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.