-----Krimel, Thursday, June 07, 2007 16:18----- I just finished Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines and I have to say I think he is on to something. His view of evolution and what he calls the law of accelerating returns at least has face validity. There have been a number of snotty responses from some about this but I suspect these are based on gut reactions not serious consideration of what he is saying.
His predictions in this book written in about 1999 are pretty much on track so far. For example he foresees quibbling over the Turing test to go one for another 25 years or so which is in his view 10 or more years after machines can routinely pass it. ----- I've read excerpts from Kurzweil's latest book *The Singularity Is Near*, in which he builds on Verner Vinge's idea of a "singularity" or discontinuity in history beyond which we cannot "see"/predict future events (like the event horizon of a black hole, ergo the name). Kurzweil argues that the acceleration of the rate of change in society in this century will lead to the equivalent of 20,000 years of progress in the space of 100 years due to the repeated doublings in technological price/performance across information-, bio-, and nano-technologies. You can listen to his argument in a couple of lectures available through two organizations I greatly admire: The Long Now Foundation <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=610691660251309257> TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38> Kurzweil also has a website devoted to essays & news items related to these trends: <http://www.kurzweilai.net/> The seeming inevitability of augmented human intelligence and apparent likelihood of artificial intelligence raises panoply of interesting philosophical questions regarding identity and ethics. I think the MOQ would argue that intelligence is a pattern, so there's no a priori reason it can't be instantiated in silicon rather than neurons. Let's just hope if that view is correct, that any artificial intelligence won't need to recapitulate the phases of our own developmental evolution (as Wilber speculates in *Boomeritis*) and that, if it's possible, we can start it off at a level of rationality rather than going through a bloody, bad sci-fi, evil conscious computer stage. While I'm definitely a technological optimist and would go so far as to remain open to the some of the tenets of transhumanism and extropianism, I still don't know what to think of these possibilities other than it sure is an interesting time to be alive. Keith moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
