FUTURE TALK - Ray Kurzweils "Theory Of Singularity"

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil, born February 12, 1948, is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurism, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), trans-humanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

Kurzweil characterizes evolution throughout all time as progressing through six epochs, each one building on the one before. He says the four epochs which have occurred so far are Physics and Chemistry, Biology and DNA, Brains, and Technology.

Kurzweil touches on the history of the Singularity concept, tracing it back to John von Neumann in the 1950s and I. J. Good in the 1960s. He compares his Singularity to that of a mathematical or astrophysical singularity. While his ideas of a Singularity is not actually infinite, he says it looks that way from any limited perspective.

During the Singularity, Kurzweil predicts that "human life will be irreversibly transformed" and that humans will transcend the "limitations of our biological bodies and brain". He looks beyond the Singularity to say that "the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization." Further, he feels that "future machines will be human, even if they are not biological".

Kurzweil claims once non-biological intelligence predominates the nature of human life will be radically altered:there will be radical changes in how humans learn, work, play, and wage war. Kurzweil envisions nanobots which allow people to eat whatever they want while remaining thin and fit, provide copious energy, fight off infections or cancer, replace organs and augment their brains. Eventually people's bodies will contain so much augmentation they'll be able to alter their "physical manifestation at will".