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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Thursday 19 August 2010

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

Saturday 17 July 2010

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

Tuesday 22 June 2010

Ever since we picked up and fashioned a stick to reach a higher branch, we have always used our tools to extend our reach, first physically and now mentally. The computer in my pocket makes me smarter in that I can access virtually all of human knowledge with a few keystrokes. As we master the software of human intelligence, and put intelligent computers in our bodies and brains to make us more durable and more intelligent, this will be a continuation of this trend to extend our reach with our tools. It is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines from outer space; it is something our civilization is creating to extend ourselves. That is what is unique about human beings: We change ourselves to overcome limitations. In my view, we will transcend our biology and its limitations but we will remain human because changing ourselves is what being human is all about. Movies tend to emphasize the dystopian implications of technology, but the reality is that technology is a double-edged sword, intertwining both promise and peril. Overall we are better off. It is only the exponential growing power of information technology that will provide the scale to address the major challenges of humanity such as cleaning up the environment, providing energy, water, food and housing for a growing biological population, overcoming poverty, providing high-quality education, and so on. We need to reap these benefits while we manage the perils. The best thing one can do to prepare him or herself is to find out where you have talent and where you have passion, because every field has something to contribute. Ray Kurzweil

Monday 21 June 2010
Tuesday 15 June 2010
Thursday 31 December 2009
Tuesday 22 September 2009
Friday 29 May 2009

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

Friday 27 February 2009
Wednesday 19 November 2008

Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans do… [It] will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly but… there’s in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they’re more complex and actually more satisfying - and we’ve also invested a lot more in education as a result… So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I’d say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another - none of these jobs existed 50 years ago. Ray Kurzweil

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software. Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology

Thursday 13 December 2007

Ultimate invention: Virtual displays using devices in our eyeglasses that beam images directly to the retina. Prototypes of these already exist. So my vision of computing and communicating in the future includes retina-mounted devices that can create stationary virtual displays even as we move our heads, and full-immersion visual-auditory virtual reality and augmented real reality. We’ll be online all the time with very high-bandwidth wireless communication. Computing and communication will be a self-organizing mesh of nodes, so if you need a million computers for a second, it will be available to you. We’ll live in a blend of real and virtual reality, and it won’t always be clear where one stops and the other begins. Ray Kurzweil

Wednesday 3 October 2007

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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