Ray Kurzweil spoke at TED earlier this year and announced the formation of Singularity University, an educational and research institution devoted to addressing the impending meeting of man and machine.
I’ve blogged about Kurzweil before – he’s a brilliant garden gnome of a philosopher scientist with a seemingly fantastical take on how our exponentially evolving technologies will eventually (ie. soon) meet and overtake us – but in a good way. He has been scoffed at for years despite the unimpeachable litany of statistics he presents to back up his claims. That was then – this is now.
People aren’t scoffing any more – they’re listening – and they’re participating in the creation of what could possibly be our best hope to stop acting like a bunch of fucking jerk-off stone-throwing chimps. The Singularity Univeristy is backed by NASA and Google. Not bad, Ray, not bad at all.
I don’t know if we’ll be able to meet Kurzweil’s prediction of the Singularity by 2020 and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to upload ourselves into a technical construct and thereby live forever (or until the warranty expires) – what do I know, I’m just a drug addled puppeteer – but I do know our very near future is going to make our very near past look like the frickin’ dark ages. It won’t all be slick and shiny and happy – but it sure as shit won’t be boring.
Consider Kurzweil’s words when he says:
What used to take up a building now fits in our pockets; what now fits in our pockets will fit in a blood cell in 25 years.
Even if we can never crack that leap of wholly integrating ourselves into our machines, as Kurzweil predicts, we will still be fundamentally changed; changed in how we think, how we sense, how we feel, how we comunicate, and how our bodies grow and develop; we will have accomplished a major leap of evolution not through any process of natural selection but through the practical implementation of our own technology.
Don’t snooze while it happens – when you wake up you might not recognize anyone.
Cheers.
Tags: evolution, Google, I want to integrate my psyche into a microwave and cook hot pockets inside myself, kurzweil, NASA, okay he's not really a garden gnome but he can be a pretty geeky looking dude from time to time, singularity, technology, TED, why the hell do I bother blogging about this shit when I have so much else to do?
I wonder how many wallets he got.
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Maybe that’s what the sign was for – 10,000?
Not a bad days work.