THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2014
RAY KURZWEIL COMES TO GOOGLE~BRINGS "MIND OF GOD" ATHEIST, SECULAR HUMANIST, EVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTS
In an exclusive with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil gave one of his first interviews since the December announcement that he joined Google full time as Director of Engineering. Speaking with Keith Kleiner, Ray discusses his new role, how his research interests connect with his latest book How To Create A Mind (which Keith recently interviewed Ray about here), and how technology will advance to produce a "cybernetic friend."
Authors@Google:
Ray Kurzweil & "The Transcendant Man":
Uploaded on Jul 3, 2009
Ray Kurzweil visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One." This event took place on July 1, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series. At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what is means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at todays rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades.
Ray Kurzweil "How to Create a Mind",
Authors at Google:
Published on Nov 19, 2012
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed About the book: In How to Create a Mind, The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, the bold futurist and author of The New York Times bestseller The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse engineering the human brain. Ray Kurzweil is arguably today's most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world's problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating. Certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books of the year, How to Create a Mind is sure to take its place alongside Kurzweil's previous classics.
Ray Kurzweil: Why Should We Create a Mind?:
Published on Dec 12, 2013
There was a time was when Google engineers spent all their days counting links and ranking pages. The company's famous algorithm made it the leading search engine in the world. Admittedly, it was far from perfect. That is why current efforts are aimed at developing ways for computers to read and understand natural language. Enter Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and expert in artificial intelligence. Kurzweil's goal is ostensibly to help the company improve the accuracy of its search results, but that is certainly not all. Kurzweil, after all, is one of the world's leading advocates of "hard AI," or the development of consciousness in an artificial being. Kurzweil believes this will come about in 2029, to be specific. So in addition to Google's development of autonomous cars and its aggressive play in robotic delivery systems, the company is also looking to build an artificial brain, aka "The Google Brain." As Steven Levy notes on Wired, this is a fact that "some may consider thrilling and others deeply unsettling. Or both." Kurzweil is collaborating with Jeff Dean to find the brain's algorithm, and Kurzweil says the reason he is at Google is to take full advantage of the company's deep learning resources. In the video Kurzweil outlines three tangible benefits that he expects to come out of this project. Beyond building more intelligent machines, if we are able to reverse-engineer the brain, we will be able to do a better job at fixing it. We will also gain more insight into ourselves, he says. After all, "our identity, our consciousness, the concept of free will is closely associated with the brain." Transcript -- You could say it's the goal of art and science to understand ourselves and our brain, our thinking is the most interesting aspect of ourselves. The three reasons to reverse engineer the brain; one, is to do a better job of fixing it. I quote one of the pioneers of the New Orleans Plant for Parkinson's Disease in saying we're now treating the brain of circuitry, not as a chemical soup, which drugs like SSRI, drugs just treat it like a soup of chemicals. It is in fact an elaborate network and if we actually understand how that network works we can do a much better job of overcoming problems and limitations, and for that matter we're all limited. Secondly, we can create more intelligent machines. We've done a fairly good job without actually understanding how the human brain works, but now that we're beginning to get biologically inspired methods, this is going to greatly accelerate AI. And thirdly, it'll provide more insight into ourselves. We can't understand ourselves if we don't understand how our brains work. Our identity, our consciousness, the concept of free will is closely associated with the brain. Now it's not exactly the same thing. We can talk about how these philosophical concepts relate to the brain, but you can't really have a discussion about consciousness, free will, and identity without talking about the brain. Intelligence is also what we need to solve all the major challenges of humanity and of the planet and so on. We need more intelligence. In fact, we won't be able to solve the major problems that we have without more intelligence. So for all those reasons, it's important to understand how the brain works, and it's really only very recently, I would say in the last year, that we have enough information to actually make intelligent statements about intelligence and how human intelligence works. Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton
Ray Kurzweil Interview - his thoughts on God:
Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045:
Published on Mar 4, 2013
Ray Kurzweil — Singularitarian Immortalist, Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mindhttp://GF2045.com/speakers/.
A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, "the restless genius" (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon's #1 book in science and philosophy.
In this video Ray Kurzweil discusses his predictions about radical life extension, singularity, life expansion and the imminence of physical immortality. He invites participants to the second international Global Future 2045 congress (June 2013)http://www.GF2045.com.
"If we have radical life extension only, we would get profoundly bored, we'd have profound existential ennui, running out of things to do, and new ideas, but that's not what's going to happen. In addition to radical life extension, we're going to have radical life expansion, we're going to have millions of virtual environments to explore, we're going to literally expand our brains."
"We'll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly, as well as our environments in virtual reality, but it will feel very real. We'll ultimately be able to do that with real reality too, like self-organizing swarms of nanobots that can link themselves up into a virtual body." says Ray Kurzweil.
