Ray Kurzweil's new book "The Singularity Is Near." was published today. At the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference tonight we had the privilege of hearing Kurzweil outline many of the key concepts from his book and from his work generally on artificial Intelligence. To me the most profound of Kurzweil's many fascinating observations was the idea that despite his assertions that; technology acceleration will result in the emergence of "forms of nonbiolobical intelligence superior to human intelligence" and, that "most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological", "the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization."
Network Solutions is having a sale on URL's. Mine (http://www.douglasross.com) doesn't do anything at the moment (I'm saving it for a rainy day) but it was coming up on ten years and I needed to renew it to protect my name. So I decided to take them up on their pay-in-advance 20 year package sale for $279.00 or $13.95 per year (about half of the regular annual fee...probably not that good a deal in hindsight.) But the kicker was, after I hit the pay button it dawned on me that I'll be over 83 years old when this thing expires. How creepy is that? If I make it I'll take it as a good sign and re-up for another 20 years. And by then maybe I'll have done something with it.
Comments