The Blaze | Ridiculously accurate futurist shares his bold prediction on the Glenn Beck program
November 20, 2012
Source: The Blaze — November 20, 2012 | Liz Klimas
The Mayans might have predicted that the end of the world is only a month away from now, but Ray Kurzweil would say the end of the world as we know it will come sometime in the middle of 2040.
At that time, Kurzweil believes technology and artificial intelligence (or accelerated intelligence as he would call it) will be so advanced that humans will augment their own minds and organs with computers that exceed their own natural intelligence.
Kurzweil has been called a “restless genius” and a “futurist.” On Tuesday, he sat down with Glenn Beck again on The Blaze TV to discuss his ideas and his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. If you haven’t heard yet of Kurzweil and his ideas, the crux is that at some point in the not so distant future humanity will make a technology-evolutionary jump, which he calls “the singularity.”
Believing such an event could happen feeds on itself creating an atmosphere that moves the necessary technological advances in genetics, robotics and other fields forward to a point where computers will exceed human intelligence and the only logical next step would be for us to use them to improve ourselves.[...] | Watch the video here.
Comments (8)
by Cybernettr
Is “The Blaze” a religious site? Because half the posts in the comments section were from bible thumpers.
I thought the Beck interview was quite good, however.
by klaatu
Ray? May ah call you Ray?
Gawd bless Glenn Beck is all ah can say.
Lettuce all build a here-after that is closer to ah collective
vision of the Mormon here-2-fore & blah blah blah.
by klaatu
Glenn Beck, that giant of right wing backwoods (Ben Stein’s word 4 SP)
foresight who is now our beacon into our collective future.
GLENN BECK, THE BACKWARD (the word Ben Stein would have used if a
beefy security guy wasn’t glaring at him in TV monitor) MONEY GUY
WHO REPRESENTS ANTI-SCI, ANTI-INTELLECT BUT WHO MIGHT BE
fronting for THE RAPTURE OF THE NERDS.
by Bob Vasquez
Ray, may I call you Ray? I read your newsletter so much that I think that I should be able to call you by your first name.
Anyway, Ray, you really need to “read the full article” here and, especially, you must read every “post” made by the readers of “The Blaze”. Allow plenty of time because there are a lot of posts.
by Editor
Ray is reachable at askray@kurzweilai.net. He is not involved in writing KurzweilAI news, but does set overall editorial policies for KurzweilAI.
by Bob Vasquez
Ray Kurzweil sat down with Glenn Beck? You mean that intellectual giant of the scientific/technological community Glenn Beck? Wow. I read the Blaze; once. I look forward to Glenn Beck’s interpretation of what he heard at that sit down.
by Sam
Here’s one thing about a prediction of Ray’s I don’t understand…
One of the predictions he makes is that post 2045, we will have reached the bottom limit of how small computer transistors can be is, at which point we will need to start making larger computers if we want them to be more powerful, which will mean eventually planet-sized computers will be made.
However, if we do actually manage to make decent quantum computers, which I’m in no doubt that we will, then surely computers won’t need to be made bigger? As we can compute a near infinite amount of information simultaneously rather than in a linear progression?
If someone can shed light on why Ray thinks computers will need to be made the size of planets, I’d be glad to hear it.
by Editor
Sam, I’m not sure which prediction you’re referring to. Are you referring to the “computronium” idea? Where did you read/hear about this?