it's nice to some dissent to Kurzweil and the ai singularity pov questioned. In my opinion KG's view here is closer to the truth of it. It seems to me that th

it's nice to some dissent to Kurzweil and the ai singularity pov questioned. In my opinion KG's view here is closer to the truth of it. It seems to me that the human organism is the singularity, and like many of our technologies, including metallurgy, cities, nuclear weapons, and bioengineering, computer tech and automation has the ability to wipe us out. But it won't be because it becomes conscious and turns on us; it will be because we cause some chain reaction or blunder, by accident or on purpose: like wiping out an invaluable resource like air or water, or by otherwise destabilizing the global biosphere, or through some code typo that causes automated manufacture machinery to eat us for breakfast. But the fear of machines gaining consciousness is, at least in our age, pure fantasy. If consciousness were a directly related to complexity, then the moon and sun would be awake and singing -- both are stuffed to the gills with highly organized information! Computers that can provide complex answers, or walk and talk as if they were conscious are no more awake than the moon or sun, and to say otherwise is to be a carnival salesman. Kurzweil and his ilk are seeing the human consciousness in the mirror of the machine and it scares them, as it should. But it's a mistake to think that the machine will awaken accidentally or casually, as result of simply adding too many circuits, or feeding the wrong code into the wrong compiler. That idea applied to computers is a philosophical misunderstanding of the difference between intelligence and consciousness. A conscious machine is not something that can be made without extraordinary technical ability and intention-ality - it's on par with the ability to colonize planets - way beyond us, and not something likely to happen by accident, except of course in the traditional sense of already having the ability to do so :}