The Singularity is Here

Ray Kurzweil's fascinating extrapolations concerning the future of technology have finally gone mainstream: Over the last several months Kurzweil has had a cover story in Time magazine, his documentary Transcendent Man, directed by Barry Ptolemy is all over iTunes and beyond, and Ray has appeared on Charlie Rose, Jimmy Kimmel and Bill Maher. Suffice to say: Ray Kurzweil's Singularity has arrived.

One of Kurzweil's central ideas is the "The Law of Accelerating Returns" which describes the exponential rate of growth that information technology follows, eventually leading towards a Singularity in which we transcend the limitations of biology. These ideas are now part of our pop culture vernacular and that is something to celebrate!

 

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Comments

[MARK PLUS]

11:26 AM on 06/22/2011

Sorry, not buying it. Progress in a lot of technologies has dramatically decelerated, as we can see from the fact that life in 2011 doesn't look all that "futuristic" compared with the sales job about the 21st Century many of us remember getting in the latter 20th Century. The ability to pick up an iPad 2 at Best Buy doesn't compensate for the deficiencies in other areas, for example, the fact that we still don't have treatments for aging and cognitive decline. Kurzweil has simply moved the deadline for future wonders to the middle of this century. You can see an example of the disconnection between the prospectus and the reality by reading, for example, F.M. Esfandiary's vision of life in that far-off, mysterious year 2010 in his essay, "Up-Wing Priorities" (1981):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10948503/Up-Wing-Priorities