Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Ray Kurzweil – Page 21

In a recent article, I began to unpack Rodney Brooks’ October 2017 essay “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions.” Now I continue my analysis by looking into the faulty atheistic thinking that motivates the AI salvation preached by futurists such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil. Although Brooks does not address this worldview dimension, his critique of AI predictive sins provides a great opportunity for just that.

Brooks is a pioneer of robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and is MIT Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus. He is also the founder and chief technology officer of Rethink Robotics, which makes cobots—robots designed to collaborate with humans in a shared industrial workspace.

Previously I discussed Brooks’ remark that “all the evidence that I see says we have no real idea yet how to build” the superintelligent devices that Kurzweil and like-minded singularity advocates imagine.

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How far should we integrate human physiology with technology? What do we do with self-aware androids—like Blade Runner’s replicants—and self-aware supercomputers? Or the merging of our brains with them? If Ray Kurzweil’s famous singularity—a future in which the exponential growth of technology turns into a runaway train—becomes a reality, does religion have something to offer in response?

Yes, not only is A.I. potentially taking all of our jobs, but it’s also changing religion.

Brandon WithrowBrandon Withrow

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Ray Kurzweil is director of engineering at Google but he is better known for writing best-selling books outlining the future of artificial intelligence.

He has made 147 predictions on the future of technology including the ubiquity of wearable devices and the move from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets. In fact, his prediction rate has been rated 86 per cent accurate.

With this in mind, fans were excited to see Kurzweil answer their questions in a live streaming interview session last week where he elaborated on his predictions.

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Innovation will do more good than harm, he says.

You know a topic is trending when the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly bicker about its potential risks and rewards. In this case, Musk says he fears artificial intelligence will lead to World War III because nations will compete for A.I. superiority. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has called such doomsday scenarios “irresponsible” and says he is optimistic about A.I.

But another tech visionary sees the future as more nuanced. Ray Kurzweil, an author and director of engineering at Google, thinks, in the long run, that A.I. will do far more good than harm. Despite some potential downsides, he welcomes the day that computers surpass human intelligence—a tipping point otherwise known as “the singularity.” That’s partly why, in 2008, he cofounded the aptly named Singularity University, an institute that focuses on world-changing technologies. We caught up with the longtime futurist to get his take on the A.I. debate and, well, to ask what the future holds for us all.

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The new self-propelled, cancer-seeking bacteriobot swims right into the tumor and zaps it with a deadly payload of cancer drugs.

The recently perfected #bacteriobot holds ‘a lot of promise’ in treating #cancer says a physician. Cancer patients at a hospital in Montreal may be the first to be treated with these #nanorobots built out of bacteria.

Summary: The recently perfected bacteriobot holds ‘a lot of promise’ in treating cancer says a physician. Cancer patients at a hospital in Montreal may be the first to be treated with nanorobots built out of bacteria. The new self-propelled, cancer-seeking bacteriobot swims right into the tumor and zaps it with a deadly payload of cancer drugs. [Cover image: Getty Images/iStock.]

Google’s Futurist Ray Kurzweil once said that within decades, we will have nanobots, swimming through our veins keeping us healthy. The tiny robots will keep us healthy by correcting DNA errors, removing toxins, extending our memories and zapping cancer. The Futurist said that back in 2007, and his prophecy is becoming a reality, at least in the treatment of cancer.

Years spent developing bacteria-based nanobots are finally bearing fruit, and thanks to progress made by a physician at the Jewish General Hospital (JGH) in Montreal, cancer patients may be the first to be treated with tumor-killing nanorobots. The JGH doctors are using a newly-developed self-propelled, cancer-seeking nanorobot built out of bacteria and referred to as a bacteriobot, an amalgam of the words bacteria and nanorobot.

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‘In my lifetime, the singularity will happen,’ Alison Lowndes, head of AI developer relations at technology company Nvidia, tells Metro.co.uk at the AI Summit.

‘But why does everyone think they’d be hostile?

Robots ‘will reach human intelligence by 2029 and life as we know it will end in 2045’.

This isn’t the prediction of a conspiracy theorist, a blind dead woman or an octopus but of Google’s chief of engineering, Ray Kurzweil.

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Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is the author of five national best-selling books, including “The Singularity is Near” and “How to Create a Mind.”

Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, 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), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Kurzweil then found a doctor (Terry Grossman, M.D.) who shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to live longer. Kurzweil was ingesting “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry. Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 90.

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By 2045, we’ll have expanded the intelligence of our human machine civilization a billion fold. That will result in a technological singularity, a point beyond which it’s hard to imagine…

“Well, by 2020 we’ll have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain, but we won’t be finished yet with reverse engineering the human brain and understanding its methods.”

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