Kurzweil on 2010

adruu

This Is It
Not going to go into a full spiel on how I feel about on how I feel about this, but Kurzweil has estimated ubiquitous everyday nanotech as being fully mature at 2010, including a COMPLETE brains able to be reverse engineered by 2020. retina embedded computers, full immersion VR, cured diabetes, breathing underwater(!), everyone sprinting...

I know he's been on this stuff for a while, but it's really gotten closer hasn't it

http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/files/raykurzweil.html
 

polystyle

Well-known member
2010's a smidge close for 'ubiquitous nanotech'(!) , etc.
but it was quite interesting talk on exponentiality !
 
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swears

preppy-kei
I can't say I know enough about this to say whather I think it's realilistic or not...
But it wouold be great if a number of new technologies were developed that gave us more hope for the future: like clean energy, cures for various diseases, etc,
They even could usher in a new era of modernism. I'd like to see that within my lifetime, being able to think that conditions could be better for the next generation than for us.
Seems naive at the moment to even consider a future.
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I didn't watch the video but I read his book and read some of his articles too. The guy is full of shit. I hate him and his smugness and his total obliviousness to the downsides of what he is proposing. The only relief is that his prophecies are unlikely to come true, especially in the timeframes he proposes.

He is wrong about exponential growth. Moore's Law was never strictly true and even a tiny error in the rate of growth implied by Moore's Law gives you wildly different timeframes of reaching this or that computing capacity. See here for more on this.

What's even crazier is that he is extrapolating on this shaky foundation into the far future making such assumptions as that the increase in computing capacity BY ITSELF will cause Artificial Intelligence to occur. And that the availability of such capacity by itself will enable us to upload our brains.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Swears, did you watch the vid ?

Yeah, sponsored by BMW. It's makes me wonder about it's neutrality though, they're hardly likely to fund a talk by somebody saying:
"Maybe if we get horses and traps going, we might not all choke to death within the next twenty years."
Whereas somebody saying:
"Oh, it doesn't matter if all the oil runs out, because there'll be lots of new fuels to replace it."
is more likely to get the green light.

Oh, and he quotes Bono and the World Bank, and he used to be a hippy.
 
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It's all about the aliens with the base on the dark side of the moon waiting til we get close to understanding zero point energy then making themselves known and guiding us into the next age of enlightenment :cool:

The point about Kurzweil and the futurists is that they tend to be the only optimists going around. Yeah sure it's technology or bust but it kind of has to be now. Voluntary reduction in consumption and pollution isn't ever likely to happen nor is dismantling the military industrial complex.

The time frames for extrapolating trends might be off but it seems inevitable that evolution is leading us towards marrying the machine and becoming godlike even if it is only in virtuality.

If the choice is nice and comfy in the matrix or sewer rat living in zion. I know what I'd choose.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah sure it's technology or bust but it kind of has to be now. Voluntary reduction in consumption and pollution isn't ever likely to happen nor is dismantling the military industrial complex.


And you don't think certain elements in the military industrial complex might want to hold back development of technologies such as the electric car? Technologies that might cost them profits?
 
^Of course, especially if powered by everlasting rechargeable batteries.

I like the futurist rhetoric, more so than the doom and gloom divine apocalyptists, as it puts the future firmly in our own hands. If we fail then get off planet and make way for the new hyperspace off ramp going straight through earth.;)
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
The point about Kurzweil and the futurists is that they tend to be the only optimists going around. Yeah sure it's technology or bust but it kind of has to be now. Voluntary reduction in consumption and pollution isn't ever likely to happen nor is dismantling the military industrial complex.
Thats the cynicism and sense of defeat lurking behing the techno-optimism. Self-fulfilling prophecy/hype...
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Didn't Buckminster Fuller spend a lot of time trying to show how we already had all the necessary resources and technology for everyone on the planet to enjoy a very high standard of living? I think he detailed this in precise mathematical terms. All that was needed was a little common sense, cooperation and rationality. Oh and being able to persuade certain armed vested interests that their lives would also be immeasurably improved if everyone else was happier and less starving.

Ray Kurzweil seems to have an almost mystical faith in technology - the right idea / invention / paradigm appearing at just the right time. Well that's all well and good for a comfortable affluent American who makes his money out of tech isn't it?
 

turtles

in the sea
Kurzweil has estimated ubiquitous everyday nanotech as being fully mature at 2010, including a COMPLETE brains able to be reverse engineered by 2020. retina embedded computers, full immersion VR, cured diabetes, breathing underwater(!), everyone sprinting...
In terms of timing, that's just straight up crazy. "Mature" as in stable and easily usable by the general public in four years, when there's not a single instance of an even unstable, hard to use application of nanotech on the market today? I sometimes think Kurzweil has never actually tried to build a single piece of technology from the ground up and realized how hard engineering and design can be. And reverse engineering the brain, oh man...we still don't even have a single decent automatic language translator. There are so many big hurdles still to overcome along that road.

As for the technology==progress==good issue, I somewhat agree with undisputed, that we have to make the best of a shitty situation here and try to steer the development of new technology towards as positive a role as possible (which is hard when DARPA has funded pretty much every major technological advance in the last century or so). At least, that's how I justify my own work within this field!
 

turtles

in the sea
also the religion vs. technology dichotomy is pretty BS. apples and oranges, plus there's a whole lot of other fruit involved.
 
Where is the humanity?

We're shedding it like snake skin to reveal the new flesh of circuitry. Of course that will require a new sense of morality and a massive intellectual evolutionary step to even fathom the cosnequences but as much as we would like, there is just no u turn. We either solve the energy problem before the fossil fuels run out and we become as the dionsuars or we get off planet battlestar galatica style and colonise another planet.
 
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