On The Media

I arrived home a short time ago from the CNU New England Sustainable Urbanism Summit in Portsmouth, NH. Among many other great speakers was James Howard Kunstler. He was speaking about the confluence of Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Financial/Economic meltdown. As part of this he identifies dangerous attitudes including that one can get whatever one wishes for, that one can get something for nothing, and that technology and energy are interchangeable.

After hearing this well outlined argument from Kunstler it was a real mind expanding experience to hear from Kurweil again. The two world views and sets of predictions come from such different foci and assumptions.

I find Kunstler to be more convincing. For one thing, Kurweil thrives on the notion that information technology will continue on its trend line from the past 100 years, but a look at human history shows that trends of various types of progress are often upset, disrupted, and reversed. Especially given that various cultures have risen and fallen at disparate times it seems like a fallacy to take on faith that we will evolve into a new species in the course of thirty years.

I have to say that I think OTM took Kurweil on faith. His breezy description was followed up with a question on what the internet will look like rather than taking a moment to ask about the impacts upon his prediction of billions living in poverty, massive debts, financial meltdown, and climate change. Instead he was able to continue painting his brilliant image of the wonders of in eye pop-ups and sensory deprivation nanobots. It seems unlikely (though I would love for you to prove me wrong), that Kunstler could come on and explain his theory without a plethora of dismissive questions eating up any time for him to talk about his vision of what life will be like in 30 years.

For more of this information I suggest people go to www.kunstler.com and www.cnunewengland.org/summit

this discussion I've heard and read before. it is as significant as it gets. the implications are inconceivable, beyond the wildest most bizarre imaginations of the best and the worst of science fiction. this goes so far beyond all discussions of cloning of humans yet no one in the religious right wingnut community has said peep about it in public. the political and social equity consequences regardless of how prophetic this discussion is are as significant as it gets.

i went to look at Kunstler as the other commenter suggests. yes, our current economy is unsustainable, and yes the bush era economy will never recover. but Kunstler doesn't offer a clue where to go nor how we'll get there. we need real scientific development, and where that takes is brings us right back to the subject of this piece that we are facing a singularity, and what's on the other side is inconceivable today.

Ray Kurzweil is controversial and a fraud. I'm suprised that you had him on so uncritically. He is no more capable of predicting future events then anyone else is and his "singularity" theory has had so many holes poked in it I'm suprised you were able to still keep it afloat in this piece. I'm suprised you didn't interview Kreskin or my dog to predict the future. He is silly science and in a show that was rightly aghast at the infiltration of bad science in our public schools, having Kurzweil on uncritically is ironic. PZ Myers has a great post showing the sillines of this theory and points out that Kurzweil theory relies too much on its poximity to our current time. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/singularly_silly_singularity.php

We are Borg...Resistance is Futile...you will be assimilated...

Perhaps somewhat related, Singularity and Stanislaw Ulam were discussed on WESAT this morning.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102748024

Don't get distracted by Kurzweil's views on immortality or the 2045 Singularity -- he's right about the exponential growth of technology in communications, medicine, research, etc., which raises a question I wish NPR would've asked him. Who's going to be able to buy this stuff? Who gets the worldwide instant communication implants, the nano-robots in the blood cells seeking out viruses, the downloadable personalities which allow you to trade a wornout body for a slick new one? I love the ideas, but I'll be looking through the playground fence, watching other people play with the new toys. Hey, it's all I can do to scratch up a donation to my local Public Radio station!

Mr. Woodruff has that right!

I kept thinking of the two tiered world of ABC's long forgotten but great Matt Frewer dramady, "Max Headroom" but, even before that, just from reading the intro at the top of the segment before hearing the program, I thought of the comic book from my youth, "Space Family Robinson". (Yes, it was the template upon which "Lost in Space" was built!)

Instead of "Robbie", recycled from "Forbidden Planet", it featured a cyborg (the first fictional version I encountered, though I was already personally familiar with Mel, a friend and frequent guest of my Aunt Rita, who, after being rendered quadriplegic by polio, had a wheelchair outfitted with a portable heart-lung machine) who was quite humanoid, integrated electronically with their craft, and not at all funny. He must have been judged too eerie for children’s' programming.

Years later, my father referred to himself as the "Half a Million Dollar Man" after his colostomy, his purchase of his toupees, and his hearing loss, requiring hearing aids, turned him into a cyborg. His macular degeneration was a condition that could not be so corrected but, until it blossomed, his reading glasses topped off his 'Borg" self. It all allowed him to survive relatively comfortably to 83.

Until I thought about the unlikelihood of my being "rebuilt", like Steve Austin, on Medicare and Medicaid, your promo had me, briefly, entertaining the idea of celebrating my Eleventy-first birthday with my own somewhat Frodo-like nephew in late 2061.

Once again NPR has added to the misinformation and misunderstanding of evolution. Consistently, they present evolution as a magical process that. (An example is one program mentioned frogs growing ears.) In this episode the interviewee mentions the evolution of the brain caused by technology.

To summarize how evolution works: Those that are not adapted have to die before they can reproduce.

So, is this individual suggesting that people will be dying before child bearing age if they are not connected to the technology.

Should he have likened it to the invention of writing. This affects the growth and structure of the brain and not the evolution of the brain.

Please try to add to the understanding of evolution, not the disinformation about evolution.

I really hope that before anything like Ray Kurzweil's Singularity happens that we'll have much better computer security mechanisms than we have now.

While I may worry about having spammers, Nigerian scammers, and the Russian Mafia in my head, I'm downright petrified at the prospect of Advertisers, Marketers, and Political Operatives having unfettered access to my thoughts, especially with "write" access.

Mr. Kurzweil may see the Singularity as a positive and inevitable thing, but I wonder what he'd think about having a computer in HIS brain that's as secure and stable as current versions of Windows.

To quote Jose Jimenez on the Ed Sullivan Show: "Oh, I hope not..." The very thought of being bodily wired up to the commercially driven, e-virus-infested Internet is horrifying. Second, the assertion that man is the only being we know of that extends his reach with tools is just plain wrong. Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of "The Selfish Gene" discusses the influence that genes exert far beyond the physical bodies that house them ("the extended phenotype") citing examples of animal behavior and other pathways that improve genes' chances of surviving into later genrations. It's diverting to extend current trends into the future, but honestly, who wants pop-ups on their computer, let alone in their head?

Kurzweil is a genius.

Question "Will we still be human?"

Answer: Take a look at the Ship of Theseus Paradox.

Is a ship that has, over the years, had every single part of its structure replaced still the same ship?

I think we are more than just the sum of our parts. Our cells are constantly dying only to be replenished with new ones. Are we still the same person at 50 that we were in high school? No, we aren't, at least in completely physical terms.

Technology is matching organic biology and building upon it. So, perhaps a better question: "Is there a difference, between fully organic development and organic development coupled with nanotechnology, which will strip humans of our innate identity?"