The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil is an exceptional human being.  I've been following him for a lot of years.  He is the person behind a number of important, computer related innovations.

Optical character recognition allows books to be translated into spoken words - a great gift to the blind.  The Kurzweil synthesizer took computer generated music to a new level, accurately replicating the sound created by traditional music instruments.

In 1998, Kurzweil wrote a book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he predicted inexpensive personal computers would have access to all the information in the Library of Congress by 2020. By mid-century, Kurzweil thinks that humans will be hardwired to their computers, and by the end of  the 21st century, neural mapping of the brain will allow humans to occupy a machine entity, effectively making immortality possible, as least for a privileged few.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil followed up  with The Singularity is Near. 

In this latest book, Kurzweil predicts that humans will be walking around, permanently attached to their computers, and those individual computers will be connected to each other, creating in effect a remarkable singularity.  In nature, ants and bees already appear to be linked that way.  In Star Trek, the Borg assimilate all that come their way, turning individuals into a collective of emotionless, hyper-efficient drones. 

I find Kurzweil's prognostications more fascinating than compelling, though I respect him immensely for his amazing technical innovations and his remarkable vision of the future.

The place I can't get past in Kurzweil's vision is his idea of turning an individual personality with all its quirks, memories, prejudices, etc, into a neural-mapped facsimile that can be trans-placed into a machine.  If that is truly possible, the question becomes, who is me?  Am I, as a human individual, my body, my physical essence, or am I more like a swirl of personality that exists separate from my body? Kurzweil seems to be saying the latter. 

 Conscioussness, aka self-awareness,  is the great mystery of life.  It's the nut the greatest neuro-biologists have not come close to cracking.  It's seems to be an unknowable; perhaps the ultimate elusive, unknowable.  Consciousness is the grand chasm Kurzweil glosses over.  In order for his vision to become fact, the mystery of consciousness will have to be bridged. I don't think it will happen.  I don't believe future generations of humans need be concerned about the Borg coming along, announcing, 'Resistence is futile.' 

No one on Earth seems to have a clue about what consciousness is.  As long as that is so, immortality will be an idea that will never come.

If I had my way, I would issue a mandate to Ray Kurzweil and smart people like him. I would tell them to turn their focus to the very real challenges we urgently must deal with right now - at this moment.  I'm talking about human overpopulation, global climate change, the need to transition away from fossil forms of energy, the planet's rapidly dwindling natural resources, the terrible, irreplaceable loss of biodiversity.  We need brilliant human individuals like Ray Kurzweil to focus on and find solutions to those challenges.  If we can get past those vexing issues, then we can calmly and thoughtfully take up the question of neural mapping and immortality.