Moira Gunn is interviewing Ray Kurzweil here at ac2005. She starts with a hard one… will artificial intelligence improve our sex lives? Ray goes on at embarrassing length, telling me more than I really wanted to know about his views regarding phone sex, Virtual Reality, something I’d call the Tiresias factor… god knows what Ray would call it…. he was breathing heavy by this time and he was speaking in shorter sentences using smaller words.
I called RB last night to gloat over my signed copy of the new Kurzweil fantasy, "The Singularity is Near." I knew RB had a few things to say regarding the numinous lunacy of such a declaration. During our conversation I somehow slipped into aggrieved iPod user mode. Chris suggested that I fix my scratched plexiglass case by doing an orange crate mod… replace the sleek Apple plexi design with something more organic, something that will put slivers in your butt if you sit on it.
Then, as if he’d been wired into the conversation, Norm offered this today. What I like about the wooden case (besides the butt sliver factor) is the fact that if you’re ver called upon to hurl yourself on a funeral pyre, you’re actually providing some of the fuel.
Kurzweil has moved onto the topic of GMO, golden rice, preventing blindness, cell transdifferentiation, and stuff like that. This is all part of a pretty coherent rap oposing fundametalisms including humanist fundies (like me) who put roadblocks up in the GMO area. Reflexive antitechnologists is how he labels us. Not sure that’s a fair statement.
Ray’s concerned about global warming but figures there will be nanotech available to clean up our messes in the 2024’s.
Manifest
destiny. Brands. The Second Great Awakening. The beautiful women would
have to wait. I was onto something. Big wheel keep on turnin. My room
35 floors high, boats on the river, bridges collapsing in perspective
to the horizon, neon twinkling in the water. Beautiful. And I’m landing
the gig with Highbeam.
All you killers / turn your lights on / ’cause there’s a monster /
under my bed… Ah, you must have been sleeping with Daniel Boorstin,
then. Trotskyites in the Dewey Decimal System. Dit-dit-dit-dot-dit-dit.
Yet another Enigma. Alan bites into the cyanide-laced apple. Fails the
ultimate Turing test. Queer Studies not having yet been instituted at
Oxford and Cambridge. Why were you so over-invested? Finite automata. A
workaround for the Gödel bug. Singularity as manifest destiny. Also
sprach Ray Kurzweil. Diodes, capacitors, printed circuits. Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea. Also sprach D. Dennett. Pandemonium, connection
machines, societies of mind. Also sprach Warren McCulloch, Danny
Hillis, Marvin Minksy. Winken, Blinken and Nod. If they wink and blink
at you, it’s hasta la vista, baby.Old slave field holler I used to sing:
go down Hannah don’t you rise no more
hey, hey, hey…
if you rise up in the mornin bring the judgment day
hey, hey, hey…
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