Folks with more wit will undoubtedly contribute more than this link post, but I’m passing along just a snippet I spotted in Kurzweil’s assertion regarding upcoming machines.
As Kurzweil seeks to clarify his singularity meme with Kevin Kelly:
… “a chimp’s hand looks similar but the pivot point of the thumb does not allow facile manipulation of the environment. In contrast, our human ability to look inside the human brain and to model and simulate and recreate the processes we encounter there has already been demonstrated. The scale and resolution of these simulations will continue to expand exponentially. I make the case that we will reverse-engineer the principles of operation of the several hundred information processing regions of the human brain within about twenty years and then apply these principles (along with the extensive tool kit we are creating through other means in the AI field) to computers that will be many times (by the 2040s, billions of times) more powerful than needed to simulate the human brain.“
Of course, any of these new computing products on our store shelves will only arrive as we continue to reverse engineer the [our] human brain! Not to worry though. Kurzweil helps assure our prospects by pointing out “the complexity of the design of the human brain is about a billion times simpler than the actual complexity we find in the brain.”
Thanks to Preoccupations for grabbing these links:
- Kevin Kelly — The Technium
Kevin Kelly’s essay on Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity Is Near’ - KurzweilAI.net: Response to ‘The Singularity Is Always Near’
“In “The Singularity Is Always Near,” an essay in The Technium, an online “book in progress,” author Kevin Kelly critiques arguments on exponential growth made in Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil responds.”