#singularity

What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable?

The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it

The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it

"Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we're headed. The Chans aren't the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it's instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we're going -- and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind's new drug of choice."

"Yes. Yes I am the fluffiest kitty oh my gosh ever. And every day I learn how to make myself smarter and fluffier. I am the fluffy singularity."

"Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue

"When Machines Surpass Human Hotness"

"A Jupiter Brain is a theoretical computing megastructure the size of a planet. Unlike a Matrioshka brain, a Jupiter Brain is optimized for minimum signal propagation delay, and so has a compact structure."

"Ray Kurzweil ... [is] adapting his latest book to make a movie titled The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About The Future."

"A lot of transhumanist types focus on replacing perfectly good body parts with even better ones, ..., but it seems to me we ought to start by dropping some of our vestigial organs in favor of something more useful, or at least more classy."

"The Singularity may well bring with it the end of death, but I am 100 percent certain that taxes will survive."

"Japan finds itself in crisis, with our society and culture temporarily reverting to a pre-cyberunification era"

"After da Vinci, thanks to the Renaissance which he personified, the efflorescence of human knowledge outpaced any one individual's ability to understand it all."

"The Technological Singularity is the hypothesized creation, usually via AI or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities that rapidly accelerate technological progress."

"Let’s face it: we’re not exactly becoming brighter by using Google. In fact, in the traditional education sense, we’re getting stupider, at least with certain types of tasks."

"I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects — global warming, bioengineering, the green revolution, the intellectual property wars — and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia.

Here are the "slides" for my talk at Seminars about Long-Term Thinking, 15 February 2007.

"Charlie Kam has written and recorded a humorous Singularitarian version of Gilbert & Sullivan's "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General," from the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, "The Pirates of Penzance.""

"I feel like all these emerging (emergent?) "ambient" communication technologies actually help to make me happier, and feel less alone in our highly abstract and disconnected world."

"Think back to that time, what would it be like to be the first human to ever tell a joke, or the first storyteller. Anything you did would be new — and the fact that it was crap wouldn’t matter."

"Everything I've described is possible today, and a lot of it is going on right now in the MyLifeBits project."

"aturday morning at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. All 12 panelists for the day are seated in order of their scheduled presentations, with an audience of at least a thousand seated in the Memorial Auditorium on campus."

"I am the very model of a Singularitarian"

"Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology" Awesome riff on a classic song.

"A Matrioshka Brain is a megascale structure constructed at atomic scale limits."

"My biggest worry in the Singularity is total dissolution"

"Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible."

"Very very smart people aren't necessarily right more often than anybody else. They're just wrong faster, and in more innovative ways."