A POINT OF SINGULARITY [ Updated]Glenn Reynolds the famed Instapundit,
reviews Ray Kurzweil's new futurist tome ,The Singularity is Near. This one is on my " must-buy soon" list but I as I haven't read it yet, I have no commentary to offer. An excerpt from the review:
"People's thoughts of the future tend to follow a linear extrapolation -- steadily more of the same, only better -- while most technological progress is exponential, happening by giant leaps and thus moving farther and faster than the mind can easily grasp. Mr. Kurzweil himself, thinking exponentially, imagines a plausible future, not so far away, with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual), vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today), other miraculous machines (nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt) and, thanks to these technologies, enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today).Naturally, Mr. Kurzweil has little time for techno-skeptics like the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who in September 2001 published a notorious piece in Scientific American debunking the claims of nanotechnologists, in particular the possibility of nano-robots (nanobots) capable of assembling molecules and substances to order. Mr. Kurzweil's arguments countering Dr. Smalley and his allies are a pleasure to read -- Mr. Kurzweil clearly thinks that nanobots are possible -- but in truth he is fighting a battle that is already won. These days skeptics worry that advanced technologies, far from failing to deliver on their promises, will deliver on them only too well -- ushering in a dystopia of, say, destructive self-replication in which the world is covered by nanobots that convert everything into copies of themselves (known in the trade as the "gray goo" problem). Mr. Kurzweil's sense of things isn't nearly so bleak as that -- he is an optimist, after all, an enthusiast for the techno-future -- but he does sound a surprisingly somber note."Kevin Drum also posted on Singularity recently.
ADDENDUM:Sean recommends
this counterpoint to Kurzweil