| I was just picking through a copy of The Singularity is Near today. Kurzweil makes several specific predictions in his "2010 scenario": * Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth. * We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times. * Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas. * Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments. * "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance. * We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name. * Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist. * Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3." I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted. I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling. |