There is no doubt Kurzweil is a brilliant mind, he started his first enterprise Kurzweil Computer Products Inc, in 1974, developing systems to be able to recognize pattern (OCR), he developed the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first full text-to-speech, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind.
All this led to a friendship with Stevie Wonder, which also led to new innovations in computer-based music
In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox (not a bad move), and he founded Kurzweil Music Systems, with Stevie Wonder as musical advisor. He developed computer-based instruments that could recreate to the perfection many orchestral instruments.
But Kurzweil is someone who apparently never rests and he sold his company again to a Korean company, and started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, which developed computer-based speech recognition. He later started his 4th company Kurzweil Educational systems in 1996, and a few others like Financial Accelerating Transactions – Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies, Medical Learning Company, and a few websites, KurzweilCyberArt.com which provides software to assist the creative process, and KurzweilAI.net, a leading resource on the web for advanced technologies.
So who is that guy? A genius?? He seems to combine technology and art with ease, and is always successful. To this impressive resume, you also have to add very successful books, and among them the ‘Age of Spiritual Machines’, #1 best selling book an Amazon…
And this is where everything becomes weird, really weird. In his books, Kurzweil made a lot of predictions for the future, and if a few happened to be true, a lot happened to be completely wrong also. But when you have so much technological accomplishments under your belt, people are impressed and take you very seriously, no matter what.
But this is what Conor Oberst was talking about when he mentioned Kurzweil’s theory of Singularity: there will be a time (and Kurzweil hopes to see this himself) when humans will transcend their biology and we will merge with technology, becoming half man half robots/computers, and our brain will be tremendously enhanced with engineering. He goes even further, as he predicts that artificial intelligence will have a life on its own, and we will be able to download our brains into machines making us basically immortal.
So it will be the end of humanity as we know it, as AI will make humans obsolete.
Yeah, it will happen soon, this is what he is saying… I was watching a video of one of his conferences from 2005 on the internet and he was saying that, by 2010, computers would had disappeared because been so small and embedded in our clothing, that images would be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtually reality.. by 2010… er?
He should stop throwing dates like this for his kooky predictions, but he is so sure he can predict the future, because everything is about exponential curves…
The other problem is that Kurzweil is not a biologist, what he is saying shows he knows very little about the brain (according to many neurobiologists), and it is not because you are good at what you are doing (computer sciences), that you can be good at anything.
The brain? We are not even close to understand how it functions but Kurzweil has all figured it out. Consciousness? The most eminent neurobiologists don’t even clearly know what it is, but Kurzweil wants to download it on a machine.
He thinks we’ll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain in a decade! He simplifies everything saying that DNA is what built our brain, but
he has no idea of the complexity of the biological processes behind the development of the organ and all the unsolved problems that still exist.
He also hopes to bring his father back to life by getting DNA from his grave and download the info into an artificial-intelligence program to create a ‘virtual person’… Good luck with that!
So this is what the new Bright Eyes’ album is about,… just saying.