Singularity: Web² and augmented First Life

I am a big fan of Ray Kurzweil.

Too make a long story short, he is predicting that man & machine will blend together around 2030, and that is not so far away !

It’s about augmented human beings. And superhumans. And what the impact on society of all that is.

A must read from Ray is his latest (already out there for 2 years or so) book: “The singularity is near”

And have in this context also a look at the Singularity University. Not only the subject and idea of building a dedicated university for his is cool in itself (I enlisted for the 3 day program in Fall 2009, and i am anxiously waiting whether i will be accepted 😉 but have a look at who was there at their founding conference !

This is top-notch “crème de la crème” set of folks: Chris Anderson, Robert Freitas, Larry Page and a lot of other Google & NASA brains.

This is just going to happen. And it’s going to get in mainstream faster then we believe. Ray is even preparing a movie to get these thought permeated into mainstream thinking.

Talking about mainstream. I am again referring to my previous post on Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at WebExpo 2.0 earlier this month.

Free interpretation: forget about Second Life, it’s all about First Life augmented with stuff in the cloud.

In my opinion we are witnessing the singularity in some form already now in what Tim O’Reilly calls Web² (yep, you got it: not Web 2.0 but Web²): World + Web 2.0 = Web².

A human being augmented with sensors in the cloud and in the body, tapping the collective intelligence in this global brain that the web is becoming, sharing & collaborating in ways we never thought possible 5 years ago.

Or is all this too much SF to you ? Have i been reading to many Asimov ?

For the fun of it, i just remind you the 3 Asimov Laws of Robotics:

  • A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

    I would be interested to hear from you on whether you believe this will happen or not. And all the above is very much inspired by things and folks working from Silicon Valley. Any cool similar things going on in the rest of the world ?

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