I'm reading ray's new book called "the singularity is near" and its amazing!. It's a top seller at amazon right now. I also get to meet Ray and have dinner in december in boston

Merge With the Machine -- In 2020

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,...tw=wn_tophead_5

02:00 AM Oct. 03, 2005 PT

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- A photo in Ray Kurzweil's new book about humanity's future shows the author wearing a sandwich board that reads "The Singularity Is Near."

"The image pokes fun at the superficial similarity between what I'm saying and millennial predictions," said Kurzweil.

The Singularity Is Near is also the title of Kurzweil's book. In it, Kurzweil predicts that in the not-so-distant future technology and biology will converge to give rise to non-biological life.

Speaking last week at Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, Kurzweil sought to explain why he believes genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics, or GNR, will converge in the coming decades to extend life and improve society.

Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence expert, inventor (think Kurzweil keyboards) and futurist, told an audience at the MIT Kresge Auditorium that technological evolution, marked by paradigm shifts, is moving at an exponential rate similar to that of human biological evolution.

Humanity will soon benefit from GNR advancements, Kurzweil said.

In fact, Kurzweil suggests that humans prepare for those advancements by "(taking ) care of yourselves for 15 years," at which point technology will begin extending our lives to the end of the 21st century, perhaps forever.

If that sounds crazy, it might help to know that Kurzweil has a decent track record making predictions.

Twenty years ago, Kurzweil predicted the exponential progression of Arpanet, the predecessor to the internet. "We have seen this kind of exponential progression (before)," he said.

And we will see the same rapid rate of change in the biological sciences and communications, Kurzweil said.

"Eventually," Kurzweil said, "we will merge with these technologies." At that point, the Singularity, humans will become immortal and capable of changing their forms and environments at will, Kurzweil believes.

"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine nor between physical and virtual reality," Kurzweil writes in his book.

Kurzweil is unsure what the post-Singularity world will look like. But he said in an interview with Wired News he can "imagine being freed from the constraints of the body and brain. It's conceivable that you will be able to instantly change physical form."

Paradigm shifts, new discoveries that change our conventional wisdom, are central to Kurzweil's Singularity theory.

Such dramatic changes are improving the science of drug discovery, for example.

"Many of the drugs on the market today are based on the old paradigm," Kurzweil said. "We'd go through 10,000 compounds to find something that lowers blood pressure. And those drugs have all kinds of side effects." But because biology is becoming information technology, also known as biotech, artificial intelligence will be able to create better drug therapies, Kurzweil said.

Other speakers at the MIT conference discussed plans to better the lives of the world's poorest people through technology.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the MIT Media Lab, presented his design for a laptop that will sell for about $100.

Inventor Dean Kamen talked about his water-purification device for developing countries, where clean drinking water is scarce.

Paradigm shifts often bring surprising benefits, said futurist Joel Barker, who popularized the term "paradigm shift" in the 1970s. (Barker did not attend the MIT conference.)

"Usually the first problems you solve with the new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm," said Barker.

Not all paradigm shifts lead to good, however. Some can be quite nasty. "There are those that lead to terrorists having the means to kill millions rather than thousands of innocent people," said Barker.

"When you drop any new idea in the pond of the world, you get a ripple effect," Barker said. "You have to be aware that you will be creating a cascade of change."

Many human injustices will have to be overcome if all people are to benefit from them, said Nancy Hafkin, a former U.N. official and a consultant on technology and gender issues. "I fear the rising waters won't bring all the points up," Hafkin said during a discussion at the conference.

The world has not seen the self-correction of the digital divide some technology proponents had predicted, she said.

Kurzweil agrees with those who see a dark side to technological development.

"The biggest issue we have now," said Kurzweil, "is how to employ these technologies to advance our human goals and human values, despite that we don't have consensus on what those are."

Fascinating! The only problem I have with singularity, is that I'm not sure if the person who turns into a cybernetic clone of himself would actually experience the cybernetic world. Wouldn't it be the computer that's experiencing it, and not us? Sure it would be an exact copy... But it's just that, a copy; therefore it wouldn't benefit anyone. Unless it's more like an upload.

Well its more about augmentation of the human brain rather than creating a copy. I think that the singularity, if it occurs, is scary aswell as exciting. If Ray and others are correct and this does happen within the next 30 years then most of us will be around to experience it.

The singularity is only rapid and unknowable if you are not riding the exponential curve. Meaning if you don't augment yourself then you in comparison will be like goldfish compared to post-humans in a very short perdiod of time and this will continue. Computer capabilities in terms of speed and capacity is growing Millions of times faster than our capabilities and soon will pass us at around 2020.

This is predicted to be huge and will change everything forever, it sounds far fetched? But the data supports the idea. The evidence is there to show that we are accelerating to such a point in time where progress is so rapid that it may give rise to ultra intelligence.

I don't know if I want this to happen or not, can we just halt technological progress to stop this from happening? Not really...

I doubt that many people here have ever heard of the technological Singularity before, but it is a facinating topic.

Do anyone reading this think we should let technology go this far?

It seems as tho we are at the knee of the curve and we will start noticing dramatic changes in the not too distant future, will you be left behind or will you ride that exponential curve and enhance yourself to keep up? or will you be the goldfish =/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Will the Future Be a Trillion Times Better?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/books/03masl.html

In "The Singularity Is Near," the inventor and prognosticator Ray Kurzweil postulates that we are fast approaching a time when humankind melds with technology to produce mind-boggling advances in intelligence. We will be able to play quidditch as Harry Potter does. We will control the aging process. We will be smarter by a factor of trillions. We will be so smart that we understand what Ray Kurzweil is talking about

Qubits, foglets, gigaflops, haptic interfaces, probabilistic fractals: Mr. Kurzweil is not writing science for sissies. He is envisioning precise details about how and when the Singularity - a fusion of symbiotic advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology that creates "a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" - will be upon us. Mark the calendar for big doings in 2045 in case he's right.

Most science books at this level of sophistication leave the armchair quantum-mechanics buff in the dust. But "The Singularity Is Near" works simultaneously on different levels.
Anyone can grasp Mr. Kurzweil's main idea: that mankind's technological knowledge has been snowballing, with dizzying prospects for the future. The basics are clearly expressed. But for those more knowledgeable and inquisitive, the author argues his case in fascinating detail.

As evidence that the concept of Singularity is as grandiose as it is controversial, Mr. Kurzweil deals almost offhandedly with prospects like "a cool, zero-energy-consuming computer with a memory of about a thousand trillion trillion bits and a processing capacity of 1042 operations a second, which is abut 10 trillion times more powerful than all human brains on Earth." And all he's talking about is reconfiguring the atomic structure of a rock. The book gets much headier when it looks at the reverse engineering and replication of the human brain.

Where Mr. Kurzweil's thinking turns quidditch-wizardly is with concepts like virtual reality created by tiny computers in eyeglasses and clothing, or cell-size devices that can operate within the bloodstream. These innovations and their far-reaching effects, he says, exist not only within the province of science fiction (they sneak into audacious roller-coaster rides like "Minority Report" and "Being John Malkovich") but are also already in the works.

Others (most recently Joel Garreau in "Radical Evolution") have argued about the Singularity's imminence and consequences. But Mr. Kurzweil approaches the subject with the glee of a businessman-inventor as well as the expertise of a scientist. The fact that a dollar bought one transistor in 1968 and about 10 million transistors in 2002 has not escaped his notice.

"The Singularity Is Near" is startling in scope and bravado. Mr. Kurzweil envisions breathtakingly exponential progress, and he is merely extrapolating from established data. To his way of thinking, "when scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today's terms)." The underpinnings of this logic go beyond the familiar to suggest that the pace of evolution (he has no doubts about Darwin) is logarithmic - another indication that the future is almost here.

Like string theory's concept of an 11-dimensional universe, Mr. Kurzweil's projections are as abstract and largely untested as they are alluring. Predictions from his earlier books (including "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "The Age of Intelligent Machines") have been borne out, but much of his thinking tends to be pie in the sky. He promotes buoyant optimism more readily than he contemplates the darker aspects of progress. He is more eager to think about the life-enhancing powers of nanotechnology than to wonder what happens if cell-size computers within the human body run amok.

In the last part of the book, he engages in one-sided batting practice with his critics. He introduces each complaint only to swat it into oblivion. By and large he is a blinkered optimist, disinclined to contemplate the dangers of what he imagines. The Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints still looms over the Singularity and its would-be miracles.

"What if not everyone wants to go along with this?" a straw man asks Mr. Kurzweil. For purposes of simulated debate, the book drums up an assortment of colorful naysayers. This voice is that of Ned Ludd, the opponent of technological advances who gave Luddites their name, but Charles Darwin and Timothy Leary also chime in. Mr. Kurzweil also gives a speaking part to George 2048, a mid-21st-century machine with a reassuring personality. His boldest move is to let bacteria from two billion years ago argue among themselves about the wisdom of banding together to form multicellular life-forms.

If the author is right, Singularity-phobes will look no less shortsighted when the dividing line between humans and machines erodes. "This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today," he writes, "but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond." In other words, "technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution."

Mr. Kurzweil ultimately describes himself as a Singularitarian in a religious sense. Not for him the "deathist rationalization" (that is, "rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing") of traditional religion: his own vision of eternal life is expressed in these pages. He underscores his conviction by putting on a cardboard "The Singularity Is Near" sign and posing for a crazy-man photo. He won't look crazy if the Singularity arrives on cue.

This quote from the kurzweilai link that you provided is what I ment in my previous post: