Resistance is Futile

For a glimpse of our Borg-bound future, check out the new Ray Kurzweil book, The Singularity is Near. I have not read it yet (it's not being released until today--may hoof it up to Borders and pick it up if they have it), but there was a mention on Marginal Revolution. The basic thrust, which sounds like an expansion of what Kurzweil laid out in The Age of Spiritual Machines, is that the future of mankind will involve some kind of human-computer hybrid, or a kind of cyborg-like existence. Or, as Tyler Cowan at MR summarizes, "In other words, we will reverse engineer the human brain and turn people into computer uploads, all within the next century."

Oh, I don't know. The theme of The Age of Spiritual Machines was along the same lines, the mixing of the mechanical and the biological, but given how flaky and unreliable computer hardware and software and--and contunue to be after at least 25 years--I am not especially enthused about the idea. I am reminded of the movie Artificial Intelligence; my favorite bit was when the robot kid, who spends hundreds of years in sleep mode at the bottom of a frozen lake, was revived and then proceeded to work flawlessly--meanwhile, the temperature in my office drops below 50 and my computer's hard drive goes nuts. (I mentioned this to someone and they said, "Well technology will get better in the future." Will it? Are computers and software these days any more reliable than they were 25 years ago? Sure, they're far more powerful, but I find them just as flaky as they always were. On the Mac, we "lived with the bomb" for over a decade, but now that has become "kernel panic." Ah, progress! And don't even get me started on Windows.)

If we are destined for a biomechanoid future, my suspicion is that it will be more Six Million Dollar Man-like (although I suspect we'll have to adjust for inflation), as computerized/mechanized limbs and organs are used to replace damaged ones. But the brain--dunno. Especially if Microsoft were involved, I think it would be tempting to categorize a software-enabled human brain as a mental disorder.

But then, maybe I should read Kurzweil's book first....

The book's Web site is to be found here.