Untitled topic

It is hard to foresee the consequences of a paradigm shift.

People creating electronics with vacuum tubes never suspected that transistors and IC would change things within a few decades.

Same with flight. Couple of years before the first flight people were flying in baloons. Couple of years later, in airliners.

I expect the author's brief was "1000 words slagging off silicon valley".

My take: Kurzweil is missing the mark to suggest unabated growth in computing or anything like a true "singularity" where a curve goes to infinity. However, I think his overall insight into exponential effects and how unintuitive they are is brilliant and basically true. All of us who have been around for a few decades can clearly see the world changing dramatically in some dimensions, and the general expectation is that it will continue to do so. Some of the developments this century will probably be quite mind bending.

Kurzweil is definitely a strong optimist, and my feeling is he's a bit too optimistic, but I suspect that he may be right in the rough sense that the technologies discovered this century will help more than they hurt.

The commentary on the religiosity of technology is an interesting one, deserving more thought.

The CIA has declassified documents where they suspect certain people known to them may had been Scientology agents; specifically the remote viewing psychic Pat Price who died under mysterious circumstances.

These members of this esoteric deep state worked with Pat Price at the CIA in the 1960s. [0] Thus they've held the highest security clearances for decades and several are current CIA contractors. [1]

Although it appears sinister, it's more like an optical illusion. Most of them are just scientists who have a legitimate interest in the unknown. Yet somewhere there is some grand secret with a subtle or covert force at work. Deciphering it is almost impossible though.

This techno-religion is affiliated with several former military and CIA employees. The US Government views it as a long-term, persistence kind of 'paranormal deep state' conspiracy which threatens national security. And, of course, the government considers their claims regarding remarkable secrets held by the government and exotic technology as false. (And they are false.)

One person involved in this is a Stanford professor who was recently in the NY Times discussing exotic and controversial research. His partner is the one who said (in the 1980s) that he was starting a new religion with the Scientology scientist; and ostensibly these people either have or are on the direct peripheral of "Singularity-type" radical technology.

Yet the only person affiliated with the group who actually works for the US Government is a JASON scientist. Some say he is the mastermind of it all but that's unlikely. JASON's an interesting group of elite scientists who meet once a year to work on various problems and topics for the federal government.

My point is there's interesting conspiracy-like actions happening, whether they are self-organizing and random, or some cosmic force of deception. If you think of the Stoic's idea of Amor Fati, then a first principle like 'deception is a force of nature' makes a lot of practical sense.

Resist the temptation to get angry, have faith in chaos and unlock mysteries of life.

[0] https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/pat-prices-d...

[1] https://thetanetworkersscientology.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/...

I struggle to see how life could really be so different. I haven't read of any concrete examples of how faster computers will lead to a singularity. Wealth will change hands and economic inequality will continue to increase, but that's about it. Maybe it'll be different if research in genetics, nanotech, and energy are driven by advanced algorithms. There's still a lot we don't know about the human brain.