God and the Machine
Must be a day that ends in Y.
Kurzweil has been predicting the “singularity,” a vagueish idea about a moment when transhumanism (aka, technognosticism) powered by teh tech (details to be determined later) and AI makes us all immortal cyborg superstars who can download our complete consciousness and live forever on a hard drive without the sticky limitations of these terrible meat sacks we call our bodies.
Ray Kurzweil is considered smart because he invented some pretty nifty things like optical character recognition and a nice keyboard. Somehow that accomplishment translated into a role as a BS-flinging futurist, so now people nod sagely when he talks demonstrable rot rather than pointing and laughing at this clearly insane prediction, which is always 20 years away even though I’ve been writing about it for years and years.
We can’t even correctly and effectively treat concussions or prescribe antidepressants without trial and error and Kurzweil thinks SCIENCE!(TM) is going to map the area of the brain responsible for, say, mild pique or the touch of ultrasuede, convert it into binary code, upload it to a computer, and reproduce the human experience, all sometime within the next decade or two. Maybe three. But soon!
Yet people still throw money at this guy and line up to hear his daft pronouncements.
Here’s the latest: we’ll all be God! (“Well, not THE God. A god,” to quote Bill Murray.)
“Evolution creates structures and patterns that over time are more complicated, more knowledgeable, more intelligent, more creative, more capable of expressing higher sentiments like being loving,” he said. “So it’s moving in the direction that God has been described as having — these qualities without limit.”
Yes, we are becoming gods.
“Evolution is a spiritual process and makes us more godlike,” was Kurzweil’s conclusion.
Hookay Ray, we’ve got a nice soft room for you right over here. It even gets WiFi! Sometimes. When the aides don’t run the microwave.
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