I have already written some posts about the futurist views of Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil in the last several months. Here are a couple excerpts from interviews Kurzweil had with Big Think.com, by the way, a site worth checking out… if you have ever visited here before.
A subtext of these interviews is the idea of the singularity, which in futurist talk (versus astrophysics) is the point where we can’t see beyond (as with the event horizon of a black hole, which has a singularity at its center…aha!). Kurzweil asserts that the growth of computer power and the research and development of such tools as mapping the human brain will result is computers reaching (and surpassing) human intelligence sometime in the next 30 years (or so…).
This is the singularity, in that we cannot really see beyond this point, in that machine intelligence may rapidly pass us up to the degree that we might not be able to ‘keep up’.
An aspect of this, and one which Mr. Kurzweil seems to hold dear to his heart is that the prospect of uploading our virtual selves into non-biological constructs (or, at least not innately human) may be our future. This implies leaving such concepts and disease and death behind us….
And all along you thought science fiction was weird…
P.S. these two links have some video interviews with Kurzweil (I don’t use them in that they are not HTML5 compliant…I am trying to keep this blog as iPad friendly as possible…). In any case, check them out!
Your Future Reality Is Virtual
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38115
Big Think: How will next-gen virtual reality change our lives?
Ray Kurzweil: Well, start from today: we have virtual worlds like Second Life. It’s flat, it’s on the little screen over here, and it’s kind of cartoon-like. Despite that fact that it’s not very realistic yet, we see harbingers of everything we do in real life from runs on banks to virtual romances to virtual concerts and all kinds of activities that we do in real life. In fact from people who have been on Second Life just for the past years, they’ve seen a substantial increase in the realism of that virtual world.
The next step is we’re going to put it in our eyeglasses, it’ll beam images right to our retina and put us in a three dimensional full immersion visual auditory environment, so rather than being here it’ll be three dimensional and all of three dimensional out there we’ll be in this three dimensional environment and will be able to walk around and we’ll be able to look at ourselves but we wouldn’t necessarily have the same body that we have in real reality. It’ll become more and more realistic, go out 10 years it’s going to be just about as realistic as real reality, still not within the nervous system.
Go out 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside. We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, they would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet, and they’ll also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system.
So, if I want to go in the virtual reality environment, the nanobots will shut down the signals coming from I realize in my real skin and create the signals that will be appropriate for the virtual environment and then it will feel like I’m in that environment and I’ll have a virtual body and those environment. It could be the same body I have in real reality, it could be a different body, a couple could become each other, experience relationship from the others’ perspective, teacher could design a student to become Ben Franklin in the virtual Constitutional Congress, not just dress up as him but become that character.
And these virtual environments would be like websites, you’ll have millions to choose from and some will be recreations of beautiful earthly environments like the Taj Mahal or the Mediterranean Beach. Some of the fantastic imaginary environments that couldn’t exist on earth, and these are not just sort of places to play although we’ll do that as well but these would be places to interact with other people and it will be an extension of real reality just as Second Life is today and for some people it’s a game, for some people it’s quite serious, it’s a place to be and this place to be, a virtual reality, will become more and more realistic, more and more full immersion, more and more detailed, and more and more imaginative.
After the Singularity, We’ll All Be Robots
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38077
Ray Kurzweil: A mind is a brain that’s conscious. Consciousness is a synonym for subjectivity and there’s a conceptual gap between subjectivity and objective observation, which is what science is. I would actually maintain that there is no scientific way to demonstrate that an entity is conscious. It’s only apparent to itself.
And my prediction is that we will—this is an objective prediction—we will come to accept entities that are not biological as conscious. But it’s not going to be, “Okay, machines on the right side of the room, humans on the left.” It’s going to be all mixed up. If you talk to a biological human, they will have lots of non-biological processes going on in their body and brain. Those computers will be out on the clouds, and the thinking of that “person” isn’t even just in their body and brain even in the non-biological portion, it’s out on the cloud. So it’s going to be all mixed up, there’s not going to be a clear distinction between human and machine.
The bottom line is we are one human-machine civilization. This technology has already expanded who we are and is going to go into high gear when we get to the steep part of the exponential.
