Kurzweil
Advantages of a Machine Brain
13.05.11 Filed in: Opinion
There is a lot of hype right now about Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the machine intelligence and the pending Singularity.
Wether or not humans will begin to implant digital contraptions in their bodies and in their brains is up to the future - at this point, we can only speculate. Though I have to say, the idea of accessing the internet directly from my brain - without having to use a computer or tablet - is a compelling thought.
Personally, I believe the bigger issue at hand - and one we have to seriously consider very soon - is this: Given the ability to interconnect at „will”, and imparted with the objective to achieve a particular goal, machines with partial „thinking” capability will always outdo their human creators. Wether or not they are able to generate higher „thinking-throughput” is probably only secondary - it is their ability to network instantly and widely that will give them the advantage.
Anyone with even average social skills will realize, no later than 35 years of age, that the social / business network is half of the rent. Without knowing „whom to call for what”, even a highly skilled knowledge worker would soon hit uncrossable boundaries.
Give your iPad 15 the verbal command to research a particular subject, and what will it do? It will instantly thread many parallel searches on the Web to retrieve this information. It will also contact all the devices it „knows”, either because you have „paired it” with a particular device (perhaps, because that device belongs to your history professor) or because it has „met” that device in previous searches. This is called „collaboration”, something humans have done since day one, albeit not particularly efficiently.
The „root of all evil” isn’t money, in my humble opinion, it is the complexity of trying to convey your ideas, dreams and wishes in a verbal language that restrains you from communicating efficiently. Add to that the interpretability of language (again, because it is imprecise) and you get? Bad communication.
Not so with digital devices. Sure, at this point they are restricted to protocols that human beings conceived and constructed for them. Communication seems to work pretty well using these „languages” already. Give it a few more years, and you may find protocols that are constructed dynamically through „learning by doing” within the grid.
The only thing that represents a limiting factor - once this state of being has been achieved - is the throughput of the Web in the future. We already have throughput issues in certain places, as much of the traffic on the Internet is already not generated by humans anymore, but by machine2machine communication and data spiders.
And finally, we retain one important function that, at least for now, is completely in our hands: we can always pull the plug if it gets too „hot”.
Wether or not humans will begin to implant digital contraptions in their bodies and in their brains is up to the future - at this point, we can only speculate. Though I have to say, the idea of accessing the internet directly from my brain - without having to use a computer or tablet - is a compelling thought.
Personally, I believe the bigger issue at hand - and one we have to seriously consider very soon - is this: Given the ability to interconnect at „will”, and imparted with the objective to achieve a particular goal, machines with partial „thinking” capability will always outdo their human creators. Wether or not they are able to generate higher „thinking-throughput” is probably only secondary - it is their ability to network instantly and widely that will give them the advantage.
Anyone with even average social skills will realize, no later than 35 years of age, that the social / business network is half of the rent. Without knowing „whom to call for what”, even a highly skilled knowledge worker would soon hit uncrossable boundaries.
Give your iPad 15 the verbal command to research a particular subject, and what will it do? It will instantly thread many parallel searches on the Web to retrieve this information. It will also contact all the devices it „knows”, either because you have „paired it” with a particular device (perhaps, because that device belongs to your history professor) or because it has „met” that device in previous searches. This is called „collaboration”, something humans have done since day one, albeit not particularly efficiently.
The „root of all evil” isn’t money, in my humble opinion, it is the complexity of trying to convey your ideas, dreams and wishes in a verbal language that restrains you from communicating efficiently. Add to that the interpretability of language (again, because it is imprecise) and you get? Bad communication.
Not so with digital devices. Sure, at this point they are restricted to protocols that human beings conceived and constructed for them. Communication seems to work pretty well using these „languages” already. Give it a few more years, and you may find protocols that are constructed dynamically through „learning by doing” within the grid.
The only thing that represents a limiting factor - once this state of being has been achieved - is the throughput of the Web in the future. We already have throughput issues in certain places, as much of the traffic on the Internet is already not generated by humans anymore, but by machine2machine communication and data spiders.
And finally, we retain one important function that, at least for now, is completely in our hands: we can always pull the plug if it gets too „hot”.
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