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I have a standing bet that Kurzweil will die in my lifetime before he will be able to upload himself to a synthetic body with a friend of mine.
by xutopia 8y ago
I have a standing bet that Kurzweil will die in my lifetime before he will be able to upload himself to a synthetic body with a friend of mine.
- logfromblammo 8y agoWhy would your friend want to share a body with Kurzweil?
- vl 8y agoIt seems that criteria for the outcome is rather loosely defined: what if he uploads to the computer cluster (which is more likely, since upload to android also requires miniaturization of brain-simulating hardware)?
- Retric 8y agoA computer cluster is a synthetic body.
- drzaiusapelord 8y agoWhy would anyone take that bet? We can't even do this to a mouse let alone a person. He's 70 years old, so maybe a decade or decade and a half left before he kicks the bucket. We're certainly not doing 'brain uploads' anytime soon, if ever. Heck, we can't even replace most organs and essentially transhumanism boils down to a brain replacement. If we can't make a spleen or a liver, we aren't making brains.
- henrikschroder 8y agoKurzweil's thesis is that technological change is exponential, but that our view of this change is linear, so we are extremely bad at predicting the future. He then tries to extrapolate this exponential change in, for example, processing power per cent, and tries to draw conclusions about what a society would look like where the processing power to simulate a human brain costs a dollar. However, and this is why I side with GP, Kurzweils predictions are all veeeery conveniently made such that he himself will escape death, because he is absolutely obsessed and terrified by death, so I think he's succumbing to wishful thinking. He likes to publish future predictions, and his track record over the last decades is pretty meh.
- rsync 8y ago"I have a standing bet that Kurzweil will die in my lifetime before he will be able to upload himself to a synthetic body with a friend of mine." My response to all things Kurzweil has always been barely interested dismissal. However, a few years ago I read an in-depth piece, with interview, wherein he pinned almost all of his motivation on his early, traumatic experience of his own (beloved) fathers death. Now my response is a very deep sadness for him. What he wants is so simple and easiy achievable - to have a child of his own. Literal immortality (at the species layer, not the (cancerous) individual layer) was there for him all along - and it included all of the love and care and devotion that he has spent his lifetime mourning.
- goodbadwolf 8y agoWould you happen to remember where the interview was published ?
- rsync 8y agoI think it may have been the New York Times sunday magazine ? Not that long ago - last two years, I think ...
- jobigoud 8y agoI don't follow your logic. What he wants is that others do not go through the same death induced trauma. What would having a child of his own achieve?