Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Ray Kurzweil – Page 30

Ray Kurzweil’s singularity of human superintelligence is a polar opposite of the singularity described by Vinge, Hawking, and Bostrom:

“The singularity will be a merger of our bodies and minds with our technology. The world will still be human, but transcend our biological roots. There will be no distinction between human and machine, nor between physical and virtual reality.”

Dear readers,

This month celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the classic book The Singularity Is Near, written by Ray Kurzweil, published in September 2005.

In the decade since its publication, we’ve witnessed an explosion of breakthroughs in genetic engineering, medical regeneration of the human body, autonomous robotics, computing power, and renewable energy. Advanced sensor arrays and internet meshes are uniting all people and things within the interconnected environments we live in, and with each other. Today’s massively scaled, crowd-sourced knowledge, innovation, and shared human experience are driving this momentum. The future is now.

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There’s a rift emerging among the members of the tech super-geniuses club. It’s not about matters of human intelligence, though. Physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla /SpaceX founder Elon Musk have both recently warned that our sci-fi nightmares about artificial intelligence could actually come true in our lifetimes.

Here’s what Musk, for instance, said during a recent stop at MIT:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. Our biggest existential threat is probably that … There should be some regulatory oversight at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

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On the cusp of a far-reaching revolution thanks to the advances in artificial intelligence and computing, it’s easy to feel a bit…concerned. Well, maybe more than just a bit, especially if you consider societal attitudes about technology.

Truth is that the way we perceive the world around us is conditioned to a degree by the environment we grow up within. There’s also little doubt that certain cultures are more open and adaptive to technology than others. But one could argue that the potential enhancements that AI could usher in are so dramatically advanced that even the earliest adopters within Silicon Valley aren’t really prepared for what’s coming.

So it’s safe to ask, before this great wave of artificial intelligence arrives and we become fully integrated with it, shouldn’t we strive to change our inherited mental models and let go of antiquated thinking patterns?

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So, you think you’ve seen it all? You haven’t seen anything yet. By the year 2030, advancements will excel anything we’ve seen before concerning human intelligence. In fact, predictions offer glimpses of something truly amazing – the development of a human hybrid, a mind that thinks in artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, spoke openly about this idea at the Exponential Finance Conference in New York. He predicts that humans will have hybrid brains able to connect to the cloud, just as with computers. In this cloud, there will be thousands of computers which will update human intelligence. The larger the cloud, the more complicated the thinking. This will all be connected using DNA strands called Nanobots. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t it?

Kurzweil says:

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Eating a group of specific foods — known as the MIND diet — may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center.

This finding supplements a previous study by the research team, reported by KurzweiliAI in March, that found that the MIND diet may reduce a person’s risk in developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers’ new study shows that older adults who followed the MIND diet more rigorously showed an equivalent of being 7.5 years younger cognitively than those who followed the diet least. Results of the study were recently published online in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

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“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.” — Ray Kurzweil.

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