wired.com— WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.04Med-Tech : Drugs Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity
Mar 26, 2008View in Crawl 4
And do you believe human advancement will occur while continuing to think inside the gender box ... among others? History proves time and again it is thinking OUTSIDE the box that advances our understanding and the quality of our lives.
Okay- One: Your consciousness in a metallic brain replica is not, and will never be, your consciousness. It'll be a copy. As would a clone or anything where the original brain is not intact.It amazes me how often smart people seem to get confused on this logical point. Just because something talks, walks, thinks and acts like you doesn't make it you- it makes it an overly believable stage actor with a screwed up memory.It's easy to work out really- Question: Can the method that I am using result in two versions of me at the same time? If so- failure- created evil twin- back to drawing board.Two: It saddens me greatly that even a rich, super intellegent, arrogant person with an apparently loving family could be as miserably paranoid and psychotic as this guy. I guess happiness really is just a short lived after effect of achievement that is quickly tarnished by the natural flow of time. What they need is a machine that wipes a persons memory, a VCR of their greatest achievements, and something that makes delicious popcorn.
Edison was a great self promoter but he wasn't all that special in terms of his inventiveness, though he did employ some exceptional people. Oh, & Edison didn't invent the lightbulb; several people from all over the world had done that many years before him.
Well it depends on the method you use to transfer your mind to the computer. For instance one proposed method known as cyborging involves slowly replacing your brain cells with nanite copies slowly while you are awake. Seeing as you are not the matter itself but the pattern that it forms and that pattern is never broken you never die. In fact something similar happens as the matter that makes up your brain is changed.
Kurzweil thinks 'nanobots' will somehow lead us into immortality because they would be superior to cells. Cells are built from the bottom up through evolution. They process information at near optimal rates, they are able to morph, they are fully motorized throughout, they can evolve into new forms on demand and all their processes work as efficiently as thermodynamics allows. They are self-replicating, they have an absurdly efficient form of information storage (a single polymer), they are robust to many forms of damage over a wide range of conditions, can self-repair and can communicate with each other in a network in many modes. The DNA in our cells contains some information (highly conserved sequences) which has remained unchanged across billions of years, faithfully copied, proofread and corrected. Top-down design could never achieve these powers. No human mind or AI will be able to predict the kinds of forces at work on the scale of cells, and adding all the simulation you like won't help that much. Even if someone like Kurzweil successfully invented tiny robots which could move around at that scale, they would still be subject to the same thermodynamic constraints as cells, would still be damaged by collisions, radiation and cosmic rays, would still wear-out. In real life these nanobots would also cause all kinds of unexpected side-effects, more forms of disease, because we cannot predict all the interactions between molecules at that scale ahead of time.Kurzweil is chasing a silly dream because he's disappointed with his body. But nothing's perfect, and we already have eternal life through our children, if we don't fk things up.
I think it was the Atheist Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre who said the goal of humanity is to become God (although this is impossible in the end). Then again, there's also that Prometheus guy who stole fire (knowledge?) from the gods and ended up being completely tortured because of it...
Yes, indeed. I doubt they would worried about humans. That would be like us worrying about ants. Once the singularity is reached it's not just a matter of machine intelligence being 5 times or 10 times more intelligent than biological humans, they will be tens of thousands of times more intelligent. But keep in mind that "machine" intelligence is actually human intelligence. It's just the next phase of evolution. It's our destiny.
lol think outside the box, pun intended?you make a good point. you want to see society change in new and creative ways... and to do so in a way that requires thinking outside the "box" but the way that i see things it would be better if we focused on thinking outside the box on problems already at hand such as divorce, which has devastating effects on all parties involved, i had a friend that almost committed suicide SEVERAL times because his parents got a divorce; he was torn and there are plethora of examples like this, i don't need to list all of them. my point is focusing on the problems at hand is the more urgent issue, rather than trying to revolutionize the way we view genders in society. Seriously, what kind of effects, such as emotional, personal, and effects on relationships, will changing our views on sex and gender have on our society? Can we predict the outcomes of this and are we ready to deal with any issues that arise? I think not, thus focusing on the problems that we have at hand are more readily beneficial to "human advancement" than radically changing our views of society before we even have a full grasp of it.
Closed AccountMar 28, 2008
And do you believe human advancement will occur while continuing to think inside the gender box ... among others? History proves time and again it is thinking OUTSIDE the box that advances our understanding and the quality of our lives.
risingashesMar 28, 2008
Okay- One: Your consciousness in a metallic brain replica is not, and will never be, your consciousness. It'll be a copy. As would a clone or anything where the original brain is not intact.It amazes me how often smart people seem to get confused on this logical point. Just because something talks, walks, thinks and acts like you doesn't make it you- it makes it an overly believable stage actor with a screwed up memory.It's easy to work out really- Question: Can the method that I am using result in two versions of me at the same time? If so- failure- created evil twin- back to drawing board.Two: It saddens me greatly that even a rich, super intellegent, arrogant person with an apparently loving family could be as miserably paranoid and psychotic as this guy. I guess happiness really is just a short lived after effect of achievement that is quickly tarnished by the natural flow of time. What they need is a machine that wipes a persons memory, a VCR of their greatest achievements, and something that makes delicious popcorn.
v01dv01cgMar 28, 2008
Edison was a great self promoter but he wasn't all that special in terms of his inventiveness, though he did employ some exceptional people. Oh, & Edison didn't invent the lightbulb; several people from all over the world had done that many years before him.
blast_flameMar 28, 2008
Well it depends on the method you use to transfer your mind to the computer. For instance one proposed method known as cyborging involves slowly replacing your brain cells with nanite copies slowly while you are awake. Seeing as you are not the matter itself but the pattern that it forms and that pattern is never broken you never die. In fact something similar happens as the matter that makes up your brain is changed.
v01dv01cgMar 28, 2008
Kurzweil thinks 'nanobots' will somehow lead us into immortality because they would be superior to cells. Cells are built from the bottom up through evolution. They process information at near optimal rates, they are able to morph, they are fully motorized throughout, they can evolve into new forms on demand and all their processes work as efficiently as thermodynamics allows. They are self-replicating, they have an absurdly efficient form of information storage (a single polymer), they are robust to many forms of damage over a wide range of conditions, can self-repair and can communicate with each other in a network in many modes. The DNA in our cells contains some information (highly conserved sequences) which has remained unchanged across billions of years, faithfully copied, proofread and corrected. Top-down design could never achieve these powers. No human mind or AI will be able to predict the kinds of forces at work on the scale of cells, and adding all the simulation you like won't help that much. Even if someone like Kurzweil successfully invented tiny robots which could move around at that scale, they would still be subject to the same thermodynamic constraints as cells, would still be damaged by collisions, radiation and cosmic rays, would still wear-out. In real life these nanobots would also cause all kinds of unexpected side-effects, more forms of disease, because we cannot predict all the interactions between molecules at that scale ahead of time.Kurzweil is chasing a silly dream because he's disappointed with his body. But nothing's perfect, and we already have eternal life through our children, if we don't fk things up.
stonewaljacksnMar 28, 2008
I think it was the Atheist Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre who said the goal of humanity is to become God (although this is impossible in the end). Then again, there's also that Prometheus guy who stole fire (knowledge?) from the gods and ended up being completely tortured because of it...
Closed AccountMar 28, 2008
Yes, indeed. I doubt they would worried about humans. That would be like us worrying about ants. Once the singularity is reached it's not just a matter of machine intelligence being 5 times or 10 times more intelligent than biological humans, they will be tens of thousands of times more intelligent. But keep in mind that "machine" intelligence is actually human intelligence. It's just the next phase of evolution. It's our destiny.
wgasaJun 7, 2008
lol think outside the box, pun intended?you make a good point. you want to see society change in new and creative ways... and to do so in a way that requires thinking outside the "box" but the way that i see things it would be better if we focused on thinking outside the box on problems already at hand such as divorce, which has devastating effects on all parties involved, i had a friend that almost committed suicide SEVERAL times because his parents got a divorce; he was torn and there are plethora of examples like this, i don't need to list all of them. my point is focusing on the problems at hand is the more urgent issue, rather than trying to revolutionize the way we view genders in society. Seriously, what kind of effects, such as emotional, personal, and effects on relationships, will changing our views on sex and gender have on our society? Can we predict the outcomes of this and are we ready to deal with any issues that arise? I think not, thus focusing on the problems that we have at hand are more readily beneficial to "human advancement" than radically changing our views of society before we even have a full grasp of it.