May 13th, 2006
Singularity: Technology, spirituality and the close box
Ray Kurzweil responded to various critiques and questions, and stuck to his PowerPoint slides of datapoints that convey his Singularity theory. He emphasized that because of the accelerating pace of change, technology will be able to solve all problems, from the practical problems of climate change and energy efficiency to cutting poverty and disease On the software side, 10 to the 16th calculations per second should be sufficient to reach human level intelligence. and bridging the digital divide–but only through the scale the new technologies will bring.
On radical life extension–including immortality–mastering and reprogramming who we are in terms of health processes through biotechnology is on the horizon, Kurzweil said that biology and medicine in post information era are about reprogramming biology to eliminate health problems, he said. "Within 15 years add a year to life expectancy every year," he predicted, which supports the "real goal of life is to expand human knowledge."
He added that "creating communities is what holds people together and enhance human relationships, and I would like more time to partake of that."
See image gallery for a closer look at event’s participants.
Kurzweil’s notion of community includes the more extreme concept soft loading the contents of a brain onto a computing substrate. It’s difficult to imagine the social dynamics of communities with computational intelligences as separate entities, full rendered proxies for a biological being or some merged entity with one million time the speed of human brain function.
"The whole uploading idea isn’t necessary," Kurzweil said. "The idea is to pass the Turing test. We don’t need your body and brain…we have this new better one in a computing substrate. We can observe and scan from inside and see what going in sufficient detail….One can make an argument that it is a different person,
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Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
