Ray Kurzweil at GDC 2008
For a conference devoted heavily to serious game culture at a sometimes epically pornographic level, it was great to come listen to Kurzweil rattle the brains of developers with the road to singularity.
His talk was excellent and consisted mostly of a rapid fire assault of smoking hot slides and anecdotes that impressed a full house with his prediction work. He drove home the notion that predicting much of the technological and biological evolution is very smooth (and predictable) when graphically represented in exponential terms.
At the end of his talk, Kurzweil provided these predictions for the next 20 years:
2010
- Images written directly to retinas.
- Ubiquitous high handwidth connections to the internet at all times
- Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
- Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
- Augmented real reality
- Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface
- Effective language technologies
2029
- $1,000 of computing will equal 1,000 times the human brain
- Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
- Computers pass the Turing test
- Nonbiological intelligence combines the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence with the speed, memory and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.
- Non-biological inteligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed.
He closed with the statement that in the next 20 years, the sands of time will begin flowing backwards biologically and some of us sitting in the room will likely see the next century…. so hang in there!
These are very important and defining times to be involved with the Metaverse and social computing, and it’s only going to get more interesting from here.
February 21st, 2008 13:57
Nice post! He gave a similar set of slides in 2005 that blew me away, before the roadmap….it’s wild to think of how far (and how little) we’ve come in these last few years.
I can’t wait to do more with immersive experiences, wearable technologies and the ability to flip through and embed ourselves into any number of real and virtual places.
February 28th, 2008 10:15
[…] (via: Golem, ElectricSheep) […]
March 27th, 2008 09:08
Ray Kurzweil is a techno-crat
He is a part of an elite group of people who will suck the life from everyone in order to stay alive on this planet. This “evolved” science is only for a chosen few - you (and me) are not invited.
See ENDGAME by Alex Jones for more details
June 10th, 2008 19:55
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
August 9th, 2008 11:43
Ray Kurzweil has never participated in the transhumanist community. He just skims off their best ideas, repackages them, and takes credit for them. He won’t even talk to the people whose ideas he stole unless he’s getting paid for it.