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POPSEvolution An excerpt from Raymond Kurzweil's "The Law of Accelerating Returns". 2001.
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POPSDid you know? This is a great video everyone should take some time to watch. We see daily many different advances on science, technology, internet... Everywhere, journals, blogs, radio, TV, here, on Clipmarks, reading some very interesting clips about many new creations, advances, innovations, new things that we just find awesome. But at the end of the day, putting everything together, do we ask ourselves what does all this means in a more general context?
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POPSImmortality only 20 years away says scientist No thanks, I don't want to live forever. "Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively. "Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen. "Heart-attack victims – who haven't taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts – will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive. "Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes. "If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening. "So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs."
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POPSThe Coming Superbrain Some more excerpts: not all humans of the industry are optimistic, "The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines." And some worst fear is the Moses Syndrome being just one generation before: "Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity; Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”
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POPSMoore's Moment Futurists such as Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, and Ray Kurzweil believe that the exponential improvement described by Moore's law will ultimately lead to a technological singularity: a period where progress in technology occurs almost instantly.
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POPSiSpeech Very cool text to speech tool. Similar to Kurzweil, but doesn't do the scanning.
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POPS Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans. Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."
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POPSThe Singularity Frankenstein Singularity defender George Dvorsky is spot-on when he calls for the singularity-aware to “frame the issue as a scientific endeavor and pitch the various scenarios as hypotheses” and in that “we need to keep the language within the scientific vernacular”. And that’s exactly what’s NOT happening.
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POPSThe Future is now - Dr. Kurzweil's Predictions Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human's.