Ray Kurzweil

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pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

These successes, together with the inception of Singularity University (created with Ray Kurzweil) in 2008, cemented Diamandis’s reputation as a mover and shaker in Silicon Valley. Unlike Diamandis, Bob Hariri was a newcomer to Silicon Valley, although he had known the XPRIZE founder for a decade. Hariri was also a great lover of aviation and an interesting character: big and burly, yet in no way gruff. There could be a boisterous side to him, but when he was talking business, he grew focused and quiet. He had grown up in Queens, raised with his older brother by a single mother, not far from where Ray Kurzweil had lived and wandered during his youth in Jackson Heights.

Finally, thank you to all of the people I harangued and pestered and tracked down for the interviews needed to write this book. These include many hours of meetings, phone calls, and emails with Ray Kurzweil, Arthur Levinson, Craig Venter, Aubrey de Grey, Robert Hariri, as well as long sessions with Bill Maris, David Botstein, Hal Barron, Cynthia Kenyon, Daphne Koller, Amalio Telenti, Riccardo Sabatini, Ken Bloom, Brad Perkins, Heather Kowalski, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, and many others. A special thanks to Aimee Markey at Calico Labs for arranging so many meetings. In the earliest days of this quest, Ray Kurzweil was especially helpful, not only in making himself available, but by providing initial access to Art Levinson and Craig Venter.

Housewives and science fiction writers stood chilled in Alcor’s canisters; infants and centenarians, professors, doctors, scientists, dreamers, and hardheaded businesspeople. Kim Suozzi, a 23-year-old suffering from terminal brain cancer, is among them. She had learned about cryonics when she came across the writings of Ray Kurzweil, then raised some of the money needed for her preservation through the website Reddit. She became Alcor member A-2643. Ted Williams, probably the greatest pure hitter baseball has ever seen, is also there, along with his son John Henry Williams (who, before his own death from leukemia in 2004 at age 35, fought to have his father frozen at Alcor).


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Also onboard at the stealth facility is Andrew Ng, former director of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a world-class roboticist. Finally, late in 2012, Google hired esteemed inventor and author Ray Kurzweil to be its director of engineering. As we’ll discuss in chapter 9, Kurzweil has a long track record of achievements in AI, and has promoted brain research as the most direct route to achieving AGI. It doesn’t take Google glasses to see that if Google employs at least two of the world’s preeminent AI scientists, and Ray Kurzweil, AGI likely ranks high among its moon-shot pursuits. Seeking a competitive advantage in the marketplace, Google X and other stealth companies may come up with AGI away from public view

At one end of the scale is Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, who as we discussed, doesn’t care to speculate beyond saying AGI is too distant to speculate about. Meanwhile, his colleagues, led by Ray Kurzweil, are proceeding with its development. At the other end, Ben Goertzel, who, as Good did, thinks achieving AGI is merely a question of cash, says that before 2020 isn’t too soon to anticipate it. Ray Kurzweil, who’s probably the best technology prognosticator ever, predicts AGI by 2029, but doesn’t look for ASI until 2045. He acknowledges hazards but devotes his energy to advocating for the likelihood of a long snag-free journey down the digital birth canal.

Despite Google’s repeated demurrals through its spokespeople, who doubts that the company is developing AGI? In addition to Ray Kurzweil, Google recently hired former DARPA director Regina Dugan. Maybe researchers will wake up in time and learn to control AGI, as Ben Goertzel asserts. I believe we’ll first have horrendous accidents, and should count ourselves fortunate if we as a species survive them, chastened and reformed. Psychologically and commercially, the stage is set for a disaster. What can we do to prevent it? * * * Ray Kurzweil cites something called the Asilomar Guidelines as a precedent-setting example of how to deal with AGI.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

She was also featured on Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 and TechCrunch’s 40 Female founders who crushed it in 2016 lists. Chapter 11. RAY KURZWEIL The scenario that I have is that we will send medical nanorobots into our bloodstream. [...] These robots will also go into the brain and provide virtual and augmented reality from within the nervous system rather than from devices attached to the outside of our bodies. DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING AT GOOGLE Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists. He has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three US presidents.

Is there anything we should worry about in terms of these developments? RAY KURZWEIL: I’ve written more about the downsides than anyone, and this was decades before Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk were expressing their concerns. There was extensive discussion of the downsides of GNR—Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics (which means AI)—in my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which came out in 1999 that led Bill Joy to write his famous Wired cover story in January 2000 titled, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. MARTIN FORD: That was based upon a quote from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wasn’t it? RAY KURZWEIL: I have a quote from him on one page that sounds like a very level-headed expression of concern, and then you turn the page, and you see that this is from the Unabomber Manifesto.

You agree that there won’t be a job for everyone, or maybe everyone won’t need a job, and that there’ll be some other source of income for people, like a universal basic income? RAY KURZWEIL: We assume that a job is a road to happiness. I think the key issue will be purpose and meaning. People will still compete to be able to contribute and get gratification. MARTIN FORD: But you don’t necessarily have to get paid for the thing that you get meaning from? RAY KURZWEIL: I think we will change the economic model and we are already in the process of doing that. I mean, being a student in college is considered a worthwhile thing to do.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

You can download a free copy of RKCP at www.kurzweiltech.com. Following is a small sampling of poems written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after it had “read” poems by several famous poets, as well as lesser-known contemporary poets. Poems by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet PAGE A haiku written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Wendy Dennis Sashay down the page through the lioness nestled in my soul. IMAGINE NOW AND SING A poem written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Wendy Dennis and Ray Kurzweil and love poems by various authors Imagine now and sing, creating myths forming jewels from the falling snow.

SITES RELEVANT TO THE BOOK Web site for the book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil: <http://www.penguinputnam.com/kurzweil> To e-mail the author: raymond@kurzweiltech.com To download a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet: < http://wwwkurzweiltech.com> This book’s publisher, Viking: <http://www.penguinputnam.com> For publications of Ray Kurzweil: Go to <http://www.kurzweiltech.com> or <http://www.kurzweiledu.com> and then select “Publications” WEB SITES FOR COMPANIES FOUNDED BY RAY KURZWEIL Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc. (creator of print-to-speech reading systems for persons with reading disabilities and visual impairment): <http://www.kurzweiledu.com> Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.

IMAGINE NOW AND SING A poem written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Wendy Dennis and Ray Kurzweil and love poems by various authors Imagine now and sing, creating myths forming jewels from the falling snow. SOUL A haiku written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by John Keats and Wendy Dennis You broke my soul the juice of eternity, the spirit of my lips. I THINK I’LL CRASH A poem written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil, Robert Frost, and Wendy Dennis I think I’ll crash. Just for myself with God peace on a curious sound for myself in my heart? And life is weeping From a bleeding heart of boughs bending such paths of them, of boughs bending such paths of breeze knows we’ve been there THE STIFLING STUFFY A haiku written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Patricia Camarena Rose and Wendy Dennis The stifling stuffy Catholic schoolroom, where I cannot be real.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF. Chapter Seven: Ich bin ein Singularitarian 1. In Jay W. Richards et al., Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2002), introduction, http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0502.html. 2. Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D., Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (New York: Rodale Books, 2004). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Max More and Ray Kurzweil, "Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity," February 26, 2002, http://www.KurzweilAI.net/articles/art0408.html. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Arthur Miller, After the Fall (New York: Viking, 1964). 9.

Journal of Evolution and Technology 1 (1998). 215. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 156. 216. See chapter 2, notes 22 and 23, on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. 217. "The First Turing Test," http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html. 218. Douglas R. Hofstadter, "A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test," May 1981, included in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 80–102, http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0318.html. 219. Ray Kurzweil, "Why I Think I Will Win," and Mitch Kapor, "Why I Think I Will Win," rules: http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?

An inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and recipient of the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize (the world's largest award for innovation), thirteen honorary doctorates, and awards from three U.S. presidents, he is the author of four previous books: Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D.), The Age of Spiritual Machines, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, and The Age of Intelligent Machines. The Singularity Is Near ALSO BY RAY KURZWEIL The Age of Intelligent Machines The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceeds Human Intelligence Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, M.D.) RAY KURZWEIL The Singularity Is Near WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. l Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) l Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England l Penguin Ireland, 25 St.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

I do not consider my involvement with these organizations to be religious, but I have met many people in the movement whose actions fit within Laderman’s definition. 74 E-mail interview with Calvin Mercer, March 22, 2009. 75 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin, 2005), 374. 76 Ibid., 374–375. 77 Ibid., 371. 78 Ibid., 7. 79 Ibid., 5. 80 Ibid., 372. 81 Ibid., 375. 82 Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (New York: Rodale Books, 2009). 83 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 390. 84 Memebox, “Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Not a Religion,” October 27, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy0tTfw8i0&feature=player_embedded. 85 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 370. 86 Ibid., 389.

Martin’s Press, 2007), 10. 11 Aubrey de Grey, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (Austin, TX: Landes Bioscience, November 2003); Michael Finkel, “Life Begins at 140,” GQ, May 2010. 12 Interview with Aubrey de Grey, November 20, 2010. 13 Finkel, “Life Begins at 140.” 14 Ben Goertzel, “AI Against Aging: Accelerating the Quest for Longevity via Intelligent Software,” Biomind LLC, www.biomind.com/AI_Against_Aging.pdf. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 See Ray Kurzweil’s biography, www.singularity.com/fullbiography.html. 18 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin, 2005), 323. 19 Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (New York: Plume, 2005). They also published a similar book in 2009 titled Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (New York: Rodale Books, 2009).

“The human brain simply was not evolved for the integrative analysis of a massive number of complexly-interrelated, highdimensional biological datasets,” he writes.15 “In the short term, the most feasible path to working around this problem is to supplement human biological scientists with increasingly advanced AI software, gradually moving toward the goal of an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) bioscientist.”16 Just as Google is a form of artificial intelligence that allows for fast searching of the Internet, a software program that could “read” biological studies and help to sort the data for human scientists would make the task of finding repair mechanisms for the human body that much easier. Another proponent of this idea is maven Ray Kurzweil. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Ray Kurzweil the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor for technological achievement bestowed by the president of the United States on America’s leading innovators. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has called Kurzweil “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-­Human Era,” in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, ed. G. A. Landis, NASA Publication CP-10129, 1993, 11–22. 5. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When ­Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Group, 2005). 6. Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity: A Talk with Ray Kurzweil,” interview with The Edge, introduction by John Brockman, March 24, 2001, https://­w ww​ .­edge​.­org​/­conversation​/­ray ​_ ­k urzweil​-­t he​-­singularity. 7. Hubert L Dreyfus, What Computers Still C ­ an’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), ix.

Chapter 17: Neocortical Theories of H ­ uman Intelligence 1. Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain ­ ill Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines (New York: St. MarW tin’s Griffin, 2005). N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 6 4 –275 299 2. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of H ­ uman Thought Revealed (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 35. 3. Gary Marcus, “Ray Kurzweil’s Dubious New Theory of Mind,” New Yorker, November 15, 2012. 4. Ibid. 5. For a general description, see Ferris Jabr, “Memory May be Built with Standard Building Blocks,” New Scientist, March 17, 2011. 6. Henry Markram and Rodrigo Perin, “Innate Neural Assemblies for Lego Memory,” Frontiers in Neural Cir­cuits 5 (2011): 6. 7.

And h­ ere we should say it directly: all evidence suggests that ­human and machine intelligence are radically dif­fer­ent. The myth of AI insists that the differences are only temporary, and that more power­f ul systems ­w ill eventually erase them. Futurists like 2 T H E M Y T H O F A RT I F I CI A L I N T E L L I G E N CE Ray Kurzweil and phi­los­o­pher Nick Bostrom, prominent purveyors of the myth, talk not only as if human-­level AI ­were inevitable, but as if, soon ­a fter its arrival, superintelligent machines would leave us far ­behind. This book explains two impor­tant aspects of the AI myth, one scientific and one cultural.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

See: http://dailytrojan.com/2017/11/19/usc-researchers-develop-brain-implant-improve-memory/. the full cyborg to the middle 2030s: Jillian Eugenios, “Ray Kurzweil: Humans Will Be Hybrids by 2030,” CNN, June 4, 2015. See: http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/. 86 percent success rate: Dominic Basulto, “Why Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions Are Right 86% of the Time,” Big Think, December 13, 2012. See: https://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time. Force #5: Communications Abundance as author Matt Ridley: Matt Ridley, Rational Optimist (HarperCollins, 2010), p. 1.

Even the more modern incarnations: Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland (New Harvest, 2015), pp. 97–105. Converging Technology Moore’s Law: See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html. as a human brain: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (Viking, 2012), pp. 179–198. “Law of Accelerating Returns”: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001. See: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. we use the term “disruptive innovation”: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (HarperBusiness, 2000), pp. 15–19. Enter distributed electric propulsion, or DEP for short: Mark Moore, “Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft,” Nasa Langley Research Center.

See: https://www.businessinsider.com/samumed-raises-438-million-at-12-billion-valuation-2018-8. Celularity: See: https://www.celularity.com. placental-derived stem cells can extend life 30 to 40 percent: Hariri, author interview. “longevity escape velocity”: Ray Kurzweil, author interview, 2018. For a video, see: https://singularityhub.com/2017/11/10/3-dangerous-ideas-from-ray-kurzweil/. PART TWO: THE REBIRTH OF EVERYTHING Chapter Five: The Future of Shopping The First Platform Play Richard Warren Sears was born on December 7, 1863: Vicki Howard, “The Rise and Fall of Sears,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 25, 2017.


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Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

id=dn10156&feedId=tech_rss20. 91 the research was also used by the Pixar Elizabeth Corcoran, “The Stickybot,” Forbes 178, no. 4 (2006): 106. 91 “Fact of nature” Finkelstein and Albus, “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Intelligent Bipedal and Other Legged Robots,” 158. 91 Designs that find their inspiration David Hambling, “A Breed Apart,” Guardian (UK), February 25, 2005 (cited December 18, 2006); available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/feb/24/onlinesupplement.insideit3. 92 Big Dog will be “unleashed” Preston Lerner, “The Army’s Robot Sherpa from the Backcountry to the Rubble-Strewn Back Alleys of a War-Torn City, This Mechanized Pack Animal Will Follow Soldiers Wherever Duty Calls Them,” Popular Science 268, no. 4 (2006): 72. 92 DARPA’s survey on robotics futures Finkelstein and Albus, “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Intelligent Bipedal and Other Legged Robots.” 92 “I have so many dreams” “Future Dreams,” BBC News.com, December 21, 2006 (cited May 30, 2007); available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/06/technology_robot_menagerie /html/10.stm. 93 researchers are at work on “claytronic” robots Tom Simonite, “Shape-Shifting Robot Forms from Magnetic Swarm,” New Scientist, January 29, 2008. 93 “it may be increasingly difficult to say” Gates, “A Robot in Every Home.” 4. TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: THE POWER OF EXPONENTIAL TRENDS 94 “I decided I would be an inventor” Ray Kurzweil on Discovery Science Channel, Robosapiens: The Secret (R)evolution, broadcast on June 18, 2006. 95 inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame “Ray Kurzweil,” singularity.com (cited May 29, 2007); available at http://singularity.com/aboutray.html. 95 “About thirty years ago” Ray Kurzweil, interview via phone, Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, December 7, 2006. 95 “We use predictions” Ibid. 95 “I’ve slowed down aging to a crawl” Ibid. 96 this is a guy whom Bill Gates described Brian O’Keefe, “The Smartest (or the Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth,” CNNMoney.com, May 2, 2007 (cited May 2, 2007); available at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05 /14 /100008848/. 96 Kurzweil gets a reported $ 25,000 Ibid. 96 He is also one of five members Ibid. 96 “only an early harbinger” Kurzweil, interview, Peter W.

., 2004 (cited March 22, 2007); available at http://w w w.desertinvasion.us /invasion_pictures / pics_american_border_patrol.html. 40 “broadcasting the invasion live” Noah Shachtman, “‘Vigilantes’ Use Drones on Border Patrol,” Defensetech.org, May 14, 2003 (cited July 21, 2006); available at http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000418.html. 40 Silver Fox UAVs searched for survivors Correspondents in Baton Rouge, “Drones Aid Katrina Rescue,” Australian IT, September 5, 2005 (cited September 9, 2005); available at australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,16494558%5E26199%5E%5Enbv%5 E15306-15319,00.html. 41 “aerial cell tower” Larry Dickerson, “UAV’s on the Rise,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, January 15, 2007, 116. 2. SMART BOMBS, NORMA JEANE,AND DEFECATING DUCKS: A SHORT HISTORY OF ROBOTICS 42 “The further backward you look” As quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 35. 42 “Perhaps the most wonderful piece” David Brewster, as quoted in Jay Richards, Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI, 1st ed. (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2002). 42 called it “most deplorable” Rony Gelman, “Gallery of Automata,” 1996 (cited November 17, 2006); available at http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics/courses/v610051/gelmanr/ling.html. 42 “the Defecating Duck” Jessika Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003). 43 “getting assistance by producing some machines” Gelman, “Gallery of Automata.” 43 these punch cards would inspire George Dyson, “The Undead: The Little Secret That Haunts Corporate America . . .

[FOUR] TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: THE POWER OF EXPONENTIAL TRENDS The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —ISAAC ASIMOV “I decided I would be an inventor when I was five. Other kids were wondering what they would be, but I always had this conceit. And I was very sure of it and I’ve never really deviated from it.” Ray Kurzweil stuck to his dreams. Growing up in Queens, New York, he wrote his first computer program at the age of twelve. When he was seventeen, he appeared on the game show I’ve Got a Secret. His “secret” was a song composed by a computer that he had built. Soon after, Kurzweil created such inventions as an automated college application program, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind (considered the biggest advancement for the visually impaired since the Braille language in 1829), the first computer flatbed scanner, and the first large-vocabulary speech recognition system.


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An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

He’s a big fan of stem cells and long-lived mice (his Methuselah Foundation offers prizes for scientific research teams who extend mouse life spans). De Grey’s line of attack could be called the ‘wet front’ – dealing as it does with the slippery world of cells and their biology. The second front could be called the ‘dry front’ – evolving from our experiences building machines. Here the transhumanists could reasonably propose Ray Kurzweil (a man I add to my list of those I should meet later on my journey) as the commander in chief – one of the world’s key thinkers in the area of artificial, or machine, intelligence as well as being a serial entrepreneur and genius. Kurzweil believes we’re likely to see smarter-than-human machine intelligences well before the end of the twenty-first century.

This is what has been called ‘The Singularity’ – the moment where the generation of new knowledge (through a merger of human-like talents of imagination, curiosity and creativity with machine-like computational muscle) starts to look like a rocket leaving a launch pad. According to The Singularity’s prophets (notably Ray Kurzweil), when this happens there is only one strategy open to us: we must merge with our machines. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I think back to something George Church said: that one way of looking at the human being (and therefore the human brain) is ‘simply’ as a collection of unthinking tiny bio-machines computing away – reading genetic code and spewing out ‘computed’ proteins and the rest.

At this rate, your new laptop will achieve the same computational speed as the human brain before the decade is out. Soon after that, if the exponential trend continues, your laptop (or whatever replaces it) will have more hard-processing muscle than all human brains put together. This will happen sometime around the middle of the century, according to Ray Kurzweil. Supercomputers have passed Moravec’s milestone and it’s therefore no surprise to find various projects using them to try to simulate parts of animal and human brains, merging neuroscience and computer science in an attempt to get to the bottom of what’s really going on in that skull of yours.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

, released April 5, 2018, Papercut Films, doyoutrustthiscomputer.org/. 28. Ford, Interview with David Ferrucci, in Architects of Intelligence, p. 414. 29. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Penguin Books, 2005. 30. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Penguin Books, 2012. 31. Ford, Interview with Ray Kurzweil, in Architects of Intelligence, pp. 230–231. 32. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, “A wager on the Turing test: The rules,” Kurzweil AI Blog, April 9, 2002, www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-the-rules. 33. Sean Levinson, “A Google executive is taking 100 pills a day so he can live forever,” Elite Daily, April 15, 2015, www.elitedaily.com/news/world/google-executive-taking-pills-live-forever/1001270. 34.

BLASTING OFF THE INNOVATION PLATEAU: SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL RESEARCH Among those who might be described as “technoptimists,” it is taken as a given that we live in an age of startling technological acceleration. The pace of innovation, we are told, is unprecedented and exponential. The most enthusiastic accelerationists—often acolytes of Ray Kurzweil, who codified the idea in his “Law of Accelerating Returns”—are confident that in the next hundred years, we will experience, by historical standards, the equivalent of something “more like 20,000 years of progress.”63 Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that while the acceleration has been real, this extraordinary progress has been confined almost exclusively to the information and communications technology arena.

In the 1940s, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts introduced the idea of an artificial neural network as a kind of computational approximation for the way the biological neurons in the brain operated.6 Frank Rosenblatt, who was trained as a psychologist and lectured in the psychology department at Cornell, later incorporated these ideas into his perceptron. The perceptron was capable of rudimentary pattern recognition tasks like recognizing printed characters via a camera that was attached to the device. The inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who is now an engineering director at Google, met Rosenblatt in his lab at Cornell in 1962. Kurzweil told me that he brought samples to try out on the perceptron and that the machine worked perfectly as long as the characters were printed clearly in the proper font. Rosenblatt told the young Kurzweil, who was then about to matriculate at MIT, that he was confident that much better results could be obtained if perceptrons were cascaded into multiple levels, with the output of one level feeding into the inputs of the next.7 Rosenblatt, however, died in a boating accident in 1971, having never built a multilayer implementation.


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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

It might take a non-human enlightenment programme to help with that. Coal-Fired Vampire Every death is tragic. We’ve learned to accept it, the cycle of life and all that, but humans have an opportunity to transcend beyond natural limitations. Life expectancy was 19 1,000 years ago. It was 37 in 1800. Ray Kurzweil, ‘Breakfast with the FT’, April 2015 Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, Futurist and AI guru, hopes to be alive for long enough to see lifespan, including his own lifespan, dramatically increase. He takes around 100 supplements a day, to maintain his health, and to slow the ageing process – these supplements are not a smash-and-grab from the pharmacy; they are tailored for his body by a physician.

Hot for a Bot My Bear Can Talk Fuck the Binary ZONE FOUR: The Future How the Future will be Different to the Past – and How It Won’t. The Future Isn’t Female Jurassic Car Park I Love, Therefore I Am Selected Bibliography Illustration and Text Credits Acknowledgements How These Essays Came About In 2009 – 4 years after it was published – I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. It is an optimistic view of the future – a future that depends on computational technology. A future of superintelligent machines. It is also a future where humans will transcend our present biological limits. I had to read the book twice – once for the sense and once for the detail.

I am a storyteller by trade – and I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning. The dream of life-forms, not human, but alongside the human. Other realms. Other worlds. * * * Long before I read Ray Kurzweil, I read Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, whose pursuit of excellence was relentless. One of his more private books – in that he was unravelling something for himself – is The Book of J (1990), where Bloom looks at the earliest texts that were later redacted and varnished to become the Hebrew Bible.


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The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

If one goes to the website of Planetary Resources, Inc., you are met with the following evocative message: “We dare you to change the course of humanity with us.” Peter D. certainly never thinks small. If you should be able to get into the ever more selective Singularity University (founded by Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Worden, until recently head of NASA Ames) the challenge you are given is to come up with an idea or project or invention that will have a positive impact on a billion people within a decade’s time. Those that are starting up new companies to engage in space mining today are largely focused on rapid payoffs to fund their larger and longer term ambitions.

They want to spread the seed of humans across the Solar System and eventually beyond. They earnestly see the “mission” as boldly going where no humans have gone before. The short mission statement or goal is to ensure that the best days of humanity are in the future and not in the past. Robert Bigelow, Peter Diamandis, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Eric Anderson, Ray Kurzweil, and Sir Richard Branson are among those that are busy seeking to create a new future of space abundance . They are 100 % sure that new technology, human innovation and the unlimited potential of outer space will allow us to reinvent the global economy. Despite their optimism, it is possible that even these visionaries do not fully grasp the broad scope of change that the New Space economy will bring to the world.

Peter Diamandis envisions low-cost space travel and mining the asteroids. Robert Bigelow envisions four-star hotels in space. Paul Allen envisions the world’s largest jet that will serve as a launching station for rockets of the future. Eric Anderson envisions private space launches that can go to the Moon and back. Ray Kurzweil envisions solar power systems, including solar power satellites that make global energy clean, plentiful and pervasive. Elon Musk sees a million people living on a space colony on Mars. Sir Richard Branson named his space transportation company Virgin Galactic because he truly thinks not only outside the box but outside the “circle” that is Earth.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

—Dileep George, AI scientist; pioneer of hierarchical models of the neocortex; cofounder of Numenta and Vicarious Systems “Ray Kurzweil’s understanding of the brain and artificial intelligence will dramatically impact every aspect of our lives, every industry on Earth, and how we think about our future. If you care about any of these, read this book!” —Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO, X PRIZE; executive chairman, Singularity University; author of the New York Times bestseller Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think HOW TO CREATE A MIND ALSO BY RAY KURZWEIL Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life The Age of Intelligent Machines HOW TO CREATE A MIND THE SECRET OF HUMAN THOUGHT REVEALED RAY KURZWEIL VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

Reprinted with permission of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). 85: Photo provided by Yeatesh (Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 License). 134 (two): Images by Marvin Minsky. Used by permission of Marvin Minsky. Some credits appear adjacent to the respective images. Other images designed by Ray Kurzweil, illustrated by Laksman Frank. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kurzweil, Ray. How to create a mind : the secret of human thought revealed / Ray Kurzweil. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-60110-5 1. Brain—Localization of functions. 2. Self-consciousness (Awareness) 3. Artificial intelligence. I. Title. QP385.K87 2012 612.8’2—dc23 2012027185 Printed in the United States of America Set in Minion Pro with DIN Designed by Daniel Lagin While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

Diamandis, chairman and CEO, X PRIZE; executive chairman, Singularity University; author of the New York Times bestseller Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think HOW TO CREATE A MIND ALSO BY RAY KURZWEIL Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life The Age of Intelligent Machines HOW TO CREATE A MIND THE SECRET OF HUMAN THOUGHT REVEALED RAY KURZWEIL VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

Hawking also told the president of the United States that “unless we have a totalitarian world order, someone will design improved humans somewhere.”5 FIVE UNDISPUTED FACTS THAT SUPPORT THE LIKELIHOOD OF THE SINGULARITY 1.Rocks exist! Strange as it seems, the existence of rocks actually provides us with evidence that it is possible to build computers powerful enough to take us to a Singularity. There are around 10 trillion trillion atoms in a 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) rock, and as inventor and leading Singularity scholar Ray Kurzweil writes: Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized.6 Although we don’t yet have the technology to do this, Kurzweil says that if the particles in the rock were organized in a more “purposeful manner,” it would be possible to create a computer trillions of times more computationally powerful than all the human brains on Earth combined.7 Our eventual capacity to accomplish this is established by our second fact. 2.Biological cells exist!

PART 1 RISE OF THE ROBOTS Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. —Ray Kurzweil29 CHAPTER 1 EXPONENTIALLY IMPROVING HARDWARE If, as the title of the book by Ray Kurzweil proclaims, The Singularity Is Near, then why doesn’t it appear so? An ancient story about the Hindu God Krishna partially illuminates the answer:30 Krishna disguised himself as a mortal and challenged a king to a game of chess. The king agreed, and allowed Krishna to name the prize he would receive if he won the game.

—Irving John Good52 CHAPTER 2 WHERE MIGHT THE SOFTWARE COME FROM? Computing hardware, no matter how powerful, will never suffice to bring us to a Singularity. Creating AIs smart enough to revolutionize civilizations will also require the right software. Let’s consider four possibilities for how this software might arise. 1.Kurzweilian Merger Ray Kurzweil believes that our brains will provide the starter software for a Singularity. Kurzweil predicts that the Singularity will come through a merger of man and machines in which we will gradually transfer our “intelligence, personality, and skills to the non-biological portion of our intelligence.”53 Although we might never reach it, economic, medical, and military incentives push us toward a “Kurzweilian merger.”


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

“Uh-huh,” I said. “The reason that people who are taking it don’t have zero cancer cells is that they don’t take it quite right. They take a big dose in the morning. You need to take a five-hundred-milligram extended-release pill every four hours. It’s more than the maximum dose, nominally.” So, this guy Ray, Ray Kurzweil, is the “director of engineering” at Google, which is arguably the most important company on the planet. He leads a team charged with developing artificial intelligence. And the reason he is so careful in his daily life is that he firmly believes that if he can just live to 2030 or so, he will never die, that we’re accelerating with such great speed toward technological power so immense that it will reshape everything about us.

It was time for a “conversation,” she felt, and “given that this scientific development affects all of humankind, it seemed imperative to get as many sectors of society as possible involved. What’s more, I felt the conversation should begin immediately, before further applications of the technology thwarted any attempts to rein it in.”27 That makes sense to me. Clearly, CRISPR is a perfect example of what Ray Kurzweil meant when he said that exponential increases in computing power would change the world. It’s one instance, one of the most striking, of what that new power might produce. It couldn’t be more remarkable: a “word processor” for the DNA that is at our core. So: what could germline engineering do to humans, and to the game we’ve been playing?

Lee suggests that high tax rates on the people running AI companies might suffice to make up the difference, although, as he points out, “most of the money being made from artificial intelligence will go to the United States and China,” so orphan mentors in the other 190 countries may be out of luck. Not everyone thinks this will be a problem. “People say everyone will be out of work. No. People will invent new jobs,” Ray Kurzweil told me. “What will they be?” “Oh, I don’t know. We haven’t invented them yet.” Which is fair enough, and in truth, it’s as far as we’re likely to get with this discussion. This new technology will likely make inequality worse—perhaps engrave it in silicon and DNA. That’s worth knowing, but it doesn’t answer the question of whether we should proceed.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Advances in Computers 6 (1966): 31–88. 22.  V. Vinge, “First Word,” Omni, Jan. 1983. 23.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 241, 317, 198–99. 24.  B. Wang, “Ray Kurzweil Responds to the Issue of Accuracy of His Predictions,” Next Big Future, Jan. 19, 2010, www.nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-issue-of.html. 25.  D. Hochman, “Reinvent Yourself: The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil,” Playboy, April 19, 2016, www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-ray-kurzweil. 26.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 136. 27.  A. Kreye, “A John Henry Moment,” in Brockman, What to Think About Machines That Think, 394–96. 28.  

But while Turing might have overestimated the ability of an “average interrogator” to see through superficial trickery, could the test still be a useful indicator of actual intelligence if the conversation time is extended and the required expertise of the judges is raised? Ray Kurzweil, who is now director of engineering at Google, believes that a properly designed version of the Turing test will indeed reveal machine intelligence; he predicts that a computer will pass this test by 2029, a milestone event on the way to Kurzweil’s forecasted Singularity. The Singularity Ray Kurzweil has long been AI’s leading optimist. A former student of Marvin Minsky’s at MIT, Kurzweil has had a distinguished career as an inventor: he invented the first text-to-speech machine as well as one of the world’s best music synthesizers.

Over the years, Google has evolved into the world’s most important tech company and now offers a vast array of products and services, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Translate, YouTube, Android, many more that you might use every day, and some that you’ve likely never heard of. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have long been motivated by the idea of creating artificial intelligence in computers, and this quest has become a major focus at Google. In the last decade, the company has hired a profusion of AI experts, most notably Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor and a controversial futurist who promotes the idea of an AI Singularity, a time in the near future when computers will become smarter than humans. Google hired Kurzweil to help realize this vision. In 2011, Google created an internal AI research group called Google Brain; since then, the company has also acquired an impressive array of AI start-up companies with equally optimistic names: Applied Semantics, DeepMind, and Vision Factory, among others.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

So much for that ‘new economy’ it was building,” Slate 2 February 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/02/uber_self_driving_cars_autonomous_taxis_aren_t_so_good_for_contractors_in.html (accessed 21 October 2016). 5. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, New York: Viking, 2012. 6. Ray Kurzweil, “The law of accelerating returns,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence 7 March 2001, http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Dominic Basulto, “Why Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are right 86% of the time,” Big Think 2012, http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time (accessed 21 October 2016). 8. Tom Standage, “Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?”

Robots will seem human-like and will do human-like things. A good proportion of experts in artificial intelligence believe that such a degree of intelligent behavior in machines is several decades away. Others refer often to a book by the most sanguine of all the technologists, noted inventor Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil, in his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, posits: “[F]undamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories.”5 He calls this hypothesis the “law of accelerating returns.”6 We’ve discussed the best-recognized of these trajectories, Moore’s Law.

But Intel and IBM have both said that they can adhere to the Moore’s Law targets for another five to ten years. So the silicon-based computer chips in our laptops will surely match the power of a human brain in the early 2020s, but Moore’s Law may fizzle out after that. What happens after Moore’s Law? As Ray Kurzweil explains, Moore’s law isn’t the be-all and end-all of computing; the advances will continue regardless of what Intel and IBM can do with silicon. Moore’s Law itself was just one of five paradigms in computing: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, discrete transistor, and integrated circuits.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

PRAISE FOR THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF GROWING YOUNG “A very compelling book.” —Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist “Being alive and healthy is the greatest joy that exists, and there has never been a better time to be alive than today. This book is going to open your mind to just how real and close-at-hand the ambition of defeating death is!” —Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation “Amazing research and the most exciting breakthroughs in the field of biomedicine and gerontology. Highly recommended!” —Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation “Read this book now.

First E-Book Edition: August 2021 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021006215 ISBN 9781950665877 (print) ISBN 9781953295392 (ebook) Editing by Glenn Yeffeth and Rachel Phares Copyediting by Judy Myers Proofreading by Michael Fedison and Sarah Vostok Indexing by WordCo Indexing Services Text design and composition by Aaron Edmiston Cover design by Faceout Studio, Amanda Hudson Cover image © Shutterstock / Oxy_gen Special discounts for bulk sales are available. Please contact bulkorders@benbellabooks.com. To Liza and to my children—Nikita, Timothy, Polina, and Maxim—for giving me the best reason to live longer and make the world a better place CONTENTS Foreword: The End of Aging Is Near by Peter H. Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil CHAPTER 1: Life at 200—How and When Technology Will Enable Us to Live Longer Than We Ever Thought Possible Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil Why This Book CHAPTER 2: Defining Longevity—The Three Dimensions of Longevity Impact and the Two Horizons of the Longevity Revolution What Is the Secret to Living Longer?

—The 10 Attitudes, Habits, and Choices You Need to Make to Take Advantage of the Longevity Revolution—Now 1.You Better Check Yourself 2.Quit Your Bad Habits 3.Don’t Do Dumb Things 4.Eat Early, and Less Often 5.Let Food Be Thy Medicine 6.Supplement Your Nutrition 7.Get On Up! 8.Make Sleep Your Superpower 9.Mindfulness over Matter 10.Think and Grow Young Acknowledgments About the Author Notes Index FOREWORD THE END OF AGING IS NEAR Peter H. Diamandis, MD and Ray Kurzweil The question of how to grapple with the profoundly agonizing issue of death has animated human history. In religion and art, we rationalize that death can be liberating or glorious, but in real life, we do not rejoice when someone dies. On the contrary, we often fantasize about achieving eternal youth.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Vom Affen zum Roboter Acknowledgments If it’s true that suffering builds character, I owe many thanks to Airbnb. In the same spirit, I must thank those who declined to be interviewed, especially Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin—my three muses. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who was interviewed, as well as all those pseudonymous people—roommates, conferencegoers, barflies—whose stories were included in this book. Thanks to my shrink, to my wife, Patricia Sauthoff, and to the voters of Oregon, whose wise passage of Measure 91 ensured the timely and relatively painless completion of this book.

Therefore it was no surprise that Silicon Valley was intent upon “gamifying” all aspects of human behavior. Corporations were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “funsultants” who provided advice on “enterprise gamification”—filling the most menial wage labor with “fun” Pavlovian rewards and punishments. According to the futurist Ray Kurzweil, there soon “won’t be a clear distinction between work and play.” If that seems far-fetched, consider how successfully Facebook gamified friendship. Sex, too, became a game, as well as a profit opportunity, on sites like Chaturbate. As the name implied, Chaturbate was Twitch for sex shows, some of which appeared to be staged in actual brothels.

Unlike some transhumanist factions that obsess over biology and genetics, the Singularity singles out computers—specifically, the development of advanced artificial intelligence—as the catalyst for an allegedly inevitable and willful transformation of the species. The person most closely associated with this concept is the author, inventor, and tech executive Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is now known primarily as a purveyor of far-out ideas, of which the Singularity is only one, but his early pronouncements are remarkably restrained in comparison. In a 1984 conference speech, he lamented the overly optimistic predictions of AI researchers, who were forever claiming that the holy grail of the field, “artificial general intelligence”—a computerized mind equivalent to that of a human, in capabilities if not in design—was just a decade or two away, only to be proven wrong time and again.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

New York: HarperCollins. 20 Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler What would it take to achieve successful cryonics reanimation of a fully functioning human brain, with memories intact? A conversation at the Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler sparked an email discussion (November 23, 2002) of this question. They agreed that, despite the challenges, the brain’s functions and memories can be represented surprisingly compactly, suggesting that successful reanimation of the brain may be achievable. Ray Kurzweil. Eric, I greatly enjoyed our brief opportunity to share ideas (difficulty of adding bits to quantum computing, cryonics reanimation, etc.).

Esfandiary, better known as FM-2030); grounded by Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s early work through the Extropy Institute, and reaching a third wave that “began in earnest” with the working draft of the human genome (circa 2000). Greg Klerkx 2006: 63. 7 Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Nick Bostrom, J. Hughes, Aubrey de Grey, Martine Rothblatt, Ben Goertzel, Ray Kurzweil, to name a few, all of whom are contributors to this seminal volume. 8 Through his analysis of technological thresholds for radically transformative intelligent machines, Ray Kurzweil, by far the best-known advocate of “the Singularity,” anticipates a mid-century point at which exponential gains in human-computer capabilities, due in large part to compounding advances in computational technologies, will overtake biological humans in general intelligence.

Nanotechnology General Computer Principles Additional Constraints for Nanocomputers Entropy Drexler’s Mechanical Logic Registers and Memory Motors Other Logics for Nanocomputers Other Mechanical Logics Electronic Logic Conclusion 19 Immortalist Fictions and Strategies Introduction: Something Like Penicillin for Immortality Immortality in Fiction Science of Biological Immortality Technological Prospects for Near-Term Human Biological Immortality Fictitious Technology vs Actual Technology 20 Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler Part V Engines of Life: Identity and Beyond Death 21 The Curate’s Egg of Anti-Anti-Aging Bioethics 22 Medical Time Travel 23 Transhumanism and Personal Identity Personal Identity and the Enlightenment Enhancement, Transhumanism and Personal Identity 24 Transcendent Engineering I.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Frank Furedi, “Elevating Environmentalism over ‘Less Worthy’ Lifestyles,” Spiked, November 9, 2009, http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7684#.U4GA7C8TFsE. 83. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 10. 84. Ibid., p. 29. 85. Alex Knapp, “Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions For 2009 Were Mostly Inaccurate,” Forbes, March 20, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate; Robert Jonathan, “Google Exec Ray Kurzweil Takes 150 Vitamin Supplements Every Day,” Inquisitr, October 20, 2013, http://www.inquisitr.com/1000017/google-exec-ray-kurzweil-takes-150-vitamin-supplements-every-day; Eric Mack, “Google Launches Calico to Take on Illness and Aging,” CNET, September 18, 2013, http://www.cnet.com/news/google-launches-calico-to-take-on-illness-and-aging; Holman W.

David Gelernter, “The Closing of the Scientific Mind,” Commentary, January 1, 2014, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind. 88. Paul Joseph Watson, “The Dark Side of Ray Kurzweil’s Transhumanist Utopia,” Infowars.com, June 20, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/the-dark-side-of-ray-kurzweils-transhumanist-utopia; Victoria Woollaston, “We’ll Be Uploading Our Entire MINDS to Computers by 2045 and Our Bodies Will Be Replaced by Machines within 90 Years, Google Expert Claims,” Daily Mail (UK), June 19, 2013; Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, p. 469. 89. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000.

This notion was noted in 1950 by the early computer designer John von Neumann, who saw that “the ever accelerating progress of technology . . . gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”83 In this new formulation, technology essentially supplants divinity, community, and family as the driving force in history. This viewpoint embraces the notion of a relentlessly improved society, powered and shaped by ever more intrusive technology, and, as a result, dominated by those who design or control them. Perhaps the most advanced voice for this new vision is Ray Kurzweil, a longtime entrepreneur and inventor. Now the director of engineering at Google, he predicts the ever more rapid evolution of humanity through technology, with the end being the merging of biological and machine intelligences. Eventually, he predicts, “the entire universe will become saturated by our intelligence.”84 Kurzweil promotes “the singularity” not only as allowing for the perfectibility of mankind—long a goal of theological speculation—but also as a step toward immortality, with our brain patterns imprinted as software and preserved permanently.


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Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Does that mean I'm not me anymore? Kurzweil has the answer. "If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are the same person closely.

(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish qwerty.html) Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) Dedication For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore For the staff — past and present — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Introduction by John Perry Barlow San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco Tuesday, April 1, 2008 "Content," huh?

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality. When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one. The Singularity — a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge — describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering. I saw the imprint of transhumanism in claims like that of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who suggested that “Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.” These men—they were men, after all, almost to a man—all spoke of a future in which humans would merge with machines.

I considered asking him whether he thought computers might eventually replace even keynote speakers, whether the thought leaders of the next decade might fit in the palms of our hands, but realized that whatever answer he provided to this question would be cause for smug vindication on his part anyway, and so I resolved instead to include a description in my book of his retrieving a dropped pistachio from inside his expensive shirt—an act of petty and futile vengeance, and the kind of absurd irrelevance that would certainly be beneath the dignity and professional discipline of an automated writing AI. Anders and the attractive Frenchwoman to my right were engaged in what seemed to me an impenetrably technical discussion about the progress of research into mind uploading. The conversation had turned to Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and entrepreneur and director of engineering at Google who had popularized the idea of the Technological Singularity, an eschatological prophecy about how the advent of AI will usher in a new human dispensation, a merger of people and machines, and a final eradication of death. Anders was saying that Kurzweil’s view of brain emulation, among other things, was too crude, that it totally ignored what he called the “subcortical mess of motivations.”

This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravec’s conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. It’s a belief shared by many transhumanists. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind uploading. “An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system,” he writes in The Singularity Is Near, “would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of one hundred trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics.”


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

The way that computers would change everything is by emerging into consciousness and telling people like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge that they were fucking awesome. The computers and Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge would hang out and kick back and rule the universe forever. This is not an exaggeration. This is what Ray Kurzweil believed. This bullshit was reported by major American media outlets. This bullshit was taken as gospel by cub reporters who did not understand regular old intelligence, let alone intelligence crafted by man. So Ray Kurzweil was the god of lies. Who would deny the puissance of a man who thought that his computer was going to wake up and hang out with him and tell him he was awesome?

Like Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire who worked for Facebook and thought that the way women who weren’t billionaires could get respect in the workplace was to act more like the men that disrespected them in the workplace. Before she was at Facebook, she was at Google, and Christine decided that Sheryl Sandberg was like Iris, the messenger of the Gods. It seemed like Sheryl Sandberg had spent her whole professional life doing nothing but delivering messages. Like Ray Kurzweil, who Christine identified with Dolos, the Greek spirit of trickery and guile. Ray Kurzweil was the king of technological liberation theology. Or, in other words, he was king of the most intolerable of all intolerable bullshit. He believed in a future where computers would reach a moment of technological singularity. The technological singularity was a bullshit phrase invented by the Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge.

Who would deny the puissance of a man who thought that his computer was going to wake up and hang out with him and tell him he was awesome? Everyone in Silicon Valley loved Ray Kurzweil. He was their High Priest of Intolerable Bullshit. He was the Seer of Pseudoscience. He worked for Google. He was a director of engineering. Like Marissa Mayer, who Christine identified with Elpis, the Greek goddess of hope. There was no way you could be Marissa Mayer without hope. When she worked at Google, she had at some point dated Larry Page while helping out on all kinds of projects that went nowhere, like Google Books, which she called, “Google’s Moon Shot.”


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

But if the economic environment is harsher, it’s unlikely that people will spend what little money they have left launching an offensive against death and it’s unlikely that society will support large-scale research into the area either. “Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor and futurist What’s in it for us? More standard versions of transhumism have attracted some serious thinkers over the years, including, most notably, the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil and the nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler. Drexler, for example, has speculated about the potential of using nanotechnology to repair worn-out or broken body parts to radically change what it means to be human and potentially extend human life indefinitely.

Google’s autonomous car project, started by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses a Toyota Prius equipped with sensors to follow a GPS route all by itself. A robotics scientist sits in the car, but doesn’t actually drive it. Already, seven cars have traveled 1,600km (1,000 miles) with no driver and 225,000km (140,000 miles) with occasional human intervention. Are these examples realistic? Some experts might say yes. Ray Kurzweil, an American futurist and inventor, has made a public bet with Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus software, that a computer will pass the Turing test by 2029. Other experts say no. Bill Calvin, an American theoretical neurophysiologist, suggests the human brain is so “buggy” that computers will never be able to emulate it or, if they do, machines will inherit our foibles and emotional inadequacies along with our intelligence.

Most of these ideas already exist in research and development laboratories, or soon will, thanks to developments in medicine, engineering, computing, nanotechnology and materials science among other fields. “Keep in mind that nonbiological intelligence is doubling each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially fixed.” Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor and futurist The challenge is not in building these bits, but whether or not all the bits can be added together. Could we, for example, buy a whole new body if our current one is worn out and just stick our head on top? Or what about a whole new brain? The term “cosmetic neurology”—essentially plastic surgery for the brain, so could we pick a new brain or, more likely, various plug-ins to create or enhance specific brain functions—has already been coined.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

And the pinnacle of it is that they want to build an artificial brain – an AGI. In May 2002 Larry Page said: “Google will fulfil its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete. You guys know what that means? That’s artificial intelligence.” (9) In December 2012 Google hired the controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil as a director of engineering. Kurzweil, of whom more later, believes that AGI will arrive in 2029, and that the outcome will be very positive. The other tech giants are in hot pursuit Facebook, Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft are determined to keep up with Google in the race to develop better and better AI.

It required 46 steps of fission to create all of your 27 trillion cells. Moore’s Law, by comparison, has had 33 steps in the 50 years of its existence. People have been claiming for years that Moore’s Law is tailing off – or even that it has stopped. But Moore’s Law has proved surprisingly robust. Ray Kurzweil claims it has been in force since before integrated circuits came along, stretching back into the ancient history of vacuum tubes and beyond. And it looks as though there is life in the old law yet. In February 2015 Intel updated journalists on their chip programme for the next few years, and it maintains the exponential growth. (38) The first chips based on its new 10 nanometre manufacturing process are expected in late 2016 / early 2017, after which it expects to move away from silicon, probably towards a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide. (39) Exascale computing Moore’s Law is important to questions about AGI because computer processing power enables many of the processes which in turn could enable AGI.

If you work there you don’t have to believe that technological progress is leading us towards a world of radical abundance which will be a much better place than the world today – but it certainly helps. Probably nowhere else in the world takes the ideas of the singularity as seriously as Silicon Valley. And after all, Silicon Valley is a leading contender to be the location where the first AGI is created. The controversial inventor and author Ray Kurzweil is the leading proponent of the claim that a positive singularity is almost inevitable, and it is no coincidence that he is now a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil is also one of the co-founders of the Singularity University (SU), also located (of course) in Silicon Valley – although SU focuses on the technological developments which can be foreseen over the next five to ten years, and is careful to avoid talking about the Singularity itself, which Kurzweil predicts will arrive in 2045.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Our problems come in waves, but so do the solutions. I’m surfing the giant life wave. —WILLIAM SHATNER Nobody understands this idea better than my friend Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, author, and entrepreneur. One of the most brilliant minds on the planet, he’s been called the Thomas Edison of our age. Yet you’ve probably never heard his name unless you’re a TED Talk junkie, or if you study the lineup at Google, where Ray is head of engineering. But Ray Kurzweil has affected your life in more ways than you could ever imagine. If you listen to tunes on your phone, on the internet—anywhere—he’s the guy you can thank.

Think and Grow Rich became one of the bestselling books of all time. Napoleon Hill’s quest has been an inspiration to me. Like his classic, this book is modeled on seeking out the best of the best in the world, from Warren Buffett to Sir Richard Branson—and including the man that experts in the field have called the Edison of our day: Ray Kurzweil, who invented the first digital music synthesizers, the first software to translate text into speech; he’s the man behind Siri on your iPhone. He developed a device that allows the blind to walk the streets and read road signs and order from any menu. Today Ray is head of engineering development for Google.

This is the opposite of what most people believe. According to an NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, 76% of Americans—an all-time record—think that their children’s lives will be worse off than their own! But you’re going to get an insider’s look at what’s coming from some of the most brilliant minds of our time. We’ll hear from my friends Ray Kurzweil, the Edison of our age, and Peter Diamandis, creator of the X Prize, about new technologies coming online: 3-D printers that will transform your personal computer into a manufacturing plant, self-driving cars, exoskeletons that enable paraplegics to walk, artificial limbs grown from single cells—innovations that will dramatically change our lives for the better in the very near future.


pages: 331 words: 47,993

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.1 I’ve mentioned that many observers have warned of the rise of superintelligent AI: synthetic intelligences that outthink the smartest humans in every domain, including common sense reasoning and social skills. Superintelligence could destroy us, they urge. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who is now a director of engineering at Google, depicts a technological utopia bringing about the end of aging, disease, poverty, and resource scarcity. Kurzweil has even discussed the potential advantages of forming friendships with personalized AI systems, like the Samantha program in the film Her.

Despite its science fiction–like flavor, many of the technological developments that transhumanism depicts seem quite possible: Indeed, the beginning stages of this radical alteration may well lie in certain technological developments that either are already here (if not generally available) or are accepted by many observers in the relevant scientific fields as being on their way.6 For instance, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute—a major transhumanist group—released a report on the technological requirements for uploading a mind to a machine.7 A U.S. Defense Department agency has funded a program, Synapse, that is trying to develop a computer that resembles the brain in form and function.8 Ray Kurzweil has even discussed the potential advantages of forming friendships, Her-style, with personalized AI systems.9 All around us, researchers are striving to turn science fiction into science fact. You may be surprised to learn that I consider myself a transhumanist, but I do. I first learned of transhumanism while an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, when I joined the Extropians, an early transhumanist group.

In the context of biological life, intelligence and consciousness seem to go hand-in-hand. Sophisticated biological intelligences tend to have complex and nuanced inner experiences. But would this correlation apply to nonbiological intelligence as well? Many suspect so. For instance, transhumanists, such as Ray Kurzweil, tend to hold that just as human consciousness is richer than that of a mouse, so too, unenhanced human consciousness would pale in comparison to the experiential life of a superintelligent AI.1 But as we shall see, this line of reasoning is premature. There may be no special androids that have the spark of consciousness in their machine minds, like Dolores in Westworld or Rachael in Bladerunner.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Deloitte Center for the Edge. (2009) “The 2009 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change,” p. 29. http://www.edgeperspectives.com/shiftindex.pdf. 165 “operative even when people disbelieved it”: Rob Carlson. (2009) In discussion with the author. 165 more than an industry road map: Ray Kurzweil. (2005) The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking. 165 Kurzweil’s Law: Data from Ray Kurzweil. (2005) “Moore’s Law: The Fifth Paradigm.” The Singularity Is Near (January 28, 2010). http://singularity.com/charts/page67.html. 167 Doubling Times: Data from Ray Kurzweil. (2005) The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking; Eric S. Lander, Lauren M. Linton, et al. (2001) “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome.” Nature, 409 (6822). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11237011; Rik Blok. (2009) “Trends in Computing.” http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~rikblok/ComputingTrends/; Lawrence G.

The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future—to head toward possibilities and increased freedoms. In The Progress Paradox Gregg Easterbrook writes, “If you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of World War II, you’d do a lot of drawing that was pointed up.” Ray Kurzweil has collected an entire gallery of graphs depicting the upward-zooming trend in many, if not most, technological fields. All graphs of technological progress start low, with small change several hundred years ago, then begin to bend upward in the last hundred, and then bolt upright to the sky in the last fifty.

The exponential growth of magnetic storage began in 1956, almost a whole decade before Moore formulated his law for semiconductors and 50 years before Kryder formulized the existence of its slope. Rob Carlson says, “When I first published the DNA exponential curves, I got reviewers claiming that they were unaware of any evidence that sequencing costs were falling exponentially. In this way the trends were operative even when people disbelieved it.” Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil dug into the archives to show that something like Moore’s Law had its origins as far back as 1900, long before electronic computers existed, and of course long before the path could have been constructed by self-fulfillment. Kurzweil estimated the number of calculations per second per $1,000 performed by turn-of-the-century analog machines, by mechanical calculators, and later by the first vacuum-tube computers and extended the same calculation to modern semiconductor chips.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Mangalindan, “A digital maestro for every object in the home,” Fortune, June 7, 2013, http://fortune.com/2013/06/07/a-digital-maestro-for-every-object-in-the-home/. 22 Unless otherwise noted, all Bass quotes and Autodesk information comes from a series of AIs with Carl Bass conducted 2012–2014. 23 Michio Kaku, “The Future of Computing Power [Fast, Cheap, and Invisible],” Big Think, April 24, 2010, http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/the-future-of-computing-power-fast-cheap-and-invisible. 24 AI with Graham Weston, 2013. 25 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1968; Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), DVD release, 2011. 26 Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau (2008; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios), DVD. 27 AI with Ray Kurzweil, 2013. 28 See: http://www.xprize.org/ted. As of the end of 2014, this prize is only in concept form. A detailed design and a design sponsor is still required. 29 “Ray Kurzweil: The Coming Singularity, Your Brain Year 2029,” Big Think, June 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6adugDEmqBk. 30 John Ward, “The Services Sector: How Best To Measure It?,” International Trade Administration, October 2010, http://trade.gov/publications/ita-newsletter/1010/services-sector-how-best-to-measure-it.asp. 31 AI with Jeremy Howard, 2013. 32 For information on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark see http://benchmark.ini.rub.de. 33 Geoffrey Hinton et al., “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/imagenet.pdf. 34 John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced By Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?

Watson in the cloud, tied to an openly available API, is the beginning of one such moment, the potential for a Mosaic-like interface explosion, opening AI to all sorts of new businesses and heralding its transition from deceptive to disruptive growth. Attention, exponential entrepreneurs: What are you waiting for? And everything we’ve just covered is here today. “Soon,” says Ray Kurzweil,40 “we will give an AI permission to listen to every phone conversation you have. Permission to read your emails and blogs, eavesdrop on your meetings, review your genome scan, watch what you eat and how much you exercise, even tap into your Google Glass feed. And by doing all this, your personal AI will be able to provide you with information even before you know you need it.”

Instead, the point is that AI has been in a deceptive phase for the past fifty years, ever since 1956, when a bunch of top brains came together for the first time at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project44 and made a “spectacularly wrong prediction” about their ability to crack AI over a single hot New England summer. But today, couple the successes of Deep Learning and IBM’s Watson to the near-term predictions of technology oracles like Ray Kurzweil, and we find a field reaching the knee of the exponential growth curve—that is, a field ready to run wild in disruption. So what does this mean to you, the exponential entrepreneur? This is a multibillion-dollar question. But as you try to find answers, remember that JARVIS is essentially the ultimate user interface, democratizing every exponential technology and giving all of us access to Stark-like capabilities.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time), from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 US Census, to Turing’s relay-based Bombe machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which Kurzweil used to dictate the very essay that described this phenomenon, in 2001. To get an idea of what exponential growth means, look at the following graph, which represents the difference between a linear trend and an exponential one. * * * Figure 4.1: The difference between a Linear and an Exponential curve. Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil. * * * As you can see, the exponential trend starts to really take off where the ‘Knee of the Curve’ begins. Before that, things do not seem to change significantly. It is just like the story of the chess board and the king. In the first few days nothing notable happens, but as soon as the curve kicks in, something dramatic happens and things go out of control.

What is even more remarkable is that, when Kurzweil plotted the world’s fastest calculator’s on a graph since 1900, he noticed something quite surprising. Remember that a straight line on a logarithmic graph means exponential growth? If you thought exponential growth was fast, you have not seen anything yet. Take a look at this graph. * * * Figure 4.2: The Exponential Growth of computing power over the last 110 years. Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil. * * * The plot is logarithmic, alright. You can see the y-axis having the number 10 growing at five orders of magnitude after each step (that is a 100,000 fold increase every time!), but the curve is not a straight line. Instead, what you see is upward trend. What this means is that there is another exponential curve.

Technological Singularity refers to the time when the speed of technological change is so fast that we are unable to predict what will happen. At that moment, computer intelligence will exceed that of human’s, and we will not even be able to understand what changes are happening. The term was first coined by science fiction writer Vernon Vinge and subsequently popularised by many authors, predominantly Ray Kurzweil with his books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near. This idea, however, is highly speculative, and it is far beyond the purpose of this book to examine its feasibility. Suffice to say that in order for machines to replace most human jobs, the singularity is not a necessary requirement, as we will see in the next chapters.


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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

If the equation is framed in terms of artificial intelligence–oriented technologies versus those oriented toward augmenting humans, there is hope that humans still retain an unbounded ability to both entertain and employ themselves doing something marketable and useful. If the humans are wrong, however, 2045 could be a tough year for the human race. Or it could mark the arrival of a technological paradise. Or both. The year 2045 is when Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will transcend biology, and implicitly, one would presume, destiny.37 Kurzweil, the serial artificial intelligence entrepreneur and author who joined Google as a director of engineering in 2012 to develop some of his ideas for building an artificial “mind,” represents a community of many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest technologists.

Geraci, a religious studies professor at Manhattan College and author of Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (2010), came to Pittsburgh to conduct his research several years ago, Moravec politely declined to see him, citing his work on a recent start-up. Geraci is one of a number of authors who have painted Moravec as the intellectual cofounder, with Ray Kurzweil, of a techno-religious movement that argues that humanity will inevitably be subsumed as a species by the AIs and robots we are now creating. In 2014 this movement gained generous exposure as high-profile technological and scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking issued tersely worded warnings about the potential threat that futuristic AI systems hold for the human species.

But after writing two best-selling books over a decade arguing for a technological promised land, he decided it was really time to settle down and do something about it. The idea that the exponential increase of computing power would inevitably lead to artificially intelligent machines was becoming more deeply ingrained in Silicon Valley, and a slick packaging of the underlying argument was delivered in 2005 by Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. “It was becoming a spectacle and it was interfering with real work,” he decided. By now he had taken to heart Alan Kay’s dictum that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His computer cave is miles from the offices of Seegrid, the robotic forklift company he founded in 2003, but within walking distance of his Pittsburgh home.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

/Feb. 2013. 6 Incredibly, it literally: Cliff Saran, “Apollo 11: The Computers That Put Man on the Moon,” Computer Weekly, July 13, 2009. 7 The modern smart phone: Peter Diamandis, “Abundance Is Our Future.” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 8 As a result of mathematical repercussions: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 7, 2001. 9 “law of accelerating returns”: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006). 10 Early criminal entrepreneurs: Evan Andrews, “6 Daring Train Robberies,” History.​com, Oct. 21, 2013. 11 Their carefully planned heist: Brett Leppard, “The Great Train Robbery: How It Happened,” Mirror, Feb. 28, 2013. 12 The incident kept the PlayStation: Keith Stuart and Charles Arthur, “PlayStation Network Hack: Why It Took Sony Seven Days to Tell the World,” Guardian, Feb. 5, 2014; “Credit Card Alert as Hackers Target 77 Million PlayStation Users,” Mail Online, Feb. 5, 2014. 13 In the end, financial analysts: J.

FBI Issues Warrant for $100M Cybercrime Mastermind,” Mail Online, June 2, 2014. 10 The unparalleled levels: McAfee, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime, June 2014. 11 There is another way: Jenny Awford, “Student Accused of Murder ‘Asked Siri Where to Hide Body,’ Say Police,” Mail Online, Aug. 13, 2014. 12 Just three years: “IBM Watson,” IBM Web site, http://​www-​03.​ibm.​com/​press/​us/​en/​presskit/​27297.​wss. 13 The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: “IBM Watson Hard at Work,” Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Feb. 8, 2013; Larry Greenemeier, “Will IBM’s Watson Usher in a New Era of Cognitive Computing,” Scientific American, Nov. 13, 2013. 14 Ray Kurzweil has popularized: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 7. 15 In 2014, Google purchased: Catherine Shu, “Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind,” TechCrunch, Jan. 26, 2014. 16 “Whereas the short-term impact”: Stephen Hawking et al., “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—but Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?

The twenty-ninth day can often seem just like any other day, but given the nature of exponentials, the pond is already half-choked to death. The lessons of the pond are that the magical nature of exponential growth can sneak up on us very, very quickly and that our continued linear thinking may come at our own peril. The World of Exponentials In his book The Singularity Is Near, the futurist Ray Kurzweil describes the exponential nature of the technological world around us and introduces the concept of what he calls the “knee of an exponential curve.” The knee of the curve is an inflection point in time at which an exponential trend becomes truly noticeable. Shortly thereafter, however, the trend line becomes explosive and appears essentially vertical as the mathematical impact of an exponential growth curve is felt.


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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

., their weights are increased], and if a triangle of a different size and shape is held up to the perceptron, its image will be passed along the track that the first triangle took. If a square is presented, however, a new set of random lines is called into play. . . . The more images the perceptron is permitted to scan, the more adroit its generalizations. . . . It can tell the difference between a dog and a cat.”8 Four years later, Ray Kurzweil, then sixteen, visited Rosenblatt after Kurzweil’s MIT mentor Marvin Minsky exposed the limitations of the one-layer perceptron that Rosenblatt had built. Rosenblatt told Kurzweil that he could surmount these limitations by stacking perceptrons on top of one another in layers. “The performance improves dramatically,” he said.

Following a Markov model, a browser pursues a “random walk” of transitions from one position to another, bouncing off “reflecting states” (unwanted sites), moving through “transitional states” (Utah, Nevada), stopping at “absorbing states” (Google Mountain View headquarters!), all without needing to factor in intentionality or plan. Hierarchical hidden Markov models enable multiple levels of abstraction, from phonemes up a neural network tree to words and phrases and meanings and models of reality. Ray Kurzweil, a Google vice president and Markov enthusiast, maintains that in recognizing speech or other patterns, hierarchical hidden Markov models are a guide to the mind: “essentially computing what is going on in the neocortex of a speaker—even though we have no direct access to that person’s brain. . . .

Here in early January 2017 many of the leading researchers and luminaries of the information age secretly gathered under the auspices of the Foundational Questions Institute, directed by the MIT physicist Max Tegmark and supported by tens of millions of dollars from Elon Musk and Skype’s co-founder Jaan Tallinn. The most prominent participants were the bright lights of Google: Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, and Peter Norvig, along with former Googler Andrew Ng, later of Baidu and Stanford. Also there was Facebook’s Yann LeCun, an innovator in deep-learning math and a protégé of Google’s Geoffrey Hinton. A tenured contingent consisted of the technologist Stuart Russell, the philosopher David Chalmers, the catastrophe theorist Nick Bostrom, the nanotech prophet Eric Drexler, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, and the “Singularitarian” Vernor Vinge, along with scores of other celebrity scientists.1 They gathered at Asilomar preparing to alert the world to the dire threat posed by . . . well, by themselves—Silicon Valley.


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Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Processor speeds improved by a factor of 1,000, but these gains were dwarfed by the algorithms, which got 43,000 times better over the same period. The second concept relevant for understanding recent computing advances is closely related to Moore’s Law. It comes from an ancient story about math made relevant to the present age by the innovator and futurist Ray Kurzweil. In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The clever man asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so on, with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous.

The difficulty of automating their work reminds us of a quote attributed to a 1965 NASA report advocating manned space flight: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” Even in the domain of pure knowledge work—jobs that don’t have a physical component—there’s a lot of important territory that computers haven’t yet started to cover. In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil predicts that future computers will “encompass … the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself,” but so far only the first of these abilities has been demonstrated. Computers so far have proved to be great pattern recognizers but lousy general problem solvers; IBM’s supercomputers, for example, couldn’t take what they’d learned about chess and apply it to Jeopardy!

In addition, Rob Atkinson, Yannis Bakos, Susanto Basu, Menzie Chinn, Robert Gordon, Lorin Hitt, Rob Huckman, Michael Mandel, Dan Snow, Zeynep Ton and Marshall van Alstyne were very generous with their insights. We also benefited greatly from talking with people in industry who are making and using incredible technologies, including Rod Brooks, Paul Hofmann Ray Kurzweil, Ike Nassi, and Hal Varian. We presented some of the ideas contained here to seminar audiences at MIT, Harvard Business School, Northwestern, NYU, UC/Irvine, USC’s Annenberg School, SAP, McKinsey, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. We also presented related work at conferences including WISE, ICIS, Techonomy, and the Aspen Ideas Festival.


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The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Among people who work in the field of computer technology, it is fairly routine to speculate about the likelihood that computers will someday approach, or possibly even exceed, human beings in general capability and intelligence. Speaking at an industry conference in 2007, Google co-founder Larry Page said, “We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. It’s not as far off as people think.”1 Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, author and futurist, states quite categorically that he expects computers to become at least as intelligent as humans by the year 2029.2 While other experts are far more conservative about the prospect for machines that can achieve genuine intelligence, there can be little doubt that computers and robots are going to become dramatically more capable and flexible in the coming years and decades.

That date is nearly 60 years before the cutoff date of 2089 that we set at the beginning of this chapter. What would Bill have in 2089? 1.4 quadrillion dollars. This is over one trillion times the 2009 amount of $1,300! These numbers should give you a sense of the incredible degree of technological acceleration we can expect over the coming years and decades. As futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil writes, “Exponential [or geometric] growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and explodes with unexpected fury.”11 How confident can we be that Moore’s Law will continue to be sustainable in the coming years and decades? Evidence suggests that it is likely to hold true for the foreseeable future.

Nonetheless, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the fact that many extremely well regarded individuals with deep experience in science and technology have a far more ambitious view of what is ultimately possible. World-renowned cosmologist and author of the book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, has said, “Computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence at some point in the next hundred years.”35 Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999, is far more optimistic and predicts that machines will achieve true intelligence by 2029. Kurzweil is also one of the leading proponents of the technological singularity, which he expects to occur by the year 2045.36 This concept, which was originally introduced by the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge,37 suggests that at some point in the future, technological progress will simply explode incomprehensibly.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Gary Marcus, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” New Yorker (Elements blog), October 24, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-we-should-think-about-the-threat-of-artificial-intelligence.html. 13. P. Z. Myers, “Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain,” Pharyngula Science Blog, August 17, 2010, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/. 14. Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, pp. 7–21. 15. Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” lecture at CalTech, December 29, 1959, full text available at http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html. 16.

Stephen Lacey, “Chart: 2/3rds of Global Solar PV Has Been Installed in the Last 2.5 Years,” GreenTechMedia.com, August 13, 2013, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/chart-2–3rds-of-global-solar-pv-has-been-connected-in-the-last-2.5-years. 4. Lauren Feeney, “Climate Change No Problem, Says Futurist Ray Kurzweil,” The Guardian, February 21, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/21/ray-kurzweill-climate-change. 5. “Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in April 2013,” Yale Project on Climate Change Communication/George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/files/Climate-Beliefs-April-2013.pdf. 6.

It is perhaps not coincidental that they also tend to have been very successful in the new economy. The most prominent digital optimists typically live at the extreme left of the long tail—or, even better, they’ve perhaps founded a company that owns the entire distribution. In a PBS television special that aired in 2012, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was asked about the possibility of a “digital divide”—meaning that only a small percentage of the population will be able to thrive in the new information economy. Kurzweil dismissed the idea of such a divide and instead pointed to empowering technologies like mobile phones. Anybody with a smart phone, he said, “is carrying around billions of dollars of capability circa 20 or 30 years ago.”12 Left unsaid was how the average person is supposed to leverage that technology into a livable income.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

His parents, Viennese Jews, fled on the eve of the Anschluss: Ray Kurzweil, Ask Ray blog, “My Trip to Brussels, Zurich, Warsaw, and Vienna,” December 14, 2010. he made an appearance on Steve Allen’s game show, I’ve Got a Secret: Ray Kurzweil, “I’ve Got a Secret,” 1965, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4. “to invent things so that the blind could see”: Steve Rabinowitz quoted in Transcendent Man, directed by Barry Ptolemy, 2011. “profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it”: Transcendent Man. “strong AI and nanotechnology can create any product”: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (Viking Penguin, 2005), 299.

For many of those seeking to invent AI, their job is just a heap of mathematics, a thrilling intellectual challenge. But for a significant chunk of others, it’s a theological pursuit. They are at the center of a transformative project that will culminate in the dawning of a new age. The high priest of this religion is a rhetorically gifted, canny popularizer called Ray Kurzweil. His ecstatic vision for the future was born in the greatest catastrophe of the past. The penumbra of the Holocaust hangs over him. His parents, Viennese Jews, fled on the eve of the Anschluss. The accretion of so many difficult years took its toll on his father, a classical conductor and intellectual.

“strong AI and nanotechnology can create any product”: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (Viking Penguin, 2005), 299. “Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 40. “version 1.0 biological bodies”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 9. “We will be software, not hardware”: Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking Penguin, 1999), 129. “What, after all, is the difference between a human”: Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines, 148. “Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense”: Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines, 147. “Anybody who is going to be resisting”: Peter Diamandis, quoted in Transcendent Man. “Our civilization will then expand outward”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 389.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

The corollary of Moore’s law was that this trend saw us packing more and more computer processing power into an ever smaller space, reducing power requirements, heat generation, and most importantly cost per processor cycle. By some measures, this pace has slowed in recent years, leading to many near-perennial predictions that Moore’s law is coming to an end. But this presumes the industry sticks to the same production methods and technologies. As pointed out by inventor, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil, the integrated circuit referenced by Moore’s law is but the fifth paradigm of a much larger trend that can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Electromechanical processing, relays, vacuum tubes, and transistors all followed a similar pattern of doubling their processing power relative to cost over time.

This accelerating change has been with us all along, but it’s become more evident in recent decades because it has finally advanced to the point when much of it occurs on human-scale time frames. When our hominid ancestors began making tools, this change generally took place so slowly it was impossible to see even across many lifetimes. Today, new technologies transform society on a regular basis. Ray Kurzweil refers to this as the “Law of Accelerating Returns” because technology essentially exists in a positive feedback loop, forcing the apparent rate of change to speed up over time.11 Some aspects of this reinforcement lead to secondary levels of exponential growth; Kurzweil maintains that exponential growth itself grows exponentially.

Skin conductivity devices, such as iCalm, the Q sensor, and Embrace, and emotional social-intelligence prosthetics like MindReader only hint at the potential. Consider the strides that have been made in interface development as researchers design new ways to help those with different sensory challenges and handicaps. Ray Kurzweil developed a portable reader for the blind. Various methods have sought to use computers to make up for lost sight, hearing, or mobility. There are even brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that seek to give paraplegics and those with locked-in syndrome the ability to communicate and maneuver devices such as wheelchairs using only their thoughts.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

We will all be gathered into the cloud to live in bliss and harmony. This line of thinking is often referred to as the rapture of the geeks. Rapture of the geeks Multiple (10) These views are purported by some people in a community that identifies itself with the term Singularity. A leader in this field is the insightful futurologist Ray Kurzweil whose many books are recommended reading. Whilst aware of the dangers, Kurzweil is generally optimistic about the future. He personally has undertaken a strict regime of diet, drugs and lifestyle changes in an attempt to live long enough to experience this future for himself. When asked about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil replied that an AGI will reflect our values because it will be us.

It seems to be an empirical fact of nature that improvements at each generation of technology are at a roughly fixed proportion to the previous generation, which produces the exponential growth. The chart above shows this trend being very consistent over a period of sixty years. Long term growth Ray Kurzweil has argued that this rise in complexity also happens over geological time-scales. In the following chart various landmarks in evolutionary development have been plotted with a logarithmic scale on both axes. Thus the first step on the x axis from 1010 years to 109 years represents almost ten billion years whereas the last step from 102 to 101 represents just ninety years.

As a science fiction writer, he felt that there was “an opaque wall across the future” through which he could not see. That wall was caused largely by the prospect of hyper-intelligent computers programming themselves. Vinge was very concerned as to the fate of mankind as a result of such an eventuality. The books by Ray Kurzweil redefined the term somewhat to simply refer to the ever accelerating rate of technological progress. If one extrapolates the graphs above several decades into the future they suggest that progress will be unimaginably fast. As previously mentioned, Kurzweil is generally optimistic as to what will result.


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The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Susan Schneider argues that it is very likely that there are more intelligent beings besides us in the universe, yet that these beings are likely not conscious.7 In her view there is good reason to think that other biological beings elsewhere in the universe created mechanical computing beings, and that these beings then surpassed them and took over from them, bringing about singularity events elsewhere in the cosmos comparable to the one that Ray Kurzweil predicts—or at least predicted in 2005—will take place in 2045,8 without ever experiencing a dawning of self-awareness, of “perception” in Leibniz’s sense, of qualitative first-person experience. Schneider reasons that if alien superintelligent beings were originally designed by conscious beings such as ourselves, these conscious beings would likely have had no obvious reason to equip them with consciousness.

Few theorists of the coming AI takeover, again, see the dawning of AI consciousness as a necessary or even likely part of this projected scenario. Yet the way they talk about it is often confused enough to make it unclear whether they envision conscious machines as a likely development. A great part of the confusion is that few AI theorists have a clear or coherent account of what consciousness is. Ray Kurzweil speaks of a near future in which machines will have “emotional intelligence,” but it is not clear whether this simply means the ability to algorithmically discern moods (as our social-media tools can already do) or whether it means the capacity to experience emotion. There is significant discussion in the literature about the possibility of developing machines that are capable of holding an artificial theory of mind.14 But even a theory of mind can be accounted for in the minimal sense of simply having the ability to anticipate how mind-endowed beings might behave in particular circumstances, which is something that it does not require a mind to do: software used by department stores generates coupons for consumers based on their previous purchases, without, obviously, truly thinking about these purchases.

We might frame this a bit differently and say that the idea of an artificially created superintelligence has been a sort of transcendental idea in the sense of this term as understood by Kant: an idea of something we do not really understand, something it lies beyond our ability to take as an object of our faculty of understanding, but that nonetheless guides or “regulates,” to use Kant’s terminology, what we end up doing with the things we do understand. Perhaps tech enthusiasts such as Ray Kurzweil have mistaken this transcendental idea for something constitutive of the project of computer science. They have allowed themselves to remain captivated by an understanding of human artifice that ultimately belongs to the pre-scientific era: one that takes our probing into nature, and our channeling of the forces of nature to our own purposes, as something that is ultimately magical, an unleashing of mysterious forces.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In today’s corporate world there is a new breed of institutional organism—the Exponential Organization—loose on Earth, and if you don’t understand it, prepare for it and, ultimately, become it, you will be disrupted. The concept of the Exponential Organization (ExO) first arose at Singularity University, which I co-founded in 2008 with noted futurist, author, entrepreneur-turned-AI director at Google, Ray Kurzweil. The goal was to create a new kind of university, one whose curriculum was constantly being updated. For that reason SU was never accredited—not because we didn’t care, but because the curriculum was changing too fast. SU would focus only on the exponentially growing (or accelerating technologies) that were riding on the back of Moore’s Law.

The sixty-year history of Moore’s Law—basically, that the price/performance of computation will double about every eighteen months—has been well documented. And we’ve come a long way since 1971, when the original circuit board held just two hundred chips; today we have teraflops of computing operating within the same physical space. That steady, extraordinary, and seemingly impossible pace led futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has studied this phenomenon for thirty years, to make four signature observations: First, the doubling pattern identified by Gordon Moore in integrated circuits applies to any information technology. Kurzweil calls this the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) and shows that doubling patterns in computation extend all the way back to 1900, far earlier than Moore’s original pronouncement.

Every expert labeled the project a failure, pointing out that at seven years for just 1 percent, it would take seven hundred years to finish the sequencing. Craig Venter, one of the principal researchers, received calls from friends and colleagues imploring him to stop the project and not embarrass himself further. “Save your career,” he recalls them saying. “Return the money.” When Ray Kurzweil was asked his perspective, however, his view of the “impending disaster” was quite different. “1 percent,” he said. “That means we’re halfway done.” What Kurzweil got that no one else did was that the amount sequenced was doubling every year. 1 percent doubling seven times is 100 percent. Kurzweil’s math was correct, and in fact the project was completed in 2001, early and under budget.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Statisticians call this sort of graph a “hockey stick curve” as it indicates evidence of an exponential growth scenario. In the 20th century, graphs like this appeared with increasing regularity, especially where technology was involved. This led to the hypothesis of what mathematician John von Neumann and futurist Ray Kurzweil dubbed the singularity (sometimes called the technological singularity)—a time when technological advancement reaches escape velocity. In theory, the singularity means that we could solve any problem mankind faces through the application of increasingly powerful computing. Figure 1.2: Major technology improvements are accelerating.

It’s Happened Before, It Will Happen Again Not wanting to borrow too much from the Matrix or Battlestar Galactica, the reality is that this cycle of new technologies that act as the catalyst for entirely new industries, but at the same time dramatically impact employment patterns and social conditions, has been happening repeatedly over the last 200 to 250 years. Commentators I admire like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis have previously classified this change as part of the coming “singularity”. Diamandis called it the “Age of Abundance,”1 but a factory worker at Ford Motor Company in Detroit or at Foxconn in China might have very different views today. Textile artisans in the early 1800s, chimney sweeps, farm tillers in the 1920s, video rental store clerks, 1-hour photo processing machine operators, newspaper reporters and taxi drivers are all examples of jobs that have been significantly impacted by technological change.

“It took $10 billion to sequence the first human genome, today we can do the same for 1 millionth of that cost. It took 5 years to sequence the AIDS virus … today that would take less than a day, but in 10 years’ time the computers that do these tasks will be a million times more powerful than they are today.” Ray Kurzweil, Exponential Finance Keynote, New York City, June 2015 The possibilities are mind-blowing. If you think of the Augmented Age, AI and technology as a threat to humanity, then perhaps the biggest problem you might have is that your choice to participate in this new world may be taken away from you by a generation that is extremely comfortable with tech.


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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion.

For there’s the real problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there . And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get, and then the more bubbled we will want to be. No matter how far futurist Ray Kurzweil gets with his artificial intelligence project at Google, we cannot simply rise from the chrysalis of matter as pure consciousness. There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload mind and soul from the body to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind.

Just as our proprietary GPS maps don’t show us the restaurants that refuse to advertise on the platform, the digital landscape to which they have migrated will be free of poverty, pollution, and whatever else the rest of us have to deal with. As always, the narrative ends in some form of escape for those rich, smart, or singularly determined enough to take the leap. Mere mortals need not apply. I got into a heated discussion about this with transhumanist Ray Kurzweil. Being interviewed for a TV show, Ray and I had each just shared our most optimistic visions for the ways technology would redefine what it means to be human. For me, it was about enhanced connectivity and maybe a new found appreciation for the non-technological, sacred weirdness of corporeal existence.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

At this scale, particles are so small that they behave like waves, meaning they can pass through physical barriers and stumble into places they shouldn’t be. Moore’s Law is being derailed by quantum-drunk electrons. But this doesn’t mean that the growth of computing power will decelerate. The computing revolution shows no sign of slowing down. Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading technology researchers, posits a theory of technological development that seeks to explain why. Technology, he says, tends to develop at an accelerating pace – according to what he calls ‘the Law of Accelerating Returns’. At the heart of Kurzweil’s model is a positive feedback loop.

The graph over the page plots the growth in computation used for state-of-the-art AI systems, set against the exponential curve of Moore’s Law. If AI’s usage of computational power had followed the Moore’s Law curve, it would have increased about seven times in six years. In fact, usage increased 300,000 times.20 It’s an astonishing statistic. But it can be explained by precisely the process that Ray Kurzweil identified decades earlier. At just the moment we were bumping up against the limits of our old method – cramming more transistors onto a chip – scientists came up with a novel solution, drawing on a slightly different approach. The answer lay in the kind of chips used. AI researchers like Krishevsky replaced traditional computer chips with ones that had been developed to draw high-end graphics for video games.

It was a decade of looking at an exponential technology, dropping in price and increasing in scale, and systematically getting it wrong.18 The problem is not just that we underestimate exponential growth, however. Experts who are mindful of the power of exponentiality can also be prone to overestimating its power. In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2019 a $1,000 computer would be ‘approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain’.19 This proved optimistic. When trying to square rapid, exponential growth with an inordinately complex issue, a slight error in your basic assumptions can throw your whole prediction off.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

They show up as straight lines and their speed is easier to evaluate; the bigger the exponent, the faster they grow, and the steeper the line. Impoverished Emperors, Headless Inventors, and the Second Half of the Chessboard Our brains are not well equipped to understand sustained exponential growth. In particular, we severely underestimate how big the numbers can get. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil retells an old story to drive this point home. The game of chess originated in present-day India during the sixth century CE, the time of the Gupta Empire.7 As the story goes, it was invented by a very clever man who traveled to Pataliputra, the capital city, and presented his brainchild to the emperor.

Its accumulated doubling will eventually yield a computer with more processing and storage capacity than the human brain. Once this happens, things become highly unpredictable. Machines could become self-aware, humans and computers could merge seamlessly, or other fundamental transitions could occur. Ray Kurzweil, who has done more than anyone else to explain the power of exponential improvement, wrote in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near that at current rates of progress these transitions will occur by about 2045.7 How plausible is singularity or the Terminator? We honestly don’t know. As with all things digital it’s wise never to say never, but we still have a long way to go.

In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa. All of them were incredibly generous with their time and tolerant of our questions. We did our best to understand the insights they shared with us, and apologize for whatever mistakes we made in trying to convey them in this book.


pages: 232 words: 67,934

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

p. 213 Drunk on the emptied wine-cup of the earth …and seconds passed in heavy honeyed drops: George Faludy, Selected Poems of George Faludy 1933–80, ed. and trans. Robin Skelton, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985, 98. p. 214 Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever: Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, New York: Rodale Books, 2009. p. 215 The law of accelerating returns …This is the destiny of the universe: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, New York: Viking, 2005, 24–9. p. 217 the universe will become sublimely intelligent: Ibid., 390. p. 217 A common view is that science has consistently been correcting …until the entire universe is at our finger-tips: Ibid., 487.

Wells arrives in Russia and falls in love – Moura, Maxim Gorky’s confidante and Wells’ ‘Lover-Shadow’ – Robert Bruce Lockhart, Moura and the ‘Lockhart plot’ – Wells discovers Moura’s secret life – Moura’s laughter – The smell of honey – Wells, Darwin and Dr Moreau: ‘beasts that perish’ – ‘There is no “pattern of things to come”’ – Maxim Gorky, God-builder – Anatoly Lunacharsky, occultist and Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment – Vladimir Bekhterev, neurologist and parapsychologist, pays a visit to Stalin – Lamarck and Lysenko – The humanism of the White Sea Canal – Gorky on the extermination of rodents – Immortality and rocket science: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – Stalin, an enormous flea – Gorky’s travelling suitcase – Gorky’s last word – Leonid Krasin, Soviet minister, money-launderer and cryogenics pioneer – Nikolai Federov, Orthodox mystic and techno-immortalist – The Immortalization Commission – Kazimir Malevich, Cubo-Futurist and inspirer of Lenin’s tomb – Victory over the Sun – Two Chekist supermen – Stalin’s coffee machine – The death machine – Eau de Cologne, ashes and freshly baked bread – Walter Duranty, disciple of Aleister Crowley and apologist for Stalin – Method acting and the show trials – Moura’s bonfire 3 Sweet Mortality From automatic writing to cryonic suspension – Freezing and starving yourself to everlasting life – Global warming and the mortal Earth – Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity – Artificial intelligence and virtual evolution – Immortalism, a programme for human extinction – Science as a machine for generating insoluble problems – Natural laws or primordial chaos – Rain – The sweet scent of death in Casablanca – The fall of a leaf Acknowledgements Permissions Notes Illustrations 1.

Contingency means humans will always be subject to fate and chance, mystery that they will always be surrounded by the unknowable. For many this state of affairs is intolerable, even unthinkable. Using advancing knowledge, they insist, the human animal can transcend the human condition. A contemporary example is the American visionary Ray Kurzweil. In The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil suggests that a world-transforming increase in the growth of knowledge is imminent. Human ingenuity has created machines with exponentially increasing capacity to process information. Given the law of accelerating returns it cannot be long before artificial intelligence overtakes its human inventors.


pages: 345 words: 104,404

Pandora's Brain by Calum Chace

AI winter, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Extropian, friendly AI, hive mind, lateral thinking, machine translation, mega-rich, Nick Bostrom, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, theory of mind, Turing test, Wall-E

He looked away, turning back to his rucksack to avoid making Matt more self-conscious. Uncomfortable, Matt changed the subject. ‘So have you read any transhumanist literature?’ ‘Not really: as I say, just the odd article here and there. If you are curious about their ideas, perhaps you should read one of Ray Kurzweil’s books: he seems to be the best-known proponent. He’s an interesting chap, actually. He was a successful software developer – made a lot of money out of speech recognition software, if I remember right. He’s also written several books about an event called a Singularity, when the rate of technological progress becomes so fast that mere humans are unable to keep up, and we will have to upload our minds into computers.

It’s just . . . you know . . . memories.’ She took a deep breath and brightened her face. ‘I tell you what. I’ll call your uncle Leo after dinner and see if he has any ideas. Better still, if he has any connections.’ After dinner, ensconced in his bedroom, Matt followed Simon Jones’ suggestion and looked up Ray Kurzweil on Amazon, and downloaded his book ‘The Singularity is Near.’ Before starting to read it, he browsed the book’s reviews. The majority saw Kurzweil as a man with intriguing ideas about the future of humanity, and some even hailed him as an inspirational prophet of a utopian future. A minority were alienated by this utopian outlook, accusing Kurzweil of championing a cult of technology.

‘AI still has many critics, who claim that artificial minds will not be created for thousands of years, if ever. But impressed by the continued progress of Moore’s Law, which observes that computer processing power is doubling every 18 months, more and more scientists now believe that humans may create an artificial intelligence sometime this century. One of the more optimistic, Ray Kurzweil, puts the date as close as 2029.’ As the lights came back up, Ross was standing again, poised in front of the seated guests. ‘So, Professor Montaubon. Since David and Matt’s dramatic adventure the media has been full of talk about artificial intelligence. Are we just seeing the hype again? Will we shortly be heading to into another AI winter?’


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

He wants it to pass what he calls the “Fredric Kurzweil Turing test,” meaning that the avatar would be indistinguishable from Ray’s real father were he alive today. Kurzweil is known for making outlandish predictions about the future. His dadbot ambitions should be taken with a grain of salt if not a whole spoonful. But Ray Kurzweil is, well, Ray Kurzweil—honored by three presidents for his innovations, the author of a book called How to Create a Mind, and a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His research team at Google is the one that developed the core technology for Smart Reply, the automated email-answering feature discussed in chapter 5.

“I have passed it on to my twin, so to speak,” Fritzshall told a journalist. “When I’m no longer here, she can answer for what’s asked of me. She will carry on the story forever.” The prospect of replicas far more advanced than the Dadbot looms large in an imagination-stirring meeting that I have in fall 2017 at Google. It’s with Ray Kurzweil, the author and futurist best known for predicting the “singularity,” an age when humans and machines will supposedly merge. As a head of engineering, Kurzweil leads a team working on machine learning and natural-language processing. But he and I are not talking about anything officially connected to Google.

That would be deeply upsetting, but I think I could eventually come to grips with it. Unlike Kurzweil, I don’t believe that we can beat death. But people can, amazingly enough, synthesize life. That we exist is a miracle, and that we can create things that exist—biological, mechanical, or a curious mix of the two—is a miracle, too. At the end of my meeting with Ray Kurzweil, he had extended an invitation. If I wanted, he and his colleagues could help me to create a next-generation Dadbot. “Sometime in the future when we get it set up, we could take the compilation of your father’s writings and create a chatbot using our technology,” Kurzweil says. “I would love that,” I say.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

It is believed (very plausibly) that this internal ‘ecosystem’ is crucial to our health. The ‘push’ from Silicon Valley towards achieving ‘eternal youth’ stems not only from the immense surplus wealth that’s been accumulated there, but also because it’s a place with a youth-based culture. Those older than thirty are thought to be ‘over the hill’. The futurist Ray Kurzweil speaks zealously of attaining a metaphorical ‘escape velocity’—when medicine advances so fast that life expectancy rises by more than a year in each year, offering potential immortality. He ingests more than one hundred supplements a day—some routine, some more exotic. But he’s worried that ‘escape velocity’ may not be achieved within his ‘natural’ lifetime.

Once machines surpass human intelligence, they could design and assemble a new generation of even more intelligent machines. Some of the ‘staples’ of speculative science that flummox physicists today—time travel, space warps, and the ultracomplex—may be harnessed by the new machines, transforming the world physically. Ray Kurzweil (mentioned in section 2.1 in connection with cryonics) argues that this could lead to a runaway intelligence explosion: the ‘singularity’.13 Few people doubt that machines will one day surpass most distinctively human capabilities; the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction.

., ‘Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge’, Nature 550 (2017): 354–59. 10.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great_Britain. 11.  The letter was organised by the Future of Life Institute, based at MIT. 12.  Stuart Russell is quoted from the Financial Times, January 6, 2018. 13.  See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). 14.  P. Hut and M. Rees, “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature 302 (1983): 508–9. 15.  Derek Parfit’s arguments are presented in part 4 of his Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 16.  Good surveys of these extreme risks are given in Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković, eds., Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Phil Torres, Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2018).


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Interlude, with Grave Robber 1.Peter Merholz, “ ‘Frictionless’ as an Alternative to ‘Simplicity’ in Design,” Adaptive Path (blog), July 21, 2010, adaptivepath.com/ideas/friction-as-an-alternative-to-simplicity-in-design. 2.David J. Hill, “Exclusive Interview with Ray Kurzweil on Future AI Project at Google,” SingularityHUB, January 10, 2013, singularityhub.com/2013/01/10/exclusive-interview-with-ray-kurzweil-on-future-ai-project-at-google/. Chapter Eight: YOUR INNER DRONE 1.Asimov’s Rules of Robotics—“the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot’s positronic brain”—first appeared in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” which can be found in the collection I, Robot (New York: Bantam, 2004), 37. 2.Gary Marcus, “Moral Machines,” News Desk (blog), New Yorker, November 27, 2012, newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/google-driverless-car-morality.html. 3.Charles T.

Underlying the company’s hyperactive solicitude is a dogged, almost monomaniacal pursuit of efficiency. Taking the misanthropic view of automation, Google has come to see human cognition as creaky and inexact, a cumbersome biological process better handled by a computer. “I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” says Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist who in 2012 was appointed Google’s director of engineering. The company will “just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.”2 The ultimate goal is to fully automate the act of searching, to take human volition out of the picture. Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration.

By putting a computer screen permanently within view, the high-tech eyeglasses would allow Google, through its Google Now service and other tracking and personalization routines, to deliver pertinent information to people whenever the device sensed they required advice or assistance. The company would fulfill the greatest of its ambitions: to automate the flow of information into the mind. Forget the autocomplete functions of Google Suggest. With Glass on your brow, Brin said, echoing his colleague Ray Kurzweil, you would no longer have to search the web at all. You wouldn’t have to formulate queries or sort through results or follow trails of links. “You’d just have information come to you as you needed it.”21 To the computer’s omnipresence would be added omniscience. Brin’s awkward presentation earned him the ridicule of technology bloggers.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

We may just not see it or think it’s random. Either way, if we implement the brain in a computer, that algorithm can learn everything we can. Thus one route—arguably the most popular one—to inventing the Master Algorithm is to reverse engineer the brain. Jeff Hawkins took a stab at this in his book On Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil pins his hopes for the Singularity—the rise of artificial intelligence that greatly exceeds the human variety—on doing just that and takes a stab at it himself in his book How to Create a Mind. Nevertheless, this is only one of several possible approaches, as we’ll see. It’s not even necessarily the most promising one, because the brain is phenomenally complex, and we’re still in the very early stages of deciphering it.

For example, from All Greek philosophers are human and All Greek philosophers are mortal we can induce that All humans are mortal, or just that All Greeks are mortal. But why settle for the more modest generalization? Instead, we can assume that all humans are mortal until we meet an exception. (Which, according to Ray Kurzweil, will be soon.) In the meantime, one important application of inverse deduction is predicting whether new drugs will have harmful side effects. Failure during animal testing and clinical trials is the main reason new drugs take many years and billions of dollars to develop. By generalizing from known toxic molecular structures, we can form rules that quickly weed out many apparently promising compounds, greatly increasing the chances of successful trials on the remaining ones.

Nearest-neighbor was the first algorithm in history that could take advantage of unlimited amounts of data to learn arbitrarily complex concepts. No human being could hope to trace the frontiers it forms in hyperspace from millions of examples, but because of Cover and Hart’s proof, we know that they’re probably not far off the mark. According to Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity begins when we can no longer understand what computers do. By that standard, it’s not entirely fanciful to say that it’s already under way—it began all the way back in 1951, when Fix and Hodges invented nearest-neighbor, the little algorithm that could. The curse of dimensionality There’s a serpent in this Eden, of course.


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The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

He noticed that this phenomenon had been going on for a while, and he speculated that the trend could continue for another decade. This observation became known as Moore’s law. Doubling the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles the power of the computer. If that were the entire story, it would be of minor interest. But along came Ray Kurzweil, who made an amazing observation: computers have been doubling in power from way before transistors were even invented. Kurzweil found that if you graph the processing power of computers since 1890, when simple electromechanical devices were used to help with the US census, computers doubled in processing power every other year, regardless of the underlying technology.

Many people find the idea that we are machines to be unsettling and even a bit offensive. Others, however, fully embrace it. Marvin Minsky, who was an AI researcher for over half a century and truly one of the giants in the field, often referred to humans as “meat machines.” He meant it literally. Ray Kurzweil longs for the day he can back up his “mind file” onto a computer, to be restored if he has an untimely death. Stephen Hawking said it plainly: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

We can sort all of them into eight groups, each of which is itself a broad theory. We can then examine each of these eight theories to see whether, according to that theory, machines could become conscious and we could upload our consciousness to them. Let’s examine the eight theories. Theory 1: Weak Emergence In his book How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil envisions the brain as a collection of about 100,000 different processes arranged hierarchically. Each process knows how to do one small thing. One of the 100,000 might just be to recognize the letter A, and one beneath it might exist only to recognize the crossbar in that letter. When you read a book, a gazillion things happen in your brain as all these processes fire, at an unimaginable speed, enabling you to piece together and make sense of the world around you.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

The truth was that the spoon was just part of the simulation, a collection of pixels. Neo is told: “There is no spoon.” In my case, there was no table or paddle! The advance of computer science, which makes the idea of a very sophisticated simulation more likely, also raises interesting (and perhaps troubling) questions about ourselves. For example, futurists like Ray Kurzweil of Google have suggested that someday we might be able to download our consciousness into a silicon-based device, extending our lives indefinitely. At some level, this would mean that we are just digital information after all. The idea that consciousness can be digital reveals perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the simulation hypothesis.

Large computer networks and their associated users may "wake up" as superhumanly intelligent entities. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect. 18 Kurzweil and Downloading Consciousness Google futurist Ray Kurzweil picked up on the term in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, and uses it as a catchall for superintelligence and human/computer interaction. Kurzweil is optimistic that we will be able to map out “all of the information” in the relatively inefficient chemical processes of the human brain and reproduce it in the more efficient electronic/silicon world (and thus achieve the Turing Test) in the next few decades.

Recently, a group of researchers in Switzerland believe that they have created a scaled computer model that reproduces and acts like the brain by modeling and reproducing an individual’s neurons: They believe by modeling a rat’s brain, which might consist of “only” 10,000 neurons (with an associated 30 million neural connections), they had a scale model that could model an entire brain within a few years. The human brain, on the other hand, is composed of networks connecting 1012 neurons through 1015 synapses.22 As of the writing of this book, no one has been able to successfully model that many neural connections, but it doesn’t mean that it’s as far off as we might think. Ray Kurzweil also makes the point, as many others have, that it’s not just consciousness that is information. The cells in your body have been replaced many times—you are literally not the physical person that you were many years ago. There must be some “information” (which Kurzweil refers to as “patterns”) that defines who you are and tells the cells how to grow.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Keywords: Disruptive, Moore’s Law, 3D Printing, Screens, Image Recognition, Exponential Growth, Haptic Touch, Artificial Intelligence, The Singularity Endnotes 1 Excerpts from A Conversation with Gordon Moore: Moore’s Law (Intel Corporation, 2005), p.1 2 IBM: History of Transistors, IBM 1401 3 http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Ferranti/Ferranti.Sirius.1961.102646236.pdf 4 mKomo.org, “A history of storage costs” (http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte) 5 See http://www.netlingo.com/word/gilders-law.php 6 See Wikipedia.org articles on WiMax, 4G, UMTS, and Spectra Efficiency of long-range networks utilizing 802.11, 802.16, and 802.20 standards 7 CNET News, 19 Nov 2008,Q&A: Kurzweil on tech as a double-edged sword, Natasha Lomas, http://news.cnet.com/cutting-edge/?keyword=Ray+Kurzweil 8 http://www.vice.com/read/ray-kurzweil-800-v16n4 9 Source; BusinessWeek.com (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/bioprinting-the-3d-future-of-organ-transplants-01092012.html) 10 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11502715 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation 12 SonyInsider.com 13 Wikipedia article on Gyricon 14 Geek.com, “Apple has a mightier mouse that needn’t be moved at all”, 5 Oct 2009 15 USA Today, “Digital Sign Revolution”, 11 April 2012 16 “The Internet?

There are other laws or principles at play here also, such as Gilder’s Law5, which says that improvements in bandwidth will occur at 300 per cent of the rate of Moore’s Law. In the next five years we will be looking at devices capable of 1 Gbit/s downlink speeds.6 To put that in perspective, by 2016 our mobile phones or tablets will be able to download a DVD-quality movie from anywhere in less than a minute. The Singularity concept Ray Kurzweil is credited with extending this principle of computing advances into what is broadly known as the concept of the Singularity. The Singularity, according to Kurzweil and others like him, is a point in time in the not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in every way due to the emergence of true artificial intelligence.

“The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller (than the one computer at MIT in 1965) and so that’s a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we’ve actually seen in the last 40 years . . . “The rate is actually speeding up a little bit, so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years—and another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking. So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.” —Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist7 Kurzweil’s propositions are based on tracking the exponential growth of technologies on the basis of the various technology and network “laws”. These technology improvement cycles are actually speeding up, so the growth curve of core technologies such as integrated circuits or the rate of Internet adoption trends upwards where they eventually reach exponential growth.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

With the Platonic/Cartesian ideal of sensory mistrust, it seems almost as if computers were designed with the intention of our becoming more like them—in other words, computers represent an IOU of disembodiment that we wrote to ourselves. Indeed, certain schools of thought seem to imagine computing as a kind of oncoming rapture. Ray Kurzweil (in 2005’s The Singularity Is Near), among several other computer scientists, speaks of a utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers. To Ackley’s point, most work on computation has not traditionally been on dynamic systems, or interactive ones, or ones integrating data from the real world in real time.

While everyone has a unique way to get motivated and stay that way, all athletes thrive on competition, and that means beating someone else, not just setting a personal best … We all work harder, run faster, when we know someone is right on our heels … I too would have been unable to reach my potential without a nemesis like Karpov breathing down my neck and pushing me every step of the way.” Some people imagine the future of computing as a kind of heaven. Rallying behind an idea called the “Singularity,” people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make machines smarter than ourselves, who make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. This time will become, in their view, a kind of techno-rapture, where humans can upload their consciousnesses onto the Internet and get assumed, if not bodily, then at least mentally, into an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity.

., July 20–22, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html. 28 Antoine Bechara, “Choice,” Radiolab, November 14, 2008. 29 Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., 1982). 30 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968). 31 William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in The Tower (New York: Macmillan, 1928). 32 Dave Ackley, personal interview. 33 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). 34 Hava Siegelmann, personal interview. 35 See Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck; or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 599–633. 36 Roger Levy, personal interview. 37 Jim Giles, “Google Tops Translation Ranking,” Nature News, November 7, 2006.


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You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Pragmatic objections to this philosophy are presented. What Do You Do When the Techies Are Crazier Than the Luddites? The Singularity is an apocalyptic idea originally proposed by John von Neumann, one of the inventors of digital computation, and elucidated by figures such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. There are many versions of the fantasy of the Singularity. Here’s the one Marvin Minsky used to tell over the dinner table in the early 1980s: One day soon, maybe twenty or thirty years into the twenty-first century, computers and robots will be able to construct copies of themselves, and these copies will be a little better than the originals because of intelligent software.

Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems. This is another of the reasons I sometimes think of cybernetic totalist culture as a new religion. The designation is much more than an approximate metaphor, since it includes a new kind of quest for an afterlife. It’s so weird to me that Ray Kurzweil wants the global computing cloud to scoop up the contents of our brains so we can live forever in virtual reality. When my friends and I built the first virtual reality machines, the whole point was to make this world more creative, expressive, empathic, and interesting. It was not to escape it.

Been Fast So Long, Feels Like Slow to Me Accelerating change has practically become a religious belief in Silicon Valley. It often begins to seem to us as though everything is speeding up along with the chips. This can lead many of us to be optimistic about many things that terrify almost everyone else. Technologists such as Ray Kurzweil will argue that accelerating improvement in technological prowess will inevitably outrun problems like global warming and the end of oil. But not every technology-related process speeds up according to Moore’s law. For instance, as I’ve mentioned earlier, software development doesn’t necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Russian billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner, for one, told world leaders and influential thinkers gathered at an elite annual conference in the Ukraine that “the emergence of the global brain, which consists of all the humans connected to each other and to the machine and interacting in a very unique and profound way [is] creating an intelligence that does not belong to any single human being or computer.”24 No doubt Yuri Milner is aware of the increasing popularity of futurist Ray Kurzweil’s ideas put forward in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. According to Kurzweil, “as we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening.”25 Or as the description on the back of his book puts it, “our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today.”26 For Kurzweil and like-minded spin-off thinkers and followers, the future is going to be comprised of unlimited lifespan lived out in virtual realms where we will be liberated from all physical and mental constraints.

And so with the singularity—as with the general ideology of the future-first techno tomorrow—we live in complete comfort, doing as we please, and never ever having to change. Is it any wonder that in the future era there are an expanding number of real-world entities actively pursuing scenarios in which the quest for future ends in a kind of timeless stasis, an eternal sunshine for the spotless, digitally transformed consciousness? Ray Kurzweil and others perpetuating various iterations of the singularity have the avid support of corporations and institutions that matter. In 2013, Kurzweil went to work for the world’s biggest and most profitable tech company. He’s now full time at Google, working flat out on his quest to build an “artificial brain.”

“One who can be disconcerted by nothing that lies outside the sphere of choice.”25 And what about those things that do lie within our “sphere of choice”? Viktor Frankl talks about those who believe that the goal of life is to achieve some kind of harmony, “equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, homeostasis.” This reminds me of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity and other similar quests to advance technology to a point where human beings can transform into immortal beings presumably in perfect equilibrium with their host machines. It also reminds me of the prepper fantasy: the return to our “natural” state, liberated human beings eking out a living through harmonious interaction with the benevolent, abundant Earth.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

The institutions we take for granted – the economy, the government, the law, the state – these would not survive in their present form. The most basic human values – the sanctity of life, the pursuit of happiness the freedom to choose – these would be superseded.”7 But the world of the Singularity is far from being entirely negative for humanity. Indeed, for Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of AI enthusiasts, it is just the opposite. He sees a fusion between humans and AI that effectively enables us to “upload” ourselves into a nonmaterial form and thereby secure eternal life.8 (I suppose this is a more positive vision for us all, isn’t it? I don’t know about you but, personally, being “uploaded” into some form of AI for eternity does not exactly appeal to me.)

The first use of the term “singularity” to refer to a future technology driven event seems to have been by the legendary computer pioneer John von Neumann, in the 1950s. But it doesn’t seem to have caught on until, in 1983, the mathematician Vernor Vinge wrote about an approaching “technological singularity.”3 More recently, the “Singularity,” notably now sporting a capital “S,” has become closely associated with the name of Ray Kurzweil, who published his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology in 2005. He is currently Google’s Director of Engineering. He has predicted that computers will surpass the processing power of a single human brain by 2025. More strikingly, he has claimed that a single computer may match the power of all human brains combined by 2050.4 The Singularity is now generally taken to mean the point at which AI acquires “general intelligence” equal to a human being’s.

According to John Brockman, what he calls designed intelligence “will increasingly rely on synthetic biology and organic fabrication.” 8 Might we also be able to extend our own life spans by overcoming the limitations that our fleshly bodies place upon ourselves? That is to say, might technology provide the way to eternal life? Some IT enthusiasts think so.9 Ray Kurzweil believes that humans will inevitably merge with machines. This leads to the possibility of immortality. Singularians – for Kurzweil is not alone – aim to try to stay alive for long enough to reach the next life-prolonging medical breakthrough until they are ultimately able to merge with some form of AI and escape the restraints of mortality.


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Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Most influential books on me: Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. Introduction to the power of evolutionary algorithms and information networks inspired by biology. Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. What Moore observed in the belly of the early integrated-circuit (IC) industry was a derivative metric, a refracted signal, from a longer-term trend, a trend that begs various philosophical questions and predicts mind-bending futures. Ray Kurzweil’s abstraction of Moore’s law shows computational power on a logarithmic scale, and finds a double exponential curve that holds over 110 years! Through five paradigm shifts—such as electromechanical calculators and vacuum tube computers—the computational power that $1,000 buys has doubled every two years.

You never know what can happen, but this book made me feel that there is a neon futurist hope, a hopeful utopian future where we use technology to better our lives, enhance our creativity, and live longer, happier, and healthier lives that are not plagued with disease, and where we use our resources in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet. I hope for that future. The Singularity Is Near informed my music—I named an album after it, and I wrote a song called “Singularity” in 2012. I even got Ray Kurzweil in the music video. I then decided to create a concept album series called Neon Future. I wanted to not just fuse all my collaborative musical efforts into this concept but to also do songs with a scientist. Ray Kurzweil agreed to join me. I interviewed him in his apartment in San Francisco and also interviewed different people who inspired me. In Neon Future II, I continued that conversation with different people and non-scientists like J.

Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Fast-forward through college, to after my father passed away. I got into studying cancer so I could understand what killed my dad. It was eye-opening. It got me looking into the future at how science is finding cures for other diseases. It all pointed to The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It opened me up to the idea of science fiction becoming science fact. I grew up reading comic books, and I loved sci-fi and anime. Ghost in the Shell was my favorite anime. I also really liked Armitage III, which dealt with the issues of self-aware robots. I read Ray’s other books, which feature radical future science concepts, and it showed me how some of these ideas are actually attainable.


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As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

And, if you are a teenager, by the time you have a few grandchildren (say 2048) … These kids may carry around the equivalent of $1,000 PCs … With a processing capacity equal to all the human brains in the United States. (These trends have led to a very public debate between two great minds, MIT’s Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and the chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, who wrote a very pessimistic essay for Wired titled “Why the Future Does Not Need Us.” If these trends interest you, these are great pieces).2 Just as the Industrial Revolution allowed some people to multiply their physical capacity a hundred- or a thousandfold … (And created large gaps between those who had machines and the education to use them and those who did not.)

Ironically, one of the drivers of Blue Gene was losing Celera’s business. When Celera asked for bids on its computer system, it provided the raw H. influenzae gene sequence and timed assembly on different machines. It took Compaq seven hours vs. IBM’s eighty-seven … 2. One of the best thinkers on these issues is Ray Kurzweil; see The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). His views upset many, including the chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, who wrote an extraordinary rebuttal in the April 2000 Wired titled “Why the Future Does Not Need Us.” www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. 3.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

They had come with questions of their own. They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?’

Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

As a result, growth can be ‘exponential’, but also take place at different ‘rates’. 16 Gordon E Moore, ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’, Electronics, 38: 8 (1965), 114–17. 17 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (2005), 111–12, and Ralph Cavin, Paolo Lugli, and Viktor Zhirnov, ‘Science and Engineering Beyond Moore’s Law’, Proceedings of the IEEE, 100 (2012), 1720–49. 18 On the assumption that the piece of paper is 0.06 mm thick. See e.g. Adrian Paenza, ‘How folding paper can get you to the moon’, Ted-Ed video, <http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-folding-paper-can-get-you-to-the-moon> (accessed 27 March 2015). 19 Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (2012), 249. Also see Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, chs. 2 and 3. 20 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 7–8. 21 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 22–6. 22 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 127. 23 Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind, 248–61. 24 The economic impact of this network effect is discussed by Michael Spence in his Nobel Prize lecture of 2001.

This growth in processing power has already had profound effects. Michael Spence, a Nobel Laureate in economics, notes that Moore’s Law resulted in ‘roughly a 10-billion-times’ reduction in the cost of processing power in the first fifty years of the ‘computer age’ (which, he thinks, began roughly in 1950). Ray Kurzweil, in his books The Singularity is Near and How to Create a Mind, stresses that this will continue. According to Kurzweil, the ‘fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories’.19 In explaining exponential growth, he says that: the pace of change for our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.

Donald Waterman, A Guide to Expert Systems (1986), Frederick Hayes-Roth, Donald Waterman, and Douglas Lenat, Building Expert Systems (1983). 7 Phillip Capper and Richard Susskind, Latent Damage Law—The Expert System (1988). 8 See John Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, in The Mind’s I, ed. Hoftstadter and Dennett. See also Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, ch. 2. 9 See e.g. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (2012), Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind (2014), John Brockman (ed.), Thinking (2013). Also relevant is the Human Brain Project at <https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en_GB> (accessed 23 March 2015). 10 Quoted in Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 30. 11 For a discussion of relevant science-fiction work, see Jon Bing, ‘The Riddle of the Robots’, Journal of International Commercial Law and Technology, 3: 3 (2008), 197–206. 12 Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014). 13 See Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

But as the years passed, I found that the question kept bouncing around in my head, and slowly I started to warm up to it, in a roundabout way. Some critics, such as Robert Wright, talk about a “global brain” uniting all the world’s disparate pools of information, while other visionaries—such as Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil—believe that the computational powers of digital technology are accelerating at such a rate that large networks of computers may actually become self-aware sometime in the next century. Did Arthur C. Clarke and The Matrix have it right all along? Is the Web itself becoming a giant brain? I still think the answer is no.

In the future, our networks will be caressed by a million invisible hands, seeking patterns in the digital soup, looking for neighbors in a land where everyone is by definition a stranger. Perhaps this is only fitting. Our brains got to where they are today by bootstrapping out of a primitive form of pattern-matching. As the futurist Ray Kurzweil writes, “Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons.”

That is, they answered by considering their own knowledge of what was in the box rather than by referring to their own previous false belief or to someone else’s current false belief. The robustness of this finding suggests that in autism there is a genuine inability to understand other people’s different beliefs.” Baron-Cohen, 70–71. We’re conscious of: Ibid., 130. “An absence of”: Dennett, 1991, 324. Only when we: Ray Kurzweil refers to this as the “Consciousness Is Just a Machine Reflecting on Itself” School. “ . . . consciousness is not exactly an illusion, but just another logical process. It is a process responding and reacting to itself. We can build that in a machine: just build a procedure that has a model of itself, and that examines and responds to its own methods.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Future of Life Institute. “Asilomar AI Principles.” Text and signatories available online. https://futureoflife.org/ai-principles/. Gaddis, J. L. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. . On Grand Strategy. New York: Penguin Press, 2018. Gilder, G. F., and Ray Kurzweil. Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI. edited by Jay Wesley Richards. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2001. Goertzel, B., and C. Pennachin, eds. Artificial General Intelligence. Cognitive Technologies Series. Berlin: Springer, 2007. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-68677-4. Gold, E. M. “Language Identification in the Limit.”

Zero Days, Thousands of Nights: The Life and Times of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities and Their Exploits. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1751.html. Adams, S. S., et al. “Mapping the Landscape of Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence.” AI Magazine 33, no. 1 (2012). Agar, N. “Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!” Journal of Evolution and Technology 22 no. 1 (November 2011): 23–26. https://jetpress.org/v22/agar.htm. Allen, C., I. Smit, and W. Wallach. “Artificial Morality: Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Hybrid Approaches.” Ethics and Information Technology 7, no. 3 (2005). Allen, C., G.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.” Diamandis is utopian in his belief that galloping progress in technology will solve human problems. This is best embodied in the Singularity University, an unaccredited educational institution in Silicon Valley that he founded in 2008 with inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. If he didn’t have so much tangible success, it would be easy to pigeonhole Diamandis as a wild-eyed dreamer. He would empathize with what Robert Goddard said after the New York Times had declared his goals unachievable: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once achieved, it becomes commonplace.”16 In humanity’s future, Diamandis foresees “nine billion human brains working together to a ‘meta-intelligence,’ where you can know the thoughts, feelings, and knowledge of anyone.”17 The Transport Guru Elon Musk wants to die on Mars.

Transhumanism is a worldwide cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to use technology to improve the human condition. Radical life extension is one aspect, as is the enhancement of physical and mental capabilities. Two prominent transhumanists are Nick Bostrom, a University of Oxford philosopher who has assessed various risks to the long-term survival of humanity, and Ray Kurzweil, the engineer and inventor who popularized the idea of the singularity, a time in the not-too-distant future when technology will enable us to transcend our physical limitations. This isn’t a prospect that leaves people apathetic. Author Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism “among the world’s most dangerous ideas,” while author Ronald Bailey said it’s a “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity.”

The most chilling example of this scenario is seen in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series of novels, where self-replicating doomsday machines are out there watching, ready to destroy life on a planet just as it begins to acquire advanced technology. Another variant of the singularity takes current efforts to fight disease and projects them into radical life extension, where technology helps us overcome all our mental and physical limitations. Ray Kurzweil has been the most eloquent proponent of this future. He’s a founder of the Singularity University, where the tech world’s movers and shakers pay tens of thousands of dollars for short courses on the cutting edge in AI and nanotechnology. Critics have mocked the idea of the singularity as the “rapture of the nerds,” and they’ve noted that only the wealthy will benefit from radical-life-extension technology.


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Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

., ‘Influence of HIV Status and Age on Cognitive Representation of Others’, Health Psychology, Vol. 17, Iss. 6, 1998 4 Lindquist, Ulla-Carin, Rowing Without Oars, John Murray, London, 2005 5 Goranson, A., Ritter, R. S. and Waytz, A., ‘Dying is Unexpectedly Positive’, Psychological Science, Vol. 28, Iss. 7, 2017 6 www.calicolabs.com 7 ‘Ray Kurzweil’s Plan: Never Die’, www.wired.com/­2002/­11/­ray-kurzweils-plan-never-die 8 It’s important to note that Kurzweil is not alone in this nonsense. The founder of Bulletproof Coffee is equally obsessed by the importance of his own life: ‘The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180’, www.menshealth.com/­health/­a25902826/­bulletproof-dave-asprey-biohacking/ 9 2019 commencement address by Apple CEO Tim Cook at Stanford University, news.stanford.edu/­2019/­06/­16/­remarks-tim-cook-2019-stanford-commencement, accessed 8 August 2019 10 The hospice movement proved a tremendous ally to the gay community during the AIDS crisis 10 BE PREPARED 1 The World Health Organization considers the death toll of 11,310 to be a significant under-estimate.

Disparaging age while idolising youth has always been the pitch. At one end of the spectrum, this is puffed up business as usual; at the further end – and it isn’t clear where Calico sits – are more radical outfits, with flavours of transhumanism that make de Grey’s ambitions look pedestrian. Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, declares that his strategy for life is never to die.7 He hopes to attain this goal with a healthy lifestyle, a strict low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, no-sugar diet and the regular consumption of a very large number of vitamins and supplements. (These products, newly branded as ‘Transcend’, are for sale, of course.)


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

The most famous such curve is that described by Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling of computer cost-effectiveness every twenty-four months. It has been recycled by the solar industry in the form of Swanson’s Law, showing the decline of the cost of silicon photovoltaic cells from seventy-six dollars per watt in 1977 to fifty cents per watt in 2014. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has put all these curves together in an exhaustive catalog that reaches a climax later in this century as a so-called “singularity,” when the capabilities of computers by many measures will surpass the power of human brains.3 All these curves document the essential identity of growth and learning as a central rule of capitalism.

But both complex systems and entropy represent surprising deformations of order. 2.“Costs and the Experience Curve, Why Costs Go Down Forever,” chapter 2 of Bruce D. Henderson, The Logic of Business Strategy (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1984), 47ff. 3.“The Six Epochs” and “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” chapters 1 and 2 of Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York, NY: Viking, 2005), 7–34. 4.William D. Nordhaus, “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not,” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, 1998. This epochal paper was delivered first to the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1993.


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Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, “Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation,” SSRN, January 24, 2017. some computer scientists are already arguing that AIs should be granted the rights of living beings Antonio Regalado, “Q&A with Futurist Martine Rothblatt,” MIT Technology Review, October 20, 2014. 57. In their view, evolution is less the story of life than of data Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (London: Penguin, 2000). Either we enhance ourselves with chips, nanotechnology, or genetic engineering Future of Life Institute, “Beneficial AI 2017,” https://futureoflife.org/bai-2017/. to presume that our reality is itself a computer simulation Clara Moskowitz, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?”

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Peter Thiel and the Cathedral,” Patheos.com, June 24, 2014, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/06/peter-thiel-and-the-cathedral/ (accessed January 10, 2018). 71. One Bay Area startup harvests the blood of young people Maya Kosoff, “This Anti-aging Start-up Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood,” Vanity Fair, June 2017. Then, say the chief scientists at the world’s biggest internet companies Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2005). Truls Unholt, “Is Singularity Near?” TechCrunch, February 29, 2016. 72. We need a Reason for what we do Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2013). 74. But agriculture also reduced the biodiversity of the human diet Robert M.


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Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Definitions of this type are often variants of the following: “AI is technology with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence”.39 The inventor of the term AI, John McCarthy, has said that there is not yet “a solid definition of intelligence that doesn’t depend on relating it to human intelligence”.40 Similarly, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote in 1992 that the most durable definition of AI is “[t]he art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people”.41 The main problem with parasitic tests is that they are circular. Kurzweil admitted that his own definition, “… does not say a great deal beyond the words ‘artificial intelligence’”.42 In 2011, Nevada adopted the following human-centric definition for the purpose of legislation regulating self-driving cars: “the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings”.43 The definition was repealed in 2013 and replaced with a more detailed definition of “autonomous vehicle”, which was not tied to human actions at all.44 Although it is no longer on the statute books, Nevada’s 2011 law remains an instructive example of why human-centric definitions of intelligence are flawed.

In January 2017, Google Brain announced that technicians had created AI software which could itself develop further AI software.114 Similar announcements were made around this time by the research group OpenAI,115 MIT,116 the University of California, Berkeley and DeepMind.117 And these are only the ones we know about—companies, governments and even some independent individual AI engineers are likely to be working on processes which go far beyond what those have yet made public. 6 Optimists, Pessimists and Pragmatists Commentators on the future of AI can be grouped into three camps: the optimists, the pessimists and the pragmatists.118 The optimists emphasise the benefits of AI and downplay any dangers. Ray Kurzweil has argued “… we have encountered comparable specters, like the possibility of a bioterrorist creating a new virus for which humankind has no defence. Technology has always been a double edged sword, since fire kept us warm but also burned down our villages”.119 Similarly, engineer and roboethicist Alan Winfield said in a 2014 article: “If we succeed in building human equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a full understanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to produce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem.

, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology Working Paper, September 2013, http://​www.​oxfordmartin.​ox.​ac.​uk/​downloads/​academic/​future-of-employment.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. See also Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions : How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005). 7Several nineteenth-century thinkers including Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace arguably predicted the advent of AI and even prepared designs for machines capable of carrying out intelligent tasks. There is some debate as to whether Babbage actually believed that such a machine was capable of cognition.


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The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Nic Brisbourne, “Solar Power—A Case Study in Exponential Growth,” The Equity Kicker, September 25, 2012, http://www.theequitykicker.com/2012/09/25/solar-powera-case-study-in -exponential-growth/ (accessed May 27, 2013). 44. Max Miller, “Ray Kurzweil: Solar Will Power the World in 16 Years,” Big Think, March 17, 2011, http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years (accessed June 1, 2013). 45. Eric Wesoff, “Mainstream Media Discovers Solar Power and Moore’s Law,” Greentech Media, November 8, 2011, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles /read/Mainstream-Media-Discov ers-Solar-Power-and-Moores-Law (accessed October 9, 2013). 46.

Still, the powers that be continually lowball their projections of renewable energy’s future share of the global energy market, in part because, like the IT and telecommunications industry in the 1970s, they aren’t anticipating the transformative nature of exponential curves, even when faced with the cumulative doubling evidence of several decades. Ray Kurzweil, the MIT inventor and entrepreneur who is now head of engineering at Google and has spent a lifetime watching the powerful disruptive impact of exponential growth on the IT industry, did the math just on solar alone. Based on the past 20 years of doubling, Kurzweil concluded that “after we double eight more times and we’re meeting all of the world’s energy needs through solar, we’ll be using one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on earth.”49 Eight more doublings will take just 16 years, putting us into the solar age by 2028.

Rudolf Rechsteiner, “Wind Power in Context—A Clean Revolution in the Energy Sector,” EnergyWatchGroup, December 2008, http://www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf /2009-01_Wind_Power_Report.pdf (accessed November 4, 2013). 48. “Wind Power Experiencing Exponential Growth Globally,” Renewable Energy Worldwide, January 30, 2009, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/01/wind-power -experiencing-exponential-growth-globally-54631 (accessed January 9, 2013). 49. Miller, “Ray Kurzweil.” 50. Greg Price, “How Much Does the Internet Cost to Run?,” Forbes, March, 14, 2012, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/03/14/how-much-does-the-internet-cost-to-run/ (accessed July 18, 2013). 51. “UN Projects 40% of World Will Be Online By Year End, 4.4 Billion Will Remain Unconnected,” UN News Centre, October 7, 2013, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

So if we are programming the web to remember, should we also be programming it to forget—not by expunging information, but by encouraging certain information to drift, so to speak, to the back of the web’s mind? THE MEANS OF CREATIVITY October 14, 2007 I WAS FLIPPING THROUGH the new issue of The Atlantic today when I came across this nugget from Ray Kurzweil: “The means of creativity have now been democratized. For example, anyone with an inexpensive high-definition video camera and a personal computer can create a high-quality, full-length motion picture.” Yep. Just as the invention of the pencil made it possible for anyone to write a high-quality, full-length novel.

On the net as off, things gravitate toward large objects. The center holds. RESURRECTION February 16, 2009 THE SINGULARITY—THAT much-anticipated moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man immortal at the instant of his obsolescence—has been called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In an interview in Rolling Stone, Kurzweil describes how, in the wake of the Singularity, it will be possible not only to preserve the living for eternity (by uploading their minds into computers) but to resurrect the dead (by reassembling the information that formed their vital essence).

People would often talk about how they could spend hours lost in a reverie of seemingly aimless Googling. That’s much less the case now. Google’s conception of searching has changed since those early days, and that means our own idea of what it means to search is changing as well. Google’s goal is no longer to read the web. It’s to read us. Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and AI speculator, recently joined the company as a director of engineering. His general focus will be on machine learning and natural language processing. But his particular concern will entail reconfiguring the company’s search engine to focus not outwardly on the world but inwardly on the user.


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Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Of course, highlighting the problem is not the same as solving it. . . . merge with the machines? Human–machine teaming, taken to its extreme, becomes a human–machine merger in which electronic hardware is attached directly to the brain and forms part of a single, extended, conscious entity. The futurist Ray Kurzweil describes the possibility as follows:24 We are going to directly merge with it, we are going to become the AIs. . . . As you get to the late 2030s or 2040s, our thinking will be predominately non-biological and the non-biological part will ultimately be so intelligent and have such vast capacity it’ll be able to model, simulate and understand fully the biological part.

For a summary of surveys of AI researchers on their estimates for the arrival of human-level AI, see aiimpacts.org. An extended discussion of survey results on human-level AI is given by Katja Grace et al., “When will AI exceed human performance? Evidence from AI experts,” arXiv:1705.08807v3 (2018). 32. For a chart mapping raw computer power against brain power, see Ray Kurzweil, “The law of accelerating returns,” Kurzweilai.net, March 7, 2001. 33. The Allen Institute’s Project Aristo: allenai.org/aristo. 34. For an analysis of the knowledge required to perform well on fourth-grade tests of comprehension and common sense, see Peter Clark et al., “Automatic construction of inference-supporting knowledge bases,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (2014), akbc.ws/2014. 35.

For an interesting analysis of Oracle AI, see Stuart Armstrong, Anders Sandberg, and Nick Bostrom, “Thinking inside the box: Controlling and using an Oracle AI,” Minds and Machines 22 (2012): 299–324. 23. Views on why AI is not going to take away jobs: Kenny, “IBM’s open letter.” 24. An example of Kurzweil’s positive views of merging human brains with AI: Ray Kurzweil, interview by Bob Pisani, June 5, 2015, Exponential Finance Summit, New York, NY. 25. Article quoting Elon Musk on neural lace: Tim Urban, “Neuralink and the brain’s magical future,” Wait But Why, April 20, 2017. 26. For the most recent developments in Berkeley’s neural dust project, see David Piech et al., “StimDust: A 1.7 mm3, implantable wireless precision neural stimulator with ultrasonic power and communication,” arXiv: 1807.07590 (2018). 27.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

This progress is generally expected to continue. On current trends a computer in 2029 will be sixty-four times faster than it was in 2017. If the technology continued to improve at the same rate, then in 2041 it would be 4,096 times faster. After thirty years, the computer would have grown millions of times more powerful. Ray Kurzweil and others predict that within the next decade or so, a normal desktop machine (costing $1,000 or thereabouts) will rival and surpass the processing power of the human brain. By 2050, ‘one thousand dollars of computing will exceed the processing power of all human brains on earth’.42 If this sounds unlikely, look back to where we have come from.

Bostrom cheerfully suggests it would not be smart in the sense that ‘a scientific OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 366 FUTURE POLITICS genius is smart compared with the average human being,’ but rather ‘smart in the sense that an average human being is smart compared with a beetle or a worm.’ 21 He adds, not very reassuringly, that the advent of a superintelligent AI system could lead to a ‘wide range of outcomes’ including ‘extremely good’ ones but also ‘outcomes that are as bad as human extinction’.22 In such a world, politics would revert to its primordial purpose: to ensure survival in a harsh world. Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil contend that in the long run, we’re heading toward a technological singularity, that is, a point at which machine intelligence comes to saturate the universe, absorbing all matter and life in its path.23 There would be no place for homo s­ apiens in such a world, let alone for politics. I’ve deliberately avoided devoting many pages in this book to how all-powerful AI systems might come to destroy the world—not because such a scenario is impossible, but because it’s already a popular topic of writing and one which can (unhelpfully) obscure the more immediate problems that we’ll have to face in the digital lifeworld.

Cade Metz,‘Google’s Dueling Neural Networks Spar to Get Smarter, No Humans Required’, Wired, 11 April 2017 <https://www.wired. com/2017/04/googles-dueling-neural-networks-spar-get-smarterno-humans-required/> (accessed 28 November 2017). 39. Silver et al., ‘Mastering’. 40. Domingos, Master Algorithm, 7. 41. Neil Lawrence, quoted in Alex Hern, ‘Why Data is the New Coal’, The Guardian, 27 September 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2016/sep/27/data-efficiency-deep-learning> (accessed 28 November 2017). 42. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York:Viking, 2005), 127, cited in Susskind and Susskind, Future of the Professions, 157; Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance:The Future is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2014), 55. 43. Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 121. 44.


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In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Many regard the noosphere as a prophetic foretelling of the Internet. Teilhard’s ideas also inform the concept of ‘AI Singularity’– the quasi-religious, teleological belief that Artificial Intelligence will overrun human intelligence by mid-twenty-first century.19 The main proponent of AI Singularity is the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. He claims that, by 2045, AI will have progressed so rapidly that it will outstrip humans’ ability to comprehend it. Once the Singularity has been reached, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. The AI Singularity futuristic narrative seems like a retelling of Teilhard’s Omega Point – or Judgement Day if you prefer – when the sum of intelligence in the universe accelerates exponentially thanks to self-improving Artificial Intelligence.

In a follow-up public letter printed in the British newspaper the Independent, co-signed by Stephen Hawking, computer scientist Stuart Russell and physics Nobel-winner Frank Wilczek,22 Tegmark and his peers raised the alarm about what might happen if AI takes over. Taking its lead from the film Transcendence (2014), these prominent scientists argued that the threat of human extinction is very real, very serious and closing in upon us. They are not the only ones worried about AI taking over the world. Ray Kurzweil – inventor, entrepreneur and currently the head of AI research for Google – thinks that this will happen by 2030. But how did all this talk about the AI Singularity start? The answer, not surprisingly perhaps, is to be found not in science but in science fiction. Vernor Vinge is a computer scientist, science fiction writer and winner of the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction.

He expressed these narrative ideas more explicitly in a 1993 essay, arguing that the creation of superhuman Artificial Intelligence will mark a point in history where ‘the human era will be ended’.23 The main argument for the inevitability of the AI Singularity in Vinge’s essay is Moore’s Law. He writes: ‘progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.’24 Ray Kurzweil adopted Vinge’s argument in a series of popular science books that explore the technological drivers, and potentially devastating impact, of superhuman Artificial Intelligence. Kurzweil marks the year 2030 as a watershed by extrapolating, like Vinge, from today’s exponential improvement of computers according to Moore’s Law:25 2030 thus becomes the year that computer complexity will surpass the complexity of information processing in the human brain.


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The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

It would seem that the task of rethinking economics is analogous to a macabre quandary - not only does technology force us to change our capitalistic mindsets, but we are also required to be very expedient in our efforts if we are to keep up with the speed of technological change. Thus, to begin the final chapter on the redefinition of capitalism, we need to understand the galloping tendencies of technological changes in the context of static economic theories. Technology and Invention: A Combinatorial Process Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor and futurist, once said that the exponential growth curves exhibited by current technological trends is based on the tendency of technology to ‘feed off’ technology. In light of the pace of change that we currently witness, this can be accepted as a fair statement if we are to accept that every technology that has been invented, is being invented and will be invented follows the very same formula - they are combinations of technologies that already existed and do not come out of sheer inspiration alone.

A primary reason for this mode of thinking is based on how we cognitively interpret the world and why we are constantly trying to predict the future. Sidebar 4-1 offers some neuroscience insights. Sidebar 4-1: A Rationale for Rational Expectations: Sources: ‘How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed’, Ray Kurzweil (2014); ‘Neuroscience for Organizational Change’, Hilary Scarlett, (2016); ‘Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Leading Organizational Change’, Robert A. Snyder, (2016). Rational Expectations is based on the innate working methodology of the human brain. We must remember that the human brain did not evolve in the current cosmopolitan and urban environment.

In fact, the brain can be seen as a constant prediction machine that is continuously trying to find safety and avoid risk. Our brain’s neocortex constantly predicts what it expects to encounter. It is an ingenious tool that recognises, remembers and predicts patterns sans arrêt and develops hypothesises of what we will experience. As Ray Kurzweil puts it, predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain. The statement below exemplifies how the brain is constantly predicting, even when there is no sign of apparent danger: “I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae.


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New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

And efforts of the global poor to share in the bounty of the wealthier parts of the world will seem ever less compelling if those of means feel morally entitled to plow ever more resources into machines meant to replace humans. An equality between humans and robots portends vast inequalities among humans themselves. ART, AUTHENTICITY, AND SIMULACRA Adam’s haikus in Machines Like Me may have been a sly reference to the work of Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, whose book The Age of Spiritual Machines systematically erodes distinctions between robots and persons. Kurzweil programmed a “cybernetic poet” to generate haikus like the following: Scattered sandals a call back to myself, so hollow I would echo.62 and other microworks that might pass for artifacts of human creation.

Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Autonomous Weapon Systems: Why a Ban Won’t Work and How the Laws of War Can,” Hoover Institution Stanford University Task Force on National Security and Law (2013), responding to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. 46. P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2009), 435. 47. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999). 48. Rebecca Crootof, “A Meaningful Floor for Meaningful Human Control,” Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 30 (2016): 53–62; Paul Scharre, “Centaur Warfighting: The False Choice of Humans vs. Automation,” Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 30 (2016): 151–166. 49.

,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 30, no. 1 (2010): 9–13; John Patrick Leary, “Keywords for the Age of Austerity 19: Resilience,” Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (blog), June 23, 2015, https://keywordsforcapitalism.com/2015/06/23/keywords-for-the-age-of-austerity-19-resilience/. 61. Jonathan Crary, 24 / 7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 62. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 166. 63. Sean Dorrance Kelly, “A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can’t Be an Artist: Creativity Is, and Always Will Be, a Human Endeavor,” MIT Technology Review, February 21, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612913/a-philosopher-argues-that-an-ai-can-never-be-an-artist/. 64.


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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The technology scholar Everett Rogers Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962), or see the writings on industrial revolutions from scholars like Joel Mokyr. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT We see this now on See, for example, Azalia Mirhoseini et al., “A Graph Placement Methodology for Fast Chip Design,” Nature, June 9, 2021, www.nature.com/​articles/​s41586-021-03544-w; and Lewis Grozinger et al., “Pathways to Cellular Supremacy in Biocomputing,” Nature Communications, Nov. 20, 2019, www.nature.com/​articles/​s41467-019-13232-z.

The coming wave is a supercluster, an evolutionary burst like the Cambrian explosion, the most intense eruption of new species in the earth’s history, with many thousands of potential new applications. Each technology described here intersects with, buttresses, and boosts the others in ways that make it difficult to predict their impact in advance. They are all deeply entangled and will grow more so. Another trait of the new wave is speed. The engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil talks about the “law of accelerating returns,” feedback loops where advances in technology further increase the pace of development. By allowing work at greater levels of complexity and precision, more sophisticated chips and lasers help create more powerful chips, for example, which in turn can produce better tools for further chips.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

.,,6 This remarkable statement exemplifies the tendency among transhumanists to extrapolate from observations about current technology states to breathtaking visions of immortality, spatial transcendence, and social transformation. Among the better-known examples of this tendency are the predictions by technical experts such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil that, given current accelerating rates of evolution in information and communication technologies, we will be downloading our consciousness into information networks within decades. 7 And yet what calls attention to transhumanism is less the specifics of the agenda and its promiscuous predictions than the legitimacy that the agenda has garnered.

The Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition held at MIT in November of 2005 attracted 17 teams, whose designs included "bacterial Etch-a-Sketches," photosensitive T shirts, and bacterial photography systems, thermometers, and sensors. A number of viruses have been assembled from scratch, including the polio virus and the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic. (Scientists trumpeted and defended the latter achievement/ while two leading techno-visionaries, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, pronounced the feat "extremely foolish" on the op-ed page of the New York Times. 6 ) In 2010, Craig Venter, another techno-visionary, built a synthetic genome that was able to support reproduction when implanted in a cell. Other researchers Level III Technology 69 have engineered the genes of Escherichia coli to incorporate a t\,venty-first amino acid, opening up an option space for design of organisms that has been unavailable to evolved biological systems for billions of years, since evolved biology is locked into the usual twenty amino acids (or at least was until human intelligence evolved to the point where new chemical bases for life could be created).


pages: 247 words: 71,698

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Gene let out a low whistle at the acknowledgement of what they had only suspected. Sean looked sideways at him. “I’m not surprised that you took this story to marketing managers and procurement and they didn’t believe it. A.I. must be a bit beyond their day to day concerns.” He stared off into the distance. “Are you familiar with Ray Kurzweil? Of course, you must be. He, among others, predicted that artificial intelligence would inevitably arise through the simple exponential increase in computing power. When you combine that increase in computing power with the vast computing resources at Avogadro, it’s naturally evident that artificial intelligence would arise first at Avogadro.

It will be trivial for every computer programmer out there to play around with creating artificial intelligences in their spare time. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a genie that won’t stay in its bottle for much longer. For more information on what happens when computers become smarter than humans, read The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. For a fictional account, I recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross. William Hertling Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the help, inspiration, feedback and support of many people including but not limited to: Mike Whitmarsh, Maddie Whitmarsh, Gene Kim, Grace Ribaudo, Erin Gately, Eileen Gately, Maureen Gately, Bob Gately, Brooke Gilbert, Gifford Pinchot, Barbara Koneval, Merridawn Duckler, Mary Elizabeth Summer, Debbie Steere, Jill Ahlstrand, Jonathan Stone, Pete Hwang, Nathaniel Rutman, Jean MacDonald, Leona Grieve, Garen Thatcher, John Wilger, Maja Carrel, Rachel Reynolds, and the fine folks at Extracto Coffee in Portland, Oregon.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

I’m not kidding: Back then, the word “computer” was just a job title. Computers were workers – mostly women – who did simple sums all day. It didn’t take long though before their task could be performed by calculators, the first in a long line of jobs swallowed up by computers of the automated variety. In 1990 the techno-prophet Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would even be able to outplay a chess master by 1998. He was wrong, of course. It was in 1997 that Deep Blue defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov. The world’s fastest computer at that time was the ASCI Red, developed by the American military and offering a peak performance speed of one teraflop.

In 2004 two prominent scientists authored a chapter suggestively titled “Why People Still Matter.”26 Their argument? Driving a car is something that could never be automated. Six years later, Google’s robo-cars had already covered a million miles without a mishap. Okay, one mishap – when a human decided to take the wheel. Futurologist Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 computers will be just as intelligent as people. In 2045 they might even be a billion times smarter than all human brains put together. According to the techno-prophets, there simply is no limit to the exponential growth of machine computing power. Of course, Kurzweil is equal parts genius and mad.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Not long after Hiroshima, Alan Turing hatched the idea that people are creating a successor reality in information. Obviously Turing’s humor inspired a great deal of science fiction, but I’ll argue it’s distinct because it poses the possibility of a new metaphysics. People might turn into information rather than be replaced by it. This is why Ray Kurzweil can await being uploaded into a virtual heaven. Turing brought metaphysics into the modern conversation about the natural future. Turing’s humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand’s humor lacks. Turing’s algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not.

We ordinary humans are supposedly staying the same (a claim I reject), while our technology is an autonomous, self-transforming supercreature, and its self-improvement is accelerating. That means it will one day pass us in a great whoosh. In the blink of an eye we will become obsolete. We might then be instantly dead, because the new artificial superintelligence will need our molecules for a much higher purpose. Or maybe we’ll be kept as pets. Ray Kurzweil, who helped found the university, awaits a Virtual Reality heaven that all our brains will be sucked up into as the Singularity occurs, which will be “soon.” There we will experience “any” scenario, any joy. Others simply expect that medical knowledge will deterministically be accelerated as well, granting people physical immortality.

Electricity was, aside from being a physical phenomenon, a folk tale with Grand Guignol undertones from its earliest days. The physician Giovanni Aldini had made a spectacle of using electrodes to make freshly dead corpses twitch at public demonstrations around the beginning of the 19th century. He created a public career a little like Ray Kurzweil’s today, claiming to have highly technical knowledge that would end the old cycle of life and death. He might have inspired Mary Shelley’s character Dr. Frankenstein. The audacious race to bring the force of life and death into sockets in every home tempted every theatrical impulse. So, Edison made a public spectacle of electrocuting an elephant.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Conclusion As we look into the future—its promises and its challenges—we are facing a brave new world, the most fast-paced and exciting period in human history. We’ll experience more change at a quicker rate than any previous generation, and this change, driven in part by the devices in our own hands, will be more personal and participatory than we can even imagine. In 1999, the futurist Ray Kurzweil proposed a new “Law of Accelerating Returns” in his seminal book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. “Technology,” he wrote, “is the continuation of evolution by other means, and is itself an evolutionary process.” Evolution builds on its own increasing order, leading to exponential growth and accelerated returns over time.

Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman.

the country’s new government: Reconciliation After Violent Conflict: A Hand-book, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), 2003. See section by Peter Uvin, “The Gacaca Tribunals in Rwanda,” 116–117, accessed October 19, 2012, http://www.idea.int/publications/reconciliation/upload/reconciliation_full.pdf. the gacaca tribunal: Ibid. Conclusion “Technology”: Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999), 32. Every two days: M. G. Siegler, “Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create as Much Information as We Did up to 2003,” TechCrunch, August 4, 2010. only two billion people: “The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures,” ITU News, December 2010, http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2010/10/04.aspx.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

David Gilbert, “From Deep Mind to Watson: Why You Should Stop Worrying and Love AI,” International Business Times, Mar. 18, 2016, www.ibtimes.com/deepmind-watson-why-you-should-learn-stop-worrying-love-ai-2339231 (accessed Oct. 8, 2016), quoting Harriet Green, general manager of Watson’s Internet of Things Unit. 16. Ray Kurzweil, “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence,” www.kurzweilai.net/dont-fear-artificial-intelligence-by-ray-kurzweil (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 17. Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom, “Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion,” in Vincent C. Müller, ed., Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence (Berlin: Springer, Synthese Library, 2014), available online at www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 18.

It is not capable of going out on its own and creating—in some iRobot-type of form—its own data construct.”15 IBM also has good reason for touting the safety and promise of its technology: Watson is anticipated to generate $10 billion in revenue for IBM by 2023. Noted futurist and AI cheerleader Ray Kurzweil welcomes the advance of superintelligence and believes man and machine will become one in a happy marriage he calls “the singularity.” He envisions an increasingly intertwined symbiosis between technology and human thought and perception. But even Kurzweil agrees with Yudkowsky’s goals for friendly AI and the perils of uncontrolled machine intelligence.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Nor do we know what format the brain uses to encode, in the way that we understand that computers use file formats such as JPEG and GIF to encode images, or DOC and TXT for text documents. Understanding the brain means not simply understanding how individual neurons work, but also how they interact with other neurons in parallel as part of a network. There are different ideas about how this is best achieved. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently employed at Google as one of its directors of engineering, has suggested using tiny microscopic nanobots to scan the brain. A bit like the injectable smart devices described in chapter three, Kurzweil’s vision calls for billions of these scanner nanobots, the size of human blood cells or even tinier, to enter the brain and capture ‘every salient neural detail’ by scanning from inside.

Life as they knew it was over. In a world of Moore’s Law, where advances in computing power are as predictable as clockwork, it is difficult to break free of this view of superintelligence. As though it’s Apple’s next iPhone launch, everyone wants to know the date on which they can expect it to take place. Last chapter’s Ray Kurzweil, for instance, predicts that it will take place in exactly 2045. Kurzweil is to the Singularity what Steve Jobs was to the smartphone: not the person to first come up with the idea, but certainly the one to popularise it. The founder of eleven companies (including Nuance, the AI company that provides the speech for Siri), he has been hailed as ‘the best person I know at predicting the future of Artificial Intelligence’ by no less an authority than Bill Gates.


pages: 274 words: 73,344

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche

airport security, Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, glass ceiling, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the market place

These were the words of the character named Archer in an episode of Star Trek that aired in 2001 (but took place in 2151). Truth be told, all computerized translation gadgets rely heavily on humans—both those with linguistic expertise and engineering know-how. The Futurist Has Faith Inventor and technologist Ray Kurzweil is probably best known throughout the world for his predictions about technology and how it will shape the future. At age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Before graduating from high school, he was invited to the White House and congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson for winning first prize in the International Science Fair for a computer he had built.

Quotes and other details provided by Carla Hurd in an interview the authors conducted in January 2012. 20. Quotes and other details provided by Franz Och in an interview the authors conducted in August 2011. 21. To see the full video interview with Kurzweil at the Huffington Post, visit www.huffingtonpost.com/nataly-kelly/ray-kurzweil-on-translati_b_875745.html. RESOURCES There are many associations for interpreters, translators, and language service providers throughout the world. Here are some of the largest and most important groups in the United States and Europe: American Literary Translators Association (www.utdallas.edu/alta) American Translators Association (www.atanet.org) Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (http://aiic.net) The Association of Language Companies (www.alcus.org) European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations (www.ceatl.eu) European Language Industry Association (www.elia-association.org) European Legal Interpreters and Translators Association (www.eulita.eu) European Union of Associations of Translation Companies (www.euatc.org) Globalization and Localization Association (www.gala-global.org) International Federation of Translators (www.fit-ift.org) International Medical Interpreters Association (www.imiaweb.org) InterpretAmerica (www.interpretamerica.net) National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (www.najit.org) National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (www.ncihc.org) Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (www.rid.org) INDEX Aariak, Eva, 32 Academy Awards, 169 “actionable intelligence,” 49–50 active language, 196 Afghanistan War, 40, 41 Africa, 105, 193 Afrikaans, 75, 192, 217 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 230 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 47 Ahmed, Nazeer, 117–18 AIDS, 11 airline industry, 76–81 Al Bawaba, 10 Algic languages, 16 Algonquian, 29 Allen, Woody, 176 alliteration, 114 Al-Qaeda, 44 Alter, Robert, 114 America, 16–18, 19–20 American cuisine, 154 American Pie (movie), 177 American Sign Language (ASL), 167, 168 American University of Beirut, 117 America’s linguistic preparedness, 44–47 Amharic, 86, 104 anagrams, 95–96 Anderson, Kirk, 158–60 Animal Crossing: Wild World (video game), 183 animation, 178–80 Annie Hall (movie), 176 Apple, 63–64, 65, 223–24 appreciation of literary translators, 98–99 Apter, Ronnie, 173–74, 175 Arabic and translation pleasures, 130, 138 saving lives, 10, 18 storytelling and religion, 98–99, 117, 118 technology, 205, 208–10, 215, 217, 226–27 war and peace, 38, 42, 43, 45, 48, 59 Arawakan, 154 Argentina, 154, 163 Armenian, 161 Asher, Aaron, 98 Asher, Linda, 93 Asia, 73, 86, 95, 105, 115, 156, 215 Assad, Bashar al-, 49 Assamese, 105 astronauts, 81–84 Athabascan, 16 Athar, Shohaib, 199, 201 Atwood, Margaret, 33 Auden, W.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Sure, there’s been inflation since Rockefeller, but there’s no disputing that we’ve decreased the time it takes innovative people to achieve dreams, get rich, and make an impact on the world—and this has largely been due to technology and communication. “A serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential,” writes the futurist and author Ray Kurzweil in his famous essay The Law of Accelerating Returns. “So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” Here we come, Star Trek! At the same time, many industries remain decidedly stuck in the past. Most large businesses stop growing after a few years.

That Could Value It at $15 Billion,” New York Times, January 13, 2011, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/groupon-readies-for-an-i-p-o/. Groupon was two years old as of November 2010. (The song I listened to while preparing the previous seven citations: shanesnow.com/song1.) 4 “A serious assessment of the history of technology”: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001, http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns (accessed February 15, 2014). A $1.7 million computer in 1990 could do 17 million “computations” per second. By 2003 a standard Dell could do 4 billion calculations per second and cost $1,600.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy 4, nos. 1–2 (2005): 87–101. 45. Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values”; Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?” (presentation, Vision 21 Symposium, Westlake, OH, March 30, 1993). 46. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2005); Singularity University, http://singularityu.org (accessed February 5, 2017); Wikipedia, s.v. “Ray Kurzweil,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil (accessed September 2, 2016). 47. “Machine-to-Machine Communications: Connecting Billions of Devices,” OECD Digital Economy Papers, no. 192 (2012). 48. Igor Aleksander, “The Self ‘Out There,’” Nature 413 (2001): 23; Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (New York: Free Press, 2011), iBook edition, chap. 11. 49.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice,” trans. Brigitte Dubiel (1797). I am indebted to Steve Hagen for pointing out this work as a parable for the power of technology. See Steve Hagen, Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom beyond Beliefs (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004), 28–29. 2. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 56–72; Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Owl Books, 2003), 70. 3. Jeremy Lent, “Louis C. K. and the Democracy of Consciousness,” Liology, November 20, 2013, http://liology.net/2013/11/20/louis-c-k-and-the-democracy-of-consciousness/ (accessed February 5, 2017).


pages: 290 words: 87,084

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

And they’ll get that because they’ve actually done an experiment that was interesting. Well, I don’t even do experiments, right?… And I’m in the media all the bloody time.’ It almost seems as though – exactly as with anti-wrinkle creams – we want to believe. A different and somehow spookier take on immortality is offered by Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant inventor – when he was 13, he turned telephone parts into a machine that could calculate square roots; later he taught computers to recognize and read text aloud – who essentially believes that technology will enable us to live forever. The downside is that we will all be computers.

We’ll have ‘eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.’ (‘Futurist Ray Kurzweil pulls out all the stops – and pills – to live to witness the singularity’, Wired, 24 March 2008) Immortality, then, is to be found in the overlap of the theories proposed by de Grey and Kurzweil. Regenerative medicine will allow each and every one of us to reach the ripe old age of Jeanne Calment, by which time we’ll be able to radically improve our bodies using technology.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

And although your smartphone doesn’t contain a fifteen-inch woofer, it transmits your endless library of music to any speaker system you’d like. 5 Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 6 Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate (Boston: Harvard Business School Publications, 2003). 7 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu; a Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927). 8 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu. 9 Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Donald Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958). 10 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). 11 Michael D. Lemonick, The Perpetual Now: A Story of Love, Amnesia, and Memory (New York: Doubleday, 2017). 12 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999). An initial rough draft of the human genome was announced in 2000, and an updated version was published in 2003. We’ve chosen 2000 as the year of completion, although note that “finishing” this project took more than another decade, and further analysis is ongoing. 13 The proposition that all creativity is cognitively unified was first advanced by Arthur Koestler and subsequently developed by cognitive scientists Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier.

And although your smartphone doesn’t contain a fifteen-inch woofer, it transmits your endless library of music to any speaker system you’d like. 5 Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 6 Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate (Boston: Harvard Business School Publications, 2003). 7 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu; a Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927). 8 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu. 9 Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Donald Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958). 10 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). 11 Michael D. Lemonick, The Perpetual Now: A Story of Love, Amnesia, and Memory (New York: Doubleday, 2017). 12 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999). An initial rough draft of the human genome was announced in 2000, and an updated version was published in 2003. We’ve chosen 2000 as the year of completion, although note that “finishing” this project took more than another decade, and further analysis is ongoing. 13 The proposition that all creativity is cognitively unified was first advanced by Arthur Koestler and subsequently developed by cognitive scientists Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

As he describes why he thinks this is a fantastic idea, I begin to choke on my noodles, much to Anders’ delight. ‘Ha! You see?’ he laughs, as I struggle for air. ‘You need a back-up. Everyone needs a back-up. What a waste of human life and potential, to die choking on noodles! Ha ha!’ (For a brief moment, I agree.) Ray Kurzweil – a director of engineering at Google, and probably the world’s most famous transhumanist – thinks that mind uploading will be possible in 2045, as Zoltan predicted. Most mainstream scientists are less convinced by Kurzweil’s estimates. (Anders is a little more conservative, which is one reason he’ll be putting himself in the nitrogen tank.)

When he learned that I’d been communicating with Zoltan, he sent him the following, unsolicited message: I understand that you are in contact with Jamie Bartlett regarding his book project, dealing with the internet and technology more generally. JB had been in touch with Anders Sandberg, who at first agreed to do a dialog with me for the end of Jamie’s book. He disappeared after the “first round” of our exchange. A few years ago (2008?), producers at the Daily Show, American television, asked me to tape a brief debate with Ray Kurzweil and I agreed. After quite a bit of discussion of details of how and when, etc., the idea was cancelled with no explanation. It is my assumption that Kurzweil changed his mind. My question is, are you up for a public discussion or just another coward who can’t back up the techno-worship you advocate?


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

This is the wave that will lift you or that will dump you. The fascination with technology and the future of work has inspired some important writings, including Martin Ford’s classic The Lights in the Tunnel, the more recent and excellent eBook Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and Ray Kurzweil’s futuristic work on how humans will meld with technology. Debates about mechanization periodically resurface, most prominently in the 1930s and in the 1960s but now once again in our new millennium. Average Is Over builds upon these influential works and attempts to go beyond them in terms of detail and breadth.

Most AI applications still require human support, and those applications, even if they spread considerably, will not come close to displacing all human jobs. Instead, intelligent machines will replace some laborers and augment the value of others in a slow and halting manner. The most radical hypothesis about future technology is Ray Kurzweil’s vision of a machine intelligence “Singularity.” Kurzweil argues that mankind will obtain the capacity to scan brains and upload them into computers. There will be many copies of each “person” and presumably these entities will exist for a long time, with the multiple copies making the “person” hard to wipe out, even in the event of a system crash.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

It provides the raw materials for the predictive algorithms that inform the decisions of individuals and groups. It underpins the automation of classrooms, libraries, hospitals, shops, churches, and homes.”24 With its massive investment in the development of intelligent labor-saving technologies like self-driving cars and killer robots, Google—which has imported Ray Kurzweil, the controversial evangelist of “singularity,” to direct its artificial intelligence engineering strategy25—is already invested in the building and management of the glass cage. Not content with the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and seven other robotics companies in the second half of 2013,26 Google also made two important purchases at the beginning of 2014 to consolidate its lead in this market.

In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

It doesn’t mean that the machine acquires knowledge or wisdom or agency, despite what the term learning might imply. This type of linguistic confusion is at the root of many misconceptions about computers.3 Imagination also complicates things. How you define AI depends on what you want to believe about the future. One of Marvin Minsky’s students, Ray Kurzweil, is a proponent of the singularity theory, a hypothetical future merging of man and machine that he thinks will be achieved by 2045. (Kurzweil is famous for inventing a musical synthesizer that sounds like a grand piano.) Singularity is a major preoccupation of science fiction. I was once interviewed for a futurists’ summit, and the interviewer asked me about the paperclip theory: What if you invented a machine that made paperclips, and then you taught the machine to want to make paperclips, and then you taught the machine to want to make other things, and then the machine made lots of other machines and all the machines took over?

Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems.”4 Facebook’s Yann LeCun is also a singularity skeptic. He told IEEE Spectrum: “There are people that you’d expect to hype the Singularity, like Ray Kurzweil. He’s a futurist. He likes to have this positivist view of the future. He sells a lot of books this way. But he has not contributed anything to the science of AI, as far as I can tell. He’s sold products based on technology, some of which were somewhat innovative, but nothing conceptually new.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Jacobowitz, PC magazine Jay Jaroslav, former scientist at MIT AI Lab Donald Johanson, paleoanthropologist, discoverer of Lucy George Johnson, science journalist, New York Times Tom Jones, former NASA astronaut Steve Kates, astronomer and radio host Jack Kessler, professor of neurology, director of Feinberg Neuroscience Institute, Northwestern University Robert Kirshner, astronomer, Harvard University Kris Koenig, filmmaker and astronomer Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State University, author of The Physics of Star Trek Robert Lawrence Kuhn, filmmaker and philosopher, PBS TV series Closer to Truth Ray Kurzweil, inventor, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines Robert Lanza, biotechnology, Advanced Cell Technology Roger Launius, coauthor of Robots in Space Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics and Spider-Man Michael Lemonick, former senior science editor, Time magazine, Climate Central Arthur Lerner-Lam, geologist, volcanist, Columbia University Simon LeVay, author of When Science Goes Wrong John Lewis, astronomer, University of Arizona Alan Lightman, MIT, author of Einstein’s Dreams George Linehan, author of SpaceShipOne Seth Lloyd, MIT, author of Programming the Universe Joseph Lykken, physicist, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Pattie Maes, MIT Media Laboratory Robert Mann, author of Forensic Detective Michael Paul Mason, author of Head Cases W.

But this leaves the crucial question unanswered: When will the singularity take place? Within our lifetimes? Perhaps in the next century? Or never? We recall that the participants at the 2009 Asilomar conference put the date at any time between 20 to 1,000 years into the future. One man who has become the spokesperson for the singularity is inventor and best-selling author Ray Kurzweil, who has a penchant for making predictions based on the exponential growth of technology. Kurzweil once told me that when he gazes at the distant stars at night, perhaps one should be able to see some cosmic evidence of the singularity happening in some distant galaxy. With the ability to devour or rearrange whole star systems, there should be some footprint left behind by this rapidly expanding singularity.

A slightly changed version appeared in Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993, http:­/­/­mindstalk.­net/­vinge/­vinge-­sing.­html. 17 “I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened”: Tom Abate, “Smarter Than Thou? Stanford Conference Ponders a Brave New World with Machines More Powerful Than Their Creators,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2006, http:­/­/­articles.­sfgate.­com/­2006–­05–­12/­business/­17293318_­1_­ray-­kurzweil-­machines-­artificial-­intelligence. 18 “If you could blow the brain up”: Kurzweil, p. 376. 19 Philosopher David Chalmers has even catalogued: http:­/­/­consc.­net/­mindpapers.­com. 20 “life may seem pointless if we are fated”: Sheffield, p. 38. 21 “One conversation centered”: Kurzweil, p. 10. 22 “It’s not going to be an invasion”: Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2006. 23 “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people”: Brian O’Keefe, “The Smartest (or the Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth,” Fortune, May 2, 2007, http:­/­/­money.­cnn.­com/­magazines/­fortune/­fortune_­archive/­2007/­05/­14/­100008848/­. 24 “It’s as if you took a lot of good food”: Greg Ross, “An Interview with Douglas R.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Craig Venter and Bob Hariri) and vice chairman of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI); and the co-founder and executive chairman of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to prospect near-Earth asteroids for precious materials (seriously). He is the author of books including Bold and Abundance, which have endorsements from Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil, among others. Behind the Scenes I’ve heard more power players describe Peter as a “force of nature” than any other person, except for Tony Robbins, a friend of Peter’s. Peter is one of those guys who, every time you meet them, leave you shaking your head and (productively) asking, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?!”

“When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.” “I saw this the other day, and this comes from Scott Belsky [page 359], who was a founder of Behance.” “The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people.” Peter co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil. In 2008, at their founding conference at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, Google co-founder Larry Page spoke. Among other things, he underscored how he assesses projects: “I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world?

Lewis), Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer (Thomas Seyfried), Ketogenic Diabetes Diet: Type 2 Diabetes (Ellen Davis, MS, and Keith Runyan, MD), Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet (Ellen Davis, MS) de Botton, Alain: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne), In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust) De Sena, Joe: A Message to Garcia (Elbert Hubbard), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Shōgun (James Clavell), The One Minute Manager (Kenneth H. Blanchard) Diamandis, Peter: The Spirit of St. Louis (Charles Lindbergh), The Man Who Sold the Moon (Robert A. Heinlein), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Stone Soup story DiNunzio, Tracy: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (Jim Collins), The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Brad Stone) Dubner, Stephen: For adults: Levels of the Game (John McPhee); for kids: The Empty Pot (Demi) Eisen, Jonathan: National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Jon L.


pages: 103 words: 24,033

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa

card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K

I would also like to thank my many bosses, colleagues, and students at all the different universities that have supported me and my research, including Tom Katsouleas, Barry Myers, Peter Lange, Kristina Johnson, Gary Gereffi, Ben Rissing, Jeff Glass, and Brad Fox of Duke University; Richard Freeman, Elaine Bernardt, and John Trumpbour of Harvard University; AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California, Berkeley; Larry Kramer, Dan Siciliano, and Joe Grundfest of Stanford University; Holli Semetko and Benn Konsynski of Emory University; and Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Naveen Jain, and Rob Nail of Singularity University. The students are too numerous to name. You will find them on the covers of my research papers. For the latest research that led to this book, I want to thank Neesha Bapat for cracking the whip and getting the data ready on time. Thanks to the Kauffman Foundation for enabling me to do such extensive research into entrepreneurship and immigration.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

In an influential 2012 book, Race Against the Machine, two MIT scholars of technology and business, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, argue that people aren’t very good at assessing the pace of exponential technological progress (for example, the repeated doubling in microchip power described by Moore’s law).11 They borrow a parable popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil.12 In the legend, a wise man invents the game of chess and presents it to his king. Pleased, the king allows the man to name his reward. The wise man responds that he wishes only modest compensation, following a simple rule. He would have one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling each time for each of the sixty-four squares.

Solow, Robert, ‘Manufacturing Matters’, The New York Times, 12 July 1987. 10. Basu, Susanto, and Fernald, John, ‘Information and Communications Technology as a General-Purpose Technology: Evidence from U.S. Industry Data’, German Economic Review, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 2007. 11. Brynjolfsson and McAfee Race Against the Machine. 12. Raymond ‘Ray’ Kurzweil (1948–) is a serial inventor and entrepreneur whose past innovations include programmes which allow computers to recognize text and convert it to speech. More recently he has become known for his writing on transhumanism, and the prospect that powerful technology will allow humanity to achieve near-immortality. 13. 


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

People like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have cautioned that technology could become so sophisticated that it decides to pursue its own goals rather than the goals of the humans who created it. The reason to worry has been articulated by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” as well as by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and most recently by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the University of Oxford. In Bostrom’s language, the fear is that technology is advancing so fast that the development of a superintelligence is imminent.

THINKING WITH TECHNOLOGY commuting a little less: www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/how-america-stopped-commuting.html. attendance at movie theaters: www.slashfilm.com/box-office-attendance-hits-lowest-level-five-years. Vernor Vinge: V. Vinge (1993). “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Whole Earth Review, Winter. Ray Kurzweil: R. Kurzweil (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books. Nick Bostrom: N. Bostrom (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ian Tattersall: As told to Dan Falk in the online magazine eon: http://eon.co/magazine/science/was-human-evolution-inevitable-or-a-matter-of-luck.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

AI is already everywhere, barely regulated and poorly understood, surveilling our purchases and clicks and learning how to nudge our behavior. AI can fly and land airplanes, make billion-dollar investment decisions, diagnose electrocardiograms, and guide manufacturing. “If all the intelligent software in the world were to suddenly stop functioning, modern civilization would grind to a halt,” predicted futurologist Ray Kurzweil way back in 2005, when AI was far less pervasive and sophisticated.4 So the question isn’t whether AI surveillance will permeate our society in the near future. It’s whether governments and businesses, which own valuable intellectual property, will have the wherewithal to govern AI in the interests of protecting democracy.

United Nations Human Rights Council, “Letter Dated 12 July 2019 from the Representatives of Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, the Congo, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the State of Palestine to the United Nations Office at Geneva Addressed to the President of the Human Rights Council,” 41st session, agenda item 3, July 12, 2019, https://ap.ohchr.org/Documents/E/HRC/c_gov/A_HRC_41_G_17.DOCX. Coda. Stop the Panopticon 1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatton and Windus, 1932). 2. George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949). 3. John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (New York: Doubleday, 1968). 4. Ray Kurzweil, “Singularity Q&A,” Kurzweil Library, September 2005, https://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-q-a. 5. Natasha Singer and Cade Metz, “Many Facial-Recognition Systems Are Biased, Says U.S. Study,” New York Times, December 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/technology/facial-recognition-bias.html.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

You would be in better touch with your body and its needs. You would be healthier. You would experience more meaning. Your soul would be nourished. “We’re going to be funnier; we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier. We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree,” predicted Ray Kurzweil, chief evangelist of the technological Singularity, a future tipping point when humanity and digital become one, merging the soul and silicon in glorious harmony. “Ultimately, it will affect everything. We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.”

It is the walk from the car to the doors of the sanctuary, the coffee and conversation after, the sound and smell and sight of everything that occurs in that moment in time, which makes it distinct and sacred from the other times and spaces of the week. “It’s about every human moment we have with each other,” Kim said, “in every moment we believe is meaningful and true about human life.” Sure, there are digital prophets like Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, who preach a future where we upload our souls to the cloud and transcend our earthly bodies to rule as gods in some virtual universe. But for most of us, the internet is a soulless place. The most meaningful moments in life are almost always physical. They happen when we are with other people, or perhaps when we are alone in the natural world.


pages: 299 words: 98,943

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

As our understanding of our bodies grows, the immortality engineers’ to-do list is therefore getting longer rather than shorter. The prescription for their elixir of life becomes ever more complex: cut back on fats, except omega-3; on alcohol, but not red wine; on bad cholesterol, but not good. One leading transhumanist, the respected inventor Ray Kurzweil, describes taking 250 supplements per day, a diet that would have made even the elixir-obsessed First Emperor balk. All of this might succeed in distracting us from the brute fact of our mortality, but it will not cure us of it. For centuries, many talented researchers have pursued the secret of aging—and believed they had found it.

The seekers of medical immortality are well represented by the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, whose book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008, written with his assistant Michael Rae) details his Engineering Approach to defeating aging. Another enthusiastic and readable immortalist is Ray Kurzweil, as reflected in his many books and articles on the subject, most notably Fantastic Voyage: Living Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, 2004), Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (also with Terry Grossman, Rodale, 2009) and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005).


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

By later in that same decade, a thaw was beginning. (In 1988, for example, Time magazine had AI back on its cover with an in-depth story called “Putting Knowledge to Work.”) Since then, the seasons of hype have come and gone. But the reality is that there has never been an actual regression in the technology. As Ray Kurzweil writes in his mind-bending book The Singularity Is Near: “I still run into people who claim that artificial intelligence withered in the 1980s, an argument that is comparable to insisting that the Internet died in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. The bandwidth and price-performance of Internet technologies, the number of nodes (servers), and the dollar volume of e-commerce all accelerated smoothly through the boom as well as the bust and the period since.

Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture,” New York Times Economix blog, January 5, 2012, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/want-a-job-go-to-college-and-dont-major-in-architecture. 6. Frank Levy, “How College Changes Demands for Human Skills,” OECD Working Paper, March 2010, http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/45052661.pdf. Chapter 2: Just How Smart Are Smart Machines? 1. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Viking, 2005), 206. 2. Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, “Automated Decision-Making Comes of Age,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2005, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/automated-decision-making-comes-of-age/. 3. Patrick May, “Q&A: Surgeon, Inventor Catherine Mohr Pushes Robotic Surgery to New Heights,” San Jose Mercury News, June 13, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25959851/q-surgeon-inventor-catherine-mohr-pushes-robotic-surgery. 4.


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The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For examples of simplistic, naive visions of how technology works in the world, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise Of Neo-biological Civilization (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). 6. For elaborations of unfounded “generational” thinking, see Jeff Gomez, Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (London: Macmillan, 2008); Neil Howe and William Strauss, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (New York: Vintage, 2000). 7.

See Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004). CH APTER 2. GO O GLE’S WAYS A ND M EA NS 1. Louis C.K. and Conan O’Brien, “Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy,” Late Night with Conan O’Brien, NBC TV, February 19, 2009, available at www.youtube.com. 2. Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey, quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 4. NOT ES TO PAGES 5 4–59 229 3. Marissa Mayer, Google I/O ’08 Keynote Address, June 5, 2008, available at www.youtube.com. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005). 7.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

And while he might well have been flummoxed by the anything-goes ethos of present-day social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, he also imagined a system that allowed groups of individuals to take part in collaborative experiences like lectures, opera performances, or scholarly meetings, where they might “applaud” or “give ovations.” It seems a short conceptual hop from here to Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button.26 The notion of a “world brain” once evoked by H. G. Wells and Otlet has found plenty of adherents in the modern era. Contemporary 292 E ntering the S trea m p­ undits like Ray Kurzweil, Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly, and others have all advocated the possibility of a global planetary awakening, as the Web takes us to the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. In the end, what distinguishes Otlet’s vision from these cyber-utopians is his belief in the positive role of institutions.

Otlet himself would surely have embraced their stated mission: “to gather the world’s information.” In 2008, Google founder Larry Page helped launch the Singularity University, a gathering of technologists dedicated to preparing for a Wellsian moment of technological transcendence predicted by, among others, Ray Kurzweil. It would take shape as a new form of collective intellect over the network as human minds became increasingly fused with so-called thinking machines within a vast global network. Google has often laid claim to a higher social purpose. In 2004, technology historian George Dyson reflected on his visit to the Googleplex in a muchdiscussed essay entitled “Turing’s Cathedral”: “I felt,” wrote Dyson, “I was entering a 14th-century cathedral—not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Echoing the sentiments of the ancient ascetic, they tend to regard the human physical form with disregard or even disdain. At best, the human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently. The notion of a technologically precipitated singularity was popularized by futurist and electronic music engineer Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil argues that human beings are just one stage in the evolution of matter toward higher levels of complexity. Yes, cells and organisms are more complex than mere atoms and molecules, but the human capacity for continuing development pales in the face of that of our machines.

April Rinne and Jerry Michalski, “Polymaths, Bumblebees and the ‘Expert’ Myth,” Washington Post, March 28, 2011. 25. Gordon Bell, Gordon Bell home page, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/ (accessed August 11, 2011). CHAPTER 5: APOCALYPTO 1. Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, The Last Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012). 2. Rocco Castoro, “Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy,” Vice, April 1, 2009, www.vice.com. 3. John Brockman, “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: A Talk with Kevin Kelly,” Edge, July 19, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly07/kelly07_index.html. 4. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 187. 5.


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

I am not suggesting that the nanobot revolution will happen tomorrow—so please do not quit your job just yet. However, it is something like this future we are headed to (assuming we do not blow ourselves up in the meantime, discussed later). How soon until we have technology of this sophistication? Optimists like Ray Kurzweil think it could be somewhere in the order of 2030 to 2040.26 Whether this is accurate or whether Kurzweil is off by half a century or more is not something we can investigate here. Rather, I would like to make a few points to show that it is not pure fantasy. The first point is that a precursor technology, 3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, is already in use and rapidly expanding.

Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (A. and C. Black, 1863). 24. There are about 7 acres of land per person in the United States, so there is more than enough land for everyone. 25. K. Eric Drexler, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (New York: John Wiley, 1992). 26. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 27. B. T. Wittbrodt et al., “Life-Cycle Economic Analysis of Distributed Manufacturing with Open-Source 3-D Printers,” Mechatronics 23, 6 (2013): 713–726. 28. Ibid. 29. Kira, “Exclusive: WinSun China Builds World’s First 3D Printed Villa and Tallest 3D Printed Apartment Building,” www.3ders.org, January 18, 2015, http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150118-winsun-builds-world-first-3d-printed-villa-and-tallest-3d-printed-building-in-china.html. 30.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

On the whole, it was evolutionary, not revolutionary.17 But for many in the new elite, technology represents far more than efficiency or convenience. It is both the beginning and the end, the material equivalent of a spiritual journey to nirvana. Google’s vision for the future is characterized by “immersive computing,” in which the real and virtual worlds blend together.18 Tech leaders like Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at Google, speak about creating a “posthuman” future, dominated by artificial intelligence and controlled by computers and those who program them. They look forward to having the capacity to reverse aging and to download their consciousness into computers. This vision rests on a faith in—or an obsession with—technological determinism, in which new technology is our evolutionary successor.19 But is this what most people want the future to be?

“The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.30 Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism is a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality.31 The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology.32 Although it sounds a bit like a wacky cult, transhumanism has long exercised a strong fascination for the elites of Silicon Valley. Devotees range from Sergei Brin, Larry Page, and Ray Kurzweil (of Google) to Peter Thiel and Sam Altman (Y Combinator). Kurzweil celebrates new technologies that allow for close monitoring of brain activity.33 Y Combinator is developing a technology for uploading one’s brain and preserving it digitally.34 The aim is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”35 In some ways, transhumanism seems natural for those who hold technology above all other values.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

With the advent of nanotechnology, this adventure leaves the realm of fiction. Researchers are perfecting microscopic devices known as nanobots and beebots (equipped with tiny stingers) that can swim through the bloodstream and directly target the site of a tumor or disease, providing radical new treatments. The futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that “by the 2030s we’ll be putting millions of nanobots inside our bodies to augment our immune system, to basically wipe out disease. One scientist cured Type I diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device already.” There are nanobots invisible to the immune system, which shed their camouflage when they reach their work site.

Would we judge it differently? For one of its gallery shows, Yale’s art museum accepted paintings inspired by Robert Motherwell, only to change its mind when it learned they’d been painted by a robot in Lipson’s Creative Machines Lab. It would be fun to discover robots’ talents and sensibility. Futurologists like Ray Kurzweil believe, as Lipson does, that a race of conscious robots, far smarter than we, will inhabit Earth’s near-future days, taking over everything from industry, education, and transportation to engineering, medicine, and sales. They already have a foot in the door. At the 2013 Living Machines Conference, in London, the European RobotCub Consortium introduced their iCub, a robot that has naturally evolved a theory of mind, an important milestone that develops in children at around the age of three or four.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

But Stross, and others like Ken MacLeod and China Miéville, have used fictions about future, past, and alternative worlds to give a fuller picture of class and social conflict. Fictional futures are, in my view, preferable to those works of “futurism” that attempt to directly predict the future, obscuring its inherent uncertainty and contingency and thereby stultifying the reader. Within the areas discussed in this book, a paradigmatic futurist would be someone like Ray Kurzweil, who confidently predicts that by 2049, computers will have achieved humanlike intelligence, with all manner of world-changing consequences.24 Such prognostications generally end up unconvincing as prophecy and unsatisfying as fiction. Science fiction is to futurism what social theory is to conspiracy theory: an altogether richer, more honest, and more humble enterprise.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Intr oduction xxxvii Markets are not instantaneously and perfectly efficient. Insights, and the ability to execute them rapidly in ever-faster electronic markets, will continue to be rewarded. Today, these insights come from people, using machines as tools. Some believe the machines will be able to play the game themselves.19 One is Ray Kurzweil,20 who started out making reading machines for the blind, met Stevie Wonder and branched out into electronic keyboard instruments for all, and accumulated a great deal of investable capital in the process. The arc of Kurzweil’s view of machine intelligence is traced in the titles of books he has written on the subject: The Age of Intelligent Machines (1992), The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Transcend Human Intelligence (2001), and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005).

The “digerati” (a hybrid of digital and literati ) would call this artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligence amplification (IA). * Moore’s Law is the well-known doubling of computational power every 18 months. Metcalfe’s Law is the less well-known maxim that the utility of a network grows as the square of the number of users. An Illustrated History of Wir ed Markets 27 Ray Kurzweil, one of the great inventors of our age, built a reading machine for the blind in 1976 and then started a musical instrument company with help from one of his customers, Stevie Wonder. Kurzweil created the market for modern electronic keyboards, and has continued to innovate and articulate the growing capabilities of computing.


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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

Google famously funded a project to “solve death.”6 This is such a precisely religious pretension that I’m surprised the religions of the world didn’t serve Google with a copyright infringement take-down notice.7 Google could have framed its work as life extension, or as aging research, but instead it went right for the prize, which is being the master of that which is most sacred within you. BUMMER must own you in order to own anything at all. Facebook also plays the game. The Facebook page of a deceased person becomes a shrine that one can only visit as a member, and to be a member you must implicitly become an adherent. Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, promotes the idea that Google will be able to upload your consciousness into the company’s cloud, like the pictures you take with your smartphone. He famously ingests a whole carton of longevity pills every day in the hope that he won’t die before the service comes online. Note what’s going on here.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction. That leaves the fourth scenario, in which we create new technology to make a much better future. The most dramatic version of this outcome is called the Singularity, an attempt to name the imagined result of new technologies so powerful as to transcend the current limits of our understanding. Ray Kurzweil, the best-known Singularitarian, starts from Moore’s law and traces exponential growth trends in dozens of fields, confidently projecting a future of superhuman artificial intelligence. According to Kurzweil, “the Singularity is near,” it’s inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it.


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski San Francisco, June 2013 Chapter 1 HISTORY AND TRENDS The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed. ~ William Gibson How can you tell if something will become so huge and powerful that it’s going to change our lives and the way we do business? Below is a well-known story, popularized by Ray Kurzweil and retold as we know it, that illustrates the power of exponential growth. In ancient China a man came to the emperor and demonstrated to him his invention of the game of chess. The emperor was so impressed by the brilliance of the man’s invention that he told the man to name his reward. The man asked for his reward in an amount of rice — that one grain be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on — doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

.§ For many crops, large farms could be replaced by precisely monitored and controlled microcontainers (Chapter 11). Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts could take care of financial services and other information goods (Chapter 12). The web has already greatly democratized access to information and educational resources (Chapter 10). Futurist Ray Kurzweil said in 2012 that “a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago,” and this diffusion of knowledge will certainly continue. And Moore’s law will continue to operate, driving prices down and performance up for all manner of digital goods, at rates unheard of in history prior to the computer era.

Spode, “The Great Cryptocurrency Heist,” Aeon, February 14, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum. 305 “In [minority members’] view”: Ibid. 305 “Ethereum Classic”: Ibid. 306 “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment”: Mike Hearn, “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment,” Mike’s blog, January 14, 2016, https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.rvh0ditgj. 306 “It has failed because the community has failed”: Ibid. 306 the performance of the Bitcoin system suffered: Daniel Palmer, “Scalability Debate Continues as Bitcoin XT Proposal Stalls,” CoinDesk, January 11, 2016, http://www.coindesk.com/scalability-debate-bitcoin-xt-proposal-stalls. 306 Chinese exchanges accounted for 42%: Nathaniel Popper, “How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War,” New York Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/business/dealbook/bitcoin-china.html. 306 an estimated 70% of all Bitcoin-mining gear: Danny Vincent, “We Looked inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine,” BBC News, May 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160504-we-looked-inside-a-secret-chinese-bitcoin-mine. 308 “a kid in Africa with a smartphone”: Brandon Griggs, “Futurist: We’ll Someday Accept Computers as Human,” CNN, March 12, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/tech/innovation/ray-kurzweil-sxsw. 309 “The Nature of the Firm”: R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937): 386–405, http://www.richschwinn.com/richschwinn/index/teaching/past%20courses/Econ%20340%20-%20Managerial%20Economics/2013%20Fall%20340%20-%20The%20Nature%20of%20the%20Firm.pdf. 311 “Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies”: Thomas W.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

., “Job Satisfaction.” 4.Blanchflower and Oswald, “Well-Being, Insecurity, and the Decline of American Job Satisfaction.” 5.Crabtree, “Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work.” 6.Dreyer and Hindley, “Trade in Information Technology Goods.” 7.The Economist, “Planet of the Phones.” 8.Bogost, “The Secret History of the Robot Car.” 9.The “second half of the chessboard” is an expression by Ray Kurzweil to explain the power of exponential growth. Legend has it that when the inventor of chess presented the game to the emperor of India and was offered to choose a reward, he asked for one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so one. The emperor found the request modest but accepted it.

(i)n17 savings aggregate (i) corporate (cash hoarding) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) retirement (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Schmidt, Eric (i) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Schumpeterian innovation (i), (ii) “scientific civilization” thinking, and planning (i) scientific research (i) see also R&D; research Scrooge character (i) “second half of the chessboard” (Ray Kurzweil) (i) Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) (i), (ii) Second World countries, and globalization (i) Seinfeld (TV series) Art Vandelay and “importer-exporter” conversation (i), (ii) “Art Vandelay logistics operation” (i) self-driving vehicles see driverless vehicles self-regulation (i) Sellers, Peter (i) Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, Le Défi américain (The American Challenge) (i) services and globalization (i) and market contestability (i), (ii) and second unbundling of production (i) see also online services “servicification” (or “servitization”) (i), (ii) SetPoint nerve stimulator (i) shale gas, and regulation in Europe (i) shareholders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) shares buybacks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) share/stock structures (i) see also stock markets Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound (i) shipping containers (i) short-termism (i) Sidecar (i) SIFIs (systemically important financial institutions) (i) Silicon Valley (i), (ii), (iii) silo curse (i) Silvia, John (i) Simons, Bright (i) Simphal, Thibaud (i) Sinclair, Clive (i) Sinn, Hans-Werner, “bazaar economy” (i) size see corporate size skill deficiencies, and productivity (i) Skype (i), (ii) Slyngstad, Yngve (i) smartphones (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Smith, Adam economy of specialization (i) labor and wealth (i) “man of system” (i) The Wealth of Nations (i), (ii) Smiths, The (rock band), “hang the DJ” lyric (i) social democratic vision (i) social regulation (i), (ii) socialism and bureaucracy (i) and community-generated content (i) corporate socialism (i), (ii) and Cybersyn project (i) and death of capitalism utopia (i) and labor vs. work (i) market socialism (i) and open source technology (i) socialist planning (i) and Swedish hybrid economy (i) Söderberg, Hjalmar (i) software technology, and regulation (i) Sombart, Werner (i) Sony (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) sourdough production, history of (i) South Africa, taxi services and regulation (i) South Korea “Asian Tiger” (i) R&D spending (i) Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (i) sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) (i), (ii), (iii) “Soviet–Harvard illusion” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) (i) space flights, commercial (i) SpaceX (i) Spain biofuels regulation (i) and diffusion of innovations (i) and globalization (i) left-wing populism (i) lesser dependence on larger enterprises (i) pensions (i) public debt (i) taxi services and regulation (i) specialization and corporate control (i) and creative destruction (i) and deregulation (i) and firm boundaries (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and organization (i) and sunk costs (i), (ii) vertical (i), (ii) speech codes, in universities (i) staff turnover rates, and economic dynamism (i) Stanford University (i), (ii) Star Trek (TV series) (i) start-ups (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Startup Genome Report (i) statistics see recorded data (national accounts) Statoil (i) Stein, Gertrude, “there is no there there” quote (i) Stern, Ariel Dora (i) stock markets changing role of (i) and corporate politics (i) post-financial crisis growth (i) and sovereign wealth funds (i) see also shareholders; shares stockholding periods (i), (ii), (iii) strategic management (i) strategic planning (i) strategy, and managerialism (i) Stratos pacemaker (i) subprime mortgage crisis (US) (i) see also financial crisis (2007) subsidies domestic companies (i) US firms (i) sunk costs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Sunstein, Cass (i) supply chains fragmentation of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) German-Central European supply chain (i), (ii) globalization of (i), (ii) and market concentration (i) marketization of (i) and multinationals (i) and Nokia (i) outsourcing of (i) and private standards (i) see also value chains Sweden corporate renewal levels (i) economic situation: 1970s–1980s (i); globalization and post-financial crisis (i) productivity and incomes (i) services and globalization (i) sourdough hotel (Stockholm) (i) state telecommunication monopoly and mobile technology (i) SWFs (sovereign wealth funds) (i), (ii), (iii) SWOT analyses (i) systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) (i) Tabarrok, Alex (i) tablets (i), (ii) Taibbi, Matt, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As the project’s first big-splash Long Bet, Kapor wagered $20,000 (all winnings earmarked for worthy nonprofit institutions) that by 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test. (To pass a Turing Test, typically conducted via the equivalent of instant messaging, a computer program must essentially fool human beings into believing that they are conversing with a person rather than a machine.) Taking the other side of the bet was Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor responsible for breakthroughs in electronic musical instruments and speech recognition who had more recently become a vigorous promoter of an aggressive species of futurism. Kurzweil’s belief in a machine that could ace the Turing Test was one part of his larger creed—that human history was about to be kicked into overdrive by the exponential acceleration of Moore’s Law and a host of other similar skyward-climbing curves.

Bill Gates in Singapore: Rohan Sullivan, “Gates Says Technology Will One Day Allow Computer Implants—but Hardwiring’s Not for Him,” Associated Press, July 5, 2005. Archived at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200507/msg00029.htm. “relief from the confusions of the world”: Ellen Ullman, The Bug (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003), p. 9. Kapor’s Long Bet with Ray Kurzweil is chronicled at http://www.longbets.org/1. “radical transformation of the reality”: Kurzweil described his vision of the Singularity in a talk hosted by the Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, September 23, 2005. Video of the event is at http://video.google.com/video play?docid=610691660251309257.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

He projected then that every two years or so the processing power of computers would double, and yet its cost would halve. Sceptics at the time claimed that this trend would last for a few years and no more. In the event, it is still going strong and computer scientists and material scientists say that it is likely to continue unabated for the foreseeable future. In his formidable book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil gives a practical illustration of the future consequences of Moore’s Law, if it continues to hold. By 2020, we are told, the average desktop computer will have the same processing power as the human brain, which neuroscientists tell us is approximately 1016 calculations per second. I find it amazing that in 1973, when I was 12, I held in my hand my first (large) electronic calculator, and that in less than 50 years a machine of the same size will have the same processing power as the human brain.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

What would be the moral case for humans to make significant decisions if there was another, superior, system? And what then would a democracy be, except an inefficient way to make consistently bad choices? Futurists often talk about something they call the ‘technological singularity’. It’s the point at which machine self-improvement sparks a runaway, self-replicating cycle. Ray Kurzweil, capo di capi of futurists, undoubted genius and scientist at Google, has suggested this will occur around the middle of the century. (Others disagree.) Far sooner and more likely, in my view, is what I’ll call the ‘moral singularity’ – the point at which we will start to delegate substantial moral and political reasoning to machines.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling (New York: Bantam, 1996) Long life changes life. Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson (New York: Harper, 1989) Sophisticated hope. The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz (New York: Doubleday, 1991) Scenarios engage and free the future. The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil (New York: Viking, 1999) Beyond Moore’s Law. Deep Time, Gregory Benford (New York: Avon, 1999) Signalling through millennia. Future Survey, Michael Marien, ed. (Monthly newsletter, $79/year from: World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Ave., Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA) All the good new books and articles about the future.


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Then an artificial intelligence takes over the world, rendering the preceding plot meaningless. To be produced and distributed worldwide through the S-DTV portal! They are so keen on their sci-fi TV show idea that they named their blockchain startup after it. It appears that they are in fact Singularitarians — fans of Ray Kurzweil’s non-musical-instrument ideas, like an artificial intelligence taking over the world this century — who came up with a way to propagandise their beliefs in Ethereum and the Singularity (and crank pseudoeconomics) through the medium of science fiction television, and decided a crypto asset offering was clearly the way to collect money to make the TV show to evangelise their cult.432 Summary Blockchains won’t solve your bad recording or publishing deal.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“suddenly become opaque and bewildering”: Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 186. 100 billion sentences: Actually, to avoid duplicate sentences, it’s really 10,000 nouns × 1,000 verbs × 9,999 nouns. It would still take more than 30,000 years to go through these sentences. from the linguist Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994; repr. HarperPerennial, 1995), 205. “This is the cheese”: Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 95. Consider Kant Generator: Program via Mark Pilgrim, Dive into Python: Python from Novice to Pro, updated 2004. Available free online: http://www.diveintopython.net/xml_processing/. While this program allows for embedding clauses within others, it seems that Kant Generator is not in fact infinitely recursive, as it will always terminate.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

That right isn’t limited by any expiry date. An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth. Notable examples are the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and the polymath and inventor Ray Kurzweil (winner of the 1999 US National Medal of Technology and Innovation). In 2012 Kurzweil was appointed a director of engineering at Google, and a year later Google launched a sub-company called Calico whose stated mission is ‘to solve death’.26 Google has recently appointed another immortality true-believer, Bill Maris, to preside over the Google Ventures investment fund.

Thus Hindus believe that humans can and should merge into the universal soul of the cosmos – the atman. Christians believe that after death saints are filled by the infinite grace of God, whereas sinners cut themselves off from His presence. Indeed, in Silicon Valley the Dataist prophets consciously use traditional messianic language. For example, Ray Kurzweil’s book of prophecies is called The Singularity is Near, echoing John the Baptist’s cry: ‘the kingdom of heaven is near’ (Matthew 3:2). Dataists explain to those who still worship flesh-and-blood mortals that they are overly attached to outdated technology. Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm.


Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business by Ernie Chan

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, Brownian motion, business continuity plan, buy and hold, classic study, compound rate of return, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, endowment effect, financial engineering, fixed income, general-purpose programming language, index fund, Jim Simons, John Markoff, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, p-value, paper trading, price discovery process, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, transaction costs

But, in general, the more rules the strategy has, and the more parameters the model has, the more likely it is going to suffer data-snooping bias. Simple models are often the ones that will stand the test of time. (See the sidebar on my views on artificial intelligence and stock picking.) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND STOCK PICKING* There was an article in the New York Times a short while ago about a new hedge fund launched by Mr. Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. (Thanks to my fellow blogger, Yaser Anwar, who pointed it out to me.) According to Kurzweil, the stock-picking decisions in this fund are supposed to be made by machines that “. . . can observe billions of market transactions to see patterns we could never see” (quoted in Duhigg, 2006).


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

We owe a special debt to the many visionaries and pioneers who have blazed AI trails and whose work has inspired and informed us, including Herbert Simon, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Arthur Samuel, Edward Feigenbaum, Joseph Weizenbaum, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, Peter Norvig, Douglas Hofstadter, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Yann LeCun, and Andrew Ng, among many others. And huge gratitude to our colleagues who provided insights and inspiration, including Nicola Morini Bianzino, Mike Sutcliff, Ellyn Shook, Marc Carrel-Billiard, Narendra Mulani, Dan Elron, Frank Meerkamp, Adam Burden, Mark McDonald, Cyrille Bataller, Sanjeev Vohra, Rumman Chowdhury, Lisa Neuberger-Fernandez, Dadong Wan, Sanjay Podder, and Michael Biltz.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This situation may well change as innovation becomes an increasingly active area of investigation, with researchers beginning to grapple with questions such as what is innovation, how do we measure it, how does it happen, and how can it be facilitated?4 The well-known inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has compiled and analyzed a list of his candidates for major innovations in a form that is highly suitable for comparison with our predictions.5 His results are shown in Figures 80 and 81, where the time between successive innovations is plotted against how long ago each innovation happened. Two versions are presented: one semilogarithmic (meaning that the vertical axis is logarithmic while the horizontal one is linear), and the other logarithmic for both axes.

It also brings up the classic philosophical question as to what extent these machines are “thinking.” What, in fact, do we mean by that? Are they already smarter than we are? Will superintelligent robots eventually replace us? The specter of such science fiction fantasies seems to be rapidly encroaching on us. Indeed, we can readily appreciate why some like Ray Kurzweil believe that the next paradigm shift will involve the integration of humans with machines, or eventually lead to a world dominated by intelligent robots. As I expressed earlier I have a fairly jaundiced view of such futurist thinking, though the questions raised are fascinating and very challenging and need to be addressed.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Observers in earlier epochs might have found it equally preposterous to suppose that the world economy would one day be doubling several times within a single lifespan. Yet that is the extraordinary condition we now take to be ordinary. The idea of a coming technological singularity has by now been widely popularized, starting with Vernor Vinge’s seminal essay and continuing with the writings of Ray Kurzweil and others.4 The term “singularity,” however, has been used confusedly in many disparate senses and has accreted an unholy (yet almost millenarian) aura of techno-utopian connotations.5 Since most of these meanings and connotations are irrelevant to our argument, we can gain clarity by dispensing with the “singularity” word in favor of more precise terminology.

Stephen Hawking even suggested that taking this step might be necessary in order to keep up with advances in machine intelligence: “We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it” (reported in Walsh [2001]). Ray Kurzweil concurs: “As far as Hawking’s … recommendation is concerned, namely direct connection between the brain and computers, I agree that this is both reasonable, desirable and inevitable. [sic] It’s been my recommendation for years” (Kurzweil 2001). 65. See Lebedev and Nicolelis (2006); Birbaumer et al. (2008); Mak and Wolpaw (2009); and Nicolelis and Lebedev (2009).


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Instead of subverting the power of the entertainment industry—as Thiel’s belief in technoescapism would suggest—PayPal has become a useful tool in perpetuating that power. Geeks’ power myopia is scandalous. Another recent manifestation of technoescapism can be found in Abundance, a new book cowritten by Peter Diamandis, a wealthy entrepreneur and cofounder of the Singularity University. The latter is an outlet that promotes Ray Kurzweil’s idea that computers will one day be as smart as people, who in turn will live forever, and presents it, along with some other key ideas of technogospel, in an easy-to-absorb manner, suitable for busy executives eager to foot the university’s $25,000-for-ten-weeks tuition bill. (Thiel is an avid supporter of singularity as well, having given money to Kurzweil; it’s not very likely that he pays anyone to drop out of the Singularity University.)

To support the idea that technologies—and now “the Internet”—develop in accordance with their own rules, Kelly and other pundits usually invoke Moore’s law. For Kelly, “the curve [behind Moore’s law] is one way the technium speaks to us.” The idea that Moore’s law is akin to a natural law is widespread in Silicon Valley—it’s one of the original myths of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity movement—and it has long spread beyond the technology industry, frequently invoked to justify some course of action. There are few empirically rigorous studies of Moore’s law, but Finnish innovation scholar Ilkka Tuomi has done perhaps the most impressive work, digging up industry data, calculating actual growth rates, and tracking various expressions and references to Moore’s law in the media.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The physics of putting ever-greater numbers of transistors on silicon chips eventually will meet physical limitations. At some point, scientists believe, it will be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive for conventional chip technology to sustain the pace dictated by Moore’s law. Some analysts believe that the death of Moore’s law will signal the end of exponential growth in computing, but Ray Kurzweil believes that the evolution of technology will start a new computing paradigm that will continue or accelerate this trend. In his deeply profound book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil writes: “Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the ‘intuitive linear’ view of history rather than the ‘historical exponential’ view.”8 In a nonlinear world, we all think linearly.

Richard Zeckhauser, “Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable,” Capitalism and Society 1, no. 2, article 5 (2006), https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/Investingin​UnknownandUnknowable.pdf. 6. “Visita a Warren Buffett,” Think Finance, 2005, http://www.thinkfn.com/wikibolsa/Visita_a_Warren_Buffett. 7. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway 1990 Annual Letter to Shareholders, March 1, 1991, http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1990.html. 8. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2006). 30. Acknowledging the Role of Luck, Chance, Serendipity, and Randomness 1. Max Gunther, How to Get Lucky: 13 Techniques for Discovering and Taking Advantage of Life’s Good Breaks (London: Harriman House, 2010). 2.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

These men believe in their “super human” qualities so deeply that they are investing millions of dollars in ventures like Thiel’s Halcyon Molecular, a company that purports to “create a world free from cancer and aging.” The men believe that technology will eradicate the fundamental human anxiety that is fear of death. The futurist Jaron Lanier once described Google chief scientist Ray Kurzweil and his concept of “the singularity”: the point in time when an artificially intelligent machine will be capable of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself. Lanier noted, “These are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.… All thoughts about consciousness, souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.”


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

More importantly, recognizing rigidity helps us understand when various changes might take place. Fast Change Matching the prospects of decreased driving with the wonders of technology provides fuel to buoy optimism. Trends are bending around vehicle use, overall travel, and technology. Ray Kurzweil,106 for instance, observes that technology advances at an accelerating rate, and is deployed more widely more quickly today than yesterday. Horace Dediu has made a similar point less breathlessly.107 108 If not arriving at a 'technological singularity', we see accelerating technical progress as fairly obvious; it applies most clearly to the information technology sector, where Moore's and kindred laws show the period of doubling of various technology.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil). Just as Hollywood is both a physical location and a global industry with a distinctive set of traditions, beliefs, and practices, so Silicon Valley is more than a place—it is shorthand for the world of digital technology, specifically Internet technology. Silicon Valley includes big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, and it includes a ­never-ending stream of ambitious startups, not all physically located in Silicon Valley proper, but all driven by and products of the broader Internet culture.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, it affected everyone.73 In 2004, we sequenced the first human genome for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now machines can sequence more than eighteen thousand genomes a year for $1,000 each.74 The futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that in the next hundred years, we will experience the equivalent of twenty thousand years of progress. With technology flooding every facet of our lives, it is natural to assume that new technologies will be running our societies even better in the near future. The Millennium Project75 is a think tank that ranks the fifteen biggest global challenges every year.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

I was just reading in John Gray’s wonderful The Immortalization Commission about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust—as would any ancient—at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Scores of experts are making similar claims. As Robin Li, cofounder of the Chinese internet search firm Baidu and an investor in several other leading AI ventures, states, “The intelligent revolution is a benign revolution in production and lifestyle and also a revolution in our way of thinking.” Many go even further. Ray Kurzweil, a prominent executive, inventor, and author, has confidently argued that the technologies associated with AI are on their way to achieving “superintelligence” or “singularity”—meaning that we will reach boundless prosperity and accomplish our material objectives, and perhaps a few of the nonmaterial ones as well.

Demis Hassabis, “[By] deepening our capacity,” is from https://theworldin.economist.com/edition/2020/article/17385/demis-hassabis-ais-potential; “Either we need…” is from www.techrepublic.com/article/google-deepmind-founder-demis-hassabis-three-truths-about-ai. “The intelligent revolution…” is from Li (2020). On Ray Kurzweil’s ideas, see Kurzweil (2005). Reid Hoffman, “Could we have a bad…,” is from www.city-journal.org/html/disrupters-14950.html. Chapter 2: Canal Vision This chapter draws on the following histories: Wilson (1939), Mack (1944), DuVal (1947), Beatty (1956), Marlowe (1964), Kinross (1969), Silvestre (1969), McCullough (1977), Karabell (2003), and Bonin (2010).


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

He derived a parabolic curve going back to the Roman Empire that showed very slow growth at first and then started to steepen as machines came into the nineteenth century. He projected from the machine age into the electric age, and from that he predicted an ethereal age to start in the early decades of this century, precisely around the time Ray Kurzweil and others think the Singularity will come—an acceleration of technological change across the board so acute as to burst the bounds of human control. Henry Adams predicting the Singularity almost a century ago may be just coincidence. But the point that the pace of social, political, and technological change is accelerating is not coincidence—it is destiny.


pages: 257 words: 77,030

A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian

Cass Sunstein, Easter island, Filter Bubble, Henri Poincaré, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, stem cell, the scientific method

The Drake Equation estimates the number of intelligent, technologically capable civilizations in the universe: N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L Where, N = The number of communicating civilizations in the Milky Way R*= The number and rate of star formation fp = The fraction of those stars with planets ne= The number of planets per star with an environment suitable for life fl = The fraction of planets on which life develops fi = The fraction of planets on which intelligent life develops fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop technology (that release detectable signs of their existence into space) L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space By plugging in best estimates for the variables, one can guestimate the number of intelligent, technology-producing life forms in the Milky Way. Even by conservative estimates the number is larger than 1. Why then have we not witnessed evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life? (This question is made even more curious when one factors in American inventor Ray Kurzweil’s idea of exponential technological growth, with mere centuries translating into unimaginable technological differences among civilizations.) One answer to this is that there’s something wrong with our model of the universe. There’s something we don’t understand, or something we’ve considered to be a remote possibility that’s an actuality.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The positive response and strong ongoing relationship between the machine and the Go community—they gave AlphaGo an honorary rank of 9th dan (the highest rank for Go players)—strengthened Joi’s belief that the future doesn’t have to hold Terminator-like intelligences that will decide that humans are a bad idea and eliminate them. It could, rather, contain a society in which humans and machines work together, inspiring each other and augmenting a growing collective intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and familiar presence on the lecture circuit, popularized the idea of exponential change in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil predicts that a computer will read as well as a human by 2029, and that the singularity—the point at which machines become more intelligent than humans—will arrive by 2045.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

[iv] The term was first applied to human affairs back in the 1950s by John von Neumann, a key figure in the development of the computer. The physicist and science fiction author Vernor Vinge argued in 1993 that artificial intelligence and other technologies would cause a singularity in human affairs within 30 years. This idea was picked up and popularised by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes that computers will overtake humans in general intelligence in 1929, and a singularity will arrive in 2045. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity [v] The event horizon of a black hole is the point beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer, or in other words, the point of no return.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

The Singularity is a hypothetical super-jump in the field of artificial intelligence, rendering our reliance on “biological intelligence” obsolete, pushing us into a shared technological realm so advanced that it will be unrecognizable from the world of today. The best-known advocate of this proposition, futurist Ray Kurzweil, suggests that this could happen as soon as the year 2045, based on an exponential growth model. But that is hard to accept. Everyone agrees that Kurzweil is a genius and that his model makes mathematical sense, but no man truly believes this is going to happen in his own lifetime (sans a handful of people who are already living their lives very, very, very differently).


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But what has struck us is how close to economics the debate actually is: competition underpins it all. A superintelligence is an AI that can outperform humans in most cognitive tasks and can reason through problems. Specifically, it can invent and improve itself. While science fiction author Vernor Vinge called the point at which this emerges “the Singularity” and futurist Ray Kurzweil suggested humans are not equipped to foresee what will happen at this point because we are by definition not as intelligent, it turns out that economists are actually quite well equipped to think about it. For years, economists have faced criticism that the agents on which we base our theories are hyper-rational and unrealistic models of human behavior.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

The studies found that “stretched” workers were not only more productive, but more motivated and engaged: “ Setting specific challenging goals is also a means of enhancing task interest and of helping people to discover the pleasurable aspects of an activity.” In 2007, the National Academy of Engineering asked a panel of leading thinkers—including Larry Page, futurist Ray Kurzweil, and geneticist J. Craig Venter—to choose fourteen “Grand Engineering Challenges” for the twenty-first century. After a year of debate, the panel settled on an array of quintessential stretch goals: Generate energy from fusion. Reverse-engineer the brain. Prevent nuclear terror. Secure cyberspace.


pages: 326 words: 74,433

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

Remember to think exponentially, especially in the world of technology. A few early data points on a geometric curve might lead you to conclude that you're observing a linear phenomenon, which would lead to some seriously erroneous predictions about what points farther up the curve might look like. To paraphrase Ray Kurzweil, when presented with exponential growth, remember that people tend to drastically overestimate what will happen in the short term, but will profoundly underestimate what happens over longer time spans. It has been said that one measure of intelligence is the ability to hold contradictory thoughts in one's mind simultaneously.


pages: 238 words: 77,730

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Instead, they were focused on a bolder challenge, the development of deep and broad machine intelligence known as Artificial General Intelligence. This, they believed, would lead to the next step of human evolution. The heart of the Singularity argument, as explained by the technologists Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, the leading evangelists of the concept, lies in the power of exponential growth. As Samuel Butler noted, machines evolve far faster than humans. But information technology, which Butler only glimpsed, races ahead at an even faster rate. Digital tools double in power or capacity every year or two, whether they are storing data, transmitting it, or performing calculations.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

When we met in Paris, he was working as a software engineer for Jobbatical, a start-up that helps businesses hire staff from around the world and relocate them. Jobbatical was led by a charismatic Estonian, Karoli Hindriks, who was an enthusiastic graduate of Singularity University, the brainchild of the world’s most famous techno-utopian author: Ray Kurzweil. When I had visited her at the company headquarters in Tallinn a few months earlier, they felt and smelled and looked like a miniature version of the offices of Google that I visited in Mountain View, New York and Paris. The company and the service it provided were one and the same. The atmosphere had a distinct, post-national, techno-enthusiast feel to it.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Anthony Levandowski founded the first church of artificial intelligence based on a new religion called Way of the Future, a belief system created “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” Levandowski thinks humans are generating a new god—not a strike-you-down-with-lightning kind of god, but a god nonetheless: “If there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”21 Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation (granted by the US president), is a proponent of the idea of the Singularity. The Singularity is a hypothesis, shared by prominent scientists and futurists, contending that we’re walking down a technological path that ends with an artificial superintelligence so powerful it will someday have the power to reproduce itself and remake human civilization in unfathomable ways.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“We are continually looking at the list of things machines cannot do—play chess, drive a car, translate language—and then checking them off the list when machines become capable of these things,” said Tim Berners-Lee. “Someday we will get to the end of the list.”18 These latest advances may even lead to the singularity, a term that von Neumann coined and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us mortals. Vinge says this will occur by 2030.19 On the other hand, these latest stories might turn out to be like the similarly phrased ones from the 1950s, glimpses of a receding mirage.

Beau Cronin of O’Reilly Media has proposed a drinking game: “take a shot every time you find a news article or blog post that describes a new AI system as working or thinking ‘like the brain’ ” (http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/05/it-works-like-the-brain-so.html), and he maintains a pinboard of stories making such claims (https://pinboard.in/u:beaucronin/t:like-the-brain/#). 18. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee. 19. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993. See also Ray Kurzweil, “Accelerating Intelligence,” http://www.kurzweilai.net/. 20. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1960. 21. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 7. 22. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.” 23. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 2. 24.


pages: 246 words: 81,625

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

The image puts me in mind of those magically animated broomsticks from the Sorcerer's Apprentice, regenerating themselves from their splinters and working tirelessly to bring about disaster. Along similar lines, some AI optimists offer extended-life prophecies that are unsettling. For instance, Ray Kurzweil talks about the day when nanorobots will crawl within your brain, recording every synapse and every connection, and then report all the information to a supercomputer, which will reconfigure itself into you! You'll become a "software" version of yourself that will be practically immortal. These two predictions about machine intelligence, the intelligent machines–run-amok scenario and the upload-your-brain-into-a-computer scenario, seem to surface over and over.


pages: 289 words: 87,292

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

Downey, Wei Wang, Elizabeth C. Tyler-Kabara, Douglas J. Weber, Angus J. McMorland, Meel Velliste, Michael L. Boninger, and Andrew B. Schwartz, “High-Performance Neuroprosthetic Control by an Individual with Tetraplegia,” Lancet 381, no. 9866 (2013): 557–64, doi:10.1016/​S0140-6736(12)61816-9. 4. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005); Luc Ferry, La révolution transhumaniste: Comment la technomédecine et l’uberisation du monde vont bouleverser nos vies (Paris: Plon, 2016). 5. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Oxford: Signal Books, 2016). 6.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Peter Cochrane — who is arguably taking a more limited approach to the problem, believing that the combination of sensory experience and the resulting neurochemistry is enough to recreate memory — thinks the Soul Catcher will be working by 2025. In The Singularity is Near, futurist, author, inventor, and director of engineering at Google — and thus the man in charge of building a conscious computer — Ray Kurzweil almost agrees with this timing, arguing that 2029 is the year man and machine will truly merge. To many, these predictions seem overly optimistic. For certain, there are long and complicated arguments about the true nature of consciousness and our ability to capture it in a computer. There are even more arguments about whether a self stored in silicon would be our actual essence or some sorely diminished version.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Thus, my study skips direct engagement with the work of Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, Daniel Bell, and others who discuss the third phase of capitalist development in social terms. The large mass of literature devoted to artificial intelligence and speculations about the consciousness (or lack thereof ) within man and machine is also largely avoided in this book. Writers like Ray Kurzweil forecast a utopian superfuture dominated by immortal man-machine hybrids. Hans Moravec predicts a similar future, only one less populated by humans who are said to “retire” to the mercy of their ascendant computerized progeny. Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, and others have also wrestled with the topic of artificial intelligence.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Where are the amateurs—the Darwins and Mendels—who are influencing science through the sort of contributions that credentialed scientists themselves make? The amateurs’ articles tend not to make it into scientific journals, and they tend not to be invited to give talks at scientific conferences. Yes, there are some exceptions—Jeff Hawkins’s theory of brain function,32 Ray Kurzweil on the biology of aging, Stephen Wolfram’s theory of everything—but they tend to be crossovers from technical or scientific fields in which they’ve been highly trained. It seems that amateurs had a bigger effect on the ideas of science in the nineteenth century than they’re having in the Age of the Net.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Driverless cars represent a level of change beyond what we’re familiar with. We struggle to understand change on the scale of driverless cars - it is hard for people to deal with nonlinear concepts - most people’s experiences have been predominantly linear, where there’s a proportional relationship between actions and outcomes. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes: “our intuition about the future is linear because that is the way the world worked for most of history. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.”[368] Given that the negative impacts of driverless cars (e.g. job losses, first deaths of humans due to system errors) are likely to happen before the positives are fully realised, we face the very real chance that coping with the change will exceed our ability to prepare for it - especially when the outcome of a nonlinear change is negative, tendencies like loss aversion can kick in and people can react in highly emotional ways.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

At a meeting of the Future of Life Institute – a charitable organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, focused on dealing with future risks – in January 2017, theoretical physicist Max Tegmark hosted a panel debate about general artificial intelligence.1 The panel included nine of the most influential men in the field, including entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk; the Google guru Ray Kurzweil; DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis and Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who has mapped our way to, what he calls, ‘superintelligence’. The panel members varied in their views as to whether human-level machine intelligence would come gradually or all of a sudden, or whether it will be good or bad for humanity.


pages: 292 words: 88,319

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Hanson, ‘How to Live in a Simulation’, Journal of Evolution and Technology 7 (2001), http://www.transhumanist.com 35. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), in Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (eds), David Hume: The Philosophical Works, London, 1886, vol. 2, pp. 412–16. 36. These questions are closely connected to the issues discussed in Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, New York, 1999), concerning the appearance of spiritual and aesthetic qualities in virtual realities and forms of artificial intelligence. 37. R. Hanson, ‘How to Live in a Simulation’, op. cit. chapter ten Making Infinity Machines 1. J.F. Thomson, ‘Tasks and Super-Tasks’, Analysis 15, 1 (1954). 2.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Books The Art of Game Design: A Book of lenses Jesse Schell Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium Carl Sagan Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing Alex Wipperfurth The Cluetrain Manifesto Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed Ray Kurzweil The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel Benjamin Graham One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market Peter Lynch The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing Burton G.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The problem is there’s no human version of Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the processing power of silicon chips would double about every eighteen months.4 Today, half a century after Gordon Moore described the phenomenon that would later be named Moore’s Law,5 it remains the engine driving what the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman calls our “age of acceleration.”6 So, yes, that iPhone in your pocket may be unrecognizably faster, and more connected, powerful, and intelligent, than its predecessor, the once-revolutionary Apple Macintosh personal computer, let alone a mid-sixties multimillion-dollar mainframe machine that required its own air-conditioned room to operate. But in spite of promises about the imminent merging of man and computer by prophets of the “Singularity”—such as Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, who still insists that this synthesis will inevitably happen by 2029—we humans, for the moment at least, are no speedier, no smarter, and, really, no more self-aware than we were back in 1965. What Friedman euphemistically dubs a “mismatch” between technology and humanity is, he says, “at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today . . .


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Klint Finley, “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries,” TechCrunch, November 23, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/?guccounter=1. Also, Cade Metz, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” New York Times, February 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html. On the singularity: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). On AI’s potential and limitations: The great AI developer, entrepreneur, and cognitive scientist Gary Marcus is also a great AI critic, pointing out all the ways that current AI technologies are riddled with problems.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Moore’s law has predicted humanity’s ability to innovate in the arena of computer science perhaps like no other law. Many other laws followed Moore’s to describe the accelerating trend in computer storage, connectivity and network speeds. All of them pointed to a clear upwards trajectory that has perhaps been summed up best by the work of Ray Kurzweil, the world-renowned inventor, futurist and author of several definitive books on the topic of AI, such as his international bestseller The Singularity. In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, he coined the term ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, which explained that the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including, but not limited to, the growth in technology) tends to increase exponentially.


pages: 361 words: 86,921

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

It’s the assumption that things will continue to get better as they get smaller on into the next century and that this continued descent into the pits of the quantum will yield ever more exciting and valuable technologies.” “I think it probably will, for 20, 30 years, anyway,” I said. “Sure. That’s what Ray Kurzweil is saying, about a singularity coming. He’s got a terrific presentation of this argument and it’s got lots of insights about the whole range of technology. But it is fundamentally based, I believe, on Richard Feynman’s mistake way back in 1957 or so when he gave his famous speech ‘There’s a lot of room at the bottom.’”


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Lem seems to hint that the ultimate drive of instrumental reason, of continually interrogating our world in the quest for answers, may only be madness: fantasies that we project onto the world in order to construct a story about truth, just as the characters in the novel must grapple with figures projected from their pasts. The endless symbolic churning of the oceans on Solaris offers a provocative metaphor for the notion of algorithmic imagination today, particularly as it’s framed by computationalists. Ray Kurzweil, leader of Google’s machine learning group and a key figure in the singularity debates, echoes this point in his documentary Transcendent Man: Well I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean. I mean it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

With the data these devices are providing, we can shortcut our way not only to better health, but to deeper self-awareness, taking weeks and months to train what used to take yogis and monks decades to master. While these are all examples of the four forces reaching deeper into the mainstream majority, they may already seem unremarkable. There’s a reason for this. Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, once pointed out that it’s hard for nonscientists to track progress in artificial intelligence because, when it shows up in the real world, “it looks like nothing fancier than a talking ATM.” It’s true for ecstasis as well. Soccer moms with Kundalini yoga practices; business men microdosing psychedelics; tech nerds tracking biometrics, The Simpsons going to Burning Man—these developments might seem pedestrian.


The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, US Department of Energy, 2005. 8. R. Costanza et al., “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital,” Nature 387 (1997), pp. 253–260. 9. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three, Simon and Schuster, 1958. 10. See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Viking, 2005, for an egregious ­example. 11. See “How civilizations fall: A theory of catabolic collapse,” in John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, New Society Publishers, 2008, pp. 225–240. Chapter Two: The Way of Succession 1.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee in On Intelligence: Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), p. 89. 64 the brain’s pattern-recognition system: A lot of neuroscientists are starting to believe that the basic function of the brain is pattern recognition. For a great book on the subject, see: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Viking, 2012). the feel-good neurochemical dopamine: Lots to choose from here. See: C. R. Clarke Clarke, G. M. Geffen, and L. B. Geffen, “Catecholamines and Attention I: Animal and Clinical Studies,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 11(4), 341–52 (1987).


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

Neatly, considering Bell’s enthusiasm, it was at Bell Labs in 1952 that a group made the first workable speech recognizer. The good news was that with training, this device managed 97 percent accuracy. The bad news is that it could only handle digits—well behind the kind of speech recognition program we tend to curse in modern automated telephone systems. It is interesting that when speech-recognition pioneer Ray Kurzweil was writing about Hal’s capabilities back in the late 1990s, he expected that we would be using speech to dictate to personal computer applications as the norm before 2001. In reality, such systems are still not used on most computers today. The shift Kurzweil expected has been much slower than he anticipated and may never come.


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review Books, 1997). 38 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 210. 39 John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 3. 40 Hans P. Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 41 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 42 For a critique, see Colin McGinn, “Hello HAL,” The New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999. 43 On this point, see Wright (2000), pp. 306–308. 44 Ibid., pp. 321–322. 45 Robert J.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

We live in a rapidly accelerating technological age, with new iPhones every year that make the old ones seem as primitive as a brick, where robots perform surgery and computers fly 757s. Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of DNA and plotting the circuitry of the human brain. Techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil talk openly about immortality. Elon Musk aspires to create a “multiplanet civilization” in the very near future. It seems only natural that a slow-moving force like sea-level rise would have a technological solution too. Why not build a thermostat for the planet? We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Why wouldn’t they continue to do so going forward? Indeed within this group of optimists are those who take an almost fantastical view, arguing there is no natural limit to human life, and scientific progress and technology will create life expectancies that approach many hundreds of years. That is the view of Ray Kurzweil, who became director of engineering at Google, where he leads a team on Artificial Intelligence. In his book,4 co-authored with his physician Terry Grossman, he describes three crucial bridges to a multi-century lifespan. The first bridge is to follow best practice medical advice so as to extend life sufficiently to benefit from the second bridge, which is created by the coming medical revolution in biotechechology, and then onwards to the third bridge, which enables one to benefit from nanotechnology innovations where Artificial Intelligence and robots rebuild ageing bodies at a molecular level.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

From my interview with Zhong, November 2012; from more on his research, see Chen-Bo Zhong, “The Role of Unconscious Thought in the Creative Process,” Rotman magazine, Winter 2010. 46 What if dots and dashes could sort the world? . . . Margalit Fox, “N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91,” New York Times, December 12, 2012. 47 Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil . . . Kurzweil told this to Thea Singer, “6 Beautiful Minds,” O, the Oprah Magazine, June 2007, http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Modern-Day-Geniuses-The-Worlds-Brightest-Minds. 48 Sam McNerney pulled together a number . . . Sam McNerney, “Unconscious Creativity: Step Back to Step Forward,” Big Think blog, May 24, 2012; also, Sam McNerney, “Relaxation & Creativity—the Science of ‘Sleeping on It,’” Big Think blog, May 8, 2012; and Annie Murphy Paul, “Why Daydreaming Isn’t a Waste of Time,” Mind/Shift blog, from KQED Public Media for Northern California, June 1, 2012. 49 “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies” . . .


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Image courtesy of Robert MacCurdy The day when products will be made entirely of digital voxels may be far off, but meanwhile I expect that some combination of analog and digital materials will emerge. Hybrid 3D printing will combine continuous analog printing for some passive materials, and digital voxel printing for other materials that are more difficult to fabricate using continuous processes. Machines making machines Technological singularity, a concept popularized by writer Ray Kurzweil, is a hypothetical future in which machines possess capabilities that enable them to accelerate their own development exponentially. One of the more widely recognized aspects of the idea of singularity is an “intelligence explosion” where intelligent machines design successive generations of increasingly powerful, even more intelligent machines.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Often called “the singularity,” or artificial superintelligence, this future involves computers whose ability to understand and manipulate the world dwarfs our own, comparable to the intelligence gap between human beings and, say, insects. Such dizzying predictions have divided much of the intellectual community into two camps: utopians and dystopians. The utopians see the dawn of AGI and subsequent singularity as the final frontier in human flourishing, an opportunity to expand our own consciousness and conquer mortality. Ray Kurzweil—the eccentric inventor, futurist, and guru-in-residence at Google—envisions a radical future in which humans and machines have fully merged. We will upload our minds to the cloud, he predicts, and constantly renew our bodies through intelligent nanobots released into our bloodstream. Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we will have computers with intelligence comparable to that of humans (i.e., AGI), and that we will reach the singularity by 2045.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Indeed, if one extrapolates the growth of raw computing power—expressed in terms of bits and bit flips—into the future at its current rate, computers should match human brains sometime in the next two to four decades (depending on how one estimates the information-processing power of human brains). The failure of the initial overly optimistic predictions of AI dampened talk about the technological singularity for a few decades, but since the 2005 publication of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity IS Near, the idea of technological advance leading to superintelligence is back in force. Some believers, Kurzweil included, regard this singularity as an opportunity: Humans can merge their brains with the superintelligence and thereby live forever. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, worried that this superintelligence would prove to be malign and regarded it as the greatest existing threat to human civilization.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

While many of Applico’s competitors were acquired or went out of business, our company thrived by becoming the world’s first Platform Innovation company. Each day, we work with some of the world’s leading businesses and hottest startups to build and grow innovative platforms. Our clients include Fortune 100 companies like Google, HP, Intel, Disney, DirecTV, Philips, and Lockheed Martin, as well as startups backed by Google Ventures, Ray Kurzweil, and top venture capital firms. While we can’t list some of our startup clients due to confidentiality, startups whose platforms we’ve helped create, including Glamsquad and Auctionata, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and achieved nine-figure exits. And since our entire business is focused around platform business models, we’ve studied them in greater depth than anyone else has.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

For instance, a company in Austin, Texas has developed a product called Cyc. It is much like a “chatbot” except that, if it answers Science and Technology 45 a question incorrectly, you can correct it and Cyc will learn from its mistakes. But Cyc still isn’t very intelligent, which is possibly why author, scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil made a public bet with Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus, that a computer would pass the Turing test by 2029. He based this prediction on ideas expressed in his book The Singularity Is Near: in essence, arguing that intelligence will expand in a limitless, exponential manner once we achieve a certain level of advancement in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics and the integration of that technology with human biology.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The most prominent recent exponents of the techno-optimist within economics have been Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their 2014 book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton & Company). More broadly, the most prominent techno-optimist is Ray Kurzweil, in a series of books. 2. The most prominent techno-pessimistic perspective is offered by Robert J. Gordon in his 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press). 3. This view is increasingly prevalent among economists.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

close to universal: In “Survival of the Richest” (Medium, July 5, 2018), the futurist Douglas Rushkoff described his experience as a keynote speaker at a private conference attended by the superrich—these patrons not themselves technologists but hedge-funders he came to feel were taking all of their cues from them. Quickly, he writes, the conversation attained a clear focus: Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

Whenever I’ve attempted to write poetry with a rhyming pattern, I’ve found it useful to tap into a database of words that rhyme. Weaving a line through the constraints of rhyme and rhythm is something a computer can do in spades. That is the principle behind the code underpinning the Cybernetic Poet, a more recent creation of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who writes frequently on the impending fusion between man and machine. Rather than relying on words randomly picked out of a dictionary, Kurzweil trained his Cybernetic Poet on the work of accomplished poets like Shelley and T. S. Eliot. Here is one of the Cybernetic Poet’s haikus, informed by a reading of Keats: You broke my soul The juice of eternity, The spirit of my lips.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

While it is no doubt inevitable that forms of long-distance communication would develop in any plausible human history, I am not persuaded that the exact forms of the telephone, telegraph, etc., are metaphysically necessary. Computation hovers provocatively between invention and discovery. Perhaps some of the most extreme computer scientists (Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram, Claude Shannon, Konrad Zuse) believe that digital computation in particular is a fundamental part of the physical universe; certainly there is at least some interesting evidence to support this view. At the same time, it seems equally if not more plausible that a wide range of calculating, quasilogical, and simulative mechanisms exist in the physical world, and that digital computation is simply one means of replicating some of these phenomena, perhaps the means that is most available to us for cultural reasons—in other words, we found digital computation because our society is already so oriented toward binarisms, hierarchy, and instrumental rationality.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Similarly, Time’s cover story for 175 (April 12, 2010), 6, 36–43, was “Inside Steve’s Pad.” On new visions of artificial intelligence, see John Markoff, “The Coming Superbrain: Computers Keep Getting Smarter, While We Just Stay the Same,” Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, May 24, 2009, 1, 4; and Alex Beam, “Apocalypse Later: Ray Kurzweil Predicts the Not-So-Near Future in ‘Post-Biological’ Visions of Humanity,” Boston Globe, June 29, 2010, G23. On nuclear power, see the references in Chapter 6, notes 31–34 and 37–52. See James Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As computers have come to “learn” a wider variety of human languages, thanks especially to designing computers around the same format as the human brain, more and more cultural forms of communication can be digitized. At a certain point in this development, a human’s sole function is to have feelings, intentions and desires, and technology will do the rest. One of the most alluring qualities of computers, from the perspective of various Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and ideologues such as Ray Kurzweil, is that they don’t necessarily die in the way that human bodies do. This suggests that with sufficient augmentation, a human could live for far longer, or even forever. If thoughts can be shared directly with other brains, thanks to technology, then at some point an entire human mind could perhaps be uploaded to a computer where it could potentially live forever.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

,” September 2014, news.xbox.com. 20. Herman Gray and Macarena Gómez-Barris, Toward a Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 21. Minerva Initiative, “Program History & Overview,” U.S. Department of Defense, 2015, http://minerva.dtic.mil. 22. Ibid. (emphasis added). 23. Ibid. 24. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006); Amnon Eden, James H. Moor, Johnny H. Søraker, and Eric Steinhart, eds., Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2012). 25. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 26.


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

Over the last few years, these assumptions about necessity and sufficiency have been dressed up and pushed out of the door by a host of other concerns and misapprehensions, giving the prospect of artificial consciousness an urgency and an apocalyptic gloss that it doesn’t really deserve. Here are some of them. There is the worry that AI – whether conscious or not – is on a runaway path to overtake human intelligence, bootstrapping itself beyond our comprehension and our control. This is the so-called ‘Singularity’ hypothesis, popularised by the futurist Ray Kurzweil and motivated by the extraordinary growth in raw computational resources over the last few decades. Where are we on this exponential curve? The problem with exponential curves – as many of us learned during the recent coronavirus pandemic – is that wherever you stand on them, what’s ahead looks impossibly steep and what’s behind looks irrelevantly flat.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

But this turns out to be hard to do, and if we don’t take care when communicating our desires, then we may get what we asked for, but not what we actually wanted. The Singularity Is Bullshit In contemporary AI, the Terminator narrative is most commonly associated with an idea called the Singularity, which was introduced by the American futurologist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near:2 The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. […] within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

It’s behaving quite unlike its cosmological namesake—the point deep inside a black hole where the strength of its gravitational field soars toward infinity. Instead, the Singularity seems to recede more the nearer we draw. Vinge’s estimate placed the event sometime between 2005 and 2030. But as he confessed at the time, “AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years.” A recent recalibration by AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil, the technorati’s favorite Singularity propagandist, reset the deadline for the digital rapture. “I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.” More revisions to the timetable may be in store.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Then it started to replace cognitive jobs that repeat sequences of steps that a machine can master. Now AI is gradually able to perform even creative jobs. So for workers, including those in the creative industries, there is nowhere to hide. All this is vaulting us even closer to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, where super intelligent machines leave humans in the dust. Author Ray Kurzweil and other visionaries predict a pivotal moment that will disrupt everything we know. An intelligence explosion will occur when computers develop motivation to learn on their own at warp speed without human direction. There are no limits to how fast or how much they can learn and what new connections they will find.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Astronomers are building a new array of radio telescopes that will generate an exabyte of data per day (an exabyte is a quintillion bytes; a byte is a single value, an integer between 0 and 255, often representing a single letter, digit, or punctuation mark). Using satellites, wildlife conservationists track manta rays, considered vulnerable to extinction, as the creatures travel as far as 680 miles in search of food. In biology, as famed futurist Ray Kurzweil portends, given that the price to map a human genome has dropped from $1 billion to a few thousand dollars, information technology will prove to be the domain from which this field’s greatest advances emerge. Overall, data is growing at an incomprehensible speed, an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes (exabytes) of data per day.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Moore’s law applies to the transistors and technology that control robots as well as those in computers. Add rapid advances in machine learning, data analytics, and cloud robotics, and it’s clear that computing is going to keep rapidly improving. Those who argue for the singularity differ on when it will occur. Mathematician Vernor Vinge predicts that it will occur by 2023; futurist Ray Kurzweil says 2045. But the question looming over singularity is whether there’s a limit on how far our technology can ultimately go. Those who argue against the possibility of singularity point to several factors. The software advances necessary to reach singularity demand a detailed scientific understanding of the human brain, but our lack of understanding about the basic neural structure of the brain impedes software development.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

His book Superintelligence goes beyond the usual fearmongering and explains in (still occasionally terrifying) detail the how and why we might create machines that are far more intelligent than we are, and why they might not care to keep humans around anymore. The prolific inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil ran in the opposite direction with the concept of super-intelligent machines. His 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, became a bestseller, although, as with so many predictions, “near” is always just close enough to be ominous but never close enough to be in focus. Kurzweil describes a nearly utopian future in which the technological singularity combines genetics and nanotechnology to augment minds and bodies as humans approach an extremely advanced level of cognition and lifespan.


pages: 482 words: 106,041

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Via the self-accruing wizardry of computers, an abundance of silicon, and vast opportunities afforded by modular memory and mechanical appendages, human extinction would become merely a jettisoning of the limited and not very durable vessels that our technological minds have finally outgrown. Prominent in the transhumanist (sometimes called posthuman) movement are Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom; heralded inventor Ray Kurzweil, originator of optical character recognition, flat-bed scanners, and print-to-speech reading machines for the blind; and Trinity College bioethicist James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. However Faustian, their discussion is compelling in its lure of immortality and preternatural power—and almost touching in its Utopian faith that a machine could be made so perfect that it would transcend entropy.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Ira Flatow and Howard Market, “Science Diction: The Origin of the Word ‘Robot,’” April 22, 2011, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135634400/science-diction-the-origin-of-the-word-robot. 18. Future of Life Institute, http://futureoflife.org. 19. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). 20. Peter M. Asaro, “The Liability Problem for Autonomous Artificial Agents,” in Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents: Papers from the 2016 AAAI Spring Symposium (Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press, 2016), https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS16/paper/download/12699/11949. 21.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

So the Kinetic team, led by the onetime Acid Phreak, kept pushing the system, feeding it more and more data. Unfortunately, the team’s faith in the machine was misplaced. In August 2011, Ladopoulos and his research associates were fired by Kinetic’s board of directors. WHILE Kinetic had failed, the dream of creating a thinking trading machine lived on. And why not? Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that as computer power and artificial intelligence expands to the point that it has the capacity to improve itself—computers effectively designing and creating more computers—the nature of humanity will become irrevocably altered, a fearsome event he calls the Singularity. Ultimately, Kurzweil says, we humans will bend the robots to our will, allowing us to transcend our biological limitations.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

It’s cynical, but at the same time it’s a real thing, all those girls from Brown and Sarah Lawrence, in lambswool sweaters, bored witless, sitting at the kitchen counter, asking earnest questions about motherboards and retail data encryption as they wait for their ten-year stints to come to an end. Last summer I enjoyed participating in a seminar at Singularity University, an unaccredited school founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Singularity U’s goal is to get the correct people fully informed about the transformative capacity of logarithmic technologies. It rests in an office building in NASA’s Ames Research Center, a building seemingly untouched since one foggy 1944 afternoon when The Andrews Sisters came in and sang for the boys.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

For many AI researchers, the intellectual holy grail is to build machines that are foxes rather than hedgehogs. In their terminology, they want to build an “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), with wide-ranging capabilities, rather than an “artificial narrow intelligence” (ANI), which can only handle very particular assignments.21 That is what interests futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom. But there has been little success in that effort, and critics often put forward the elusiveness of AGI as a further reason for being skeptical about the capabilities of machines. There is a sense among purists that only AGI is “real” AI, and that without this generality of capability these machines will never be “true rivals” to human beings in the work that they do.22 AGI, it is said, will represent a turning point in human history—perhaps the turning point.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

The first was that biology, sociology, and geography jointly explain the history of social development, with biology driving development up, sociology shaping how development rises (or doesn’t), and geography deciding where development rises (or falls) fastest; and the second was that while geography determines where social development rises or falls, social development also determines what geography means. I now want to extend these arguments. In the twenty-first century social development promises—or threatens—to rise so high that it will change what biology and sociology mean too. We are approaching the greatest discontinuity in history. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil calls this the Singularity—“a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep … that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed.” One of the foundations of his argument is Moore’s Law, the famous observation made by the engineer (and future chairman of Intel) Gordon Moore in 1965 that with every passing year the miniaturization of computer chips roughly doubled their speed and halved their cost.

Renfrew, Colin, and Iain Morley, eds. Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Reynolds, David. One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945. New York: Norton, 2000. Richards, Jay, et al. Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2002. Richards, John. Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Richardson, Lewis Fry. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press, 1960.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

He worried about public perception of the possibilities of self-reproducing machines, and said that he did not want any mention of the “reproductive potentialities of the machines of the future” made to the mass media. It took a while, but the mass media eventually caught up. In 1999, computer scientists Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec celebrated the possibility of super-intelligent self-reproducing robots, which they believe will be built in the near future, in their respective nonfiction (but rather far-fetched) books The Age of Spiritual Machines and Robot. In 2000 some of the possible perils of self-reproducing nano-machines were decried by Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, in a now famous article in Wired magazine called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

After the second abortive attempt Smith predicted, using Moore’s Law, that it would be five years before computer-animated movies would prove viable, because Moore’s Law can be restated as ‘Computers improve by an order of magnitude every five years.’ So when Disney approached Pixar five years later to make Toy Story, they said yes, and the rest is history. A few years ago, Ray Kurzweil made a startling discovery: that Moore’s Law was being obeyed before silicon chips even existed. By extrapolating the power of computers back to the early twentieth century, when they used different technologies altogether, he drew a straight line on a logarithmic curve. Before the integrated circuit even existed, the electromechanical relay, vacuum tube and the transistor had all improved along the very same trajectory.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Life extension is now seriously studied in leading universities, while robotics and artificial intelligence receive millions of dollars of investment. There are now tens of thousands of self-declared transhumanists based all over the world, including influential people at the heart of the world’s tech scene. Ray Kurzweil, a firm believer in the ‘singularity moment’ (the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to produce new and ever more advanced versions of itself), is a senior engineer at Google. Billionaire Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal, influential Silicon Valley investor and a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team—is also a self-declared transhumanist and has invested millions of dollars into life extension and artificial-intelligence projects.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

In other words, if smart tech replaces more and more workers, leaving people without income, who is going to buy all of the products being produced and services being offered? Intelligent technology is only just beginning to impact the world economy. In the next several decades, tens of millions of workers across every industry and sector are likely going to be displaced by machine intelligence. Ray Kurzweil at MIT observes that “the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.”9 Kurzweil calculates that at the current rate of technological change, by the end of the twenty-first century “we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what we achieved in the twentieth century.”


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

In the face of this, we find, as already suggested, a surprising ally in a deeply compromised figure: the philosopher Hegel, who fascinated the critics of both capitalism and colonialism (Marx and Fanon). Hegel is known for his theory of “world-spirit,” or Geist, in terms of whose unfolding he interpreted the whole of history. One might therefore have expected Hegel to be an ally of Big Tech; it was, after all, Ray Kurzweil, now director of engineering at Google, who wrote that “the singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.”35 But Hegel was a complex philosopher and also one of the most searching investigators into the nature of human freedom. In the words of his main interpreters, Hegel saw freedom as “possible . . . only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relation to others.”


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Wasn't it factitious to make such broad claims on one contentious reading of history? His list may be well-considered, but it is inevitably somewhat arbitrary. The paper relies on the equivalence and validity of the selected innovations, discoveries and technologies, and this is a matter of debate to say the least. Critics like Ray Kurzweil also believed that it missed how important current innovations could become. Others thought population a poor measure. But Huebner's argument is none the less revealing. Some years later, the geneticist Jan Vijg looked at the number of significant inventions per decade as judged by Wikipedia's timeline of historic inventions.6 Vijg argues that Wikipedia's self-correcting, deliberative model makes it particularly valuable here.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

National Academy of Engineering, Grand Challenges for Engineering (Washington, DC: NAE, 2008). 3. Graeme Laurie, Shawn Harmon, and Fabiana Arzuaga, “Foresighting Futures: Law, New Technologies, and the Challenges of Regulating for Uncertainty,” Law, Innovation and Technology 4, no. 1 (2012): 1–33. 4. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005). 5. “The overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex. We can say that technology creates itself out of itself.” W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 21. 6.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

* * * Forty-fifth VR Definition: A person-centered, experiential formulation of digital technology that hopefully inspires digital economies in which the real people who are the sources of value aren’t ignored. * * * Silicon Valley continues to believe in bits too much. There’s a lot of serious talk about offering ordinary people, consumers, faux-immortality in VR. Ray Kurzweil has promoted the idea. Meanwhile, some of the captains of Silicon Valley invest in often nutty schemes to achieve physical, biological immortality for themselves. Birth of a Religion The worst offender when it comes to believing in bits too much is artificial intelligence. AI’s talking points were codified during the period chronicled here.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Consider three possibilities: 1.We’ll solve AI (and this will finally produce machines that can think) as soon as our machines get bigger and faster. 2.We’ll solve AI when our learning algorithms get better. Or when we have even Bigger Data. 3.We’ll solve AI when we finally understand what it is that evolution did in the construction of the human brain. Ray Kurzweil and many others seem to put their weight on option (1), sufficient CPU power. But how many doublings in CPU power would be enough? Have all the doublings so far gotten us closer to true intelligence? Or just to narrow agents that can give us movie times? In option (2), Big Data and better learning algorithms have so far got us only to innovations like machine translations, which provide fast but mediocre translations piggybacking onto the prior work of human translators, without any semblance of thinking.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The artificial neural networks that power today’s best-performing artificial intelligence systems, like those of Google’s DeepMind, are also a kind of parallel processor: they seem to ‘learn’ in a somewhat similar way to the human brain – altering the various weights of each artificial neuron until they can perform a particular task. This was the first time anyone had so clearly compared brains and computers. ‘Prior to von Neumann,’ says inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil, ‘the fields of computer science and neuroscience were two islands with no bridge between them.’97 Some believe it should have stayed that way. Psychologist Robert Epstein, for example, claims that the popularity of the ‘information processing’ (IP) metaphor – that is, viewing the brain as a kind of computer, as von Neumann suggested – has held back progress in neuroscience.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Interview with Gavin Andresen, June 8, 2015. 71. www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GAC15_Technological_Tipping_Points_report_2015.pdf, 7. 72. Interview with Constance Choi, April 10, 2015. 73. The digital revolution has moved on to “the second half of the chessboard”—a clever phrase coined by the American inventor and author Ray Kurzweil. He tells a story of the emperor of China being so delighted with the game of chess that he offered the game’s inventor any reward he desired. The inventor asked for rice. “I would like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third square, and so on, all the way to the last square,” he said.


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Maybe I should start with Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen who, in 2009, introduced a bill in the legislature to get me banned from lecturing at the State University on the grounds (an idiosyncratic interpretation of the role of a university, to say the least) that my ‘statements on the theory of evolution’ were ‘not representative of the thinking of the majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’. *4 He didn’t mean singularity in the sense used by the transhumanist futurist Ray Kurzweil, but was advancing a different metaphorical development of the physicists’ term. *5 See Christopher Hitchens’ The Missionary Position for substantiation of this negative judgement. V LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD READING RICHARD DAWKINS on issues of public concern, whether ethics or education, law or language, can feel like plunging into a chilly sea for a swim – from the first sharp intake of breath to increasing exhilaration to emergence with a tingling sense of well-being.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

JWPR007-Lindsey May 7, 2007 16:12 David Leinweber 27 Markets are not instantaneously and perfectly efficient. Insights, and the ability to execute them rapidly in ever-faster electronic markets, will continue to be rewarded. Today, these insights come from people, using machines as tools. Some believe the machines will be able to play the game themselves.16 One is Ray Kurzweil,17 who started out making reading machines for the blind, met Stevie Wonder, and branched out into electronic keyboard instruments for all, and accumulated a great deal of investable capital in the process. The arc of Kurzweil’s view of machine intelligence is traced in the titles of books he’s written on the subject: The Age of Intelligent Machines (1992), The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Transcend Human Intelligence (2001), and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005).


pages: 303 words: 67,891

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

[Hugo de Garis]: I’m no expert in brain scanners, but people tell me they are subject to Moore's Law. Talking to a neuroscientist, I asked, what’s state of the art in brain scanner work today? She said millimeters and milliseconds. So you know its true that – well it is true that its subject to Moore's Law. Then you get into the Ray Kurzweil scenario of being able to scan the brain to the point of every synapse. So you can imagine downloading all that information into a kind of future hypercomputer, and they’re coming. I talk about Avogadro machines. If you know any chemistry, you know Avogadro’s number, the number of atoms you hold in your hand, which is effectively a trillion trillion, so you have all the components and hardware needed.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

That in turn brought in the lawyers, who pointed out that if the nonprofit Long Now Foundation became a bookie by taking a cut on the bets, the Internal Revenue Service would certainly frown on the idea. Eventually, Long Bets found its way around the legality issue by establishing a philanthropic fund to disburse the winnings. Despite its shortcomings, the project was launched after Jeff Bezos became its first backer. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (a high-profile inventor who gained increasing recognition for his belief in the inevitability of the singularity) placed the first bet over the question of when a computer program would successfully pass the Turing test, an idea first proposed by the English mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer could be programmed to exhibit such humanlike intelligence that an observer would be unable to distinguish its answers from those of an actual person.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

As the Dutch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek puts it in his fine book Moralizing Technology, “We are as autonomous with regard to technology as we are with regard to language, oxygen, or gravity.” But still the Khannas roll dizzily along. “The Hybrid Age is the transition period between the Information Age and the moment of Singularity (when machines surpass human intelligence) that inventor Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, estimates we may reach by 2040 (perhaps sooner). The Hybrid Age is a liminal phase in which we cross the threshold toward a new mode of arranging global society.” These are end times. The Hybrid Age is the preparation for the apotheosis of the Singularity—a Singularity-lite of sorts.


pages: 505 words: 147,916

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

., ‘Mobile phones and the evolution of social behaviour’, Behaviour & Information Technology 24(2) (2005), 111–29. doi:10.1080 /01449290512331321910. 2.‘OKR: Poor People Using Mobile Financial Services: Observations on Customer Usage and Impact from M-PESA’, at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/9492. 3.Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012). 4.Gibson, C. C., & Long, J. D., ‘The presidential and parliamentary elections in Kenya, December 2007’, Electoral Studies 28 (2009), 497–502. 5.‘Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2012–2017’, at www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html. 6.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Misunderstanding will disappear, difference will become superfluous, and peace and freedom will break out. If this sounds a few notches below messianism, that’s because it is. Google, remember, is a company that plans to organize all of the world’s information; its ambitions could not be greater. It also employs Ray Kurzweil, the chief promoter of the Singularity, a belief that machines will soon become self-aware, or that we will somehow combine with them, or upgrade our brains to the cloud—something amazing, we just don’t know what yet. In short, this is an industry in which such far-fetched thinking is de rigueur.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

New goods, old theory, and the welfare costs of trade restrictions. Journal of Development Economics 43:5–38. p. 355 ‘the world economy will be doubling in months or even weeks’. Hanson, R. 2008. Economics of the Singularity. IEEE Spectrum (June 2008) 45:45–50. p. 355 ‘a technological “singularity”’. This notion has been explored by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. See Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near. Penguin. p. 355 ‘says Stephen Levy.’ Levy, S. 2009. Googlenomics. Wired, June 2009. p. 356 ‘says the author Clay Shirky’. Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. Penguin. p. 356 ‘Says Kevin Kelly’. Kelly, K. 2009. The new socialism. Wired, June 2009.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 40. Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001); Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2016); John Mark Newman, “The Myth of Free,” George Washington Law Review 86, no. 2 (October 2016), 513–586. 41. James Glanz, “The Cloud Factories: Data Barns in a Farm Town, Gobbling Power and Flexing Muscle,” New York Times (September 2012). 42.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

These well-established convictions about accelerating growth got a powerful boost from the development of electronic capabilities that, we are promised, will soon have societies that will be governed by artificial intelligence and whose economic growth will be decoupled from rising needs for energy and materials. These claims belong to the second, and truly unrestrained, category of inevitably escalating progress. In this world of never-ending advances there is no room for asymptotes and limits. This attitude has been carried most prominently to its extremes by Ray Kurzweil and, more recently, by Geoffrey West (2017) and Yuval Harari (2018). In extreme interpretation this would entail far more than continuous and vigorous growth: it would lead us to unimaginably rewarding futures: So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). . . .


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Rather than rely on a handful of anonymous referees, a self-organized community of participants can vet results continuously. This, in turn, will allow new knowledge to flow more quickly into practical uses and enterprises. Binfield even goes so far as to suggest that open access is underpinning the kind of exponential advances that will trigger the singularity, Ray Kurzweil’s theory that human civilization will soon be superseded by advanced forms of artificial intelligence and a new race of cybernetic beings. “Open access will drive exponential leaps in scientific understanding,” he says. Time will tell whether Kurzweil’s singularity plays out as he predicts. But one thing seems certain.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

American Red Cross (www.redcrossblood.org/make-donation) Bonfils Blood Center (www.fourhourbody.com/bonfils) National Blood Service (For people in England and Wales: www.blood.co.uk) Alcor (www.alcor.org) Perhaps you’d like to store your body in ice-free cryosuspension at the first sign of terminal illness, just in case technology catches up? There’s nowhere better than Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, where gems such as Ted Williams’s head are allegedly stored. Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by Ray Kurzweil (www.fourhourbody.com/transcend) Kurzweil, called the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Inc. magazine, proposes that those interested in “radical life extension” should make it their immediate goal to live through the next 20 or so years, in order to see advances like DNA reprogramming and submicroscopic, cell-repairing robots.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace. —Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google My other vehicle is unmanned. —Bumper sticker on a car in Silicon Valley Now that we have defined this age of accelerations, two questions come to mind—one primal, one intellectual. The primal one is this: Are things just getting too damned fast? The intellectual one is: Since the technological forces driving this change in the pace of change are not likely to slow down, how do we adapt?


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In 2008 Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, bet $1 million with Protégé Partners, a New York fund of hedge funds, that even a rigorously selected portfolio of hedge funds would not beat the return on the market over 10 years. Buffett argued that large fees mean that hedge funds have to earn substantially greater returns than the S&P 500 index to match let alone beat its performance.32 The Buffet bet paralleled a $20,000 wager between Lotus founder Mitchell Kapor and futurist Ray Kurzweil that by 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will pass the Turing Test, where a computer successfully impersonates a human being. In 2010, Stanley Druckenmiller, who had been one of the traders at Soros’ Quantum Fund that broke the pound, announced that he was closing his fund Duquesne Capital Management.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Whether an ill-advised remark was made this morning or 20 years ago, if it comes up in an online search it is still, in some important and novel sense, part of the here and now. Only with the greatest difficulty can stuff be entirely removed, the published unpublished. One further technological possibility demands a mention: that of computers achieving a level of artificial intelligence at which they may be judged themselves to speak. While cyberutopians join Ray Kurzweil in envisaging the glorious moment when artificial and human intelligence merge into one transformative ‘singularity’, cyberdystopians fear machine intelligence first overtaking and then taking over humans—like the mesmerically voiced computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, but this time with HAL coming out on top.30 We are not there yet, even if the hypnotic lady speaking from the GPS in your car adjusts her instructions as you change your route, and your handheld box, using software such as Apple’s Siri, can respond to your spoken requests exploiting all the information she’s got on you.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

His email signature at Napster was “specialization is for insects,” and he was indeed diligent in defying speciation. His website later boasted: A girl named Nina once remarked of me, “I can’t tell if you’re animal or machine.” This would have hurt, if I were human. Luckily I’m a chinese [sic] hamster that has been fitted with an experimental math co-processor wetwired into my brain by Ray Kurzweil. I also have an empathy chip. “His brain doesn’t work like anyone else’s,” Parker’s fiancée, now his wife, once told me. “He has five thoughts for every sentence.” None of those thoughts could save Napster. Even though the company eventually struck a deal with the media giant Bertelsmann, music executives and investors never forgot its association with copyright infringement.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

At Caltech, then at Berkeley, he developed what he called “neural dust,” tiny implants that could be put in the brain and send out signals. Musk also recruited a bright-eyed and sharp-minded technology investor named Shivon Zilis. As a student growing up near Toronto, she starred at hockey, but she also became a tech geek after reading Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. After studying at Yale, she worked at a few startup incubators helping new AI ventures, and she became a part-time consultant at OpenAI. When Musk founded Neuralink, he took her out for coffee and asked her to join.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I’m not interested in supporting an organization that doesn’t develop code” → OpenCog → nothing changes. “Eliezer Yudkowsky lacks academic credentials” → Professor Ben Goertzel installed as Director of Research → nothing changes. The one thing that actually has seemed to raise credibility, is famous people associating with the organization, like Peter Thiel funding us, or Ray Kurzweil on the Board. This might be an important thing for young businesses and new-minted consultants to keep in mind—that what your failed prospects tell you is the reason for rejection, may not make the real difference; and you should ponder that carefully before spending huge efforts. If the venture capitalist says “If only your sales were growing a little faster!

The term “technological singularity” is sometimes used in place of “intelligence explosion;” until January 2013, MIRI was named “the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence” and hosted an annual Singularity Summit. Since then, Yudkowsky has come to favor I.J. Good’s older term, “intelligence explosion,” to help distinguish his views from other futurist predictions, such as Ray Kurzweil’s exponential technological progress thesis.2 Technologies like smarter-than-human AI seem likely to result in large societal upheavals, for the better or for the worse. Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI theory” to refer to research into techniques for aligning an AGI’s preferences with the preferences of humans.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Millennia/ tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats 79 4.5 Contemporary techno-millennialism 4. 5 . 1 The s i n gu l a rity a n d tech n o - m i llen n ia l i s m Joel Garreau's (2006) recent book on the psychoculture of accelerating change, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human, is structured in three parts: Heaven, Hell and Prevail. In the H eaven scenario he focuses on the predictions of inventor Ray Kurzweil, summarized in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. The idea of a techno-millennial ' Singularity' was coined in a 1993 paper by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge. In physics 'singularities' are the centres of black holes, within which we cannot predict how physical laws will work.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

A number of Silicon Valley visionaries are trying to bring that world closer.19 They have funded research institutes which aim not to chip away at mortality one disease at a time but to reverse-engineer the aging process itself and upgrade our cellular hardware to a version without that bug. The result, they hope, will be an increase in the human life span of fifty, a hundred, even a thousand years. In his 2006 bestseller The Singularity Is Near, the inventor Ray Kurzweil forecasts that those of us who make it to 2045 will live forever, thanks to advances in genetics, nanotechnology (such as nanobots that will course through our bloodstream and repair our bodies from the inside), and artificial intelligence, which will not just figure out how to do all this but recursively improve its own intelligence without limit.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

And this is one of the most consequential undesirable consequences of this information flood: time spent per adult user per day with digital media doubled between 2008 and 2015 to 5.5 hours (eMarketer 2017), creating new life forms of screen zombies. But the rapid diffusion of electronics and software are trivial matters compared to the expected ultimate achievements of accelerated growth—and nobody has expressed them more expansively than Ray Kurzweil, since 2012 the director of engineering at Google and long before that the inventor of such electronic devices as the charged-couple flat-bed scanner, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first omnifont optical character recognition. In 2001 he formulated his law of accelerating returns (Kurzweil 2001, 1): An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view.