I don’t really have the time to read this closely right now, but there’s a cool interview with Ray Kurzweil on the ACM Ubiquity web site. He’s talking about his book The Singularity is Near. Here’s a quote from the interview:
There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity — the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We’ll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We’ll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we’re gathering about the brain every year. We’re showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations. There’s also two dozen regions of the brain, that we have modeled and simulated, including the cerebellum — which is where we do our skill formation and which compromises more than half the neurons in the brain. There’s an effective simulation of that.
And let the stories of humans being enslaved by machines begin….