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cory doctorow
a couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton
Charlie Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those
stories have the same relation to futurism as romance novels do
to love: a shared jumping-off point, but radically different mor-
phologies.
Of course, the Singularity isn’t just a conceit for noodling with
in the pages of the pulps: it’s the subject of serious-minded pun-
ditry, futurism, and even science.
Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He’s a
serial
entrepreneur
who
founded
successful
businesses
that
advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-
reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical
instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and
stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through
a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of
first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears
to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from
the gods and embarking on a quest to bring his maverick ideas
to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, getting
rich in the process.
Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto,
“The Age of Intelligent Machines,” Kurzweil persuasively argued
that we were on the brink of meaningful machine intelligence. A
decade later, he continued the argument in a book called
The Age of
Spiritual Machines,
whose most audacious claim is that the world’s
computational capacity has been slowly doubling since the crust
first cooled (and before!), and that the doubling interval has been
growing shorter and shorter with each passing year, so that now
we see it reflected in the computer industry’s Moore’s Law, which
predicts that microprocessors will get twice as powerful for half
the cost about every eighteen months. The breathtaking sweep of
this trend has an obvious conclusion: computers more powerful
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