Prologue: An Inexorable Emergence By Ray Kurzweil from book

Be Careful What We Wish For –We wish to always win in casinos. –We wish to live forever. –We wish to be the richest. –We wish to live in a society without any negative issues we have now. Do we really wish for them? Do we have psychological capacity to stand those “perfect” things? R. Kurzweil

A Paradox of Human Nature We wish good, but not purely and absolutely. We like to solve problems, but we do not want them all solved, not quickly, anyway. We are more attached to the problems than to the solutions. R. Kurzweil

What is so good that we may not be ready for it? Machines as intelligent as, or more intelligent than, humans will emerge; We’ll be in a position to change the nature of mortality. R. Kurzweil

A Specter of 21 st Century Machine intelligence will seriously compete human intelligence. Human beings will no longer be the most intelligent type of entity (‘species’ or ‘creature’) on this planet. “Singularity” – integration of human and machine R. Kurzweil

Rule of Acceleration The pace of technology development has been accelerating since the inception of the 1 st industrial revolution. New technologies and new applications have been emerged at an increasingly fast rate. R. Kurzweil

What AI Can Do Now Playing chess at a world master level, Diagnosing certain medical conditions, Transcribing human speech, Recognizing patterns in medical procedures such as electrocardiograms and blood tests,... R. Kurzweil

What AI Cannot Do Now Describe the objects on a crowded kitchen table, Write a summary of a movie, Tie shoelaces, Tell difference between a dog and a cat, Recognize humor and other subtleness of humans,... R. Kurzweil

Computer and Brain Current computer is different from human’s brain in terms of structure and working approach. ‘Parallel processing’ makes a brain fast. Increase machine speed –Moore’s law and parallel processing Reverse engineering –Scanning and copying a brain. R. Kurzweil

A Credible Capability of Computers We have had computers possessing following capabilities, though elementary: –Ability of reading and understanding written documents, –Ability of learning from own experience. They are the self-learning capability, - acquiring knowledge on their own. R. Kurzweil

What Self-learning Implies? If a machine is equipped with the capability of self-learning, then its knowledge can be accumulated by itself, rather than being ‘injected’ by its manufacturer. Thinking a human who is able to read as fast as a scanner, memorize as accurate and vast as a computer, and do not sleep, eat, rest,... R. Kurzweil

If Computer Is as Smart as Us, then It Is Smarter than Us Once a computer achieves the level of our intelligence, especially self-learning, it will necessarily roar past human intelligence. Combining human-level intelligence / capability with a computer’s inherent superiority in speed, accuracy and sharing ability of its memory will generate formidable machines. R. Kurzweil

Computer Technology: Dynamic The state of art in computer technology is anything but static. Exponential growth in the past 60 years. Human’s intelligence remained unchanged in the past 60 years, 300 years, or 3,000 years. R. Kurzweil

In the 2 nd Decade of 21 st Century It will become increasingly difficult to draw any clear distinction between the capabilities of human and machine intelligence. Machine will pass the Turing Test. R. Kurzweil

At the End of This Century Human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. R. Kurzweil

Great Import It took billions years to have human intelligence in the universe. Another intelligence that competes with, and ultimately exceeds, human intelligence will have the import no less than the creation of human intelligence. R. Kurzweil

Philosophical Issues Are computers thinking or just calculating? Are we ‘machines’? –Since our brains follow the law of physics, it is a ‘machine’, or a ‘bio-machine’, albeit a very complex one. Is there a fundamental barrier that prevents a machine from reaching human-level intelligence? Our Discussions