Friday, November 11

What I'm reading—slowly  

For an excerpt of what I'm reading, go here: The Law of Accelerating Returns.

It's a thick book. It's certainly a thought provoking book. It's about the coming Singularity (which I might survive long enough to actually see, most certainly my kids will). Ray Kurzweil is certainly optimistic about the future. I'm taking my time reading it, understanding it, comprehending it. I'm certainly enjoying it.

If I talk other people into reading this copy (and they should, although they might not make it a priority), I then want to reread the book and do something I haven't done since college. Pick up a highlighter and highlight things, write notes in the margins. I will probably also note the copious footnotes that I want to follow up on, probably by writing down the chapter and footnote number on a sheet of paper.

It's a fantastic trip for a futurist's mind to go down. Ray does it quite well without too much seemingly technical stuff in the way. Then again, I've been following a lot of this before, so it may be more technical than other people can handle. I dunno at this point.

It's certainly been made clear to me that by the start of the 22nd century, we will have either killed off the human race or evolved to the next level. Ray again is very optimistic about this. Me, I'm not so sure. David Brin asks a question that has been posed to him about how to push Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology without scaring anybody off. I'm really not afraid of nanotechnology. I don't see the problem per se with nanotechnology. Yes, it's possible to make nanobots that do bad things to humans. It doesn't take nanotechnology to do that.

Artificial Intelligence has the issue of once the AI becomes aware of itself, what will it do with its parents (us humans)? There is a comparison to the bad child. Perhaps. Looking at AI the way Ray does, what used to be considered AI is now just considered to be a computation. My feeling is that machine born AI will be by the nature of how it is developed, working in conjunction with human wetware, at least for the beginning period. Merging the two then becomes the defacto method of operation.

That's my thinking as of now. Give me a few more weeks with the book, and who knows what my outlook will be.

I'm already having issues with what Ray says where I'm currently reading, particularly about replacing the major organs of the body with nanobots. Yes, a nanobot might carry oxygen more efficiently. But there is no discussion about what more efficiently actually means. The nanobots are still going to be responsible for bringing oxygen to cells, and removing the carbon dioxide from the cells. Why are lungs no longer important? The nanobots will still need some sort of port to exchange the carbon dioxide for oxygen in the atmosphere. Or is the nanorobot just supposed to strip the oxygen out of the carbon dioxide and create a bunch of carbon atoms out of the residual carbon, and put that where? And yes, I do believe that we are going to have to keep the blood filtering organs around, such as the kidneys and the liver. We are also going to have to have our own nanobot organ that will filter out the damaged nanobots. And yes, there will be damaged nanobots. Maybe this gets addressed later.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 11/11/2005 09:16:00 PM    0 comments Links to this post

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