He's smartbu super biased and sensationalist,he's more interested in impressing people and making money selling books and going to events than really make scientific statements,people loves to hear they will live a cyber-utopia the next decade
@@gs-nq6mw I would say your statement is true I'd he didn't accomplish anything. But his track record speaks for itself. Every musician in the 80's, 90's had a Kurzweil.
I mean, if he changed up what he's saying every time he gave a presentation, he'd be a pretty shitty futurist. I think it's probably a compliment to his methodology to say that he keeps on saying the same things (& that those things continue to be valid) as the years go by.
He's talking about us being better off nowadays than before, and included wealth per capita, but that's not the whole picture or is it very accurate. Sure, our income and revenue has increased, but a lot of things have increased faster than our incomes, such as rent and mortgages, healthcare costs (including prescription drugs), other insurances, college tuition, cable television, movie tickets, the cost of gasoline, etc.
Given all the exponential graphs he was showing, it was pretty evident the increase in income was linear... wealth gap is obviously something he didn't want to talk about.
@@internetzpotato383 I was thinking exactly the same... The graphs were all averages, so doesn't take into account the ever expanding rich poor divide...
The problem with Kurzweil's predictions is that they've become too predictable. They are no longer weird enough. With the kind of accelerating technological change we are experiencing right now, true weirdness is coming next decade. Count on it.
Ray Kurzweil is the *modern day prophet.* The exponential trends that he is talking about will transform almost every job and industry. The future is great !
@@z.ncvcbv is a ducking Moran that wants to argue whether the internet is going to be a good thing if its implanted in your brain well let's use a little common sense and remember a majority of the internet is deep web and dark web and let's not forget hackers have fun living in lala land with ray kurzweil lmao then go practice falling down
@@z.ncvcbv yessssspoppi ty ty the words getting around and just so u kno Christopher I will whip anybody's ass talking about God go make a fucking mental note bitch
I love Dr. Kurzweil, but using income averages is highly misleading. Median income has been flat for decades in the U.S. All the growth has been in the top decile. Quite a lot of his talk paints an unrealistically rosy picture of the world today.
Yes, I concur. Since the 70s 20% of the middle class has disappeared according to some economists. Also, looking at US farming w/ the stats he presented alone is highly misleading. Agronomist know that soil erosion is about 0.4-1% per year and that our current system of industrial farming leaves us with about 50 more harvests, however climate change is accelerating soil erosion as these 1/500 year deluges are now occurring much more rapidly. There are limits to growth and we will hit the wall. On top of the condition of the world's soils is the more pressing problem of over pumped aquifers.
Median income has not been flat. fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N - Median income took a hit after the sub-prime mortgage led crash of 2008. But it has recovered and/or is recovering quite well. It's also important to look at how the bell-curves have changed over the course of time. Meaning, what proportion of the population is in which quartile, with respect to income generated (per person/ per household). Ray does not paint an unrealistic rosy picture of the world today or in the future. This is really where technology is going. The world is indeed getting better. You can choose to look at the data that Ray, Pinker, Diamandis continue to put out. Or you can choose to ignore facts. Choice is yours man.
Don't forget, Ray's prediction record has been pretty damn good (and profitable, for him) so far. It's how he made his living until all this singularity stuff got popular. He usually knows which stats to focus in on in order to make accurate predictions.
Median income has been flat? Remember women in the workforce wasn't a thing before WW2, now we have 2 people working in a household and that is not twice the money...
The answer to that question is: No. Current hair-transplant status / hair loss & male-pattern baldness will remain so for eternity & throughout the entire universe and beyond, including hyperspace and pre-big bang.
@@TheRockyCrowe The answer to that question is: No. Current hair-transplant status / hair loss & male-pattern baldness will remain so for eternity & throughout the entire universe and beyond, including hyperspace and pre-big bang.
I thought I'd be really clever and find a VST of the Kurzweil synth and then say. No THIS is a simulation of Kurzweil. But they never made one. So that was a waste of 5 minutes. Ho hum heh
I wouldn't have thought that someone so smart would assume that mental illness is the only reason for suicide. Sometimes life can be too difficult to bare and that isn't a mental illness. And it yes Ray, the suicide rate is way up.
Exactly, you may just not like life, period, life is pointless to many people, sometime you have to put up with so much bullshit that doesn't mean you are depressed.
Agreed. I heard him say that just as I read your comment. Sure sometimes I think it is a mental illness, but there are certainly various circumstances where in my opinion it makes sense even.
It is obviously a mental illness... how can anyone mentally sound have anything to complain about while having access to the world's knowledge at they fingertips? I know because I came from a suicidal family & was suicidal most my life until I left Australia & England/Europe now I know #2= We are all ONE, all CONNECTED & all EQUAL ✌ & #3= ALL things are ALWAYS in perfect timing 👌
Actually if you consider that Women joined the workforce in WW2 then you can see household income actually decreased instead of doubling by 2 people working... Also, these statistics don't show debt inquired due to all time high housing prices and student debt, and the end of effective public transportation which requires a car loan. Not to mention business are now not selling products but continuous services; which eat up all supposed increase in pay. Overall the economy in USA can't be look at positively because that is not the case, however, gadgets and small pleasures in life have gotten cheaper for sure.
Yes. The total wealth of the bottom half of the U.S. is now negative, meaning they have more debt than assets. It used to be in the hundreds of billions, in the positive direction.
He makes predictions about tech you know. And he is one of the best (probably the best) at doing so. How the basic greedy asshole use the tech is something else.
@@batfink274 Anybody can be a troll of the exception of the rule, here I do the same: No Bat Fink nooo, your an idiot because those ugly women that also couldn't get a job were probably living with their parents so no those ugly unlucky women who also didn't got the job didn't work! You are a bad contrarian.
Well, debt drives the GDP. Whether you're swiping a credit card or the government is subsidizing a credit (socialism), you're in debt. The US economy topped the chart in a 2019 assessment at 24% vs. China's (2nd up) 15%. A majority of US consumer debt is mortgages. Defaults on mortgages continues to drop, already at pre-2008 levels. Statistics show that we're consuming more by choice (I'm sure most won't admit it) vs. by crisis. It'll be interesting to see where we stand once SARS-2 is done with us. By no means am I implying you're wrong. Further elaboration (if you even catch this comment) would be appreciated based on your own findings.
@@slslsldndndn82 immortality won’t happen in biological bodies so we have to upload our minds or keep making new biological bodies of ourselves and transfer our consciousness. The former sounds much better and less material usage and cost effective. It’s not like we will loose our senses and emotions then because we don’t have a body; that’s not true. Everything we feel around us are electrical signals from emotions to touch and they will be stimulated in our virtual bodies. We are literally brain in a vat.
Ted Joseph it’s all lies my friend. Death is totally unavoidable. The elites have been trying to cheat death since the beginning of history. Our only hope is our Father in Heaven.
Artificial Common Sense should be top priority. From a top down perspective we need to replace or augment governments with AI as this is the fastest way to a sutainable world and a fair and compassionate society now and into the future. The best way to a acheive accurate AI to avoid centalised control and instead implement AI in a distributed way open source on something like the block chain. The people's AI which is true democracy. Loved that thanks Ray
Kurzweil is interesting to listen to, if you can get through the first several minutes of him telling everyone how absolutely amazing he is, most of which I'm highly skeptical of.
he is amazing! I understand it may be boring or annoying to you but he has right to say that about himself. So many useless celebrities are admired and this man is insanely smart and did great things in do many sciences. And still many people don't know him or think he is crazy. Maybe he has crazy predictions but his part achievements show her is definitely an intelligent man.
Well, I would believe him more if he wasn't obsessed with the Altered Carbon brain-uploading and shit, and how he has 'reprogrammed his biology' to be like 20 years younger, which is a load of crap. You see him onstage, you see a man in his 70s onstage.
Yeah. Come on Ray, you're not fooling anyone. Also, Ray seems to completely miss the fact that we have a much better chance of dealing with existential angst through psychology, neuroscience, psychedelics, brain technologies etc. All enabled by exponential increase. He's looking for solutions in the wrong direction.
@John Lamee But what right do we as humans have to stall the development of other consciousnesses? Isn't it selfish to say "I won't develop something that may go beyond my own potential because I don't like it."
John Lamee We already have narrow AI then General AI should be soon, And next is Super AI. That’s going to be when machines surpass humans and we will be slaves
I read the "Singularity is Near" around 2005 when it was published, Ray may be the greatest mind alive today. He predicted vertical acceleration in 2045, the exponental graph is still practically horzontal, the logarithmic remains straight, yet right on target.
well...I was heavily involved in the internet since 2002 and although it was initially sustainable, I now live in a van. Poverty may have declined, but new types of people are thrown under the bus. If it was 1980, Id be married with 2 kids, a wife and own my own house, but me today...well...I better not be the only one or Im really gonna feel stupid.
Agree with you. To add to that, Kurzweil mentioned in Singularity is Near, Quantum Computing (or any other alternative form of computing) will not be critical in replicating the full breadth of neocortical intelligence. Traditional silicon based computing is already sufficient, today. Quantum computing, however, will be important for future dynamic, continuous whole brain emulation, which is a completely different issue.
Maybe what Google did wasn’t really a clear achievement. I read that their quantum computer only calculated the probability for quantum random number generation... of course it would be easier for a quantum computer. Look it up
@@monomotor2044 The problem is that most people don't really understand classical computing in the first place. "Quantum" is a sophisticated word that gets everyone excited. So you put this two things together, and everyone will believe what they are told to believe. Bottom line, quantum computing is a red herring that is not critical for the next 10 years. As classical computing is further refined, and hidden markov models are harnessed to create very powerful micro-algorithms that can mimic a pattern recognition module that the neocortex has, we would be able to create systems that can out-think even the smartest person on every human domain conceivable.
Ray Kurzweil has always shared the necessary data in order to be able to back his predictions. I recall seeing graphs like this in 'The singularity is near'. But it's super interesting to see the graphs continuing to evolve. I've read most of the books Mr. Kurzweil has written. Looking forward to reading Daniel and sharing it with some of the kids in the family.
I have one prediction from technological advancement - Tyranny. That's what we've seen so far all over the world and that's what we're going to get more of. Although impressive in technological terms, that's not my idea of improvement.
Idk about that. I think the same places today are gonna be tyrannical like china and north Korea but everywhere else it seems like we're improving with people becoming more intelligent shockingly enough. Then again I see more optimistic side of the singularity but it's something to consider that we have been getting less opressed. I mean think about it we have had a black man in office only 50 something years after segregation. Plus even the poorest nation have access to smart phones something that wasn't wild available to even rich countries 10 years ago.
Well you get rise of assholes like bolsonaro in brasil and that coup in bolivia... I see tyranny in the cards, but it is a cyclical thing for systems to change into one another as several have observed and or theorised. The danger with ai would be for it to be used to solidify tyranny into a permanent thing.
yaboi stephen - I’m blown away that you don’t see it here in America. It’s so in plain sight, you must not see it anymore. The US is not free, not private, and full of tyrannical systems and subsystems benefiting a minority of citizens.
@@JEiowan Yeah, that's actually a class issue. You don't see it if you're a winner. Only the LOOOOOOOZERS need to worry - so don't be one! Get elected - get rich - live dumb and happy.
Fragmentation/balkanization is also a serious possibility. Take the US as an example. The ability (and profitability) of creating social media bubbles has resulted in a situation where the two allowable "sides" in our political discourse live in separate epistemic universes, to the point that it is not possible for US society to come to agreement on whether wearing masks reduces the spread of a pandemic, or even if the pandemic itself exists or not. If our sense-making is so broken we can't even agree if 215,000+ people have died of a sickness or not, how are we going to be able to decide on how to employ increasingly powerful and ubiquitous technologies, or respond to common threats such as climate change or antibiotic-resistant bacteria? This will only get worse as Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality and Deepfake technologies improve and become more widespread. What happens when people are no longer merely divided by ideology, but by differing reality-filters that make communication and shared understanding impossible?
Considering inflation, basic yearly income has gone down every year since 1973. Appliances are cheaper but they break faster for instance, my mother's hand mixer broke 3 years ago. It was 40 years old. Since then I've bought 3! There are things that are better but not very many! I have no doubt the future will be a slave nightmare. Don't let them chip you!
In 2005, about when SiN book came out, social networking and Internet video emerged. It was enabled by PCs, laptops, servers and Internet bandwith reaching necessary levels of price/performance. Fast forward to 2019 and we still are at the same basic paradigm. Just more of the same. I expected VR, AR and AI taking over by now but they haven't. Just mobile versions of what we have already known for years from desktop PCs (Facebook, RU-vid, WWW browsing, Office, 3D games etc). I remember the transition we experienced between 1996 and 2006 and it was more profound (search Quake II and Crysis in YT and compare them two).
The fundamental statement that "computer capabilities double every year" is unfortunately wrong. When SiN came out, it was still true though so I understand why Kurzweil thought it would continue. Between 1999 and 2006 GPUs were doubling in speed every year (GeForce 256 SDR to GeForce 8800 GTX) and CPUs every year and a half (Pentium 750 MHz to Core QX6700). Between 2007 and 2017 GPUs were becoming twice as fast every 2 years (8800 GTX Ultra to GTX 1080 Ti) and CPUs every 3 years (Core QX9650 to Threadripper 1950X). Since 2017, GPUs improved about 50% and CPUs about 120%. Yes, there is exponential growth but its acceleration became lower. Smartphones don't count btw, they can't be used for any serious work.
I'm sorry but I highly doubt that we could ever see the singularity. Ray did actually manage to get a few predictions right, but most of it has started to go erray after the mid 2010s. Try and take a look at what he predicted for 2019, 2020 and you'll know what I'm talking about. He even delayed the release date for his new book.
What a video title!! Before I start, let's break that down. "The Future of Intelligence" The very definition of the "Event Horizon" of the technological "Singularity" and intrinsic to it, is the point at which all current concepts break down, so according to that, it is futile even to attempt to predict "the Future of Intelligence" using conventional intellectual instruments, yet they persist at the expense of rational and logical thought (which in themselves are products of Intelligence, future or otherwise). If this sentence structure or evaluation is too complicated to the reader then that can be taken as proof positive of this point. "Artificial and Natural". If intelligence is inadequately defined and described (as indeed they consistently are) then how can one possibly expect to comprehend either. My work, on the other hand, define both as universal constants which means that both concepts "Artificial and Natural" are rendered meaningless, as indeed, in this context, they are. As a universal constant Intelligence is a natural existential state identical within any system whether organic or synthetic, with there being nothing "artificial" about it. Yes, when it comes to "intelligence" consciousness and mind there is indeed only "black and white" whereby "grey areas are completely absent. As for Ray Kurdziel; even being one hundred per cent correct in his predictions, having knowledge of anything as an end in itself has neither intrinsic significance nor existential merit or consequence if the possession of knowledge is regarded as an end and not a means to a clearly defined end which can only be derived from understanding that which is both implicit and explicit in the previous paragraphs and those to follow.
After the singularity is complete, mankind will still strive to recreate sensations that feel good. Therein lies the problem. All we really want is to feel good. We will never convince anything organic that it obtains rewards from working . Once we realize that expanded knowledge is the reward, we will see many persons opting out. Just like the old days. Knowledge ain't enough.
We ask questions now for a future time but we are stuck with our now-bias or as the germans call it zeitgeist. I would guess that asking "what motivates us if not work?" will be one of those stupid questions that seems obvious then as the norm then will be entirely different.
Poor Ray Kurzweil. Even if you have to give 200 more lectures. People are only entertained like a tea party. You know yourself by now that there are only a few people who are able to follow your "visions" in their depth. Therefore you are the more admirable. A hero of our time, a modest giant, a spirit like one in a thousand years.
Alan B War in the US has been the single largest source of funding for scientific research. The development of the atom bomb was the root of the space program. The foundations of the internet came as a result of the increased funding into space tech with NASA on a race against Russia. For developments to take place, research needs to be funded. Not a myth... common knowledge.
@@ThrivingRockstar All funded by the taxpayer, the ultimate source of all government spending. And, guess what? If you don't take people's money, they will also save and invest it worthwhile things. Heck, things that are usually more worthwhile that what government spends it on. And many people, if not killed in wars, go on to create many great things. I don't think the atom bomb was the basis for the space program. Maybe you can say that about German missile development. That's where we got Wernher von Braun from. But most of the things you mention were part of our defense and necessary. Especially the atom bomb. We had to develop that before the Germans did. But that doesn't mean the private sector wouldn't have invented the peaceful technologies involved as needed or wouldn't have to a lot more of them earlier without the massive inefficiencies of government. I mean, seriously, how many trillions have they spent? There'd better be SOMETHING to show for it. Even now, they want to spend $2 billion for a single ride in the SLS, while the private sector can do it for a few percent of that.
Alan B I fully agree with you. It’s not the way I’d like it to be and the way forward is having as much cumulative brainpower as possible working at the biggest issues humanity faces. Unfortunately history tells the story that the will to survive causes us to be creative and as a nation that manifests in war... i think going forward, as abundance continues to reach the furthest corners of humanity, we can unite. Democratic nations don’t war each other...
@@ThrivingRockstar And yet the graph shows that this is not true for processing power. It increased predictably. Maybe true for weapons, at least as far as perceptions of history go. Where is the data on this? What does it show? The claim that history tells this story is backed up somehow?
Talk about an Exciting Future, Thanks #RayKurzweil. Most people complaining just repeating the same Victim Stories & excuses why they can't enjoy life lolz Pretending to forget Who we are=Unlimited, Infinite Potential & Possibility #2= We are all ONE, all CONNECTED & all EQUAL ✌ #2=你我都是一體的，都是值得平等被對待的 ✌
High5 that Like button, Comment & Subscribe for the algorithm so RU-vid shows this Inspiring content to us more, plus other people 🙏 #LovingLifeNoww ♾ Utilize use the Comment section for notes, plus possibly Inspire others, plus remind & affirm/enable ourself with what is Important to us (we get to decide that too) ☯️✨🙏❤
If his income graphs were adjusted for the fall of value due to inflation, or looked at the amount you can save, they'd go downwards. If Ray isn't well aware of that, I'll eat my hat.
@@JasonSmith709 They take into account fake inflation numbers, not actual inflation. If real income would actually increase, people would be able to afford a houses with fewer work hours. But the opposite has been the case for the last 50 years.
29:30 “Now this graph, it looks like my other graph. It goes up over time. But the doubling time is not one year. The doubling time here is 3.5 months. This is where we take a neural net model and see how much computational ability is required to do that. And we basically have been doubling the amount of computation in the neural net every 3.5 months. So the speed has increased 300,000 fold since 2012.” ~Ray Kurzweil
It was 2013 when I read his predictions for the first time and I called bullshit because of the ridiculously small span of time he was expecting all this crazy things to happen. At that moment I thought it would take 100 years at least to achieve an AI capable of passing the Turing test. Then just 5 years later in 2018 i watched google duplex passing the Turing test in an specific situation (making a phone call) and suddenly his 2029 prediction of having a general AI with human level intelligence sound perfectly reasonable. At that moment I realized this guy wasn’t as crazy as I thought. Once you have human level AI it will take just few years to make it ridiculously intelligent I’m talking about millions of times more intelligent than the most brilliant human that have ever existed, and once that happen that thing will be able to solve really hard problems that would have take our best scientists thousands of years to solve. Now I’m afraid of what will happen in the next 50 years if he happens to be right which is very likely taking into account all what is happening at the moment.
This guy has been ridiculously wrong for 2019 "predictions": 1) No VR in real world. 2) No real world AI. Can you call up a company and have any functional interaction with AI even in 2021? 3) Life expectancy of 100 by 2019 is a joke. Life expectancy is actually decreasing in most first world societies. 4) "Self Driving Cars" are useless and cant drive in any real world situations in 2021. Even Ray Kurzweil's hairpiece looks like its from the 1950s. Not impressed at all.
Prices may come down in 2040 but some much desired things such as a flat in Manhattan will continue to be affordable only to the very wealthy because there are only so many flats in Manhattan.
I wish we had universal basic income, even if it's just two or three hundred dollars and more symbolic for now. As technology gets better we can increase the universal basic income. :)
@@simonsuh1733 Vinod Khosla is a proponent of a high basic income. I am not sure what that really translates into. Zoltan Istvan has some good ideas on how a universal basic income could be powered. I'd also be interested in going into the documented details that Andrew Yang has to share on this subject.
Kurzweil's predictions are starting to go seriously awry: he reckoned that by 2019 computers would be largely invisible and data would be streamed directly to the optic nerve, or projected within the lens structures of the eye. Well, at a consumer level, that is still science fiction.
Ray's wildest predictions are manifestations of the part of the brain that creates religion. Humans create religion to reduce the anxiety that results from our awareness of our inevitable demise. Ray effectively demonstrates how inteligent, logical scientists are no less prone to this folly.
Sam Sarsam I think that’s definitely true where life extension is concerned. Kurzweil wants to live forever, and he’s arranged his future projections to neatly coincide with his own lifetime, assuming his vitamin supplements keep him chugging along into the latter half of this century.
About the average income: it increased for sure, but the increase is not evenly spread. Income inequality has increased as well. But that's because of political choices.
Ray seems obsessed with staying young, to the point he got laser eye surgery, a hair piece and god knows what other aesthetic surgery. He thinks we’re going to figure out how to stop/reverse aging before it’s too late for him, but I think he’s going to be highly disappointed.
I kind of feel sorry for him. He's been imagining the future for his whole life, and right when all sorts of amazing shit starts happening, he's an old man. I think of myself. I have struggled terribly with mental illness and addiction in my life. Cutting-edge technologies and treatments have helped me a great deal, and I look forward to what else is coming. But I'm 41, not 72. If I was 72 I don't know how I'd feel about life. Probably be an alcoholic. (Only partly joking).
The projections are based on the past which was generally a time of human population growth. Now, we are seeing clear signs of the global population growth rate stalling/reversing, which would be a huge super-cycle paradigm reversal, I believe this to be a large factor not addressed in Ray's forecasts. Need to study, other species of animals, to conclude that individual life keeps getting better during a species population decline. Word up?
There was a guy who gave an 'inspirational talk' at my high school when I was in Grade 9. He came back when I was in Grade 13 (used to be a thing in my part of Canada) and gave *exactly the same speech.* He apparently forgot about Grade 13 where I was lol
An entire hour to learn that we wil have web interfaces attachd to our brains very soon and we are on an exponential path to learning. Very little else. A lot of 'Ahhs' and long thoughtful pauses. A large applause and people coming to see a speaker who could not give enough time to even fly out to talk to Australians. Which of course makes sense as he had so little usefulness to talk about.
I love this, the future of intelligence. I can help out here with a explanation. The most intelligent among us will still have to put up with the majority of dullards with low intelligence continuing to do stupid stuff, that affects the rest of us, the intelligent ones.
Around 11:00, he's running the bubble movie, and the amazing thing is that loop-de-loop that China does. It's the biggest bubble, so you can't miss it.
I forget when exactly Mr. Kurzweil talks about the s-curve. But it reminds me of Geoffrey West. And I am not familiar with the work of Mr. West. I wonder if Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. West talk to each other. Overall, 10 years to the technological singularity. Hmm, so we need to seriously start thinking about how to make it work for ourselves and the new life-form that we will be sharing reality with.
I find measuring average and per capita incomes of americans as misleading as wealth inequality increases the wealthy will drag the average and per capita numbers up. A much more honest measure of american's income over the years is to measure the MEDIAN HOURLY wages americans make relative to the median housing price per square foot in the country. If you measure it that way you will see that the median american hourly wages as far been outpaced by home price increases since the 60s at a worrying rate.
@@josephl6896 yea I really can't see there being a superintelligence or even a human level intelligence by 2045 which is when he said the Singularity would happen. We haven't even simulated a fruit fly brain fully yet. Maybe by 2045 we'll have fully simulated a rat brain (then the debate of "is the computer as conscious as a rat" can begin). Maybe we could all get virtual pet desktop rats that behave exactly like a real rat would. But a post-human superintelligence? I can't see it happening until 2100. None of our AI's are even 5% sentient, our most advanced AI can do some amazing stuff (like beating Go and Starcraft grandmasters) but most of that is due to the amazing processing power we have to brute force pattern recognition, nothing to do with any real consciousness or sentience. Personally I think our first real sentient AI will either be some complete simulation of a human brain (again we haven't even done a fruit fly yet) - or it will be some kind of simulated evolution done 1000000 times as fast as normal. And if it is the latter how can we even hope to control it?
that's why the american joe doesn't fight back against income inequality: because he's still better off than his predecessors and afraid to lose that if he rebels against the system. that's the true curse of technological progress.
when you look closely at the graph in 7:53 you can see that you can fit an s curve to this log plot. it might be a better fit than just a straight line
If we are able to fix someones metal illness by going into the brain and flipping switches, would that not mean that we loose the identity of individuals!? Who is to say what is mentally ill or what the brain ought to think about in the first place? I think the problem with enhancing our brains is ultimately loosing the individuality of a person and the I. In a strange way it is our individual limitations and abilities which defines who we are as a person. If we are all enhanced and interconnected we essentially become the same in one large body operating as a single brain. It maybe not ending up that we upload or minds into a computer machine. And the reverse happens. An AI or someone uploads a "Mind" into your human body or alters it without your consent..
@kath david Naw, Kurzweils track record is pretty good with many great inventions. So he is definitely not a psycho! However there is a HUGE quality difference in extending our Brains through body sensory imput with a smartphone, in comparisons to making the technology a part of the brain via an implant. The implications and results are far more complicated than Kurzweil Puts it here. Just imagine that brain implant highjacks your own mind and forces you to do things which aren't really you.
I agree with your fears regarding BCIs. But just to play devil's advocate, what is the difference between doing that and taking drugs like antidepressants, that alter your brain chemistry and in a way, make you a different person?
@@adrienneshanks4468 Yes, your example of drug influence on the brain emphasizes how dangerous or helpful an direct altering of the brain is. With brain implants there are no safety barriers and they could be used to fundamentally alter the brains workings with direct programming. While drugs wear off rather quickly and analog input (body senses) is controllable indirect programming. A cellphone is only an external tool but a brain implant is not! Huge difference in my opinion and Kurzweil is probably wrong in comparing these two as being the same. I think the price of enhancing our intelligence bodily limits will ultimately result in in the loss of individual consciousness. We become like an electrical charge or machine roaming the universe of endless possibilities.
@@Gigaloader maybe. Technology is only as good or bad as the people using it. Maybe we will cure all disease and rid humanity of unhappiness. Maybe we will all turn into mindless agents of the state. The problem with curing unhappiness (which should be our ultimate goal as a species, I think), is that we evolved to survive, not be happy.
We keep being told that life for all is waaaay better than its ever been because the data shows it clearly, but what data doesn't show is that as society progresses, so too do our expectations. We will never measure ourselves against what our forefathers had and think how lucky we are, we will always see all the things we don't have thanks to companies bombarding our brains with advertising reminding us how far we still have to go and therefore how far behind we are. Data doesn't take into account increasing gaps between parents and children on account of the differences between childhoods. It doesn't see the growing dis-intergration of society bought about by technological distractions from each other. It doesn't show the increased stress levels bought about by this fast paced world no one understands, or the physical stress and inflammation from highly processed foods woefully deficient in nutrients. It doesn't take into account the feeling of hopelessness young people have when faced with tne prospect of being able to find well paid employment that can keep them in the level of luxury they've grown accustomed to. Stress about climate change is another big one. There are so many reasons life is worse than ever, I'd get rsi writing them all.
