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Ray Kurzweil Responds to Richard Eckersley
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0641.html
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Ray Kurzweil Responds to Richard Eckersley
"Eckersley bases his romanticized idea of ancient life on communication and the relationships fostered by communication. But much of modern technology is directed at just this basic human need."
Originally published in The
Futurist March-April 2006. Reprinted on KurzweilAI.net February
2, 2006.
This article is a response to Richard
Eckersley's comments on Kurzweil's article, Reinventing
Humanity. You can also read other responses to Kurzweil's article
by Terry
Grossman, John
Smart, J.
Storrs Hall, and Damien
Broderick.
Click here
to read a PDF of the full feature.
Richard Eckersley’s idyllic notion of human life hundreds
of years ago belies our scientific knowledge of history. Two hundred
years ago, there was no understanding of sanitation so bacterial
infections were rampant. There were no antibiotics and no social
safety nets so an infectious disease was a disaster plunging a family
into desperation. Thomas Hobbes’ characterization in 1651 of
human life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short was on the
mark. Even ignoring infant mortality, life expectancy was in the
30’s only a couple of hundred years ago. Schubert and Mozart’s
death at 31 and 35 respectively was typical.
Eckersley bases his romanticized idea of ancient life on communication
and the relationships fostered by communication. But much of modern
technology is directed at just this basic human need. The telephone
allowed people to be together even if far apart geographically.
The Internet is the quintessential communication technology. Social
networks and the panoply of new ways to make connection are creating
communities based on genuine common interests rather than the accident
of geography. This decentralized electronic communication is also
highly democratizing. In a book I wrote in the mid 1980s I predicted
the demise of the Soviet Union from the impact of the then emerging
communication networks, and that is indeed what happened in the
early 1990s. The democracy movement we saw in the 1990s and since
is similarly fueled by our unprecedented abilities to stay in touch.
If Eckersley really sticks to his own philosophy, he won’t
be around for very long to influence the debate. I suspect, however,
that he will take advantage of the life extension—and enhancement—technologies
that will emerge in the decades ahead. And I hope that he does so
that we can continue this dialogue through this century and beyond.
© 2006 Ray Kurzweil. Reprinted with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Power
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We move because of power.
We want to feel more POWER.
Act. Action. Fly rage roar, soar explode, conquer, love FEEL grow forever..or until WE choose.
Goethe stated man's aim was to hunt with impunity.
Man is big and bigger than I could define, and will augment bigger than I can imagine.
The future is about the will to power.
That means not dying and being as extropian as possible.
I was a unitarian before I was an aetheist and looked at multi-disciplined ideas as the Way.
Seems to me men have fundamental thngs in common, but augmented men will be limitless.
I saw that people about 7 years old decide they cant not die, and develop and entrench a personal or adopted philsosophy based on acceptance of death.
To demonstrate they need not die, you generally have to reduce them to that 7 year old and talk there.
When I joined the UK cryonics people who were abouit 10 in total, the thing we had in common was intelligence and underachievement...even the ones who had made good by most standards felt they hadn't done anything.
I dont feel I've begun yet but my peer group think their lives are running predictable courses and they'll die in a few decades.
I set out to write a complete philosophy for myself.
I reduced everything to minimising pain and maximising pleasure.
Then I spent years figuring out on paper how to achieve this.
Including not dying, or if the pain was too much committing suicide.
This way I could get more pleasure since I had longer time, or would cease pain if I chopped myself.
I still think that dichotomy or polarisation is accurate and there is good arguement for suicide if you believe future technologies can resurect the past.
What's the point is that we want to liove and it's organic will...how we are defined.
I think anyione who doesn't want to live forever and to grow is depressed perhaps fundamentally stuck at the 7 year old who thinks death is not surmoutable.
Transhumanist manifesto sums up a lot of my stuff
http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm
Most people DONT want live forever nor expand like this, but a few of us do.
so my answer is:
Hey, we're a new species!
you die, we dont..we can co-habit!
I'll talk and teach your great grandchildren1
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Re: Power
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Most people DONT want live forever nor expand like this, but a few of us do.
While Iím firmly on the side of life expansion and technological advance, itís fundamentally impossible for *you* to live forever. You could try to live forever by not changing, shutting down all learning and living each day the same never learningÖthatís hardly life, or you can start to learn even a little. Over time, eons you will absolutely wash away any trace of who you were. I could go deeply into this, but our entire construct of ourselves is based on a certain structure of distributions that we used to learn by. Those distributions will radically change over time and so you must either decide to ride entirely orthogonal learning waves, stop changing or to store whatever you were and ride on. Even the memory of you will go eventually. People think there will be no resource costs in post Singularity but if anything the resource costs will be more acute. Rapid learners who donít bother storing things like concept of self will have a competitive advantage.
All of this gets even worse if we can modularly exchange knowledge, training and experience. Nothing of you will remain. To be honest, even in 50 odd years, the you who was a child is very little like the you you are now, beyond a somewhat fictitious sense of continuity.
Thus, we can have immortality as in being part of the flow of advancing life Ö but that is the exact condition normal mortals are in now. Rather, we can go for a much longer life but melt into the flow. It is theoretically possible to re-simulate our youths, but that might become like re-simulating your life as an embryo Ė you wouldnít even understand it if you did it and it would probably too dull to do anyhow.
Gary |
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Re: Power
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Would I subject the future to a version of me?
Basicly I am an evil creature. I am a monkey, with some drives that are downright brutal. I want sexual conquest, to devour, to subjugate, including those of my own race. What morality I have is at best false sentimentality. I am original sin incarnate.
Imagine a world where "better" stuff has its genesis. Imagine AI, developed from the raw beauty of mathematical algorithms of necessity, and me stomping around in some post biological form, getting virtual filth all over the place?
Imagine a species of posthuman meta-eloi, beautiful, graceous and elegant as I can never aspire to be, having to look in disgust at the creatures we are today, imagine the essence of me giving motivation to 10E(A lot) of quantumflops of raw upgraded crocodile brain darwinian desire?
Maybe humanity needs to go.
However, the flip side of this may be that we are damn good at what we do. Imagine the future being controlled by smooth polished survival machines, as merciless in survival as would be gigerian aliens, but as soulless and unspiritual as insects.
We could be, as post-biological humans, be carrying hardwon, meticulously evolved survival algorithms, a library of biological cunning well-polished to outwit the mechanically (and hastily) evolved?
We could bring some usefull baggage to the future.
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Re: Richard Eckersley
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I am still new to these ideas and have never quite made a futuristic decision that has come true before but I would like to apply something that I consistently see occur in the university setting where you look at the history of something and look for the patterns that came together to form the present.
What I mean to say in response to Mr. Eckersley deals with the idea that through the past humanity always seems to take the path of least resistance , whether right or wrong. If there is a job to be done and there is a way to accomplish that job in a quicker or more profitable manner then that is the technology that is adopted.
One of the key points that Mr. Kurzweil seems to drive home is the idea of not only advancement , but also the affordablity of advancement on a $1000 dollar incremental level. Thats significant to me because at the point at which technology is brought down to the $1000 level , then at that point it has already been deemed useful at much more extravagent price ranges.
I say this because at the point at which futuristic technology not only becomes affordable but if it also allows for someone to get a job done quicker or easier then it will be adopted and not only will it be adopted but it will be expected to be adopted in cutting edge industries such as digital design.
Right now there are digital designers at Universities who are studying interface design and who are dealing with how to apply design conceptology to abstract data. There is a need for large quantities of information to be sorted and to be dealt with such as in the field of genetics. Farmers might not need the technology that Mr. Kurzweil speaks of but Genome researchers might.
There are imaginations being piqued in universities across the country where students are being asked to apply problem solving skills to large problems. This is just the start , it might not be the people you see around you who develop the need for the technology that you might resist, its the younger generations that you have little contact with on a regular basis who might be the early adopters of these advancements at the point where the technology becomes affordable to them.
The film industry because of need furthered the advancement of computing technology and created a need for natural alogorithms that mimicked nature and these alogorithms could have only really been created after the development of the LCD screen , prior to direct visual feedback there were branches of math that could not have been developed. The monitor allowed for imaginations to wrap around this object and capable people pursued problems and solved them and advanced the state of intellectual conversation in multiple fields.
I think a lot of people get frightened by their own visions of what the future might be , but when that happens the best thing to do is sit back and look out the window and realize that not much is really happening. All the real change that is occuring is occuring to the story of popular concensus. The cultural mythos that binds together whole societies of people. The people that are striving to advance themselves are frightening the people that find solace in mediocrity and complacency. The status quoters who always object at first but then end up taking the path of least resistence at some point always end up falling in line after much argument.
You personally are not required to adopt all the new fast paced change , you can do as a Mr. Timothy Leary suggest and drop out and join a society that is slower to adopt technological change. The Amish are a good example of this as are the Brouderhoff. You do not have to participate, its an opt in situation. Your inner dialogue and personal story that you use to drive what you want to speak about might be affected long before any actual change occurs. The language changes first and a lot of people are reacting harshly to new words whose full meanings they dont fully understand. The change in language is what frightens so many people and again, the Amish speak a language that is derived from different tools. To some degree you could make the argument that the tools you surround yourself with, that which you spend 40 or 60 hours a week working with to derive your livelyhood is what has the most dramtic impact on your personal language. What you need to do to survive , to stay in whichever conversations you wish to stay in may be where the most impact is felt and where the quickest change occurs.
I think in the future, as the seconds tick away and the changes in the workplace occur. What frightens you now will be replaced by what will be frightening you then.
-nicholas |
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Re: Ray Kurzweil Responds to Richard Eckersley
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Bradsky;
While Iím firmly on the side of life expansion and technological advance, itís fundamentally impossible for *you* to live forever. You could try to live forever by not changing, shutting down all learning and living each day the same never learningÖthatís hardly life, or you can start to learn even a little. Over time, eons you will absolutely wash away any trace of who you were. I could go deeply into this, but our entire construct of ourselves is based on a certain structure of distributions that we used to learn by. Those distributions will radically change over time and so you must either decide to ride entirely orthogonal learning waves, stop changing or to store whatever you were and ride on. Even the memory of you will go eventually.
Having only recently addressed this self same question I will unfortunately be repeating myself, but anyway-
Firstly a statement
The self seems to have no static reality,
we appear to be a flux of change.
The person I am today is not who I was 10 years ago and 10 years in the future I will also be different from the person I am today.
The illusion of person as a static 'thing' seems to arise from the mental model we build to understand both other people and oneself being a snapshot of that person.
This is further reinforced by the language we use to frame our concepts of person and personality.
While we cannot discard our models, we can consciously alter them to better reflect our observations - lets call this the science of perceptual modelling (that sounds suitably pompous).
So the model of self as static thing (noun) can be safely discarded in favor of models that deal with selfhood as dynamic processes (verb)
The selfhood as process model becomes not a person that changes, but rather an evolving complex pattern or patterns.
Viewed in this way, any statement that relies upon a procession of different 'selves' seems either false, or incomplete. |
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