The Ubiquity and Predictability of the Exponential Growth of Information Technology
6:00-6:55 pm, October 3
The exponential growth of the price-performance and capacity of information technology in many realms including biology, communication, and even resources such as energy continues unabated. New and updated graphs showing the remarkable predictability of this progression will be presented. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030. Within one to two decades, we will be in a position to stop and reverse the progression of disease and aging resulting in dramatic gains in health and longevity. The portion of the economy comprised of information technology is itself growing exponentially and within a couple of decades, the bulk of the economy will be dominated by information and software. Exponential growth also applies to the reverse-engineering of the human brain. Once nonbiological intelligence matches the range and subtlety of human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. The implication will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the evolutionary process it spawned.
Critics of the Singularity
1:30-2:00 pm, October 4
The most common criticisms of the exponential growth of information technology and its implications will be examined. These include criticisms from hardware (“Moore’s Law will not go on forever”), software (“software is stuck in the mud”), the brain (“the brain is too complicated to understand or replicate”), ontology (“software is not capable of thinking or of consciousness”), and promise versus peril (“biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are too dangerous”).
Biographies: Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office.
He has received sixteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
