blog, blog, blog -nonsense and conundrums: May 2006

the Singularity

From Futureboy:

No aging, robot cars - and radical business plans

The rate of technological progress is about to shift into high gear, some futurists say. Are you ready to take advantage of the business opportunities?

By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor

If Ray Kurzweil is right, the business landscape - indeed, the entire human race - is about to be transformed beyond all recognition.

Kurzweil is a renowned computer scientist and inventor (he built the first flatbed scanner). And no less a figure than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has called Kurzweil the greatest thinker on artificial intelligence alive today. So when he talks, it's worth paying attention.

Here's the question Kurzweil is asking these days: What if the exponential growth shown in Moore's Law applies not just to etching transistors in silicon chips, but to all of human progress and innovation?

For many in Silicon Valley, that's not a question so much as a description of reality. Two weeks ago, the largest auditorium on Stanford University's campus was packed to capacity for the Singularity Summit. A dozen leading researchers and futurists of all stripes came together to discuss what signs of a rapidly advancing future we could already see.

At the summit, Kurzweil gave his latest vision of the future: "We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century - it will be more like 20,000 years of progress at today's rate. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity: technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

"In practical terms," Kurzweil added, "human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes, and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem."