Angel,

Great point.  It made me laugh because it is so obvious and I missed it,
haw.

Phil.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Angel" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: The Age Of Ray Kurzweil


> Can we say the tower of babble here.  This sounds horribly like what those
> misguided folks thought when they began to build that structure.  Their
> plans came to naught as will his.  I think he is just afraid of dieing
that
> is all.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Phil Scovell" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 10:39 PM
> Subject: The Age Of Ray Kurzweil
>
>
> > This article only proves the Bible is true, that is, there
> > is nothing new under the sun.  Most blind people know this
> > guy so I am posting it here.  See how many spiritual things
> > you can identify in this interesting article.  Lots of
> > spiritual things going on in this story about him and not necessarily in
a
> > positive way.
> >
> > Phil.
> >
> >
> > The age of Ray Kurzweil
> >
> >   By Drake Bennett
> >   The Boston Globe, September 25, 2005
> >
> >   CAPTION: Ray Kurzwell takes hundreds of nutritional supplement pills
> every
> >   day. As he puts it, he is "reprogramming my biochemistry." (Photo by
> Rick
> >   Friedman for The New York Times)
> >
> >   What will happen when technology outstrips human intelligence?
> Renowned --
> >   and controversial -- techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil says we won't have
to
> >   wait long to find out. And he, for one, is looking forward to it.
> >
> >   KURZWEIL TECHNOLOGIES takes up two floors of a low office building in
> >   Wellesley Hills, near where the Charles River crosses and then
recrosses
> >   Route 128. In the reception area are a vintage Thomas Edison dictation
> >   machine and a large flat-screen monitor on which a computer program
> draws
> >   angular, cartoon-like portraits. Across from the entrance sits an
> > alarmingly
> >   lifelike man made of wax, bearded and brandishing a pipe as if in
> >   conversation.
> >
> >   Ray Kurzweil, the company's founder, is an inventor, and has been one
> for
> > as
> >   long as he can remember. ''When I was 7 or 8 my inventions actually
> began
> > to
> >   work," Kurzweil told me recently in his large, cluttered office. ''I'd
> > build
> >   these robotic devices, like a theater that would move scenery and
props
> > and
> >   characters in and out of view by elaborate mechanical linkages."
> >
> >   He was still a high school student when, in 1964, he created a
computer
> > that
> >   composed music in the style of Chopin, Mozart, and other great
> composers.
> > In
> >   the early 1970s he invented the first flatbed scanner and the first
> >   practical character-recognition software, paving the way for
everything
> > from
> >   digital photography and graphic design to online newspaper archiving.
> >   Combining those two technologies with a text-to-speech synthesizer
> > (another
> >   of his inventions), he made the Kurzweil Reading Machine. He sold the
> very
> >   first one to Stevie Wonder--for whom he then developed the first music
> >   synthesizer able to fool professional musicians into thinking they
were
> >   listening to real instruments. In 1987 his company Kurzweil Applied
> >   Intelligence was the first to market large-vocabulary
speech-recognition
> >   software.
> >
> >   By any measure, Kurzweil has had an exceptional career. Now, however,
he
> > has
> >   a new project: to be a god. And not just because he thinks he can live
> >   forever. Within decades, he predicts, he will be billions of times
more
> >   intelligent than he is today, able to read minds, assume different
> forms,
> >   and reshape his physical environment at will. So will everyone.
Today's
> >   human beings, mere quintessences of dust, will be as outmoded as Homo
> >   Erectus.
> >
> >   All this, Kurzweil believes, will come about through something called
> The
> >   Singularity. Popularized more than a decade ago by the mathematician,
> >   computer scientist, and science fiction novelist Vernor Vinge, who
> > borrowed
> >   the term from mathematics and astrophysics, it refers to the future
> point
> > at
> >   which technological change, propelled by the explosive growth of
> > artificial
> >   intelligence, will accelerate past the point of current human
> > comprehension.
> >   In Vinge's prevision, once artificial intelligence surpasses human
> >   intelligence there will be no turning back, as ever more intelligent
> >   computers create ever more superintelligent offspring.
> >
> >   Among the programmers, scientists, and philosophers concerned with the
> >   larger contours of technological evolution, the term quickly caught
on.
> > The
> >   Singularity became an axis around which debates on technology, human
> > nature,
> >   genetic enhancement, and the future of consciousness all turned.
Figures
> >   like Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence
> pioneers,
> >   and K. Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, took it up.
> >
> >   Today Ray Kurzweil is the most radical and most visible prophet of The
> >   Singularity. In talks, public debates, articles, postings on his
> website,
> >   and in a series of increasingly provocative books--''The Age of
> > Intelligent
> >   Machines" (1990), ''The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers
Exceed
> >   Human Intelligence" (1999), ''Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to
Live
> >   Forever" (2005)--he has done more than any other thinker to make the
> case
> >   for both the desirability and the imminence of The Singularity.
> According
> > to
> >   Doug Lenat, a leading expert on artificial intelligence, ''Ray is one
of
> > the
> >   few people who can step back and see the big picture for what it means
> for
> >   our species and for the planet."
> >
> >   This week Kurzweil has a new book out, with the self-consciously
> > millennial
> >   title ''The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology"
> (Viking).
> > It
> >   is the most detailed brief he has yet written for the nearness of the
> >   unimaginably strange future, and it arrives with approving blurbs from
> >   Minsky and Bill Gates (''Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at
> >   predicting the future of artificial intelligence," writes the
Microsoft
> >   founder.) At a time when political debates over the ethics of stem
cell
> >   research, genetic modification, cloning and even nanotechnology are
> > growing
> >   at once more fervent and more complicated, Kurzweil offers a vision of
> >   technology as destiny, of transformative change that has slipped the
> bonds
> >   of politics, culture, and--for many--credulity.
> >
> >   That his predictions make moot most of the cultural norms and physical
> >   limits of today's world is, he believes, only a testament to the power
> of
> >   the forces he describes. To his many critics, however, Kurzweil is
> simply
> >   spinning fairy tales, preaching transcendence but propagating
ignorance.
> >
> >   Arrayed around Kurzweil's office and in the hallways outside are a few
> of
> >   his inventions. When I asked, he readily showed them off. He had an
old
> >   Kurzweil Reading Machine flatly declaim the opening of the Gettysburg
> >   Address. He played the first few measures of a Beethoven piano sonata
on
> > an
> >   early-model Kurzweil synthesizer, stumbled, started over, stumbled
> again,
> >   then switched to Gershwin. He arranged a demonstration of a pocket
> reading
> >   machine for the blind that he plans to roll out in January. He told me
> > about
> >   FatKat, his artificial-intelligence investment program: Over the past
> two
> >   years, he claims, it has brought in stock market returns of 80 to 100
> >   percent.
> >
> >   Kurzweil is compact and trim, with full cheeks, a small smile, and a
> >   knot-like nose drooping toward a broad chin. The tone of his voice,
deep
> > and
> >   deliberate, is somewhat at odds with his eyes, which narrow and
> furiously
> >   blink as he talks. He is 57 years old, nearly the age at which his
> father
> >   died of a heart attack. According to a battery of controversial tests
> >   administered by Terry Grossman, the anti-aging expert who co-wrote
> >   ''Fantastic Voyage," Kurzweil has not aged appreciably in the past 17
> > years.
> >
> >   Every day, Kurzweil takes hundreds of nutritional supplement pills,
and
> > once
> >   a week he takes several others intravenously. He is, as he puts it,
> >   ''reprogramming my biochemistry" and claims in so doing to have
> conquered
> >   his Type 2 diabetes. More importantly, he insists, he is stretching
his
> >   natural lifespan until either genetic therapies, microscopic
''nanobots"
> >   (hypothetical robots on the scale of single atoms and molecules that
> >   Kurzweil believes will be able, among many other things, to take over
> some
> >   of the vital functions of the human body), or simply the ability to
> > download
> >   one's mind onto a computer make immortality a reality.
> >
> >   What links all of Kurzweil's creations is the concept of pattern
> >   recognition: recreating the human ability to distinguish signal from
> > noise.
> >   As he sees it, the predictions he's making are simply pattern
> recognition
> >   applied to history.
> >
> >   The pattern he sees is a simple one: He calls it the law of
accelerating
> >   returns. To explain, Kurzweil uses the example of Moore's Law, the
> storied
> >   1965 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the power of
> computer
> >   chips would double roughly every two years. In 1972 there were 2500
> >   transistors in an Intel chip, in 1974, 4500, and by 2004 there were
592
> >   million.
> >
> >   For Kurzweil, however, the explosive power of exponential growth goes
> far
> >   beyond transistors: Human technological advancement, the billions of
> years
> >   of terrestrial evolution, the entire history of the universe, all, he
> >   argues, follow the law of accelerating returns. He has put a team of
> >   researchers to work gathering technological, economic, historical, and
> >   paleontological data. All of it, he claims, graphs neatly onto an
> >   exponential plot, starting out slowly, then nosing sharply upward
> through
> >   the ''knee of the curve" into higher order and greater complexity,
> arcing
> >   toward infinity.
> >
> >   ''Ultimately," he promises in ''The Singularity Is Near," ''the entire
> >   universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the
> destiny
> > of
> >   the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it
> > determined
> >   by the current 'dumb,' simple machinelike forces that rule celestial
> >   mechanics." How he is not sure, but he trusts his math.
> >
> >   At such moments, Kurzweil's predictions have the ring of eschatology,
of
> >   half-cocked end-times rapture. For him, though, it's surreal to hear
> > people
> >   talk about the size of the Social Security shortfall in 2042--by then,
> he
> >   believes, advances in nanotechnology will allow us to ward off disease
> and
> >   senescence and to manufacture all the goods we want for a pittance. By
> > then,
> >   in other words, aging and poverty may hardly exist and people may not
> > retire
> >   or even work in a way that's recognizable to us.
> >
> >   For Kurzweil, stubbornly linear habits of mind explain why, for
example,
> > so
> >   few neuroscientists share his conviction that we will soon be able to
> >   reverse-engineer the brain. ''A lot of scientists," he told me,
''Nobel
> >   Prize-winners included, take a linear perspective. They just
intuitively
> > do
> >   the mental experiment of what will it take to achieve certain goals at
> >   today's rate of progress, with today's tools." Kurzweil points to the
> >   skepticism that greeted his forecast, in 1990, that in as few as nine
> > years
> >   a computer would beat the world chess champion. He was too
conservative,
> > as
> >   it turned out: Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.
> >
> >   . . .
> >
> >   Yet even among those like Vinge, Minsky, Drexler, and Lenat, for whom
> The
> >   Singularity is less a matter of if than when, Kurzweil is a figure of
> rare
> >   certainty. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and the director of the Future
of
> >   Humanity Institute at Oxford University, isn't so sure the timing of
The
> >   Singularity can be pinpointed. ''We should be thinking about it more
as
> a
> >   probability distribution smeared out over a long period," he says.
> >
> >   Then there are the many thinkers who find Kurzweil's case less than
> >   compelling. Since his theories take in the whole history of the
> universe,
> >   there is no shortage of points at which to contest them. Some skeptics
> >   dispute Kurzweil's computer science. They argue that even computers
> > billions
> >   of times more powerful than today's wouldn't necessarily be
meaningfully
> >   intelligent, much less spiritual. Any one of a number of hurdles--from
> the
> >   complexity of neural networks to the difficulty of recreating the
> brain's
> >   analog processing with a computer's digital circuitry to our continued
> >   inability to begin to articulate the essence of consciousness--might
> stand
> >   immovably in the way of human-level artificial intelligence.
> >
> >   As John Searle, a philosopher of mind and language at the University
of
> >   California, Berkeley, wrote in a public exchange of letters with
> Kurzweil,
> >   ''the existing technological advances that are supposed to provide
> > evidence
> >   in support of these predictions, wonderful though they are, offer no
> > support
> >   whatever for these spectacular conclusions."
> >
> >   Others, like the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, take issue
> > with
> >   Kurzweil's teleological view of evolution. ''It's the old idea that
the
> >   process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater
> > complexity--in
> >   particular greater intellectual complexity," Pinker says. ''In one
twig
> of
> >   the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have
> >   advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of
> > primate
> >   5 to 7 million years ago."
> >
> >   Still others see something darker in Kurzweil's visions of
> transformation.
> >   Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, was so horrified by a
> >   conversation with Kurzweil that he wrote a now-famous Wired magazine
> cover
> >   story in 2000 entitled ''The Future Doesn't Need Us," describing a
> >   technological apocalypse, the earth chewed to pieces by out-of-control
> >   nanobots. Thinkers like the political scientist Francis Fukuyama of
> Johns
> >   Hopkins University foresee a subtler corrosion: The pursuit of
> biological
> >   perfection, Fukuyama warns, deprives us of qualities like compassion
and
> >   courage that spring from an awareness of our vulnerability.
> >
> >   Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality computing, and like
Kurzweil
> > and
> >   Joy somewhat of a tech-world guru, manages to combine the
technological
> > and
> >   the moral critiques of Kurzweil's thought. In a 2000 essay entitled
> ''One
> >   Half of a Manifesto," he argued that our ever-more-powerful computers
> were
> >   likely to be limited, for the foreseeable future, by the software
> running
> >   them. Lampooning Joy's nightmare scenario, he wrote, ''Just as some
> > newborn
> >   race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our
> > dear
> >   old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash."
> >
> >   Still, Lanier finds Kurzweil's ideas unsettling. ''Ray has
incorporated
> in
> >   his little system of thought all of the elements of a religion that
are
> >   selfish but none of the ones that are generous," Lanier told me. ''His
> > thing
> >   is purely, 'Here's how to live forever, here's how to be uploaded into
> the
> >   machine.' There's no concern for other people since it's assumed that
> >   everyone will be infinitely rich and happy in his future." It's a
> > philosophy
> >   based on narcissism, Lanier charges, a dream of ultimate individual
> >   fulfillment.
> >
> >   The last chapter of Kurzweil's new book is entitled ''Response to
> > Critics,"
> >   and it is nearly 60 pages long. Kurzweil's rejoinders are detailed and
> >   exhaustive, ranging across topics from software development and neural
> >   networks into quantum mechanics and the philosophy of consciousness.
> >   Nowhere, however, does he offer any apology for his promise of
eternity
> or
> >   his focus on individual enhancement.
> >
> >   This individualistic, mechanistic ethos, his critics argue, also blurs
> >   Kurzweil's predictive power, because it ignores all the ways in which
> >   technologies are bounded by social forces. As Harvard's Pinker points
> out,
> >   ''the track record of technological predictions is laughable. I
remember
> a
> >   prediction in my childhood that by now we'd be living in domed cities
> and
> >   commuting by jet pack and eating protein pills instead of meals. On
the
> >   other hand a lot of revolutions are predicted by no one. My favorite
is
> > that
> >   in the movie '2001,' you had space travel and human-level artificial
> >   intelligence, but people were still writing on clipboards. Arthur C.
> > Clarke
> >   hadn't predicted the laptop."
> >
> >   Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
[log in to unmask]
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/09/25/the_age_of_ray_ku
> >   rzweil?mode=PF
> > End of article.
>
>
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