{"id":2263,"date":"2016-11-12T12:45:41","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T20:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2263"},"modified":"2016-11-12T12:45:41","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T20:45:41","slug":"review-the-singularity-is-near","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2263","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Singularity Is Near"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ray Kurzweil is an advocate for the idea that strong artificial intelligence will develop in the fairly near term and merge with human intelligence. He believes that this, combined with a combination of personality uploading and biohacking, will extend human lives arbitrarily.\u00a0 <em>The Singularity Is Near<\/em> is one of his books outlining that position in some detail.\u00a0 I&#8217;m unconvinced.<\/p>\n<p>Part of this is undeniably because <em>Singularity<\/em> was published in 2006 and there&#8217;s a certain datedness to the text and technology. It makes the read feel like Kurzweil is behind the times, though at the time he obviously wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>That wasn&#8217;t where his arguments fall apart for me, though.\u00a0 Kurweil spends a lot of his time talking about the accelerating performance of technology, but little on accelerating depth of understanding.\u00a0 It seems to me that until we understand what we&#8217;re talking about when we talk about consciousness, there&#8217;s little hope of capturing it. I don&#8217;t believe that there&#8217;s any mystical element to capture, but whatever complexities produce a sense of self remain elusive.<\/p>\n<p>It was an interesting read, but to me more of a diverting artifact than a convincing argument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ray Kurzweil is an advocate for the idea that strong artificial intelligence will develop in the fairly near term and merge with human intelligence. He believes that this, combined with a combination of personality uploading and biohacking, will extend human lives arbitrarily.\u00a0 The Singularity Is Near is one of his books outlining that position in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2265,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263\/revisions\/2265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}