The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections

Consider how many of our thoughts and thinking are directed toward our body and its survival, security, nutrition, and image, not to mention affection, sexuality, and reproduction. Many, if not most, of the goals we attempt to advance using our brains have to do with our bodies: protecting them, providing them with fuel, making them attractive, mak... See more

The Double Exponential Growth of the Economy During the 1990s Was Not a Bubble

DNA Sequencing, Memory, Communications, the Internet, and Miniaturization

The economy “wants” to grow more than the 3.5% per year, which constitutes the current “speed limit” that the Federal Reserve bank and other policy makers have established as “safe,” meaning noninflationary. The underlying long-term growth rate will continue at a double exponential rate. Restricting the growth rate of the economy to an arbitrary li... See more

Once brain porting technology has been refined and fully developed, will this enable us to live forever? The answer depends on what we mean by living and dying. However, if we are diligent in maintaining our mind file, keeping current backups, and porting to current formats and mediums, then a form of immortality can be attained, at least for softw... See more

Let’s consider the issue of just who I am, and who the new Ray is a little more carefully. Like the water in a stream, my particles are constantly changing, but the pattern that people recognize as Ray has a reasonable level of continuity. After each procedure, I claim to be the same guy. If we talk about consciousness as just a certain type of int... See more

The Singularity Is Near

Bill and I have been frequently paired in a variety of venues as pessimist and optimist respectively. Recently a Noble Prize winning panelist dismissed Bill’s concerns, exclaiming that, “we’re not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities for a hundred years.” I pointed out that 100 years was indeed a reasonable estimate of the amount o... See more

To appreciate the nature and significance of the coming “singularity,” it is important to ponder the nature of exponential growth. By the end of the first half of the chess board, the inventor had accumulated one large field’s worth (4 billion grains), and the emperor did start to take notice. Incidentally, with regard to the doublings of computati... See more

How will we apply technology that is more intelligent than its creators? Again, the primary aspect of nanobot-based virtual reality that is not yet feasible is size and cost. You (i.e., your brain) could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you normally would, but the nanobots again intercept these interneuronal signals, suppress your ... See more