Monday, September 19, 2005
Ray Kurzweil presented the thesis of his new book, The Singularity is Near, at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference this weekend. During the presentation, slides appeared on screen as if erupting from an AK47. I couldn't keep up. Happily, the graphics are so good that you can devine Ray's story from the graphs alone if you're visually inclined.Everything you can shake a stick at is progressing exponentially.
Ray is not the only one to find this broad exponential growth of evolution.
By 2040, computer processing power will surpass total human intelligence. (I know, you're skeptical. Look at Ray's full presentation, especially the part about reverse-engineering the human mind.)
This is all coming on VERY fast.
Learning takes place when you depart your comfort zone. I've learned a lot from Ray.
BETA | jay 9/19/2005 10:27:00 AM| WRITE JAY |
1 Comments:
Sounds like a great conference! I first really got into Ray Kurzweil when he published "The Age of Spiritual Machines" in the late 1990s (from which most of these charts are drawn). His vision of the future has a certain inevitability to it that is both scary and exiting. And you see evidence of it popping up all over -- beach clubs in Europe inserting RFIDs under the skin of members so they don't have to carry a wallet to buy drinks is just one example, as are the recent breakthroughs in thought-controlled artificial limbs.
What I like most about Ray's work is that he is both an artist and a geek, a musician and an inventor (somewhere on the web you can access his computer-composed music engine, but I can no longer find the link).
Probably his most quoted statement is "an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started." If only those responsible for starting out on the e-learning path had heeded this caution, we'd be a whole lot further along today than we are..
Godfrey Parkin
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