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.