tag archive: singularity

Ray Kurzweil occasionally uses imaginary conversations as a device to discuss ideas in his books The Singularity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines. They usually involve people from the future and the past (Ned Ludd, for example). Here is a more contemporaneous dialog between himself and a pretend Bill Gates from Singularity:

BILL: What would the principles of the new religion be?
RAY: We’d want to keep two principles: one from traditional religion and one from secular arts and sciences—from traditional religion, the respect for human consciousness.
BILL: Ah yes, the Golden Rule.
RAY: Right, our morality and legal system are based on respect for the consciousness of others. [...]
BILL: And the secular principle?
RAY: From the arts and sciences, it is the importance of knowledge. [...]
BILL: We need to get away from the ornate and strange stories in contemporary religions and concentrate on …

Still working on The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil.

These opening excerpts to chapter five (on the overlapping revolutions of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) are striking:

There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. … But what would happen if technology continued to evolve so much more rapidly than the animal and vegetable kingdoms? Would it displace us in the supremacy of earth? Just as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race. … We are daily giving [machines] greater power and supplying by all sorts …

Just getting started on Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and enjoying it so far, although this is a speed bump:

The biggest obstacle here is the understandable hesitation of publishers to make the electronic versions of their books available, given the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry.

I thought the problem was more that the music industry doesn’t have a clue, and brought on their own decline by turning out mass-produced crap that surprisingly didn’t sell as well when more entertainment alternatives became available.

He goes on to discuss the growth of electronic readers:

The primary issue is going to be finding a secure means of making electronic information available. This is a fundamental concern for every level of our economy. Everything–including physical products, once nanotechnology-based manufacturing becomes a reality in about twenty years–is becoming information.
–Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, p55-56

Earlier in the book, Kurzweil discusses intelligence permeating the universe in a coming epoch of man/machine expansion, but I …