Kurzweil's name can be seen in huge letters across the front of the synthesizer's in your church, and he is the guy responsible for voice recognition systems now available to consumers. To support his wild extrapolations, he points to nanotechnology and its capacity to merge with biological systems in the human body and control such things as spasms and seizures. He believes that there is no limit to this merger, and that he'll be able to download his consciousness into a computer before his body wears out (He just turned 61). Kurzweil believes he will then be able to control an everlasting synthetic body and soon models will be available to us all. So, in the very near future, instead of pulling up google on your laptop you will be able to pull it up in your mind's eye and thus command knowledge beyond that of Spock. Thus Homo-laptopicus, our present evolutionary model, will evolve into something along the lines of Data.
"What about the soul," you ask? Well the soul is nothing more than a word for the complex computing of our brains that seemed to point to a mystical, spiritual side that we could not fully comprehend. But now that we have taken the reductionist step of reducing the mind to the brain, we realize that we can and soon will transcend our brains with computer brains. In other words, what we call spirituality will soon be possible in the machines that will eventually replace our bodies. Kurzweil believes in what he calls the "age of spiritual machines," when the organic world is replaced by chips and plastic and heaven and earth passes away and becomes a computer. We will communicate inaudibly, mind-to-mind, via something like omnipresent wi-fi. Sound scary? Well not for Kurzweil. He can't wait and neither can Kaku it seems.
This is exactly the path predicted by Lewis in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. Kurzeil's humanoid-of-the-future does not live off the land but in space, where he has solved the problem of space travel and can traverse the universe and the multiverse and date extra-terrestrials. He is literally trillions of times smarter. His is a synthetic world where man no longer eats, grows, or reproduces through sex. I guess the orgasm is purely intellectual.
I've seen Kurzweil on TV too and his mannerisms eerily resemble the scientists in That Hideous Strength. Perhaps I don't know him well enough, but he seems to have already merged and the soul was left holding the door. I pray that he'll soon run into Mr. Bultitude, who might scare it back into him. Lord save us from our vain technological imaginations.
2 comments:
Dr. Heckel........ has this bright physicist read about Dr. Frankenstein? Making technology and science a hope for eternal life, or overcoming death, is a vain hopeful dream that any reasonable soul can see will always end up as a nightmare. Besides, how can a human exist without the phsycho-somatic unity and all the senses and feeling going with that? As you point out, sexuality is a part of that, but what about something like eating a piece of chocolate or watching and touching a basketful of kittens? True enough, Data had some sexual function, just as did Asimov's robots in his Robots of Dawn series, but Data still never developed feelings. and Asimov's robots always seemed to fail somehow. I haven't read a Hideous Strength but it would seem this guy is just insane, though he sees his end of life coming at him down the tunnel, which is sanity. Look, the aging process of the human body can't be stopped. Every day, millions I think, of our cells split and our DNA replicates, each replication causing a loss of the end stuff called telomere. As the telomere runs low, the cells replicate less accurately, so we age.
Let me make a prediction, this physicist is going to meet his maker before he meets his machine.
Scary stuff though to think about......
Good comments Michael.
When you lose hope you start inventing your own as you look around for anything that might save you from telomere depletion.
If you think you are faced with a future without chocolate, I guess Data is better than dirt. I guess it's still dirt phobia!
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