The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil 2024

3 responses to “The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil 2024”

1. 

   sbove

   Apr 21, 2024 at 1:39 am

   This is the hollywood equiv of getting the hot script first 😉

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2. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 21, 2024 at 6:35 pm

   [https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbove] earlier than ever… it’s been a few years in the making, and I read it all a year ago. I offered a few updates, but my main advice was to move the Moore’s Law curve more to the front of the book as the showcase. I wrote "my biggest point of feedback…. I think your Moore’s Law curve should be front and center in your book. It does not show up until p.273., as if it was just another one of your graphs, and I’d argue that it is foundational to your LOAR. Yes, while I have also argued that idea recombination might be the more basic underpinning of accelerating tech change, your Moore’s Law abstraction is a special case for several reasons:
   1) It is foundational, versus derivative. Some trends, like gene sequencing cost, are derivative to Moore’s Law (computation enabled shotgun sequencing)
   2) It’s the longest running trend, for 125 years now across many tech epochs. This is not true for the others, which might end up looking like S curves if given more time. (to that end, why did you truncate your older data points and start at 1939 now?)
   3) It has predictive power. When you make a prediction, or take a bet, it’s based on Moore’s Law… singularly. I don’t see you, or anyone, making bold predictions off the other graphs (another sign that they are derivative). Sure we can predict solar costs in the future, but not seismic shifts in society or culture that it will engender. The closet to predictive usefulness could be DNA synthesis cost… but like gene sequencing, that capability has advanced, but computation and AI has held us back from making it useful. To make a prediction of what “genetic engineering” can do for us 10 years from now will rest on your AI/computation predictions, as they all do.

   This is why I call your Moore’s Law abstraction the most important thing ever graphed. And it feels like it is buried and demoted in this latest work. It’s continuity, over your lifetime of writing, is the greatest takeaway, for the future of humanity and the future of intelligence."

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3. 

   sbove

   Apr 22, 2024 at 1:35 am

   1) I hope MrK took your excellent and eloquently articulated advice…and sent you a "guest editor in chief" payment in btc 😉
   2) Ray’s "The Singularity is Near" is tied for first place in my libes for "most underlined/annotated book" along side works like Barrow and Tipler’s "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" which, whether you agree or not with the concepts, was a real mind bender back in 1988…
   3) Ray is a national treasure. I really hope he lives long enough to see his myriad insights and conceptions play out…

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