I know. You want some 🙂. For ages I have been pestering the people around me with the visions and projections of Raymond Kurzweil (1948). Kurzweil is a successful inventor and futurist. He has been pioneering in optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech and speech recognition technology. He is the author of the upper right corner of my library and fascinated me with his daring projections on artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, and the technological singularity.
Basically, he claims that computers are slowly migrating into intelligent devices, capable of heuristic data treatment and parallel processing. In other words, create a nice neural computer, set it up nicely and it will learn. By itself. It will become “intelligent”. Transhumanism and some hybrid thinking (you, with some extra computing power and techno-gadgets imbedded, like a pacific version of Robocop J) made up for great reading, and freaked the heck out of my trusted friends who thought I finally lost it.
But see: revenge is mine! In a newspaper (The Financial Times) Kurzweil is prominently projected on the first page. Nasa and Google are throwing their weight behind a new University in Silicon Valley that will be headed by Ray Kurzweil and will teach people how to think about machines that will be able to improve themselves, and will help us find solutions for problems as energy, climate change, malaria…. And snow. 🙂
