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Crossposted for my blog, Deepsurface.net On Friday, Reuters published this article: Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor. When the device was to be used, technicians plugged a cable connected to a computer into the pedestal. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.
And the most recent episode of Studio 360 explored various ways the line blurs between computer entertainment and reality. It covers a range of topics, from an artist who makes a living from hacked 80’s video games to an interview with Richard Linklater. He directed A Scanner Darkly, yet another movie from a Phillip K. Dick about what makes us human. These segments focus attention on the various ways computers define us as a society and as individuals. Yesterday, Ray Kurtzweil was on Talk of the Nation discussing an opinion piece he wrote for the Philadelphia Enquirer. He writes: A key point to keep in mind as we contemplate the future: The pace of change is accelerating. And that means our power to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and accomplishment is accelerating, too. That the pace of change is accelerating may seem obvious, but most people fail to take it into consideration. According to my models, we are doubling the “paradigm-shift rate” (roughly the rate of technical progress) every decade, so we’ll see twice the change in the next decade that we saw in the last, four times the change in the next 20 years that we saw in the last 20, and so on. The power of information technology is doubling even faster: in less than one year. This means that information technology, as measured by price performance and capacity, will multiply by 1,000 in less than a decade and 1 billion in 25 years. At the same time, we are shrinking the size of technology by a 100 (per 3-D volume) each decade, so the key features of our technology will be 100,000 times smaller in 25 years. That means the equivalent of your iPod nano will be smaller than a human hair. (read the rest)
And finally, today I woke up to a Morning Edition segment describing new technological tools being tested by soldiers. “The army is considering new battle gear that loads the grunts up with 17 pounds of electronic gadgets… There’s really no other way to put this. The soldiers that have been outfitted with the new gear look like the borg- All just moving parts of a battle-field computer network.” I’m still working through Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, but I’m already convinced that humanity is in the middle of a massive shift toward a time when “humans transcend biology”, that book’s sub-title. I have become a Singulatarian. So what is the Singularity? Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the “Singularity” by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds. - from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
For more, listen to this archive Science Friday interview with Kurzweil from last year and check out KurzweilAI.net for the latest developments and discussions related to “accelerating intelligence.” [Edit: 6.22.06] ~C4 posts a related link: Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves. It looks like things are happening faster than I thought. …So if improved hardware is all it takes to speed up the device, Cyberkinetics’ chip could be able to process thoughts as fast as speech - 110 to 170 words per minute - by 2012. Imagine issuing commands to a computer as quickly as you could talk. (read the whole article)
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