What is Digg?Sponsored by AVG
Not All Free Anti-Virus Software Is Created Equal view!
free.avg.com - 2.4 million people a week get AVG Anti-Virus Free, for the best protection against web threats.
250 Comments
- anexanhume, on 04/14/2009, -3/+49My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer.
- Vaiper, on 04/13/2009, -3/+44I wish. Singularity is one of the few topics that fascinates me.
- JDRay, on 04/14/2009, -6/+41Don't hold your breath. We've had the capability to go to the moon for nearly half a century, but you don't see anyone up there now, do you? We'd rather fight wars with our science than do cool things with it.
- fluidfoundation, on 04/14/2009, -2/+37I've seen a few videos of woman and machine becoming one, I guess man is just late to the game.
- richgustavson, on 04/14/2009, -2/+31Do you like techno? Well you would if you had robot ears.
- AudioLoveMagic, on 04/14/2009, -1/+30You think it's hard to find a job now?
Shiiiiiiiiit. (Sen. Clay Davis) - writeman, on 04/14/2009, -6/+34I love predictions like this. Here are a few from the past:
In 1925, Harvey W. Corbett of the American Institute of Architects said, "Fifty years hence automobile traffic will have entirely disappeared from the surface thoroughfares of New York City, and people will be shot through tubes like merchandise."
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
--Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
http://www.findlove-keeplove.com/funny-predictions ... - mark076h, on 04/14/2009, -1/+24The Singularity Is Near!
- unsigneddigger, on 04/14/2009, -1/+21Beats the ***** out of dying
- wizzwizz1, on 04/14/2009, -3/+21Just let me know when I can shoot lasers out of my eyes, that's really all I care about.
- roedood, on 04/13/2009, -3/+19I AM A ROBOT!
- DaffyDuck, on 04/14/2009, -1/+17Unlike space travel, the technology required to reach the singularity is driven by consumer and corporate spending (on processors). That's why the price is dropping so quickly. Going into space is as expensive as always because there is no consumer product involved. There's a huge difference.
- eloestea, on 04/14/2009, -0/+15Nah, Kraftwerk already made Man Machine decades ago.
- Trigonometron, on 04/14/2009, -2/+16The difference is that Ray has been right before. He has his own stock market AI for crying out loud. The man is basically skynet.
- anthropodeus, on 04/14/2009, -1/+15and you would know how?
- 4NDr01D, on 04/14/2009, -1/+15they will be one in the same, there is no difference between biology and technology
we will grow ourselves
stop being a luddite - johnwiz, on 04/14/2009, -0/+14Robot penis here i come!!
- kingcam, on 04/14/2009, -0/+13How about we make some sort of novelty, internet, "Kurzweil countdown Clock".
- MiddleOfNowhere, on 04/14/2009, -1/+14In the Sixties, Star Trek imagined a lot of technologies for the 23rd century that are available now or will be soon. iPhone & Co. = Tricorder. Speaking/listening/"reading" (99.5% reliable OCR) computers: Available (BTW, Kurzweil has done a lot of groundbreaking work in that area). Thumb-sized data stores holding millions of pages. Personal music and video archives with thousands of titles. Large video screens (I could work real hard for three weeks and afford a shiny 50" Samsung - if I had the living room space). Up next: (Reliable) machine translation.
And then there's the mobile phone. And the Internet. With the exception of A.C. Clarke, our grandparents' generation didn't even imagine these technologies that shape our daily lives. If someone had described a technology like the Internet to your grandparents in the Fifties: When do you think they would have placed it on a timescale? 2100? 2200?
So the future might be different from what we expect.
But it might be different in an interesting way. - Brutis, on 04/14/2009, -1/+13Didn't know people on digg watched good shows like The Wire. Thought you all watched Battlestar.
- MiddleOfNowhere, on 04/14/2009, -0/+12Is it?
I consider myself a transhumanist, I've read Kurzweil, Moravec, Minksy, Egan & Co.
But as the years go by, it looks more and more like the Singularity is the IT-meets-philosophy equivalent to commercial nuclear fusion or a manned mission to Mars: Lots of smart people see it coming; and it's always twenty years away - thirty max. *Really*.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to live forever in a self-improving, complex virtual society that can travel to the stars in nano-sized spaceships, taking a backup of our whole civilization with us and creating a new one along the way, just for fun ("Diaspora" is one hell of a book! :).
But with the current state of the planet, our appetite for self-destruction and more of the same, it seems 99% of mankind needs to change their priorities before merging them all into one happy, smart hive seems like a good idea.
As for technological feasibility: 2145 seems more realistic than 2045, I'm afraid. We are talking about replicating/reproducing the wetware in our heads - the machine we still know almost nothing about. For all I know, even simulating the brain of a fly is still decades away.
But I'd be very happy to be wrong about that. - grantHamNeck, on 04/14/2009, -1/+13His predictions for 2009 were not entirely correct.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ...
Remember this a man who makes his money by predicting the future it makes sense that he would exagerate, at least slightly, his ideas so that he sells more books etc... - hazard99, on 04/14/2009, -4/+14People in the 50's thought we would all be driving rocket cars on the moon.
- eloestea, on 04/14/2009, -0/+10Poly metal Alloy
- ultraJesus, on 04/14/2009, -0/+10GET TO DA CHOPAAA
- LilJimmyNordin, on 04/14/2009, -1/+11I'M DETEKTIFF CHON KIMBULL!!
- bluebirdgm, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9If he wrote this in 1999, he's pretty good. It hasn't gotten as far as he's predicted, but we're well in that direction, maybe just one or two steps behind. At your link Kurzweil pretty much describes Bluetooth, smartphones, netbooks, home servers, SSDs, wireless and wireless broadband, head-mounted displays, improved LCD displays, e-paper and e-readers, built-in cameras on computers and phones, distributed computing, cloud computing, nanotech, the pervasiveness of laptops and portable electronic devices in schools, even GarageBand.
I don't think there are many other texts like this from 1999 that have sketched out 2009 with such accuracy. - DaffyDuck, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9Keep an eye on these projects:
Blue Brain
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/out_of_the ...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518 ...
http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
FACETS
http://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/index.html
I agree that we still have a lot to learn about the brain but we finally have most of the tools needed to really understand the brain. I don't think it will take as long as you might think. - fluidfoundation, on 04/14/2009, -1/+10I HAVE A ROBOT VAGINA!
- phaseblue, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9The data can be called pain.
- Sporky023, on 04/14/2009, -1/+10or, even MORE scary, the realization that our ego is an role we play to ourselves, an illusion brought about by the network of pain nerves at the periphery of our physical bodies. Our "freedom" is just an illusion borne out by the conceptual play of our various masters - hunger, sex drive, fear, competing for attentional processing power.
What's terrifying is realizing that the biological goals of unicellular life has remained within us essentially unchanged, that we are made to die, and that our short lives are lived in sacks of flesh and that we perceive the universe through the "soft gelatin of these dull cow eyes". Imagining our shell getting wrinkly and smelling like rotting flesh for the last decade of our life. Imagining our minds becoming diffuse and lethargic as our neurons die, and our sexual fire dwindling to flicker, now THAT's terrifying. - writeman, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9Being right before doesn't mean he's right this time. It doesn't mean he's wrong, either. But let's face it. Nobody really knows what the hell the future will bring. It's all speculation.
- AudioLoveMagic, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9In my humble, The Wire is the best show ever produced for television.
- rohmann, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9"People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked using "body LANs" (local area networks).1 These computers provide communication facilities similar to cellular phones, pagers, and web surfers, monitor body functions, provide automated identity (to conduct financial transactions and allow entry into secure areas), provide directions for navigation, and a variety of other services.
For the most part, these truly personal computers have no moving parts. Memory is completely electronic, and most portable computers do not have keyboards."
I don't know... Sounds a lot like a typical smartphone to me. Not dozens of computers, and they aren't monitoring my health, but the gist of it is there.
"Computers routinely include wireless technology to plug into the ever-present worldwide network, providing reliable, instantly available, very-high-bandwidth communication. "
Wi-Fi, netbooks.
"A $1,000 personal computer (in 1999 dollars) can perform about a trillion calculations per second.4 Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain--20 million billion calculations per second.5 Unused computes on the Internet are being harvested, creating virtual parallel supercomputers with human brain hardware capacity."
Software for the Seti project, Curing Cancer, that Aids one... Not sure what we currently think would be the equivalent of human capacity.
He's definately not perfectly right on, but he's not very far off on a lot of it. - gerryk, on 04/14/2009, -0/+9GECHOO ASS TO MOSS!
- Glassmentality, on 04/14/2009, -2/+10Go, Go, Gadget Dick!
- DaffyDuck, on 04/14/2009, -0/+8Man is a machine. A biological machine. Religious people generally do not accept this truth.
- anthropodeus, on 04/14/2009, -2/+10feel free to die. nobody's forcing you to live forever. you can leave the future to us.
- anthropodeus, on 04/14/2009, -0/+8or, even more scarily, a foreign entity (big brother?) controlling us from the OUTside.
- DaffyDuck, on 04/14/2009, -1/+8Kurzweil's predictions may be as far-fetched if not much more than many that never came true but at least his are very well reasoned and he's considered them from many angles. The Singularity is Near goes into tons of detail and he has a section devoted to responding to criticism.
- kingcam, on 04/14/2009, -0/+7Most people here obviously have not actually read anything that Kruzweil has written on the subject. His views are presented with too much factual argument and mathematical reasoning to dismiss out of hand.
- oboshoe, on 04/14/2009, -0/+7Yes.
However they will be micro-robot monkeys. - inajeep, on 04/14/2009, -0/+7Well at that age my body won't be much use by then so I'll sign up to be a machine/man hybrid. See you on the front lines.
- anthropodeus, on 04/14/2009, -0/+7why will people need jobs? all production and R&D will be automated.
- Ghoztt, on 04/14/2009, -0/+6Who is your Daddy, and what does he do?
- usafdave, on 04/14/2009, -1/+7We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.
- Harabeck, on 04/14/2009, -1/+7Except Ray Kurzweil has been one of the few people to actually get some right.
- Harabeck, on 04/14/2009, -0/+6A lot of that stuff is pretty close to being right actually, he's just a little over optimistic about solid state memory and the body lan stuff.
- DiggasWAttitude, on 04/14/2009, -0/+6C'mon, don't ***** me.
- scheibs14, on 04/14/2009, -0/+6So wait, we'd be getting shot through the internet?
-
Show 51 - 100 of 257 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is