I first encountered Ray Kurzweil’s predictions at a talk at Harvey Mudd College, where he gave the talk from his office in Boston as a hologram. No joke.
Anyway, I find his predictions to be amazing, mostly because they’re based in a lot of empirical data. He’s also made use of his predictions throughout his life to predict when his inventions should go to market. His inventions have done very well, so his predictions have predictive power, which is exactly the kind of postmodernism you’d expect from a good futurist.
Anyway, among other things, he’s predicted that
-Sentient machines will be developed in the next ~10 years: at the pace that computer processing power is increasing and price is decreasing, a computer with the processing power of the human brain will be c0st about $1000 (although, he’s since humbled this prediction, pushing the date from 2019 to 2020, and increasing the price from $1000 to the cost of a personal computer).
-People alive today will live forever: the rate of increase of life expectancy is such that, during this century, life expectancy will increase by more than a year every year, making immortality achievable (in principle).
-Intelligent machines sigularity: He predicts a “singularity” at which point intelligent machines are able to pioneer their own advances, accelerating machine intelligence exponentially.
He doesn’t talk about machines conflicting with us, or about the weapons that all this great technology will produce, or anything like that. Though he predicts neural nanomachines that increase brain power and allow knowledge to be downloaded from the internet, he doesn’t mention (that I’m aware of) the possibility of hacking people’s thought, or of EMP weapons that could knock out half of what you know.
Still, I think he makes a lot of reasonable predictions that are mind-blowing all the same. I have to admit, I haven’t read any of his books, I’ve just seen him speak and read about him on the internet. I’ll download his book in about 15 years.
I disagree with the absoluteness of the above statement.
A.I. will appear smarter and powerful than most humans. To the ignorant & indolent human idiot, the machine will be superior in every way.
However, to the “elite” human beings, they will still be beyond mechanical capabilities, since they are the ones doing the “programming”.
From a superficial stance, yes his statement his correct, but not from the background.
Most likely, cyborgs will lead humanity. Machines, drugs, and technological marvels of every kind will combine with the Human Animal to create the Human Machine. Once that happens, humanity (as we currently know it) truly loses its “spirit” and becomes extinct. However, spirits are immortal, so they will simply transfer into a “mechanical” state of being. Hu-man machines…
I’ve run into Kurzweil’s books a couple of times, and while I question some of his predictions, one thing does stand out: Predicting the future isn’t some black art. Most of our predictions are very short range and short term because the variables are in constant adjustment to each other. Being able to predict into the near future relies on constructing a model that accounts for most of the variables and simply pushing their relationships to their logical conclusion. It ain’t rocket science, nor is it ethereal philosophy. It is just looking at what is happening and pushing that out into tomorrow. The further one projects, the more generalized the predictions must be in order to account for sponteneity and novel variables appearing.
Er… Still playing video games and talking on the telephone…? As far as I know, robotisists are cobbling together specialized modules into conglomerates, aping evolving life. The current hope is that if you lash enough idependent modules into a network, and allow a degree of ‘mutation’ in connectivity - sentience, or at least something approaching it, will emerge from the gaps.
But the “super-computer stand alone achieves self-awareness” is pretty much on the dumpster. I think a body or vehicle of sufficient complexity is required first, as a seed crystal around which sentience can precipitate.
This is a graph Kurzweil set up, showing the progress of technology in the units of time, by plotting the time to the next “paradigm shift” versus the time before now. Granted, paradigm shifts are inherently subjective, but I think that recent history, which is better recorded and more discussed, bears out the trend.
Tab, I think you’re right about super computers needing bodies. Sentience almost demands personal experience to relate ideas to. The development of human-like robots is progressing nicely though. It will be no time before the most worldly robots rival the most bookish of scholars in terms of sentience.
As far as I know, robotisists are cobbling together specialized modules into conglomerates, aping evolving life. The current hope is that if you lash enough idependent modules into a network, and allow a degree of ‘mutation’ in connectivity - sentience, or at least something approaching it, will emerge from the gaps.