The accelerating pace of technological progress means that our intelligent creations will soon eclipse us—and that their creations will eventually eclipse them.
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Category: Ray Kurzweil – Page 25
As technology and innovation move faster and faster, concerns over ownership and access continue to increase. In answer to a question at a Singularity University event, Ray Kurzweil suggested we need to rethink intellectual property laws to more realistically match today’s pace.
Intellectual property laws from the 19th century were envisioned with roughly 20-year cycles, he said, which was enough to give you a head-start on a new idea or invention and attract funding to see it through. But how relevant is a 20-year cycle today when a generation of technology can come and go in a year—and even that is set to speed up?
Attracting investment and capital is a critical function of intellectual property law. But the way things are currently structured, intellectual property laws are falling behind the pace of invention.
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Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, a director of engineering at Google and a co-founder of the Singularity University think tank at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He is a nonfiction author and creator of several inventions.
Kurzweil met with the Silicon Valley Business Journal to discuss how technology’s exponential progress is rapidly reshaping our future through seismic shifts in information technology and computing power, energy, nanotechnology, robotics, health and longevity.
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Driving a motor vehicle requires making tough choices in the heat of the moment. Whether slamming on the brakes in traffic or speeding up before a light turns red, split-second decisions are often a choice between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes, a choice could lead to bodily injury or even a loss of life.
As more self-driving cars reach the road, life-and-death decisions once made by humans alone will increasingly shift to machines. Yet the idea of giving that responsibility over to a computer may be unsettling to some.
Self-driving cars have the potential to significantly reduce the tens of thousands of auto fatalities occurring yearly—but a reduction isn’t the same as elimination. In fact, some deaths will inevitably happen at the hands of computer algorithms once they make those decisions for us.
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And, a few words from Ray.
According to Ray Kurzweil, we’re approaching a time when humans will begin to radically extend their lifespans. This sounds good on the surface, but will we have enough resources to support everyone? And won’t living indefinitely get boring eventually? Not so much, Kurzweil says.
Kurzweil suggests that by the time we’ve significantly extended our average lifespan, we’ll no longer be in a scarcity-driven world competing for finite resources. Take energy, for example. Kurzweil notes solar is on an exponential curve and has been doubling every two years.
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Ray believes we’re becoming gods.
People tend to ask Ray Kurzweil all manner of questions about technology and the future. But they also want to know about his own personal philosophy. In one session last summer, a questioner asked Kurzweil if he believes in God. Of course, many of us struggle with the question, he replied, and to him, it’s not unambiguous.
There’s variability in how we describe God, but he thinks there are some commonalities. Shared traits include creativity, love, and intelligence—attributes we tend to also value in conscious beings. To Kurzweil, consciousness is the ultimate measure of spirituality. Much of our morality is based on whether an entity is conscious or not (even though it’s still hard to define).
“Everyone with very few outliers believes in the sacredness of a conscious person, and in fact, non-conscious things, like a machine or a diamond, are only important in so far as they affect the conscious experience of conscious beings.”
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I love investing. Every investor who strives to understand their craft to the fullest, ends up at the undeniable conclusion that time is the most valuable asset, bar none. Without it, nothing else of value can exist, it’s the magic ingredient. We can leave value behind for our loved ones, but on an individual level, this intangible asset is a requirement to value and enjoyment as a life form.
Technological innovation and growth can be compared to a snowball rolling down a mountainside, growing faster with each rotation, while speeding up simultaneously. Moore’s Law has held for decades, some say we will hit a wall in silicon transistor shrinking, but the advent of graphene has recently given new light on how this can continue on. New materials, will keep the acceleration of processing power and shrinking of those technologies, intact.
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When not all men and women are created equal.
If futurist, inventor, and Google executive Ray Kurzweil is right about the future, we’ll all be augmenting our brains with extra capacity in the cloud at some point in the future.
Which sounds exciting, even if a little frightening.
But this very advance could also pave the way for the rich to become thousands of times smarter than poor people, which would likely permanently solidify and even exacerbate current socioeconomic stratifications. I asked Kurzweil if he saw that consequence as a possibility, and he strongly disagreed.
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Will we live longer lives in the future? According to Ray Kurzweil, it’s only a matter of time until technology begins successfully tackling age-related disease—and life expectancy grows longer and longer. At some point, technology will annually add more than a year to our life expectancy—allowing us to indefinitely increase lifespans, and perhaps eventually live as long as we want.
“We will get to a point where our longevity, our remaining life expectancy is moving on away from us. The sands of time will run in rather than run out,” Kurzweil says.
How will this happen? We’re now learning to reprogram biology to cure disease and repair the body. This will accelerate in coming decades and be followed by the nanotechnology revolution.
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