TIME magazine (@TIME) features futurist Raymond Kurzweil’s (see his website) “radical vision for humanity’s immortal future.” It has seismic implications for those of us in book publishing. Book formats morphing into digital entities may not be the only sea change occurring in this century. Here are a few excerpts:
Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It’s an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don’t have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer ... is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Kurzweil (@KurzweilAINews) believes we're approaching [the Singularity,] a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.