Posted on 04/22/2006 3:47:09 PM PDT by Dark Skies
Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist, has stumbled on a discovery of earth-shattering importance. It is the arrival of "singularity," and according to him it will happen in 2045.
"Gradually," he writes at the beginning of "The Singularity Is Near," "I've become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the 21st century … the impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality."
Singularity, Kurzweil says, is a development "representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" and a "radical upgrading of our bodies' physical and mental systems."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
kurzweil, noted genius, has been having megalomaniacal delusions for years.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Sorry about the misspelling in the title. Haste makes waster, darn it.
Sorry about the misspelling in the title. Haste makes waste, darn it.
By the way, it's freaking 2006 already! Where is my flying car?
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Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence'
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He pretty much was spot on with his prediction of when a computer would defeat a chess grand champion. Actually, he was a bit optimistic. It happened about 20 months earlier than he had predicted.
If you bother to read him, you may find his prognostications all seem to be tracking.
Pick up his latest. Good read. You might learn something.
May 13th...wish I could be there!
Thank goodness my Mayan Calendar says we all take the big Dirt Nap come December, 2012! ;)
The horror...the bad music...please don't remind me that I came of age during that time!
I think it'll happen (whatever singularity is) long before 2045.
Me too. I'm thinking 2025.
all I know about him is that he is a prodigy, he invented the infamous kurzweil digitally-sampling synthesizer, he came up with a contraption to read Stevie Wonder's mail for him (and Stevie Wonder uses Kurzweil keyboards, or did at least); he went to MIT, I owned the dullard Kurzweil stock for short spell in the '80s. I've followed, with decreasing envy and increasing awe and pity, bits and pieces of the man's ramblings, which suggest a mental trajectory akin to that of a balloon that has been untied and released.
Thanks.
Kurzweil sits on the Army Science Board. I recently met someone else who's been assigned. My goal is to be able to meet the man himself.
In my view, he's the only futurist who's earned himself the right to be followed closely by us lay people.
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