Sunday, April 24, 2011

ray kurzweil and singularity

Most of us have probably heard of new-age media futurist Ray Kurzweil and his ideas about how technology is transforming us, and how it will continue to transform us in the future. Check out this TED talk about technology and singularity:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html

Kurzweil's predictions about how technology will change us seem very utopian from his perspective-- he talks about how we might live forever by eventually consolidating with technology and possibly uploading our consciousness to computers and thereby living forever.

The flipside of this is a very dystopian popular reaction to some of his theories. What will it actually mean for our humanity for technology to reach a point where it changes what we think of as "human" forever? And have we already reached this point to some degree?


He considers that the economics of technology will follow an exponential curve from now on, meaning that technology and computing costs will be cheaper and cheaper as we move into the future. Because of this, technology and computing will be even more ubiquitous than it is now, assuming nothing cataclysmic happens which completely reverses this trend.

Although I personally think that adopting technology and "merging" with it in some ways is a very exciting idea, I'm also somewhat frightened by what that would mean for my humanity. What I'm interested in, though, is whether Kurzweil's predictions are really that accurate. Will we really be living in such a strange, sci-fi sounding future? Or will things not move as quickly as he says?

And finally, will we really one day shed our humanity to move into the technological realm? What do you guys think?

Ryan Aliapoulios

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