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cory doctorow
invented air travel. We’ll do the same with intelligence.
“Progress is exponential — not just a measure of power of
computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots
on a hard disk — the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating,
doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they in-
tuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last
year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is ex-
hausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the
power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution,
bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists,
don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the
human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem,
but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.”
But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a
rush. As William Gibson observed, “The future is here, it’s just
not evenly distributed.”
“Sure, it’d be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, re-
instantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will
ultimately happen.
“But the most salient scenario is that we’ll
gradually
merge
with our technology. We’ll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to
kill cancer cells, and then they’ll go into our brain and do benign
things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they’ll
get more and more sophisticated. There’s no single great leap, but
there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps.
“In
The Singularity Is Near,
I describe the radically different
world of 2040, and how we’ll get there one benign change at a
time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth.
“Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with
nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 cal-
culations per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological
human brains on Earth and that number won’t change much in
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