BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 1999 > December
Where We Go From Here
By Jon Udell
December 28, 1999
(Where We Go From Here
: Page 1 of 2 )
If you can read this, we've transited into the year 2000. The odds are good, however, that most of us don't figure we'll see the dawn of another century, let alone another millennium. But one of this century's most accomplished technologists -- Ray Kurzweil -- isn't so sure. In a radical book titled The Age of the Spiritual Machines, published by Viking, Kurzweil says computational substrates to which we can "port" human minds will exist within a matter of decades. Mind transplants are routine science-fiction fare, but Kurzweil is deadly serious when he says that if Moore's law holds until 2020, it will produce a platform on which we can run the application we call consciousness.
Kurzweil likens the process to the old story in which the inventor of chess asked the emperor of China for a grain of rice, doubled for each square on the board. Halfway through the process, the emperor is doing OK: he only owes the inventor a few dozen bags of rice. Then it gets out of hand. We, says Kurzweil, are at that halfway point in a game that doubles computational power like those grains of rice. At square 31, you get discontinuous speech recognition. A square 32, another doubling, you get continuous speech recognition. At this point in the game, though, the emperor never guessed that square 64 would cost him more grains of rice than the universe has atoms.
We're at the tipping point, says Kurzweil. Even the acceleration will accelerate, because machine intelligence doesn't let the end of the Moore's Law era slow it down, it just jumps into quantum-computing and other substrates.
There are three ways to evaluate Kurzweil's thesis:
- He's completely wrong. The mind isn't software, the brain isn't a computer, and it will never be possible to transplant brains to computers. This is a perfectly reasonable position, but I don't buy it. I think consciousness is computation, and I don't think the soggy meat between our ears is the only place it can ever happen.
- He's half-right, half-wrong.
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 1999 > December
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