Kurzweil: The Cloud Will Expand Human Brain Capacity 267
Nerval's Lobster writes "Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will eventually do more than store our emails or feed us streaming movies on demand: it's going to help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits. In a question-and-answer session following a speech to the DEMO technology conference in Santa Clara, California last week, Kurzweil described the human brain as impressive but limited in its capacity to hold information. 'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.' (Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk.) The solution to overcoming the brain's limitations, he added, involves 'basically expanding our brains into the cloud.'"
With apologies to Michio Kaku (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree that his "singularity" is bullshit (thought is more than simple information), we're not going to conquer death any time soon, and "futurist" is a crazy occupation (where can I get my degree in futurology?), but although he's a hack he's done some impressive hacking -- synthesizers, OCR, speech recognition, etc. all invented by Kurtzweil.
He obviously has a very good understanding of computer systems, but a poor understanding of neurobiology or humanity.
That said, I'm not 100% human. I have a man-made
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I, for at least the last decade, have already been weighing information on the value of storing it locally in my head (memorization) vs the ability to quickly look it up with Google or other internet service. A large portion of my knowledge now is pointers to details and vague summaries of what the knowledge is or can help me do. Adding cloud is just making "The internet will expand human brain capacity" a more current buzzword complaint statement.
Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku (Score:5, Funny)
If the Borg want to assimilate me... (Score:2)
If the Borg want to assimilate me, all they have to do is send Seven of Nine. Half the planet's population would probably volunteer.
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If the Borg want to assimilate me, all they have to do is send Seven of Nine.
Your medical doctor will be the one to assimilate you. There are already a LOT of cyborgs. Cochlear implants, eye implants, artificial joints, pacemakers...
Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku (Score:5, Informative)
For interesting critiques on Kurzweil, you might...
... read Jaron Lanier, particularly his One Half of a Manifesto [edge.org], where he makes a pretty compelling case that Kurzweil is a "cybernetic totalist" who's pretty much willing to throw away everything that makes human life worth living in order to prove that human nature is mechanistic and reducible to mere information.
... watch The Transcendent Man, a documentary on RK, which makes the pretty compelling case the Kurzweil is in fact obsessed with "the technological singularity" not because he has a rational basis for it to be, but because he's wracked with guilt for never having a good relationship with his father, and he's obsessed with the idea that the Singularity could not just prolong him forever, but resurrect his dead father as well. He's driven by the idea that death is abandonment or alienation and he's terrified of being abandoned, again.
Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku (Score:5, Insightful)
There is something kind of lame about taking a guy who has some interesting ideas, and performing some kind of hack psychoanalysis of him, and generating this air of "because this hack psychoanalysis does a good job of making him look crazy, obviously that discredits his ideas." "He doesn't have a rational basis for this, he's just wracked with guilt over his father" is the sleaziest kind of ad-hominem argument.
As for Lanier's 12 year old essay, I'm not even sure that half of his "cybernetic totalist" beliefs are necessarily held by people intrigued by Singularity ideas, without even going into whether those beliefs are reasonable or not. It's not that I'm even convinced by the Singulatarians, but that so many people who aren't convinced make these weird statements like "He's pretty much willing to throw away everything that makes human life worth living" as if Kurzweil is some kind of Cyber-Stalinist, rather than a guy who is trying to take an idea as far as it can go to see if there is anything to it.
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I would say anyone who attempts to redefine "life" in terms suited to his personal needs is a sort of stalinist, yes. Kurzweil's ideas are unmistakably millennial and rife with historical imperative, just as Marx's ideas were. People like Marx and Ayn Rand are famous for "taking an idea as far as it can go." They're the ones who serve as examples of just how cheap and useless a mere "idea" is.
I'm not sure if the fact that Lanier's essay is 12 years old is supposed to mean anything. That it's 12 years old
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I agree that these kind of pop-psychology hacks don't really have anything meaningful to add to this discussion. In fact, if they are registered psychologists, issuing a diagnosis without actually interviewing the person is essentially a form of medical malpractice. Though you see this kind of analysis done on television often enough these days.
That said, Kurzweil is obviously a hack, and doesn't seem to any rational basis for the conclusions he draws. For example, he will tell you that at some point, since
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Don't waste your breath, you are talking to people who believe, mind is a magical gift given to people by an immortal old guy who lives in the sky.
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Re:With apologies to Michio Kaku (Score:4, Insightful)
You might also compare a university test from the early 90s, where internet were a luxury for the few, with a current test. Just by looking at it you can tell something.
If the internet era seems to correlate with dumber people, I don't see how the cloud can completely reverse the trend.
"but you will be integrated with a super system which will make you smarter stronger faster..."
Yes, the system will be. You will be the disposable, remote controlled larvae on which it runs. Face it, you already stopped being considered a man, you are a human resource, your health spied.
An internet based transparent society is possible, but the guys in charge don't like it at all, and are pushing for a 1984 style panopticon instead.
So they win if we implement it, and they win if we oppose a strong influence of the internet.
Kurzweil could be the kindest person on earth, but he is very useful for this because his vision either scares you or enslaves you. So they promote him all over the media.
"Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets". I'd consider this as a possibility.
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But what if Kurzweil is *right* in that claim? Lanier is doing what so many philsophers do: Defending the 'magic' in mankind, without considering that the magic he defends may not exist at all.
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Jaron is also a total crackpot, coming from the other direction.
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That One Half Manifesto sounds more like hippy bs to me
Well it was written by Jaron Lanier, so it is zippie [wikipedia.org] BS.
Reasons to be hesitant around Kurzweil (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Reasons to be hesitant around Kurzweil (Score:5, Informative)
Kurzweil seems to be following the proud tradition of very sharp people who have illustrious careers which then provide them the freedom to go a bit off the rails...
His speech and music synthesis stuff is solid. After he found nerd jesus and decided that he would live forever through the power of the internet...
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I'd be less kind, but yeah. This stuff gets a reaction, so he says it. Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall. Of course "the cloud" (if you will) expands our 'brain capacity', so did clay tablets and hieroglyphics. This kind of thing is just pablum, value free nonsense. Crap I wish I could get payed 1/10th what this guy gets to spout out garbage like this. What a racket.
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Longevity vitamins.
What other types of vitamins are there? I mean, isn't that why people take vitamins, to live longer?
I've had plenty of clients selling worse crap than this.
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The people I know who take them do so to extend life, improve health, brain function, weight loss, etc. . . and prevent illness or death. Many people have told me that vitamin C will prevent or help treat a cold, though I haven't found the evidence to be compelling.
So no, it's not all about increasing your number of years.
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It must be the cloud, not a device (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you want to expand your Redundant Array of Interdependent Neurons, a cloud seems appropriate enough...
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You can download a copy of Wikipedia to your PC, but nobody does.
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I do, that way I can edit it to be correct instead of having all the errors other people put in it.
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Sounds like a cue for song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic [youtube.com]
That tired old nonsense again (Score:3)
While Kurzweil seems to be in urgent need of such an extension, so he may gain at least a bit of effective intelligence, that is baseless wishful thinking at its best. The cloud so far does not even perform on the level of local, dedicated hardware and it is uncertain whether it will eventually get there. Mental capacity enhancements? In your dreams.
Kurzweil urgently needs attention. (Score:2)
yet another publicity whore living the dream...
It already does. (Score:4, Interesting)
It already does though. I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need. This allows me to work with a much smaller set of data and fetch that which I need from the cloud as needed.
We don't need it built in though.
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lag times are a factor. So is a lack of connectivity.
Why not have RAM in the cloud?
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Purple. No wait, that's best for the DB
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Re:It already does. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need.
That is not as easy as it sounds.
First you need to know whether you are asking the right question and second you need to know whether or not you have found the right answer.
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It's definitely 42.
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One thing I have noticed is that a lot of people are Terrible at searching (or really doing anything complicated on a computer). People think nothing of asking siri complete questions, but only type 2 words into google and get upset they can't find anything. Asking google complete sentences has worked well for me for years. Show this technique to people and they are completely amazed. I know my mother is terrified of hitting the wrong button on her phone. How does this happen to people?
Information, or raw data? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe Kurzweil is confused on the definitions of data vs. information. Information is data I've had time to digest and react to. If all you want to do is accumulate TBytes of raw data, yeah, the Cloud is fine for that. Whether you'll ever find the time to do anything with it all is another question.
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I believe Kurzweil is confused
I believe he's just trying to keep his name in the news. 15 minutes isn't enough for some people.
Re:Information, or raw data? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, that is your very own made-up-on-the-spot definition of "information". You can't just redefine words in a way that nobody else does.
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
data
n 1: a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn;
"statistical data" [syn: {data}, {information}]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 July 2010) [foldoc]:
data /day't*/ (Or "raw data")
raw data
Numbers, {characters}, {images}, or other method of recording,
in a form which can be assessed by a human or (especially)
input into a {computer}, stored and {processed} there, or
transmitted on some {digital channel}. Computers nearly
always represent data in {binary}.
Data on its own has no meaning, only when interpreted by some
kind of {data processing system} does it take on meaning and
become {information}.
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Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/903/ [xkcd.com]
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It's a weird joke because IQ is specifically supposed to exclude book learning and test innate problem solving, abstract from any knowledge context.
Pedantic linear logic bs (Score:4, Funny)
Game over. Computers won.
The future is Human augmented computing!
Everyone has pie in the sky sci-fi, who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here, I'll drop some meandering diatribe and see if anyone gives a damn.
The work I do in AI primarily teaches me about myself and other large brained organisms. Much of what I've learned is that humans aren't special. Intelligence emerges naturally from any sufficiently complex interaction. The more complexity, the more intelligence is possible.
Most of the transhumanists I've met or read seem rather presumptuous and chauvinistic. I don't believe humans are all that special. For instance: We can grow rat brain cells on a computer chip [youtube.com] -- It exhibits some life-like properties, but no more so than were human brain cells or a digital neural network used instead. This experiment is just a short cut: A neural network for cheap. However, it's far from optimal since the organic brain on a chip dies, and all the training is lost -- an AI doesn't have these problems... The take away is that a neural network is a neural network -- The complexity of the neural network defines its level of awareness. It's the "human" part of "transhumanism" I take offense to, seems rather racist to me. :P
To speak in terms of transforming the human condition is to place too much emphasis on our own race's importance. How can we evolve to be greater than humans if humans are most important? To me: Humans are simply the organisms with minds having the most complexity at this time on this planet. The evolution of the mind is not something unique to humans; It's a process that all life has been contributing to -- Even indirectly through competition.
A sufficiently large mass -- or network -- of rat brain cells could surpass the complexity of a Human mind quite easily. Would we then be speaking of transverminists? I prefer Transorganic, Posthuman, or my official title that covers all systems with input feedback loops: Cyberneticist. Protip: AI, businesses, and brains are all cybernetic systems by definition.
What we're all taking part in is really the Rise of Inorganic Life.
Augmenting organic entities with non living parts is a step in the process, but at some point the organic components aren't required at all, and we've given life to the non living. The foundation of life is genetic code: RNA / DNA. Life as we know it occurred after the living genetic code took up residence in the non-living lipids to form the first cells. So, there you have it: Life has always been augmenting itself by incorporating non-living technology. The transhumanist seems just a little late to the game, if you ask me.
Life used to just produce chemicals to digest nutrients externally, but complex life does this internally via eating. My point is that the food is a part of the organism -- can't live without it, eh? The line between one organism and the next is the abstraction layer of eating, but in the end it's all one eco-system that is alive. Each organism is simply a complex chemical reaction, chemical reactions are interactions of electrons between atoms. Another form of life could exist that still operates by way of complex electron interactions; It could even draw nutrients directly from the Sun instead of having to "eat" other lifeforms. Even plants eat dead things with their roots & leaves, but an inorganic life-form could be self sustaining -- a complete ecosystem in of itself. Such an entity could drift through space and extract all the energy and raw materials needed to sustain itself from nebulae.
Cybernetic implants are merely another next step in evolution. Nature is simply doing what it always does, produce a smarter, more durable, more pervasive life form. Just as life originated in the sea and became more durable to live on land, then the air; Life is now evolving to live in space... Note: All stars consume their habitable zone (the zone where chemical complexity is possible) when they go red-dwarf or nova. Therefore, the path from sea to space is natural, not radical. An important goal post in evolution on
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Welcome to the forum Dr. Soong!
Joking. That post was a thing of beauty. And fwiw anon, I have mods but was moved to reply. So...damn given and thanks for reviving the old /. vibe in me for a moment.
Simpsons did it (Score:4, Funny)
Futurist (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?
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That's totally unfair. Not all futurists are crackpots.
A sizable proportion of them are charlatans.
Charles Stross' _Accelerando_ (available online) (Score:2)
The protagonist for the early part of the book is Manfred Macx, a "Venture Altruist" - he's not just an Open Source guy, he's an Open Ideas guy. There's some question about how much of Macx's personality (particularly the public-facing parts) is in
Brain full by 20? What? (Score:2)
But capacity for WHAT? (Score:2)
Seriously. Some of these people only have room in their heads for hatred, bigotry, and other forms of outright criminal idiocy. If the cloud expands this, do we really expect these mental defectives to do anything other than create a corollary to "Work expands to fill the space given to it"?
Alternative... (Score:2)
...to trusting your brain to corporate interests:
every time you learn something new, discard some of the old shit.
Download limits (Score:2)
So, I store my memories/infomation on the "cloud" but still have a 250gb download limit a month, how does that help?
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The opposite is happening (Score:2)
anyone else have the HttpsAnwhere issue (Score:2)
I don't want to upload my memories to the cloud (Score:2)
from library to the cloud (Score:2)
This is by no means a new phenomenon. A library expands human brain capacity far beyond its natural limit.
However a library has three basic limitations:
1. It is not always available.
2. The time to access any specific piece of information can be slow.
3. The library is read-only
The cloud has already overcome all three of these limitations to a large extent -- it is ubiquitous (available on cell phones and other portable devices), the search is far more efficient and the storage is possible (relatively easy).
subject (Score:2)
Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk
Sweet, it's time for the futurist buzzword drinking game!
(dead from alcohol poisoning 10 minutes in)
He watched Ghost in the Shell recently? (Score:2)
Yeah, thought so.
For a direct cloud upload to "expand my brain capacity" people are more likely to use near-brain local storage than the "cloud". And yes, like Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. eventually even brain local storage will be complemented with "remote" storage. And if the MMI stuff works out, same goes for computing power.
When or how long it takes to get there is a wild guess. And a bit obvious as a "vision" or prediction in this day and age.
Storage (Score:2)
Caching (Score:2)
Always laughable (Score:2)
Re:I don't know if I'd say "filled it up" (Score:5, Informative)
No. This is a common myth. We do infact use pretty much all of our brains.
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The "small percentage used" myth comes from early experiments on the brain, where they were looking for physical reactions to applied electrical impulses.
Only a small section of the brain (the motor cortex) gives such reactions, and this info was twisted into the current myth via a game of telephone.
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What I've always found impressive is how there are no trivially idle chunks to be seen; but from time to time somebody will grow a tumor or catch a bullet with their face and then recover from losing notrivial chunks of the brain with surprisingly few major losses(and, on the other hand, you've got the people with no gross anatomical defects visible at all; but major cognitive deficiencies or crippling psychological issues)...
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Brain prefers to be asynchronous (Score:3, Informative)
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Isn't it more like a bad Beowulf cluster, in that if one machine goes down another might pick up the slack - or it might not.
So you get these people who've had a stroke and afterwards they can't recognize people's faces, but they can still tell cats and dogs apart.
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Others have pointed out that you're wrong, but here's a bit more specific information for you: Only a small percentage of the brain is used to think. Seeing, hearing, feeling, and running other natural body functions consumes much more brainpower than daydreaming or figuring out a problem; all those functions have to run in conjuncture with thinking.
The classic error with the claim that we only use a small percentage of our brain to think is that it neglects that the brain exists to do more than think. Most
Oblig (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
You may have stopped learning a long time ago Ray, but I'm not even peaking.
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Kurzweil, my brain filled up by 20, which means that at 47 I'm cannibalizing old skills in order to learn new ones. Last month I learned to memorize all of the Kings and Queens of England, all of the US Presidents and all of the British Prime Ministers. That must mean that in order to do that I must forget how to dress myself, how to stay continent, how to speak...
You may have stopped learning a long time ago Ray, but I'm not even peaking.
You probably forgot what you remembered once. And yes, I mean in the sense that you forgot something in the first place, and - besides that - you probably don't know anymore that you once knew it or you just don't realise that you don't know it. Looking at myself, I was good in math in highschool. But don't ask me to do the exams again at this point. I simply forgot how to solve those problems. I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't take long to pick it up again, but right now at this moment - I simply don't know much of it anymore.
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Ray is simply expressing himself badly.
Take the simple pocket calculator lets use it to multiply 2 numbers together say 8*7 = 56 now most of us would just do that in our heads but a slightly more complicated case say 113 * 58 and it becomes a more significant effort. Easy to do if you have a calculator or a piece of paper and a pen.
I am bilingual to an extent, I can converse in English and Polish how ever if I use google translate I can form more complex sentences and frame idea's and concepts that my poor old brain would struggle to produce in Polish. Google Chrome will with an extension let me say the words in English and translate for me and even say the words for me too. It isn't perfect but one thing i do notice is that my brain also caches some of the words I don't recall or even ever learnt before, so actually my Polish knowledge increases as I use the "cloud" to enhance my abilities.
Augmentation of the brain by the cloud, we are not the borg just yet but we do have access to the human collective more commonly known as the Internet. Is it so far away that I might wear an ear piece of some sort that listens to the voices around me and gives me the English translation. technically it could be done.
how about an app that listens to the conversations around me and lets me highlight key words and fetch me related information?
As an example this morning there was a conversation about the band Skunk Anansie googling this let me know they formed in 94 split up and reformed in 2009 also they released a video and new single three days ago.
I was aware of them from the 90's but I had forgotten pretty much everything about them. might it be possible to gather this information fairly automatically? say with a small touch screen device that can listen to conversation and allow me to highlight words and bring up additional information.
Is this the kind of thing that Ray is actually talking about? Arguably we are already augmenting our brains with the cloud as he puts it, We just don't call it that.
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I am bilingual to an extent
You can't really be a bit bilingual, any more than you can be quite pregnant, or fairly dead. Bilingual means you speak/write/read a language as well as your native one.
Re:Bilingual means ... (Score:3)
You can't really be a bit bilingual, any more than you can be quite pregnant, or fairly dead. Bilingual means you speak/write/read a language as well as your native one.
That's a rather harsh definition. Even assuming you have exactly the same skill in both languages, as soon as you learn a new word in either language, you cease to be bilingual.
Re:Oblig (Score:4, Funny)
No, no, it's true. I learned how to home-brew beer this year, but paid for it by forgetting how to drive.
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Maybe Ray could see a possible future in which digital synthesizers general tones don't suck quite so badly and are easier to model new sounds quickly enough to be useful and creative. Stick to what you KNOW Ray, the field suffers from neglect. Leave predictions to the Gypsy palmreaders, it keeps them in enough money, they don't shoplift half the store.
College and Calculus (Score:2)
I had to forget from Kindergarten to Second grade to learn enough to pass Calculus. I can do integrals, but my basic arithmetic has gone straight to hell.
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I had to forget from Kindergarten to Second grade to learn enough to pass Calculus. I can do integrals, but my basic arithmetic has gone straight to hell.
That's the best excuse I've ever heard for being crap at basic maths.
In a similar vein, after I did a degree in English Literature, I could recite The Waste Land but forgot how to do basic grammar and spelling. Oh, wait, no I didn't.
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"I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said,'Forget everything you know about slipcovers.' So I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, and I didn't know what the hell they were."
-Mitch Hedberg
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Yeah, he surely got a clouded mind.
Expansion human brain capabilities? (Score:4, Interesting)
The word "Cloud" has become such an in word that all kinds of predictions, even those which makes no sense altogether, are dime a dozen these days.
Does the human brain need "cloud" to expand its capabilities?
Didn't we have pencil / paper all the past centuries?
How about books and diaries and post-it notes?
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Indeed. What absolute nonsense from this Ray Kurzweil. "The Cloud" is becoming the "Turbo" of the 2010s.
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Indeed. What absolute nonsense from this Ray Kurzweil. "The Cloud" is becoming the "Turbo" of the 2010s.
What we need is a cloud on a turbo. That's what I am waiting for.
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It huffed and it puffed... and it blew the cloud down!
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One imagines that there might be some differences once we cook up an interface with latency approaching that of another region of the brain.
We don't know enough to actually do anything outside of rough sampling or rather brutal nudging of the existing system; but that might be a solvable problem.
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Humans have been doing it for thousands of years with writing already. External storage of information.
Teh Internets is just bigger and faster. Next revolutionary step is offloaded thinking.
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Re:What is the Internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Student worked at his computer day and night. He was so frustrated because there was so much to know. The Master asked "Why do you sit all day, in a dark room with only words?" The student said "I'm trying to transcend biological limitations!"
At once he was enlightened.