Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity: A Hard or Soft Takeoff

[CharlieM]

This is one of those rare, mind blowing speeches that you only hear once or twice in a lifetime.

It is from the Singularity Summit symposium, hosted by Stanford University, given with the purpose of discussing the very real implications that the Singularity (point at which human intelligence rockets us into a type 1 civilzation) may hold in the very near future.

The man is Ray Kurzweil, hes one of the major pioneers in the fields of Optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and a whole host of other extremly impressive stuff youll hear in the intro. This man is no dim lightbulb.

Theres a 1 min intro, and it is slow for maybe the first 3 min, but it gets awesome.
Well worth a watch.

http://documentaries.videosift.com/video/Ray-Kurzweil-The-Singularity-A-Hard-or-Soft-Takeoff

[BLACK]

lol Stanford.


LOL @ this guy. Just sits there and sucks himself off for the first 5 minutes.

Thing about this guy is that he is smart as hell but has no people skills.

[Grog]

can i get a summary?

[BLACK]

Talks about AI vs Human intelligence.

[Grog]

thanks, it was mind numbing

[BLACK]

No problem, human.

[CharlieM]

Talks about AI vs Human intelligence.

Its a lot more than that.
Hes showing the trend lines between cost of processing power over time, and at what point we will reach the ability to have a pc as powerful as the human brain, for 1k dollars (desktop CPU).

He then gos on to cover how these machines can be integrated into nano technology which will pretty much stamp out all forms of dissease and illnesses.

He isnt speculating about technology yet to exist, these 'predictions' (if you will) are based off of already existing technology and the capabilities of them at the moment, and their trend of capability versus cost over time, and size etc.

He pretty much states that within the next 30 years, we will have the technology avaliable to us to cure all illnesses, and make use of nano tech to solve our energy problems (nano construction of solar cells, bringing efficiency up to 100% etc.).

Its pretty amazing stuff.

The guy has been quoted in the past of being a radical in how he predicts things (has been doing it since the 70's), when in reality, the things he has been predicting have come true before his estimates, which would indicate he is being very conservative with his timelines.

The internet would of been a massive community of millions of people by ~2003. It took off in 1996 - one of many many predictions (extrapolations moreover) of what is yet to come that have come true.

Mind blowing stuff.

[BLACK]

I was being sarcastic.

That's some cool shit though.

[Hclinton/Brokenex]

I can't believe I watched that whole thing, found it quite fascinating