Monday, October 03, 2005

The Singularity is Near.

The Boston Globe reviews Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:
We'll eat whatever we want but never get fat. Real estate will be virtual. Cheap, tiny computers will be smarter than we are. Energy demands will be met by nanoscale renewable technologies. We'll choose when, and if, we'll die. Many organs will be irrelevant, we'll be able to select from alternate personalities, and those among us who are ''software-based" will be a decade or two away from being ''able to expand [our] thinking without limit."

Is this utopia? A new science fiction movie? An optimistic scenario for human life in the year 2500?

Try 2030. It is a prediction evangelized in intense detail by Ray Kurzweil in his staggering new 650-plus-page treatise, ''The Singularity Is Near." Kurzweil, a renowned computer scientist and inventor of, among other things, the flatbed scanner, argues that our society is facing an imminent and overwhelming transformation called the Singularity.

The Singularity is, in Kurzweil's words, ''a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Another way to put it is to say that pretty soon biological evolution will be transcended by technological evolution.
The ideas Ray presents aren't really so farfetched, and he should know. He lives and breathes entrepreneurship, having created scanners, optical character recognition and speech recognition tools, and some amazing electronic musical instruments.

People like Ray Kurzweil think of the ideas that drive technology forward. But for most of you, all you need is that one decent idea coupled with good execution to be successful. Though we can't help much with the idea, by the end of Chapter 3 you'll be ready to execute, and you'll be more than just good.

1 Comments:

Blogger Jim Estill said...

Great blog. I look forward to the event and will see you there.

9:05 PM  

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