the near future.

[Achilles]

The YouTube vid just seems like one guy's opinion to me,

ahem

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

 

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen “revolutionaries who made America”, along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

 

doesn't really reflect truth;

Which part of his work would you like to refute and on what basis?

[Gargoyle King]

Which part of his work would you like to refute and on what basis?

I ain't disputing anything, merely suggesting that "Nano Technology" etc. maybe further off in the distance than he states, that's not to say it won't be just it may not be here anytime soon. I have huge respect for this guy and his work, he certainly knows what he is talking about. So like i said, his video is an "opinion" as he personally believes technological evolution through the greateness of the human mind will develop a lot faster than what it actually may. I'm not trying to undermine someone whom is obviously interlectually superior to me, i was just analysing his opinion with my own. Besides, it hasn't been "proven" to a full extent that nanotechnology can be implemented like he says as it is more of a scientific idea than theory and will still need to be fully proven before it can be refined and worked upon. Evolution can only occur if there is something there in the first place for evolution to improve upon (in our case our own biology adapting to different circumstance such as the dinosaur to the mammal etc), a theological idea is all well and good but without proof it is baseless. Sorry if you didn't understand my post, thought it was clear enough

[SithRevan]

Hmmm, I must say this is most interesting. I am very curious though about the Genetics break-throughs we have been establishing though. I wonder what else we may be able to do with the Human genome and if those changes could change us externally rather then internally. Really quite interesting though.