Findings – Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology – NYTimes.com

Link for this Post: Findings – Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology – NYTimes.com.

Here is a bit from the beginning of this piece.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy

I’m certainly in favor of the idea that scientific progress can bring us the benefits that Kurzweil suggests will occur.  However, when he gets into his ideas about artificial intelligence,  the article begins to be a bit more skeptical and so do I. The problem when talking about intelligence is that you start having to consider the related area of consciousness and personal experience.

I’m have become a slow book reader and have been reading a book by Susan Blackmore called Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore for what seems like forever but is probably closer to a year. Its not an easy book to get through but has a lot of food for thought. Perhaps because the book is about thought, or something closely related to it which she calls consciousness and which I have come to think about as personal experience.

The semantics and conceptual maze which is the study of consciousness makes my head spin. Not because there is so much known about it but the fact we hardly know anything about it at all.

With so much of science having its foundations based on clear borders between objectivity and subjectivity, the fact that we know so little is quite remarkable. What is even more amazing is that people like Kurtweil can talk about artificial intelligence without considering these questions with more than placing bets on whether some computer will pass the Touring Test.

Note: Image at the top from the Times article