Hes's so smart he is stupid like the Bible says. Unless I am blind I did not see anthing about Jesus. Just dark spiritaul things.
--
When Satan is knocking on your door. Simply say, "Jesus could you get that for me?"
Karen Carter '74
> 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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