Mar 15, 2023 08:10 PM
https://www.science20.com/content/the_ol..._he_sounds
INTRO: In the 1980s, "transhumanism" had an air of truthiness because digital became all the rage. Left out of that inconvenient math was that in order to digitize a human brain you'd need CDs as tall as a skyscraper.
This never stopped Ray Kurzweil from saying the singularity was just around the corner. The corner being 25 years from whenever he was speaking.
What was never real was...well, all of it. It is 2023, and we still can't predict the weather 7 days out, goofy meteorologists even throw up PM2.5 air quality maps to manufacture things for people to worry about, and yet 30 years ago Vernor Vinge jumped into the singularity prophecy and wrote, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
And he can do math so he should have known better. We're still here, there is still plenty of oil, plenty of water, plenty of food, all the things various doomsday prophets said would happen did not...but neither did all the things technoptimists wanted. In 2011, Kurzweil said it was 35 years away; a nice cushion, since he was in his 60s. Smart people assumed he just wanted to be dead when he was shown wrong again. But now he has pushed it ahead to 2030... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In the 1980s, "transhumanism" had an air of truthiness because digital became all the rage. Left out of that inconvenient math was that in order to digitize a human brain you'd need CDs as tall as a skyscraper.
This never stopped Ray Kurzweil from saying the singularity was just around the corner. The corner being 25 years from whenever he was speaking.
What was never real was...well, all of it. It is 2023, and we still can't predict the weather 7 days out, goofy meteorologists even throw up PM2.5 air quality maps to manufacture things for people to worry about, and yet 30 years ago Vernor Vinge jumped into the singularity prophecy and wrote, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
And he can do math so he should have known better. We're still here, there is still plenty of oil, plenty of water, plenty of food, all the things various doomsday prophets said would happen did not...but neither did all the things technoptimists wanted. In 2011, Kurzweil said it was 35 years away; a nice cushion, since he was in his 60s. Smart people assumed he just wanted to be dead when he was shown wrong again. But now he has pushed it ahead to 2030... (MORE - details)