A bit off-topic, but interesting anyway. Will super-intelligent computers someday inherit the Earth? This portentous question
is a staple of science-fiction thrillers such as "The Matrix" and "The Terminator" movies as well as more thoughtful cinematic
treatments such as Steven Spielberg's haunting film "A.I."
The title of Kurzweil's book is borrowed from a famous prediction by computer-science pioneer John von Neumann, who
opined in the 1950s that "the ever-accelerating progress of technology... gives the appearance of approaching some
essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."
Kurzweil, like von Neumann, uses the term "singularity" to mean a fundamental historical discontinuity so profound it
will alter the very nature of what it means to be a human being.
Kurzweil believes the drivers of this revolutionary development will include: the arrival of computer hardware and
software capable of fully emulating human intelligence within three decades; the development of environment-friendly
nanobots (ultraminiature robots) capable of reversing pollution from earlier eras of industrialization; the invention of
"nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s... capable of creating almost any physical product from
inexpensive raw materials and information"; and the reversal of degenerative diseases and ultimately the aging process
itself, enabling human beings to live forever.
And that's just for starters.
As soon as computers acquire the capacity to access their own design specifications and then to improve upon them, a cycle
of exponentially quickening enhancement will begin, resulting in artificial intelligence that "by the end of this century,
will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence." As a consequence, Kurzweil predicts,
"within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately
including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain
itself."
If you think this is wildly speculative twaddle, think again. No less an information-age eminence than Bill Gates has
proclaimed that "Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence," while MIT
computer guru Marvin Minsky has written that Kurzweil's latest tome offers "deep insights into the future from one of the
leading futurists of our time."
Indeed, "The Singularity Is Near" is a kind of encyclopedic map of what Gates once called "the road ahead." Like the graph
of a mathematical singularity flipped on its side, it is a road that leads straight upward toward a momentous event that,
in Kurzweil's scary phrase, will be "capable of rupturing the fabric of human history."
Will anything that we would recognize as human history endure after the singularity? Kurzweil offers this ambiguous
reassurance that the arrival of the Singularity will not represent the end of our history: "The intelligence that will
emerge post-Singularity will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization.
In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution,
the next high-level paradigm shift. Most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological.
However, to address often-expressed concerns, this does not imply the end of biological intelligence, even if it is
thrown from its perch of evolutionary superiority. Even the nonbiological forms will be derived from biological design.
Our civilization will remain human -- indeed, in many ways it will be more exemplary of what we regard as human than it
is today, although our understanding of the term will move beyond its biological origins."
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