The Singularity
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THE SINGULARITY: HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY - HUMAN-MACHINE MERGING
Ray Kurzweil says
The Singularity will, according to Kurzweil, "represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction post-Singularity between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality." The Singularity "[i]s a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet."
According to Kurzweil, the Singularity, that will happen around 2045, means that technology will allow humans "to transcend our biological bodies and brains ... (and live well forever)
[O]ne of the salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in the nature of our ability to understand. We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology...
[A] key observation regarding the Singularity is that information processes -computation- will ultimately drive everything that is important.
[I]n the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst... [B]y reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation to spread out from its origin on Earth... In any event, the 'dumb' matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublimes forms of intelligence...
[U]ltimately, 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 mechanisms. ...
[T]he intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a humane-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. ... Our civilization will remain human... although our understanding of the term will move beyond its biological origins.
The Singularity
The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century By Ray Kurzweil (keynote addressat the 2000 ACM SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans)
Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity By Max More and Ray Kurzweil As technology accelerates over the next few decades and machines achieve superintelligence, we will encounter a dramatic phase transition: the "Singularity." Will it be a "wall" (a barrier as conceptually impenetrable as the event horizon of a black hole in space), an "AI-Singularity" ruled by super-intelligent AIs, or a gentler "surge" into a posthuman era of agelessness and super-intelligence? Will this meme be hijacked by religious "passive singularitarians" obsessed with a future rapture? Ray Kurzweil and Extropy Institute president Max More debate.
THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX? By Ray Kurzweil Most viewers of The Matrix consider the more fanciful elements--intelligent computers, downloading information into the human brain, virtual reality indistinguishable from real life--to be fun as science fiction, but quite remote from real life. Ray Kurzweil explains that these elements are very feasible and are quite likely to be a reality within our lifetimes.
We Are Becoming Cyborgs By Ray Kurzweil The union of human and machine is well on its way. Almost every part of the body can already be enhanced or replaced, even some of our brain functions. Subminiature drug delivery systems can now precisely target tumors or individual cells. Within two to three decades, our brains will have been "reverse-engineered": nanobots will give us full-immersion virtual reality and direct brain connection with the Internet. Soon after, we will vastly expand our intellect as we merge our biological brains with non-biological intelligence.
Want to live to 200? Being a cyborg has advantages By Garry Barker Ray Kurzweil predicts that human identity will be called into question by the massive computers of the future
Kurzweil: Rooting for the Machine By Declan McCullagh "By the end of this century, I don't think there will be a clear distinction between human and machine," Kurzweil told the Foresight Institute's Eighth Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology
Goodbye biology, hello software By Ivan Briscoe Do we really need our flesh and blood? Ray Kurzweil, guru of Artificial Intelligence, believes that the conscious machine is only decades away--so get ready to download
Review of Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney Brooks Ray Kurzweil responds Rodney Brooks' latest book on robotics fwhere he challenges Jaron Lanier's claim that AI is "based on an intellectual mistake" and Kurzweil's statements on reverse-engineering the brain and the date of the "Singularity."
The Singularity: Special Report (IEEE Spectrum)
Technology in the 21st Century: an Imminent Intimate Merger Ray Kurzweil presents the case of the emergence of biological and machine intelligence, answering the three major challenges: limited resources, inadequate software, and ethical concerns.
The Singularity and the Fixed Point (Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, Technology Review, Sept. 4, 2009) - Looks into the challenge of giving Artificial Intelligence proper motivations, or motivations at all.
Singularity Scenarios: The Ultimate Innovation or an AI Apocalypse? (Jamais Cascio, Oct 13, 2009, FastCompany)
The Singularity and Society (Jamais Cascio, Sep 29, 2009)
Intelligence unity should only coincide with saturation (F. Santaella, Nov 2009)
Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday (By ASHLEE VANCE, NYT, 11 june 2010)
Articles on Singularity in KurzweilAI.net
Cyberconsciousness & Techno-Immortality
What is Techno-Immortality? Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones (Martine Rothblatt, Oct 24, 2009) - Cyberconsciousness implies techno-immortality, living forever. Mindclones are the key to techno-immortality.
Memory and Insanity (Mike Treder, nov 2009)
The Methuselarity
The singularity and the Methuselarity: similarities and differences (Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, Ph.D., 2008) - Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. The paper looks at the similarities and differences between the Singularity and what Dr. de Grey calls the “Methuselarity”, when biomedical technology reaches actuarial escape velocity and therapies are available to rejuvenate the human body faster than it ages.