Boston Globe sneaks a peek into the deep future

The Boston Globe asks: "What will happen to us?" To answer the question, writer Graeme Wood highlights the work of futurists Nick Bostrom, Sir Martin Rees, Sean Carroll and Ray Kurzweil. Highlights:

The community of thinkers on distant-future questions stretches across disciplinary bounds, with the primary uniting trait a willingness to think about the future as a topic for objective study, rather than a space for idle speculation or science fictional reverie. They include theoretical cosmologists like Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology, who recently wrote a book about time, and nonacademic technology mavens like Ray Kurzweil, the precocious inventor and theorist. What binds this group together is that they are not, says Bostrom, “just trying to tell an interesting story.” Instead, they aim for precision. In its fundamentals, Carroll points out, the universe is a “relatively simple system,” compared, say, to a chaotic system like a human body — and thus “predicting the future is actually a feasible task,” even “for ridiculously long time periods.”
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Also among the cosmologists is Rees, the speaker at the Royal Institution, who turned his attention to the end of time after a career in physics reckoning with time’s beginning. An understanding of these vast time scales, he contends, should have a large and humbling effect on our predictions about human evolution. “It’s hard to think of humans as anything like the culmination of life,” Rees says. “We should expect humans to change, just as Darwin did when he wrote that ‘no living species will preserve its unaltered likeness into a distant futurity.’ ” Most probably, according to Rees, the most important transformations of the species will be nonbiological. “Evolution in the future won’t be determined by natural selection, but by technology,” he says — both because we have gone some distance toward mastering our biological weaknesses, and because computing power has sped up to a rate where the line between human and computer blurs. (Some thinkers call the point when technology reaches this literally unthinkable level of advancement the “singularity,” a coinage by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge.)
---Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher, puts the odds at about 25 percent, and says that many of the greatest risks for human survival are ones that could play themselves out within the scope of current human lifetimes. “The next hundred years or so might be critical for humanity,” Bostrom says, listing as possible threats the usual apocalyptic litany of nuclear annihilation, man-made or natural viruses and bacteria, or other technological threats, such as microscopic machines, or nanobots, that run amok and kill us all.

This is quite literally the stuff of Michael Crichton novels. Thinkers about the future deal constantly with those who dismiss their speculation as science fiction. But Bostrom, who trained in neuroscience and cosmology as well as philosophy, says he’s mining the study of the future for guidance on how we should prioritize our actions today. “I’m ultimately interested in finding out what we have most reason to do now, to make the world better in some way,” he says.
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There is, both in Bostrom’s scenarios and in Rees’s, the possibility of a long and bright future, should we manage to have any future at all. Some of the key technologies capable of going awry also have the potential to keep us alive and prospering — making humans and post-humans a more durable species. Bostrom imagines that certain advances that are currently theoretical could combine to free us some of the more fragile aspects of our nature, such as the ability to be wiped out by a simple virus, and keep the species around indefinitely. If neuropsychologists learn to manipulate the brain with precision, we could drug ourselves into conditions of not only enhanced happiness but enhanced morality as well, aiming for less fragile or violent societies far more durable than we enjoy now, in the nuclear shadow.

And if human minds could be uploaded onto computers, for example, a smallpox plague wouldn’t be so worrisome (though maybe a computer-virus outbreak, or a spilled pot of coffee, would be). Not having a body means not being subject to time’s ravages on human flesh. “When we have friendly superintelligent machines, or space colonization, it would be easy to see how we might continue for billions of years,” Bostrom said, far beyond the moment when Rees’s post-human would sit back in his futuristic lawn chair, pop open a cold one, and watch the sun run out of fuel.

There is one surprising survival scenario of particular worry for Bostrom, however — one that involves not a physical death but a moral one. The technologies that might liberate us from the threat of extinction might also change humans not into post-humans, but into creatures who have shed their humanity altogether. Imagine, he suggests, that the hypothetical future entities (evolved biologically, or uploaded to computers and enhanced by machine intelligence) have slowly eroded their human characteristics. The mental properties and concerns of these creatures might be unrecognizable.

“What gives humans value is not their physical substance, but that we are thinking, feeling beings that have plans and relationships with others, and enjoy art, et cetera,” Bostrom says. “So there could be profound transformations that wouldn’t destroy value and might allow the creation of any greater value” by having a deeper capacity to love or to appreciate art than we present humans do. “But you could also imagine beings that were intelligent or efficient, but that don’t add value to the world, maybe because they didn’t have subjective experience.”

Bostrom ranks this possibility among the more likely ways mankind could extinguish itself. It is certainly the most insidious. And it could happen any number of ways: with a network of uploaded humans that essentially abolishes the individual, making her a barely distinguishable module in a larger intelligence. Or, in a sort of post-human Marxist dystopia, humans could find themselves dragooned into soulless ultra-efficiency, without all the wasteful acts of friendship and artistic creation that made life worth living when we were merely human.

“That would count as a catastrophe,” Bostrom notes.

Time taps into transhumanism

Transhumanism doesn't get more mainstream than this.

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

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Not all of [the singularitarians] are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

It's not all about Ray: There's more to Singularity studies than Kurzweil

I'm finding myself a bit disturbed these days about how fashionable it has become to hate Ray Kurzweil.

It wasn't too long ago, with the publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines, that he was the cause célèbre of our time. I'm somewhat at a loss to explain what has happened in the public's mind since then; his ideas certainly haven't changed all that much. Perhaps it's a collective impatience with his timelines; the fact that it isn't 2049 yet has led to disillusionment. Or maybe it's because people are afraid of buying into a set of predictions that may never come true—a kind of protection against disappointment or looking foolish.

What's more likely, however, is that his ideas have reached a much wider audience since the release of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near. In the early days his work was picked up by a community who was already primed to accept these sorts of wide-eyed speculations as a valid line of inquiry. These days, everybody and his brother knows about Kurzweil. This has naturally led to an increased chorus of criticism by those who take issue with his thesis—both from experts and non-experts alike.

As a consequence of this popularity and infamy, Ray has been given a kind of unwarranted ownership over the term 'Singularity.' This has proven problematic on several levels, including the fact that his particular definition and description of the technological singularity is probably not the best one. Kurzweil has essentially equated the Singularity with the steady, accelerating growth of all technologies, including intelligence. His definition, along with its rather ambiguous implications, is inconsistent with the going definition used by other Singuarlity scholars, that of it being an 'intelligence explosion' caused by the positive feedback of recursively improving machine intelligences.

Moreover, and more importantly, Ray Kurzweil is one voice among many in a community of thinkers who have been tackling this problem for over half a century. What's particularly frustrating these days is that, because Kurzweil has become synonymous with the Singularity concept, and because so many people have been caught in the hate-Ray trend, people are throwing out the Singularity baby with the bathwater while drowning out all other voices. This is not only stupid and unfair, it's potentially dangerous; Singularity studies may prove crucial to the creation of a survivable future.

Consequently, for those readers new to these ideas and this particular community, I have prepared a short list of key players whose work is worth deeper investigation. Their work extends and complements the work of Ray Kurzweil in many respects. And in some cases they present an entirely different vision altogether. But what matters here is that these are all credible academics and thinkers who have worked or who are working on this important subject.

Please note that this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, so if you or your favorite thinker is not on here just take a chill pill and add a post to the comments section along with some context.

• Jon von Neumann: The brilliant Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, John von Neumann is regarded as the first person to use the term 'Singularity' in describing a future event. Speaking with Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, von Neumann made note of the accelerating progress of technology and constant changes to human life. He felt that this tendency was giving the appearance of our approaching some essential singularity beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. In this sense, von Neumann's definition is more a declaration of an event horizon.
• I. J. Good: One of the first and best definitions of the Singularity was put forth by mathematician I. G. Good. Back in 1965 he wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they might be able to improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. He thought that, while the first set of improvements might be small, machines could quickly become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to a cascade of self-improvements and a sudden surge to superintelligence (or a Singularity).
• Marvin Minsky: Inventor and author, Minsky is universally regarded as one of the world's leading authorities in artificial intelligence. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of robotics and computer-aided learning technologies. Some of his most notable books include The Society of Mind, Perceptrons, and The Emotion Machine. Ray Kurzweil calls him his most important mentor. Minsky argues that our increasing knowledge of the brain and increasing computer power will eventually intersect, likely leading to machine minds and a potential Singularity.
• Vernor Vinge: In 1983, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge rekindled interest in Singularity studies by publishing an article about the subject in Omni magazine. Later, in 1993, he expanded on his thoughts in the article, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." He (now famously) wrote, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." Inspired by I. J. Good, he argued that superhuman intelligence would be able enhance itself faster than the humans who created them. He noted that, "When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid." He speculated that this feedback loop of self-improving intelligence could cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period, and that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence represented a breakdown in humans' ability to model their future. Pre-dating Kurzweil, Vinge used Moore's law in an attempt to predict the arrival of artificial intelligence.
• Hans Moravec: Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec is a visionary thinker who is best known for his 1988 book, Mind Children, where he outlines Moore's law and his predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec's primary thesis is that humanity, through the development of robotics and AI, will eventually spawn their own successors (which he predicts to be around 2030-2040). He is also the author of Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1998) in which he further refined his ideas. Moravec writes, "It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half–century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long–time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period. But there are very good reasons why things will go much faster in the next fifty years than they have in the last fifty."
• Robin Hanson: Associate professor of economics at George Mason University, Robin Hanson has taken the "Singularity" term to to refer to sharp increases in the exponent of economic growth. He lists the agricultural and industrial revolutions as past "singularities." Extrapolating from such past events, he proposes that the next economic singularity should increase economic growth between 60 and 250 times. Hanson contends that such an event could be triggered by an innovation that allows for the replacement of virtually all human labor, such as mind uploads and virtually limitless copying.
• Nick Bostrom: University of Oxford's Nick Bostrom has done seminal work in this field. In 1998 he published, "How Long Before Superintelligence," in which he argued that superhuman artificial intelligence would likely emerge within the first third of the 21st century. He reached this conclusion by looking at various factors, including different estimates of the processing power of the human brain, trends in technological advancement and how fast superintelligence might be developed once there is human-level artificial intelligence.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky: Artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky is a co-founder and research fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). He is the author of "Creating Friendly AI" (2001) and "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence" (2002). Primarily concerned with the Singularity as a potential human-extinction event, Yudkowsky has dedicated his work to advocacy and developing strategies towards creating survivable Singularities.
• David Chalmers: An important figure in philosophy of mind studies and neuroscience, David Chalmers has a unique take on the Singularity where he argues that it will happen through self-amplifying intelligence. The only requirement, he claims, is that an intelligent machine be able to create an intelligence smarter than itself. The original intelligence itself need not be very smart. The most plausible way, he says, is simulated evolution. Chalmers feels that if we get to above-human intelligence it seems likely it will take place in a simulated world, not in a robot or in our own physical environment.

Like I said, this is a partial list, but it's a good place to start. Other seminal thinkers include Alan Turing, Alvin Toffler, Eric Drexler, Ben Goertzel, Anders Sandberg, John Smart, Shane Legg, Marin Rees, Stephen Hawking and many, many others. I strongly encourage everyone, including skeptics, to take a deeper look into their work.

And as for the all the anti-Kurzweil sentiment, all I can say is that I hope to see it pass. There is no good reason why he—and others—shouldn't explore this important area. Sure, it may turn out that everyone was wrong and that the future isn't at all what we expected. But as Enrico Fermi once said, "There's two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."

Regardless of the outcome, let's make a discovery.

Myers still thinks Kurzweil does not understand the brain

The blog war between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil continues. Myers has now retorted to Kurzweil's retort:

...you can't measure the number of transistors in an Intel CPU and then announce, "A-ha! We now understand what a small amount of information is actually required to create all those operating systems and computer games and Microsoft Word, and it is much, much smaller than everyone is assuming." Put it in those terms, and the Kurzweil fanboys would laugh at him; put it in terms of something they don't understand at all, like the development and function of the brain, and they're willing to go along with the pretense that the genome tells us that the whole organism is simpler than they thought.

I presume they understand that if you program a perfect Intel emulator, you don't suddenly get Halo: Reach for free, as an emergent property of the system. You can buy the code and add it to the system, sure, but in this case, we can't run down to GameStop and buy a DVD with the human OS in it and install it on our artificial brain. You're going to have to do the hard work of figuring out how that works and reverse engineering it, as well. And understanding how the processor works is necessary to do that, but not sufficient.

Myers concludes,

In short, here's Kurzweil's claim: the brain is simpler than we think, and thanks to the accelerating rate of technological change, we will understand it's basic principles of operation completely within a few decades. My counterargument, which he hasn't addressed at all, is that 1) his argument for that simplicity is deeply flawed and irrelevant, 2) he has made no quantifiable argument about how much we know about the brain right now, and I argue that we've only scratched the surface in the last several decades of research, 3) "exponential" is not a magic word that solves all problems (if I put a penny in the bank today, it does not mean I will have a million dollars in my retirement fund in 20 years), and 4) Kurzweil has provided no explanation for how we'll be 'reverse engineering' the human brain. He's now at least clearly stating that decoding the genome does not generate the necessary information — it's just an argument that the brain isn't as complex as we thought, which I've already said is bogus — but left dangling is the question of methodology. I suggest that we need to have a combined strategy of digging into the brain from the perspectives of physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and development, and in all of those fields I see a long hard slog ahead. I also don't see that noisemakers like Kurzweil, who know nothing of those fields, will be making any contribution at all.

Link.

Kurzweil responds to PZ Myers

Ray Kurzweil has retorted to PZ Myers's claim that he does not understand the brain:

For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.

Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.

I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.

Be sure to read the entire response.

Myers: Kurzweil is a "pseudo-scientific dingbat" who "does not understand" the brain

Biologist and skeptic PZ Myers has ripped into Ray Kurzweil for his recent claim that the human brain will be completely modeled by 2020 (Note: Not that it's particularly important, but Kurzweil did say it'll take two decades at the recent Singularity Summit, not one). In a rather sweeping and insulting article titled, "Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain," Myers takes the position that the genome cannot possibly serve as an effective blueprint in our efforts to reverse engineer the human brain.

In regards to he claim that the design of the brain is in the genome, he writes,

Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It's [sic] design is not encoded in the genome: what's in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn't even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

Myers continues:

To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn't even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Okay, while I agree that Kurzweil's timeline is ridiculously optimistic (I'm thinking we'll achieve a modeled human brain sometime between 2075 and 2100), Myers's claim that Kurzweil "knows nothing" about the brain is as incorrect as it is disingenuous. Say what you will about Kurzweil, but the man does his homework. While I wouldn't make the claim that he does seminal work in the neurosciences, I will say that his efforts at describing the brain along computationally functionalist terms is important. The way he has described the brain's redundancy and massively repeating arrays is as fascinating as it is revealing.

Moreover, Myers's claim that the human genome cannot inform our efforts at reverse engineering the brain is equally unfair and ridiculous. While I agree that the genome is not the brain, it undeniably contains the information required to construct a brain from scratch. This is irrefutable and Myers can stamp his feet in protest all he wants. We may be unable to properly read this data as yet, or even execute the exact programming required to set the process in motion, but that doesn't mean the problem is intractable. It's still early days. In addition, we have an existing model, the brain, to constantly juxtapose against the data embedded in our DNA (e.g. cognitive mapping).

Again, it just seems excruciatingly intuitive and obvious to think that our best efforts at emulating an entire brain will be informed to a considerable extent by pre-existing data, namely our own DNA and its millions upon millions of years of evolutionary success.

Oh, and Myers: Let's lose the ad hominem.

NYT: Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

I'm sure most of you have caught this by now, but the New York Times recently published a 5,000 word article about the Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil, and the technological Singularity. All the usual suspects are referenced within, including the IEET's James Hughes, Terry Grossman, Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, Andrew Hessel, Sonia Arrison, and William S. Bainbridge.

A taste of the article:

Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has followed Mr. Kurzweil’s work and written a science-fiction thriller, “Breakpoint,” in which a group of terrorists try to halt the advance of technology. He sees major conflicts coming as the government and citizens try to wrap their heads around technology that’s just beginning to appear.

“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. Clarke says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”

Mr. Clarke says the government has a contingency plan for just about everything — including an attack by Canada — but has yet to think through the implications of techno-philosophies like the Singularity. (If it’s any consolation, Mr. Long of the Defense Department asked a flood of questions while attending Singularity University.)

Mr. Kurzweil himself acknowledges the possibility of grim outcomes from rapidly advancing technology but prefers to think positively. “Technological evolution is a continuation of biological evolution,” he says. “That is very much a natural process.”

Disturbing fact revealed in the article: Google and Microsoft employees trailed only members of the military as the largest individual contributors to Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

For a curious and infuriating response to the NYT article, be sure to check out Pete Shank's "A Singular Kind of Eugenics," but be warned: the bullshit factor is off the charts (e.g. Shank is terribly confused about the history of transhumanism, particularly the role and evolution of the Extropy Institute, the World Transhumanist Association, Humanity+ and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies).

Welcome to the Machine, Part 4: Kurzweil's nano neural nets

Previously in series: The Ethics of Simulated Beings, Descartes's Malicious Demon and The Simulation Argument.

As previously noted in this series, our entire world may be simulated. For all we know we're sitting on a powerful supercomputer somewhere, the mere playthings of posthuman intelligences.

But this is not the only possibility. There's another way that this kind of fully immersive 'reality' could be realized -- one that doesn't require the simulation of an entire world. Indeed, it's quite possible that your life is not what it seems -- that what you think of as reality is actually an illusion of the senses. You could be experiencing a completely immersive and totally convincing virtual reality right now and you don't even know it.

How could such a thing be possible? Nanotechnology, of course.

The nano neural net

In his book, The Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil describes how a nanotechnology powered neural network could give rise to the ultimate virtual reality experience. By suffusing the brain with specialized nanobots, he speculates that we will someday be able to override reality and replace it with an experience that's completely fabricated. And all without the use of a single brain jack.

Here's how:

First, we have to remember that all sensory data we experience is converted into electrical signals that the brain can process. The brain does a very good job of this, and we in turn experience these inputs as subjective awareness (namely through consciousness and feelings of qualia); our perception of reality is therefore nothing more than the brain's interpretation of incoming sensory information.

Now imagine that you could stop this sensory data at the conversion point and replace it with something else.

That's where the nano neural net comes in. According to Kurzweil, nanbots would park themselves near every interneuronal connection coming in from our senses (sight, hearing, touch, balance, etc.). They would then work to 1) halt the incoming sensory signals (not difficult -- we already know how to use "neuron transistors" that can detect and suppress neuronal firing) and 2) replace these inputs with the signals required to support a believable virtual reality environment (a bit more challenging).

As Kurzweil notes, "The brain does not experience the body directly." As far as the conscious self is concerned, the sensory data would completely override the feelings generated by the real environment. The brain would experience the synthetic signals just as it would the real ones.

Generating synthetic experiences

Clearly, the second step -- generating new sensory signals -- is radically more complicated than the first (not to mention, of course, the difficulty of creating nanobots that can actually work within the brain itself!). Creating and transmitting credible artificial sensory data will be no easy feat. We will need to completely reverse engineer the brain so that we can map all requisite sensory interactions. We'll also need a fairly sophisticated AI to generate the stream of sensory data that's needed to create a succession of believable life experiences.

But assuming we can get a nano neural net to work, the sky's the limit in terms of how we could use it. Kurzweil notes,

You could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you normally would, but the nanobots would intercept these interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and instead cause your virtual limbs to move, appropriately adjusting your vestibular system and providing the appropriate movement and reorientation in the virtual environment.

From there we will create virtual reality experiences as real or surreal as our imaginations allow. We'll be able to choose different bodies, reside in all sorts of environments and interact with our fellow neural netters. It'll be an entirely new realm of existence. This new world, with all its richness and possibility, may eventually supplant our very own.

And in some cases, we may even wish to suppress and alter our memories such that we won't know who we really are and that we're actually living in a VR environment...

A topic I will explore in more detail in my next post.

Kurzweil: When minds merge with machines

Scientific American has republished an article by Ray Kurzweil about the coming merger of minds with machines. Excerpt:

Sometime early in this century the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within a quarter of a century, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike today’s virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they tell us so. By around 2020 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.

Once computers achieve a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans, they will necessarily soar past it. For example, if I learn French, I can’t readily download that learning to you. The reason is that for us, learning involves successions of stunningly complex patterns of interconnections among brain cells (neurons) and among the concentrations of biochemicals known as neurotransmitters that enable impulses to travel from neuron to neuron. We have no way of quickly downloading these patterns. But quick downloading will allow our nonbiological creations to share immediately what they learn with billions of other machines. Ultimately, nonbiological entities will master not only the sum total of their own knowledge but all of ours as well.

As this happens, there will no longer be a clear distinction between human and machine. We are already putting computers—neural implants—directly into people’s brains to counteract Par­kinson’s disease and tremors from multiple scle­rosis. We have cochlear implants that restore hear­ing. A retinal implant is being de­veloped in the U.S. that is intended to provide

at least some visual perception for some blind individuals, basically by replacing certain visual-processing circuits of the brain. A team of scientists at Emory University implanted a chip in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim that allowed him to use his brainpower to move a cursor across a computer screen.

In the 2020s neural implants will improve our sensory experiences, memory and thinking. By 2030, instead of just phoning a friend, you will be able to meet in, say, a virtual Mozam­bican game preserve that will seem compellingly real. You will be able to have any type of ex­perience—business, social, sexual—with anyone, real or simulated, regardless of physical proximity.

Read the entire article.

Kurzweil and Grossman: Transcend

Futurist Ray Kurzweil and MD Terry Grossman have announced their next collaboration: Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever. Back in 2004 the duo published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. As the title suggests, the new book will offer practical advice for those people who are looking to optimize their health. And perhaps live forever.

The book will hit store shelves on April 28, 2009, but you can pre-order your copy.

Book description:

In 2004, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Their groundbreaking book marshaled thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and technology will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Soon, our notion of what it means to be a 55-year-old will be as outdated as an eight-track tape player. TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever presents a practical, enjoyable program so that readers can live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. To help readers remember the nine key components of the program, Ray and Terry have arranged them into a mnemonic: Talk with your doctor Relaxation Assessment Nutrition Supplementation Calorie reduction Exercise New technologies Detoxification This easy-to-follow program will help readers transcend the boundaries of our genetic legacy and live long enough to live forever.

While you're waiting for this book you can read my article, Eight tips to dramatically improve your chances of living forever.

Via Astranaut.

Kurzweil's "Transcendent Man" film trailer

Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, the renowned futurist who journeys the world offering his vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent...all within the next thirty years.

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Ray Kurzweil's acceptance speech at TV07

Ray Kurzweil gives his acceptance speech after being awarded the World Transhumanist Association's H.G. Wells award for transhumanist of the year.