Scientists like roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil advocate uploading our minds into robots or virtual reality so that we can live forever. They believe that our minds can be replicated outside of our brains if we simply copy the pattern of neuro-chemical activity taking place in our bodies. That pattern, rather than the brains in which the pattern takes shape, “is” the personality. If it can be transferred to a digital medium, it can be made immortal. Both Moravec and Kurzweil predict that this technological transcendence is rapidly approaching. In the near future, our essential selves will be digital information, capable of infinite replication, rapid learning, and regular backup in case of an accident. Surpassingly intelligent robots—our Mind Children, according to Moravec—will populate the universe, converting physical reality into a cosmic interweb of thinking machines. The Cult of Kurzweil: Will Robots Save Our Souls? ☀
Currently, solar power supplies less than 1% of the world’s energy needs, which has led many to disregard its future significance. Where they’re wrong is that they fail to understand the exponential nature of technology, says eminent inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Just like computer processing speed—which doubles every 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law—the nanotechnology that drives innovations in solar power progresses exponentially, he says.
During his latest Big Think interview, Kurweil explained:
“Solar panels are coming down dramatically in cost per watt. And as a result of that, the total amount of solar energy is growing, not linearly, but exponentially. It’s doubling every 2 years and has been for 20 years. And again, it’s a very smooth curve. There’s all these arguments, subsidies and political battles and companies going bankrupt, they’re raising billions of dollars, but behind all that chaos is this very smooth progression.”
So how far away is solar from meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs? Eight doublings, says Kurzweil, which will take just 16 years. And supply is not an issue either, he adds: “After we double eight more times and we’re meeting all of the world’s energy needs through solar, we’ll be using 1 part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the earth. And we could put efficient solar farms on a few percent of the unused deserts of the world and meet all of our energy needs.”
Reducing this bold of a prediction to simple mathematics sounds absurd, but it has served Kurzweil in the past. Using this formula, he accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, chessmaster Garry Kasparov’s defeat to a robot, and the proliferation of the Internet—as well as over 100 other predictions. (He also says that humans will merge with machines in 2045!)
Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It’s design is not encoded in the genome: what’s in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn’t even aware of the magnitude of that problem. We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell! Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain ☀
Fifteen years ago, you had to be wealthy to have a mobile phone. When somebody took out a mobile phone at a movie, that was a signal that this person was powerful and a member of the wealthy elite. They actually didn’t work very well. It took 10 years to put up the first billion cell phones, and three years to put up the second billion, and 14 months to put up the third billion. We’re now at 5 billion cell phones for 6 billion people. A third of the individuals in Africa have cell phones. According to industry projections that they will all be smart phones within two or three years. So everybody in the world is going to have access to the Internet from these extremely inexpensive mobile devices. The reason for that is that the law of accelerating returns applies approximately a 50 percent deflation rate for information technology. It’s true of every form of information technology, whether it’s genetic data, DNA, brain data, bits of computing, bits of memory, bits of communication. Every year the cost comes down by about half. Ultimately, by the time these technologies work well, they’re extremely inexpensive. Ray Kurzweil ☀
The common wisdom that you can’t predict the future is not all wrong. We can’t predict specific things, such as whether Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock will be higher or lower three years from now. But within information technology there are meaningful patterns. The evolution of information technology follows such exquisitely smooth exponential trajectories, in fact, that I can say with confidence that all information technology doubles its price performance and capacity pretty much every year. If you ask me the cost of a MIPS (million instructions per second) of computing in 2010, the cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the spatial resolution of brain scanning in 2014, I can give you detailed figures and they are likely to be accurate. This has proved true for computation for more than 100 years, going back to the first data processing equipment used to automate the 1890 census. One way to think about the patterns in information technology is to look at science, where we see other examples of remarkably predictable effects resulting from the interaction of inherently unpredictable phenomena. The laws of thermodynamics provide an example. The path of each molecule in a gas is modeled as a random walk. Yet the properties of the overall gas, made up of many chaotically interacting particles, is predictable to a high degree of precision. Technology evolution is, similarly, a chaotic system with remarkably predictable properties. Ray Kurzweil ☀
There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic device.
And so, Mr. Kurzweil presents Blio, a software package that can run on everything from PCs to hand-held devices. It displays colorful images and varying fonts with formatting similar to what people find in physical texts.
The Blio free software should become more widely available to consumers over the next two months, Mr. Kurzweil said, as large PC makers and retailers like Walmart begin to offer it on their own devices.
“Walmart is very excited,” Mr. Kurzweil said. (Melissa O’Brien, Walmart spokeswoman, said, “We speak to manufacturers and suppliers all the time regarding new products, so as a general rule we simply do not comment on speculation about what may be coming to Walmart or Walmart products until plans are absolute.”)
Mr. Kurzweil argued that the existing e-readers and tablets have limitations in the text formats they support and the way they handle the original images and layouts in printed texts. Blio preservers the original formatting, making it particularly attractive to publishers of things like cookbooks, how-to guides, schoolbooks, travel guides and children’s books.
Lyons dismisses my accurate prediction (written in the mid to late 1980s) of a world web of computing and communications ubiquitously tying together people with each other and with vast information resources. He writes “But hold on a minute. Who didn’t think the Internet was going to catch on?” The answer is virtually everyone. I wrote this when the entire U.S. defense budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the Arpanet. My prediction was considered very radical at the time that I made it just as many of my predictions are regarded today. It is typical that when my predictions become true, people write that they were always obvious. Ray Kurzweil ☀
An Interview with Newsweek's Steven Levy ☀
- UBIQUITY: What is your next book going to be about?
- LEVY: Well, I haven't really figured that one out yet. There's a couple ideas I'm exploring, since I haven't committed to any of them I'm really not ready to talk about them.
- UBIQUITY: Why don't you do one on Ray Kurzweil and his group?
- LEVY: Interesting. I mean, I've met him a few times and he's a fascinating guy. Well, maybe if Ray helps me live forever, I'll certainly get around to doing a book about him.
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