Ray Kurzweil The Transhuman: When Humans Merge With Science-Fiction

Wikimedia, South by Southwest 2024

Posted By: Darren Orf via Popular Mechanics August 13, 2024

Lest you forget, Ray Kurzweil is the consummate Transhuman and Technocrat rolled into one. He is also chief scientist at Google and hopes for his head to be frozen by Alcor Life Extension in Scottsdale, Arizona, after he dies. In 2017, he doubled down on his prediction of reaching the Singularity by 2029, advancing his original timeline from 2045. The problem? Blending science fiction with reality always yields science fiction, and to bet your future on it will not end well. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

• Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.
• American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has long argued that the singularity would likely occur around the middle of the 21st century, and with the rise of AI, his predictions are gaining more credence.
• In his new book, The Singularity is Nearer, Kurzweil doubles down on those predictions and details how humanity’s intelligence will increase a millionfold via nanobots (among other things).

You don’t exactly become a world-renowned futurist by making safe predictions. And while some of these past predictions haven’t exactly come to pass (Back to the Future Part II, specifically), these ideas help expand our thoughts on what exactly the future might look like.

And no one makes futuristic predictions quite like Ray Kurzweil.

An American computer scientist-turned-futurist, Kurzweil has long believed that humanity is headed toward what’s known as “the singularity,” when man and machine merge. In 1999, Kurzweil theorized that artificial general intelligence would be achieved once humanity could achieve a technology capable of a trillion calculations per second, which he pegged to occur 2029. Experts at the time scoffed at the idea, figuring it’d be at least a century or more, but with Kurzweil’s timeline only a few years off—and talk of AGI spreading—that decades-old prediction is beginning to loom large.

Now in his new book published last month, The Singularity is Nearer (a play on his 2005 book of the same name minus an “er”), Kurzweil doubles down on these ideas in the modern era of artificial intelligence. Not only is he “sticking with [his] five years” prediction, as he recently said in a TED Talk, Kurzweil also believes that humans will achieve a millionfold intelligence by 2045, aided by brain interfaces formed with nanobots non-invasively inserted into our capillaries.

“We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence,” Kurzweil said in an interview with The Guardian, “and it’s all going to be rolled into one. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045, and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”

While this idea subscribes to a merger more akin to physical intervention to bridge the gap between man and machine, other philosophers and AI experts agree that some form of merger is likely inevitable, and in some ways, is already beginning. In July, Oxford’s Marcus du Sautoy and Nick Bostrom both expounded on the hopeful and harrowing possibilities of our AI future, and for both of them, a kind of synthesis appeared inevitable.

“I think that we are headed toward a hybrid future,” Sautoy told Popular Mechanics. “We still believe that we are the only beings with a high level of consciousness. This is part of the whole Copernican journey that we are not unique. We’re not at the center.”

Of course, this “Brave New World” of a hybrid AI-human existence brings with it a plethora of issues both political and personal. What will humans do for jobs? Could we possibly live forever? Would that change the very idea of what it means to be human?

Kurzweil, like many other futurists, are relatively optimistic on this front. In that same interview with The Guardian, Kurzweil highlights the idea of a Universal Basic Income as a necessity rather than a fringe idea currently supported in more progressive circles, and AI will bring unprecedented advancements in medicine, meaning the very idea of immortality isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

“In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through aging we get back from scientific progress,” Kurzweil told The Guardian. “And as we move past that, we’ll actually get back more years. It isn’t a solid guarantee of living forever—there are still accidents—but your probability of dying won’t increase year to year.”

Just like “Back to the Future Part II” predicted flying cars, so too could these technology-fueled utopias crumble to dust as these dates inch closer and closer. But 25 years ago, Kurzweil predicted we’d be rapidly approaching a major moment in humanity’s technological history at the tail end of this decade.

Currently, no evidence suggests the contrary.

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Source:  technocracy.news

Rep Fires Back: NOAA’s Climate Change Report Is Science Fiction

Written By: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) November 27, 2015

TN Note: Rep. Lamar Smith, (R-TX) is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and he has rightly busted NOAA squarely on the chops. NOAA is pursuing a purely political agenda under the leadership of President Barack Obama.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the nation’s leading collector of climate data. Every day, NOAA analyzes vast amounts of data to predict changes to our climate, weather, oceans and coasts. The agency also publishes monthly temperature averages across the nation and compares those numbers to historical temperature records.
As the nation’s self-proclaimed authority on “environmental intelligence,” NOAA should be held to the highest scientific standards. This means their conclusions should be objective, independent of political consideration and based on all available sources of information.
NOAA’s top official, Kathryn Sullivan, has described the agency’s role as providing “timely, reliably, and actionable information — based on sound science — every day to millions of Americans.”
In testimony before the House Science Committee, NOAA’s deputy administrator, Manson Brown, made similar remarks, noting the importance of satellite data. He said that NOAA’s ability “to deliver environmental intelligence starts with keeping the pulse of the planet, especially the atmosphere and the ocean, and this is the central capability where space-based assets come into play.” So why does NOAA leave out satellite data when it releases climate projections?
NOAA often fails to consider all available data in its determinations and climate change reports to the public. A recent study by NOAA, published in the journal Science, made “adjustments” to historical temperature records and NOAA trumpeted the findings as refuting the nearly two-decade pause in global warming. The study’s authors claimed these adjustments were supposedly based on new data and new methodology. But the study failed to include satellite data.
Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. This fact is well documented, but has been embarrassing for an administration determined to push through costly environmental regulations.
Instead, NOAA focused its study on surface temperature monitoring that is often flawed because these sites measure thousands of independent temperature readings and utilize a hodgepodge of different methods that have changed over time. For example, measurements from land-based stations can be skewed because of their location and proximity to surrounding heat-holding asphalt in urban areas.
Satellite data, on the other hand, is highly calibrated and provides complete global coverage. For decades, satellites have been used to monitor the earth and collect information. Satellites measure something extremely important — the deep atmosphere. The temperature readings collected by satellites often differ from ground monitoring stations and have consistently shown much smaller rates of warming. Yet NOAA refuses to incorporate satellite data into its monthly projections that are released to the public. Why?
NOAA appears to pick and choose only data that confirms their bias. NOAA then disseminates this incomplete data to the media who manufacture alarming headlines but ignore the uncertainty of the conclusions.
Earlier this year, NASA issued a news release stating that 2014 was the warmest year on record. Few media acknowledged the footnote: Scientists were only 38 percent sure this was actually correct. That is less than 50-50.
NOAA fully understands margins of error and works with them on a daily basis. But where are these details in their news releases? While NOAA’s monthly projections usually warn of increased warming, they ignore satellite data that refutes their alarmist statements.
The ability to remain independent of political consideration seems like a minimum requirement for an agency that should provide unbiased scientific information. But NOAA’s habit of picking and choosing data raises serious questions about the agency’s independence. In fact, it shreds NOAA’s credibility.
As a self-proclaimed “environmental intelligence agency,” NOAA’s reports should be based only on the best available science that takes into account all sources of data. Unfortunately, NOAA continues to rely upon biased science in pursuit of a predetermined outcome. That’s not good science, it’s science fiction.
This administration is pursuing an extreme political climate change agenda and has made NOAA its accomplice. These are not the actions of an objective agency. NOAA needs to come clean about why it cherry-picked and changed certain data, while ignoring satellite data, to get the results it wanted.
Read full story here…

Note  Source Technocracy.news