Jon Xavier — Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal
Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished men of our time. The relentless inventor — whose credits include the flatbed scanner, optical character resolution and speech-to-text- systems — is also a bestselling author, a successful entrepreneur, and an artificial intelligence pioneer.
His current title at Google, then, always seemed a little puzzling to me — after all, wasn’t he the sort of guy to set his sights on something a little higher than juicing sales of online advertisements at the world’s biggest Web search engine?
QUOTATION(S): “…All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy … in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow, all that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow … all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradictory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty…”
CITATION(S): “…There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible…” AND “…That instability [between stasis and dynamism], or our awareness of it, heightened by the fluidity of contemporary life: by the ease with which ideas and messages, goods and people, cross borders; by technologies that seek to surpass the quickness of the human mind and overcome the constraints of the human body; by the ‘universal solvents’ of commerce and popular culture; by the dissolution or reformation of established institutions, particularly large corporations, and the rise of new ones; by the synthesis of East and West, of ancient and modern ─ by the combination and recombination of seemingly every artifact of human culture. Ours is a magnificently creative era. But the creativity produces change, and that change attracts enemies, philosophical as well as self-interested… With some exceptions, the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the dynamical processes through which it is carried. In our post ─ Cold War era, for instance, free markets are recognized as powerful forces for social cultural, and technological change ─ liberating in the eyes of some, threatening to others. The same is true for markets in ideas: for free speech and worldwide communication; for what John Stuart Mill called ‘experiments in living’; for scientific research, artistic expression, and technological innovation. All of these processes are shaping an unknown, and unknowable, future. Some people look at such diverse, decentralized, choice-driven systems and rejoice, even when they don’t like particular choices. Other recoil. In pursuit of stability and control, they seek to eliminate or curb these unruly, too-creative forces … Stasists and dynamists are thus divided not just by simple, short-term policy issues but by fundamental disagreements about the way the world works. They clash over the nature of progress and over its desirability: Does it require a plan to reach a specified goal? Or is it an unbounded process of exploration and discovery? Does the quest for improvement express destructive, nihilistic discontent, or the highest human qualities? Does progress depend on puritanical repression or a playful spirit? … Stasists and dynamists disagree about the limits and use of knowledge. Stasists demand that knowledge be articulated and easily shared. Dynamists, by contrast, appreciate dispersed, often tacit knowledge. They recognize the limits of human minds even as they celebrate learning … Those conflicts lead to very different beliefs about good institutions and rules: Stasists seek specifics to govern each new situation and keep things under control. Dynamicists want to limit universal rulemaking to broadly applicable and rarely changed principles, within which people can create and test countless combinations. Stasists want their detailed ruled to apply to everyone; dynamists prefer competing, nested rule sets … Such disagreements have political ramifications that go much deeper than the short-term business of campaigns and legislation. They affect our governing assumptions about how political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural systems work; what those systems should value; and what they mean .… These are not the comfortable old Cold War divisions of hawks and doves, egalitarians and individualists, left and right. Nor are they the one-dimensional labels of technophile and technophobe, optimist and pessimist, or libertarian and stasist that pundits sometimes grab to replace the old categories. They contain elements of those simpler classifications, but they are much richer, encompassing more aspects of life ─ more aspects of the emergent, complex future…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPAL (TENETS) TO SEIZE PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS: (7) Reverse-engineering a gene and a bacterium or, better yet, the lucrative genome. (8) Guillotine the over-weighted status quo. (9) Learn how to add up ─ in your own brainy mind ─ colors, dimensions, aromas, encryptions, enigmas, phenomena, geometrical and amorphous in-motion shapes, methods, techniques, codes, written lines, symbols, contexts, locus, venues, semantic terms, magnitudes, longitudes, processes, tweets, “…knowledge-laden…” hunches and omniscient bliss, so forth. (10) Project your wisdom’s wealth onto communities of timeless-connected wikis.
BOOK(S): The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita. ISBN-13: 978–0812979770
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION(S): “…People are always [and wrongfully] assuming that everything that is going to be invented must have been invented already. But it hasn’t…” AND “…The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, BUT HOW TO GET OLD ONES OUT …”
CITATION(S): “…We live in strange times, in case you have not noticed. Here we are with our home computers and other high-tech appliances, living what we regard as a normal life … The world we are living in ─ a world that couples Homo sapiens with fast-paced hypertechnology ─ is strange to us because sometimes it feels like what it is, a transient dream .… We are dreaming a strange, waking dream; an inevitably brief interlude sandwiched between the long age of low-tech humanity on the one hand, and the age of human beings transcended on the other. We are living in the latter days of humanity; cybertechnologies will quickly replace us. Just inches of time away exists a speedy reality bearing down on us that we may sense, but do not show on our faces .… While one may be made uncomfortable by the thought of a truly strange 21st century, there is around us an impending sense of arrival ─ a strangeness in the air, an uneasiness, a feeling that deep down, things are starting to change in swift, fundamental ways too fuzzy to put a finger on. More than just the onset of the third millennium, it is the quiet before the storm. The products of technology are becoming more curious ─ a little too smart, a little too fast. It’s downright unsettling. And, hey, people aren’t dumb. They know that we have just begun to build smart dumb machines; soon it will be dumb smart machines. Where will it stop? If we continue to build machines smarter than the last ones, and then one that is smarter than that and so on ─ well, you do not have to be a particle physicist to see that the machines cannot keep getting smarter and smarter, yet forever remain dumber than us. Garry ‘John Henry’ Kasparov, chess Grand Master, lost a championship game to a machine for the first time in history this year. Perhaps someday, we’ll hear the battle cry of humanity rallying in desperation: ‘Remember Deep Blue’…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPAL (TENETS) TO SEIZE PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS: (1) Picture mentally, radiantly. (2) Draw outside the canvas. (3) Color outside the vectors. (4) Sketch sinuously. (5) Far-sight beyond the mind’s intangible exoskeleton.
BOOK(S): The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. ISBN-13: 978–0393339758
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION(S): “…We won’t just experience 100 years of progress in the twenty-first century ─ it will be more like 20,000 years of progress…”
CITATION(S): “…If it seems like your world has been topsy-turvy over the past few years … Consider what’s coming. Your genetic code will be imprinted on and ID card … For better and worse. Medicines will be tailored to your genes and will help prevent specific diseases for which you may be at risk. (But … your insurance company and your prospective employer may also find out that you are genetically disposed to, say, heart disease, or breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s.)…” AND “…The lesson of the last three decades is that nobody can drive to the future on cruise control…”
BOOK(S): Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff. ISBN-13: 978–1591844761
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION(S): “…The FUTURE is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed…” AND “…The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you…” AND “…I’m deglitched that the future is unsure. That’s the way it should be…”
CITATION(S): “…From Conventional Wisdom to Shocking Probability. Maybe someday, sooner or later, truly intelligent machines will be built. Until that time, speculation will abound. Much of that speculation is based on what might be called ‘Conventional Wisdom,’ the underlying assumptions and conventions we collectively share. We can list some of these assumptions as follows: The next century will be an extension of this one, with increasingly smarter machines being run by people and for people … Because the human mind is linked to a soul, cybernetic machines will never be fully self-aware like we are … If intelligent robots can be built, it will be a long time before they can be made to do what humans do, as well as humans do it. Perhaps centuries will be required … Even after intelligent robots are made, multitudes of humans will continue to exist on earth, and maybe even in space … Human minds and personal identities will never be able to merge with an electromechanical system … Even if it were possible, we humans would refuse to download our minds onto hardware, no matter how tempting and intelligent the new surroundings might be. We believe that cyberbeings will be emotionless, soulless, and humorless mechanical zombies ─ rather like ‘Star Trek’s’ Lt. Commander Data, a somewhat sad android pining for a humanity he will never achieve … No matter how smart they are, digital minds will never have the insight, intuition, and smooth savvy of the human mind. They will forever remain mentally inferior, and our faithful, self- maintaining servants … The robots will soon prove our mental and physical superiors. Self-generated enhancements will refine them beyond our control. They will enslave us all except, of course, for a renegade band of rebellious, young, good-looking, daring humans armed with battered, recycled surplus weapons, fearlessly following their craggy but wise leader into a fight for truth, justice, and the hominid way … THIS BOOK ARGUES THAT THE NEXT CENTURY WILL PROVE TO BE NOTHING LIKE THIS ONE, NOR ANY FORECAST SO FAR. COMPUTING POWER, NEUROSCIENCE, AND NANOTECHNOLOGIES ARE ADVANCING SO RAPIDLY THAT THEY WILL COMBINE TO PRODUCE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ITSELF … WE MAINTAIN THAT THE HUMAN MIND AND CONSCIOUS THOUGHT ARE EXCLUSIVELY NATURAL AND PHYSICAL IN ORIGIN AND NATURE. ULTIMATELY, THEIR NATURES AND FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES ARE KNOWABLE AND CAN BE REPLICATED FOR THE PURPOSES OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY…”
BOOK(S): Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier. ISBN-13: 978–0544002692
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
Within five to eight years, search engines will start to appear much more human-like, according to Google Inc.GOOG+1.51% engineering chief Ray Kurzweil. They will respond to long and complex questions, understand the meaning of the documents they are searching, and be on the look-out for information they think might be useful to people. These advances will lead to improved problem-solving, not just for punctual questions, but for longer-term projects, he said.
The Google search engine of today ranks pages according to the number of times they have been cited by other pages. “Larry and Sergey applied page rank to Web pages. If a lot of other pages point to it, then it must be an important page. And that’s worked very well,” Mr. Kurzweil said Monday evening at the Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference in San Diego, where he was interviewed on stage by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker. Mr. Kurzweil is developing a new kind of search. “Google has already taken steps toward actually understanding the meaning and it can read with a little bit of understanding. That’s basically what I’m working on, to actually understand the content of the Web pages.”
QUOTATION(S): “…By mid-century, computers will be linked directly into our nervous systems via nanotechnology, which is so small it could connect every neuron in our brains. By about 2040, there will be a backup of our brains in a computer somewhere, so that when you die it won’t be a major career problem…” AND “…The future is being colonized all the time by people who have the resources, who do spend time thinking about it, planning for it and trying to shape it in their direction…”
CITATION(S): “…By the end of the twentieth century, science had reached the end of an era, unlocking the secrets of the atom, unraveling the molecule of life, and creating the electronic computer. With these three fundamental discoveries, triggered by the quantum revolution, the DNA revolution, and the computer revolution, the basic laws of matter, life, and computation were, in the main, finally solved .… That epic phase of science is now drawing to a close; one era is ending and another is only beginning .… The next era of science promises to be an even deeper, more thoroughgoing, more penetrating one than the last .… Clearly, we are on the threshold of yet another revolution. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS]. In the past decade, more scientific knowledge has been created than in all of human history. COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS. Almost daily, the headlines herald new advances in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, and space exploration. In the wake of this technological upheaval, entire industries and lifestyles are being overturned, only to give rise to entirely new ones. But these rapid, bewildering changes are not just quantitative. They mark the birth pangs of a new era .… FROM NOW TO THE YEAR 2020, SCIENTISTS FORESEE AN EXPLOSION IN SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. IN TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES, COMPUTER POWER AND THE DNA SEQUENCING, WE WILL SEE ENTIRE INDUSTRIES RISE AND FALL ON THE BASIS OF BREATHTAKING SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES. SINCE THE 1950S, THE POWER OF OUR COMPUTERS HAS ADVANCED BY A FACTOR OF ROUGHLY TEN BILLION. IN FACT, BECAUSE BOTH COMPUTER POWER AND DNA SEQUENCING DOUBLE ROUGHLY EVERY TWO YEARS, ONE CAN COMPUTE THE ROUGH TIME FRAME OVER WHICH MANY SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS WILL TAKE PLACE .… BY 2020, MICROPROCESSORS WILL LIKELY BE AS A CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL AS SCRAP PAPER, SCATTERED BY THE MILLIONS INTO ENVIRONMENT, ALLOWING US TO PLACE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE. THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING AROUND US, INCLUDING THE NATURE OF COMMERCE, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, AND THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE, WORK, PLAY, AND LIVE…”
BOOK(S): A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought) by Vernor Vinge. ISBN-13: 978–0812515282
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
uArm, A Mini Robotic Arm You Can Assemble and Control http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/28/uarm-a-mini-robotic-arm…d-control/ QUOTATION(S): “…It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…” AND “…Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion…”
CITATION(S): “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS].…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…”
BOOK(S): Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. ISBN-13: 978–0307473332
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
PayPal Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Sellers http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/idUS371088795720140205 QUOTATION(S): “…Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important…” AND “…Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition…”
CITATION: “…BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK(S): Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. ISBN-13: 978–1451654967
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION: “…Thirty-five years ago, psychologist and visionary Dr. Abraham Maslow warned, ‘life is moving far more rapidly now than ever before in the rate of growth of facts, knowledge, techniques, and inventions. We need a different kind of human being able to life in a world that changes perpetually, who has been educated to be comfortable with change and situations in which he has absolutely no forewarning. The society that can turn out those people will survive. Societies which do not will die.’…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. ISBN-13: 978–0312367077
Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished men of our time. The relentless inventor — whose credits include the flatbed scanner, optical character resolution and speech-to-text- systems — is also a bestselling author, a successful entrepreneur, and an artificial intelligence pioneer.
