The Globe and Mail | How To Create a Mind: Can a marriage between man and machine solve the world’s problems?
February 8, 2013
Source: The Globe and Mail — February 8, 2013 | Don Tapscott
How do you know when your new book is a success? When Google promptly offers you a plum job as soon as the book is on the stands.
That’s the pleasant turn of events that Ray Kurzweil, 64, is enjoying. His most recent book, his sixth, is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. His new job at Google is director of engineering. Google made the announcement in December.
Kurzweil has many fans. The Wall Street Journal once described him as “the restless genius” and Fortune said he was “a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas.” Time put him on its cover, and Forbes called him “the ultimate thinking machine.”
Kurzweil spends most of his time thinking about the inevitable unification of man’s brain and computers, an event he described in detail in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near. The term “singularity” was coined by mathematician John von Neumann in the mid-1950s. He wrote that artificial intelligence was only a matter of time, but that once mankind is fused with machine, it was impossible to predict what would happen.[...]
Comments (6)
by Cybernettr
Did Google offer Kurzweil a job as a result of his book? In any event, Google are no dummies. They know that the search engine landscape could change very suddenly, virtually overnight. All it would take is for another company to get exclusive access to something like the Watson technology.
Google wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. Having someone like Kurzweil could allow them to hedge their bets and to be in a better bargaining position if they ever need to buy something like Watson. It’s a strategic business decision, pure and simple.
by Bob Vasquez
The title hit my funny bone. For some, marrying a machine might be better than their current situation. ;-)
by Bri
It’s already happened( a sex doll) and will undoubtably happen again.
by Roland
> Can a marriage between man and machine solve the world’s problems?
If the marriage keeps pursuing mindless growth in a limited environment, such as the planet we live on, the answer would be no. It is about mindset, not about ‘better’ minds.
by Bri
Spot on. We have more than enough of the right ingredients. We know of the inevitability of the singularity. At this point very little could derail it. Unfortunately we are the largest obstacle. The transformations will be so great that it has the potential of inflaming luddite sentiments. I don’t think they will be enough to stop it entirely but they could cause so much unnecessary suffering. It also could affect how it all plays out making for s darker AI. If we as sentient beings look at a natural scene we are struck by it’s beauty. Even the harsh interplay of nature has a quality of beauty. I think AGI will also appreciate all the lesser life forms. It’s only if we are a problem for it that we incur the risk of being annihilated by it. If it is a reflection of us we should strive to give it as beautiful a picture as possible to reflect. That up to us not science. Science can only facilitate that.
by asiwel
Hopefully … fortunately .. such an AGI will read literature and history, learn to appreciate art and music, and “see” beauty – as well as math and particles and fields – and then probably make up its own mind about all of that and where to go next.