David Kushner writes in rolling StoneIssue 1072 — February 19, 2009
Meet Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the techno rapture. By 2045, he says, computers will surpass us in intelligence, the universe itself will become conscious, and humans will live forever...
Over the past four decades, Ray Kurzweil has established himself as one of the world's most prolific and influential inventors. His specialty is pattern recognition — teaching machines to classify data and learn. He created the first program to enable computers to read text — the basis of modern scanning — as well as the first program to translate text into speech...
The crowd erupts in applause — not just for the invention but for Kurzweil's artful segue to the topic about which they all want to hear. The idea of superhuman intelligence — intelligence that comes when humans merge with machines — is not new. It dates back to the 1950s, when mathematician John von Neumann observed that the ever-faster pace of technology would reach "some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." By 1993, sci-fi novelist Vernor Vinge was predicting that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. " But the Singularity still seemed like something out of the Tom Swift books Kurzweil read as a child. "It wasn't very quantified," he says. "It was more impressionistic. It needed to be fleshed out, so that's what I sought to do."...Read in full...
Yah!... I know ... you feel your brain folding in on itself.
Read Bill Joy's: Why the future doesnt need us...
a new documentary about the post-human future. Contemplating a real "rise of the machines"...
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