When the problem is fully solved, Battelle predicts an eerie future: "Search may well lead to the creation of Hal, the intelligent but creepy computer doppelganger of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or, if that possibility doesn't keep you up at night, think of search as the application that lays the foundation for Skynet, the AI (artificial intelligence) programme that takes over the world as imagined in the Terminator films, or the equally dystopian Matrix trilogy."
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
2 way-out views of technology's role in shaping the future: Inventor predicts the fusion of human and machines; author says let go of technological fixes for humans' sake
Inventor Ray Kurzweil's new book, "The Singularity Is Near," predicts the fusion of humans and machines to create powerful and potentially immortal life forms.
In his book, "Enough," environmentalist Bill McKibben says that unless we forgo such technological fixes, and accept death, we will ultimately cease to be human.
I don't know about you, but I think humans are vastly overrated. As a bit of code in a vast, ongoing computation, we are -- at best -- a placeholder for something better.
6 comments:
I'm with you, Mac. Let's go robot in 2012!
At the end of the Mayan calendar. How fitting!
A future with immortality will be more boring that you might think. Visitors to this sight and readers of Sci-fi might see an endless future of learning, invention, travel, reading, art ect.
Most people are much more boring. Imagine an immortal middle class slob. Living forever but no different than he lives now. Boring job, Sitcoms and porn and Monday night football. Plugging away untill his 401k reaches critical mass so he can go fishing instead of his job THEN come home to his TV dinner and sitcoms.
A future of immortal cubicle dwellers, shop keepers, dock workers, ect. Just because you can expand your ming doesnt mean you will. How many people have read any important book while in college. How many did what they had to do to get the grade then forgot whatever they had learned as soon as the class was over?
Opening new frontiers could mean very little if only a handfull of people explore it. Think of the internet. Most people can read their Email and visit their favorite sights but only a few are excited enough about the technology to become hackers.
Oh the Singularity is near.
Funny. I read it as Sherriff
Boogey Man--
The middle-class leisure "culture" you describe simply couldn't survive democratized immortality in the first place.
However, I think it might very well survive a situation in which the wealthy seize immortality by the reigns and keep it out of the hands of the "proles."
Scary thought.
Mac
Never underestimate small minds in large numbers. Remember, we are the wierd ones. Every have that rare TV show that entertains you get cancelled? Its because no one but you and maybe me watched it. The odd men out are and will be swamped by the endless sea of low rent white trash.
What would be the more likely outcome if everyones brain were wired together'
1. The more brilliant and far sighted would enlighten the masses with their fantastic and cutting insight, or
2. The more numberous 'average' brains will drown out all others with their preoccupation with porn, beer, sports, Jerry Springer and endless empty chatter?
Listen to peoples cell phone conversations now. Drop in on almost any random chat room or listen to conversations on the bus.
I have seen the future, and like the present it is 89% boring and stupid sprinkled here and there with amazing nuggets.
Also in a race between conspiracy and stupid, stupid is the better bet.
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