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Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF 175

Posted by Hemos from the a-little-something-to-read-on-the-holiday-weekend dept.
prostoalex writes "The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0.""
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Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF More

Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF

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  • Futurists... feh (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:04AM (#12979592) Homepage Journal
    Man, I wish I could get a job making untestable hypotheses, and talking in stunningly vague terms about a vast morass of unrelated ideas.

    But I don't want to be a futurist, and I don't have the time to study for the priesthood.
    • You have to study to be a priest? I thought they just took every relavent scientific debate, and twisted it up.

    • Futurists Are Funny (Score:5, Funny)

      by Vagary ( 21383 ) <jawarren@gmail.cAUDENom minus poet> on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:57AM (#12979905) Journal
      Futurists are just like science fiction writers, except instead of being entertaining by combining prognostication with insight into the human condition (cyberpunk) or appealing to our mythological archetypes (space opera), futurism is entertaining by making you laugh in either pity or amazement at their naivete. So they're all doing their part to make the world a better place...unlike priests.

    • Re:Futurists... feh (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dylan Zimmerman ( 607218 ) <Bob_Zimmerman&myrealbox,com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @01:49PM (#12980491)
      You realize that Kurzweil doesn't really need a job anymore, right? He made the Kurzweil reader (reads books aloud) from which flatbed scanners and omnifont OCR came and the Kurzweil synthesizer (the first to accurately reproduce the sounds of orchestral instruments). He's founded nine companies spanning everything from music and assistive technologies to cybernetic art to financial investment. From his site:

      Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence."

      So it isn't exactly his job to make these hypotheses, more like his hobby. ;)


    • > But I don't want to be a futurist, and I don't have the time to study for the priesthood.

      Besides, the Rapture of the Nerds [wikipedia.org] is probably only a few years away anyhow.

  • Memes? (Score:5, Informative)

    by delta_avi_delta ( 813412 ) <dave.murphy@g m a i l.com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:05AM (#12979600)
    Meme is definately not synonymous with "theme", meme being defined as a piece of information passed on through the generations. I wouldn't say "How to build a brain" is a very memetic idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme [wikipedia.org]
    • Ah, but "theme" wasn't a buzzword during the period these essays were written. ;)
    • I haven't seen anyone come up with a compelling reason to use the word "meme" as opposed to "idea", or in this case, "category".

      1999 called, they want their starry-eyed Wired-wank back...

      --grendel drago
      • When Dawkins defined the term, he didn't mean that which has become it's common meaning. He was thinking more of certain songs, the ones that get stuck in your mind, and that you can't seem to get rid of.

        It's a quite different idea from categoyr or idea. That said, this sure isn't one.
        • Isn't that ironic that people are arguing over the exact and unchanging meaning of meme? Of course, the meaning changed -the old "catchy song" was not very useful and so not very fit. The more general "modern meme" mutation was much more successful for a variety of reasons, primarily because it's more useful. The idea of the meme itself is a meme and it changes to ensure its propagation in human culture.
          • Sorry, but that WAS the useful meaning. We don't need another synonym for idea.

            (OTOH, it's worth considering that the word meme is, itself, a meme. I.e., it reproduces itself [as best it can] without respect to context. The meaning may have turned into garbage, but it keeps reproducing anyway...looks like a genuine meme to me.)

            One of Dawkin's points was that this kind of thing isn't interested in whether it's useful to you, it's merely interested in reproducing. So this useage of meme qualifies as an
      • It's not a definition thing, it's a connotation thing. Memes are basically the same thing as ideas. Using the word makes it clear (at least it used to) that you're talking about ideas w.r.t to their survival. The interesting ideas are the ones that have uses, that lead to other ideas, the good ideas, so to speak, and so on. The interesting memes are the ones that survive, even if they are bad ideas (relative to some value system).

        I generally keep my head out of popular science writing and haven't read Wir

    • Re:Memes? (Score:3, Informative)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) *
      Sorry, but Wikipedia is the wrong source here. You should instead look at the (final?) chapter of Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene".

      He coined the word meme on the analog of the word gene, and the intention was that it should mean a *SMALL* piece of information that reproduced itself. It's not a meromosome, it's a meme. It's typically the size of an ad jingle...the really obnoxious kind that you can't forget, no matter how you try. One of his points is that it isn't necessarily true or beneficial to it

  • I didn't know either, but he seems like an inventor of sorts.

    clicky [kurzweiltech.com].

  • Kurzweil (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:05AM (#12979605) Homepage Journal
    I always get confused by Kurzweil reader. My mother who is blind had a device that would scan and read books for her years ago. It was called a Kurzweil. So when I hear Kurzweil reader...

    I wonder if there is a pun in there somewhere? I'll have to read some of this stuff and find out.
  • Of the little I've read of Raymond Kurzweil, he seems like a pure genius. From his ability to program computers at only 12 years old, to his AI and nanobot research, he is a modern day "Renaissance man" with his hand in many different aspects of technology.

    His immortality stuff is a little out-there, but we all have our little quirks :-)

    I can't wait to read some of these essays.
    • Programming a computer at 12 does not require genious. I was programming my first TRS-80 when I was 8. I would not consider myself a genious.

    • From his ability to program computers at only 12 years old

      That really isn't anything special - I was programming games in Z80 and 6502 at 9 years old and I'm sure I'm not exceptional by Slashdot standards.

    • Dude, is your comment meant as a joke? I started programming at 10 and have a wide range of interests (including being a professional number theorist), but certainly do not consider myself a "pure genius". Also, one would have to be working in more than just technology to be considered a Renaisssance man. Does he have any artistic achievements to speak of?
    • If by "genius" you mean "twit", I'm right there with you. Inventions aside, Kurzweil seems very disconnected from reality, and most of his futurism seems so naive that I don't understand why it gets any attention whatsoever. The Age of Spiritual Machines is one of the most useless books I have ever read.

    • Re:Kurzweil is one of those geniuses (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @03:04PM (#12980852) Journal
      From his ability to program computers at only 12 years old

      In response to all the slashdotters saying "That's lame, I started programming way before that," I guess that in itself isn't too impressive. Heck, I started programming when I was 8 myself. However, keep in mind that Kurzweil [wikipedia.org] was born in 1948, which would mean that he started learning to program with the computers of 1960. I find that a little more impressive, although there's undoubtedly also slashdotters who learned to program at a similar age and time. I find them impressive too.

      To get an idea of what computers were like in 1960:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_ hardware#Second_generation_--_late_1950s_and_early _1960s [wikipedia.org]

      The next major step in the history of computing was the invention of the transistor in 1947. This replaced the fragile and power hungry valves with a much smaller and more reliable component. Transistorized computers are normally referred to as 'Second Generation' and dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s. By using transistors and printed circuits a significant decrease in size and power consumption was achieved, along with an increase in reliability. For example, the vacuum tube based IBM 650 of 1954 weighed over 900 kg, the attached power supply weighed around 1350 kg and both were held in separate cabinets of roughly 1.5 meters by 0.9 meters by 1.8 meters. It cost $500,000 or could be leased for $3,500 a month. (Its drum memory was originally only 2000 ten-digit words, and required arcane programming for efficient computing. This type of hardware limitation was to dominate programming for decades afterward, until the evolution of a programming model which was more sympathetic to software development.) By contrast, the transistorized IBM 1620, which replaced the 650, was the size of an office desk. Second generation computers were still expensive and were primarily used by universities, governments, and large corporations.

      In 1959 IBM shipped the transistor-based IBM 7090 mainframe and medium scale IBM 1401. The latter was designed around punch card input and proved a popular general purpose computer. Some 12,000 were shipped, making it the most successful machine in computer history at the time. It used a magnetic core memory of 4000 characters (later expanded to 16,000 characters). Many aspects of its design were based on the desire to replace punched card machines which were in wide use from the 1920s through the early 1970s.

      In 1960 IBM shipped the smaller, transistor-based IBM 1620, originally with only punched paper tape, but soon upgraded to punch cards. It proved a popular scientific computer and about 2,000 were shipped. It used a magnetic core memory of up to 60,000 decimal digits.

      Also in 1960, DEC launched the PDP-1 their first machine intended for use by technical staff in laboratories and for research.
    • Considering immortality seems to mean little more than preventing or repairing damage to DNA, I don't think it's all that far "out-there." I'm sure there will be other hurdles, such as lifetime accumulation of toxic substances (heavy metals, radioactive substances), and other degenerative diseases, but I certainly don't think it's unsolvable. Whether or not we, or our children, or our children's children will be around to see it is another question altogether.

      The idea of immortality was much more fantast

  • A Must Read For Anybody Interested In Future Tech (Score:5, Informative)

    by DanielMarkham ( 765899 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:08AM (#12979621) Homepage
    Ray has got it nailed. It's interesting how much agreement there is anymore on future technology predictions. Only a few decades ago, predictions were all over the place: flying cars, nuclear power plants in every home, etc. But lately it seems that most people agree on the basics: man and machine will merge in some fashion, biotech will begin to cure aging, etc. The details are still very fuzzy, but it's interesting that Ray can bring these pieces together in a way that is not that far away from mainstream thought.

    What's the Other Slashdot Effect? [whattofix.com]
    • Just because it's mainstream doesn't mean it's actually correct.

      Thinking that biotech-curing-aging and man-merging-with-machine- will happen before flying cars or table-top fusion is more a by-product of where the 'hot' topics are (and therefore the media attention), rather than which is actually more probable.

      Which, I guess, could just be another definition of mainstream.
    • It's interesting how much agreement there was a few decades ago on future technology predictions.

      Before that, they were all over the place: alien invasions, giant mutant plants and insects, space pirates flying in rockets to other planets.

      But then most people started agreeing on the basics: flying cars, nuclear power in every home, giant monolithic computers controlling the government, with potential interruptions by nuclear winters from WWIII.

      The details were fuzzy, but with this consensus clearly we we
    • It is premature to say Ray is right, considering nothing he predicted has come to fruition yet. Futurists don't have to "nail" it; the whole point of the exercise is to provoke thought and ideas, not to be correct or mainstream.
    • > Only a few decades ago, predictions were all over the place: flying cars, nuclear power plants in every home, etc.

      Seems to me a lot of people got out of the futurist business becuause, well, its mostly groundless speculation and self-promotion. I'm not surprised that the remaining self-styled futurists agree, seemingly, more than usual. If anything the singularity crap and super-amazing just around the corner nanomachines/genetic engineering are memes in themselves and the remaining futurists are jus
    • The problem that still exists is that conventional "futurists" (they don't do futurology anymore, they do technology foresight) don't look farther than 2030 (in Japan). This is time where you can largely ignore the cumulative effect of technologies and concentrate on obvious and immediate implications. Kurzweil and other transhumanist [transhumanism.org] thinkers concentrate on what happens in a slightly longer term - the technological singularity (2030-2050). But the first group largely ignores the inspired visions of the sec
    • It's interesting how much agreement there is anymore on future technology predictions.

      Argh. You've just committed a terrible crime against English and made my head hurt. The word "anymore". Look at it. It's really two English words stuck together. Any and more. As in "any more", or "any longer".

      For example:
      I don't like Slashdot anymore.
      I don't like Slashdot any longer.

      Compared to:
      I like Slashdot anymore.
      I like Slashdot any longer.

      It doesn't mean a god damn thing. It's nonsense. It leaves the r

    • As someone else commented on this story, The Singularity is a rather blatantly Rapture for science/geeks. This kind of futurism has become indistinguishable from religion. But what's really bad is that universal craving for The Good Word discourages dissen from The Singularity, marginalising all conservative futurists.

      So, to mix metaphors, The Singularity meme has eaten all the other futurist memes and now we're left with stupid goo.
      • The Singularity is a rather blatantly Rapture for science/geeks

        That comment is complete BS. Whereas Rapture is a fabrication created out of essentially nothing, the singularity is an attempted explanation for what we observe (or more accurately what we don't observe). It is an elaboration of the Fermi paradox.

        There is a strong inclination to assume we are not unique and that there must have been others like us at different places and times. But given the 5+ billion years and the immense number of potenti
        • Let me get this straight: the reason we don't see any aliens is that their civilizations reached The Singularity and therefore they stopped doing things which would make us notice them? Okay, assuming that the enraptured humans are having enough fun they don't worry about the possibility of ET anymore, shouldn't the AIs still be sending out signals or whatever? Or if The Singularity involves non-friendly AIs, then why haven't they come to Earth to eat us yet?
          • their civilizations reached The Singularity and therefore they stopped doing things which would make us notice them?

            Yep, that is a fair way to paraphrase what I wrote. Another would be that something fundamental changes rather than continuing incremental change. My own unpopular inclination is that we really are unique (or possibly first) in the galaxy. That allows me to assume that if there is a singularity event in our future it will not be as profound as it would otherwise have to be.

            Another possibili
            • Is there any theoretical evidence that a world run by friendly or unfriendly AIs would do less SETI activity than one run by humans? Besides, the encryption, of course, which is a cool idea.

  • ramona ! (Score:3, Funny)

    by maharg ( 182366 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:09AM (#12979629) Homepage Journal
    Me: hi - your website appears to have been slashdotted

    Ramona: <silence>
  • It shall rename nameless for now so those that do not want to play it will not get spoilers. But in it, the world of the game was later revealed to be a virtual world/"other dimension" in which the level of complexity had created billions of virtual characters, that technical details aside, were the same in existence as those that created the game. It brought up an intersting moral question. If they ever did create a game in which we just watched the lives of "virtual people" play out while we threw situ

  • RIP? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by kabdib ( 81955 )
    Ray Kurzweil is dead at age 2?

  • Kurzweil, Borg of the Now. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by torpor ( 458 )
    I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.

    To me, there is little between the ideologized mind/computer monstrosity and '"God is Dead" is my Co-Pilot'.

    Can someone explain to me why his sort of thinking is safe to have going on in this world? Do we really want future generations of fascist to be raised on and inspired by such militant technologism as trans-humanism?

    No thanks. If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.
    • How exactly is Kurzweil's technologism militant?

    • Re:Kurzweil, Borg of the Now. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shihar ( 153932 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @01:20PM (#12980359)
      You are entirely misunderstanding Kurtzweil if you think him a militant or a fascist. Kurtzweil talks about inevitability. Humans advance knowledge. Nothing short of some sort of anti-technology fascism is going to halt humans from advancing knowledge. Certain societies might choose to abstain in fear of a 'trans human' era, but unless those societies are willing to wipe out societies that choose not to abstain, there is an inevitability to Kurtzweil's line of reasoning.

      Kurtzweil's line of reasoning is simple. As we amass more knowledge, the speed at which we amass knowledge grows greater. Further, he says we will come to a time when we build something that can begin to produce its own knowledge, and that this thing will create a singularity. That is to say that once we have machines that can amass knowledge and improve on themselves with that knowledge, technology will explode so rapidly compared to today that you can't even begin to comprehend life in this post singularity world. Such a technological singularity could appear so quickly that it might be that no one knows it happened until after the fact.

      A lot of futurists believe all of the above. They argue against a human centric world as seen in most sci-fi. The idea of a crew of a few thousand running a ship as seen in Star Trek is silly to them because they argue AI will one day be able to do it better. I personally tend to agree.

      What might be rankling you is Kurtzweil's take on whether or not having humanity eclipsed is a bad thing. Kurtzweil argues that humanity's eclipse is all but inevitable, but not necessarily a bad thing. People tend to take a dim view at having one's species wiped out, or at least rendered inconsequential. Kurtzweil argues that perhaps this eclipsing won't be such a bad thing. While having humans wiped out might be one possibility, a Garden of Eden created by appreciative creations might be another, as could the possibility of merging/joining with said creations.

      A Garden of Eden to play in for as long as I desire or transcending to a higher plane of existence doesn't sound all that bad in my eyes.

      Kurtzweil isn't a militant technologist. He is an optimist. Could you argue his optimism is naive? Sure. I personally take it as a welcome change. We have a morbid view of the future some times, especially in a future where humans have been eclipsed. It seems like everyone argues for a Terminator/Matrix style future where it has to be man Vs machine. Kurtzweil just offers up a little optimism that the future might not be all that bad and that it might be man with machine, or man carrying on merrily while machine goes off and does whatever.
      • Oh, damn, you mean this guy is the moron who thought up the damn "Singularity?"

        Let me sum up my objection simply: I doubt that we're going to be able to make a quantum-state realtime adaptive intelligence that's significantly better than the one between your ears.

        • I agree with parent. What is next? Is some ass hole going to suggest that we are going to build a flying machine humans can use better then what nature has built in birds? This is just stupid. Humans can't fly and will never beat out evolution. The suggestion that humans could some how improve upon a few million years of trial and error is just totally inane. Next they will tell us they have thinkin'-gadets that can beat a chess master at chest. /scaracsim

          Simply put, never is a very long time. If yo
    • If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.

      Be specific - it will come from the makers of voting machines.
    • I've never been impressed with the militant technologism of Kurzweil.

      I believe you're confusing Ray for a Futurist [wikipedia.org].

      If there is a future for fascism, its going to come from the makers of machines.

      Futurists philosophically paved the way for fascism, but that all played out about a century ago. And, yeah, it didn't work all that well.
    • Do we want a future dominated by technophobes who would condemn all humans to hideous decrepitude and death after a mere 70ish years? I don't think so. Kurzweil's vision is highly benign and has no fascism or borg-like parts at all. The poster's slur is beneath contempt. What could be more fascist than the poster's implied wish to outlaw thoughts the poster finds uncomfortable?
  • Everyone who follows the link will be trying to download a 4.4mb pdf from one single server.

    Did NOBODY think a few mirrors would be apropriate before putting it up on /.??
    • ah, come on!

      it's not like anyone is really gona read TFA. they will just :
      a) bash this 'kurtzweil' character. who the f**k does this dude thinks he is?
      b) complain about the pdf format...

      if the futue depends on /.ers... gee...

    • HERE'S A 30-DAY MIRROR! (Score:5, Informative)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @05:41PM (#12981463) Journal

      With all the free web servies out there, I don't understand why nobody bothered to upload this PDF to one of them. I've uploaded it to rapidshare. Follow the directions:

      1. Click on this link [rapidshare.de]
      2. Click on the "Free" button at the bottom of the screen
      3. Wait for the "download ticket" counter to reach zero. When it does, you'll be presented with a link that you can right-click and save to your hard drive.

      That should be good for at least 30 days.

      GMD

  • Somebody called "pietrocco" called the reader a "great collection" on 07/11/2003 5:52 PM.

  • Kurzweil is not just a computer scientist... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SenorCitizen ( 750632 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @12:28PM (#12980060)
    Most keyboard players hold his old Kurzweil Music Systems products in high esteem. The K250 (introduced in 1984) was one of the first affordable samplers that was actually any good (no, the E-mu Emulator wasn't all that good)...

    From Vintage Synth Explorer's Kurzweil K250 page:

    One of the first keyboard samplers, it was great then and still good today. It has an adjustable sample rate of 5kHz to 50kHz which means 100 to 10 seconds of sampling time, respectively. Its sampler was also 16-bit. Many other samplers of this time had much more limited sampling/digital audio specs which made this synth a very prominent keyboard. By todays standards, however, this synth has many limitations such as samples are stored directly on Apple Mac disks only. But it had extremely modern features that make this synth easy to use and quite versatile.

    It has a 12-track sequencer, chorus, transpose, tune, 36 ROM sounds, 96 pristine quality acoustic instruments, 341 presets, 12 voice polyphony, 2 LFO's per voice, variable sampling rate, truncation, looping, velocity crossfading, full 88 weighted keyboard, MIDI and more! Of course the newer K2000 series is supposed to be better, but the K250 still seems like a major contender even in todays modern synthesizer era. It was also available in keyboardless Expander (pictured above) or as a rackmount module.

    It has been used by Stevie Wonder, Sean Hopper, Richard Wright, Patrick Moraz, Paul Shaffer, Lorin Hollander, Michael Kamen, Kitaro, and John Carpenter.

    Check out the rest of the range: http://www.vintagesynth.com/kurzweil/ [vintagesynth.com]

  • Ray/Ramona (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04, 2005 @01:56PM (#12980538)
    This is the same guy that does "live" performances as "Ramona", his virtual 22-year old female rock star alter-ego, complete with motion-tracking and voice-transformation. And he doesn't think that there is anything weird about that. In fact, he says that in the future, everyone will do that kind of thing.

    I'm just saying, grains of salt....

  • I'm not trying to sell this guy's books for him, but...

    If you want to read a book that will blow your f-ing mind, check out "The Age of Spiritual Machines", by Ray Kurzweil. I went around for a month with my head smoking after that one.
    • Amen to that.

      It's not an understatement to say this book changed my view on the world, hence my life. Talk about far reaching consequences to today's givens, like Moore's Law, this book is a real eye-opener in that respect.

      Required reading.

  • Charlie Stross's Accelerando also downloadable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:14PM (#12981874) Journal
    On the topic of downloadable literature about rapidly-accelerating technology, Charlie Stross's newest novel is available for free download. Here's the relevant info (from another one of my slashdot submission attempts):

    Programmer-novelist and Hugo nominee Charles Stross [wikipedia.org] has gotten permission from his publishers to make his newest novel, Accelerando [accelerando.org], available as a free download [accelerando.org] in several formats. As described by one reviewer [trashotron.com]: 'Accelerando fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity [wikipedia.org]. As the novel can be somewhat dense in novel technical ideas, I've started a Technical Companion [wikibooks.org] on wikibooks to help provide more information on the relevant concepts.

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