INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM
201
Jacob Weisberg:
I want to thank Ray Kurzweil for that stimulating, in fact
I would say mind-boggling, talk. That was, as we say at Microsoft, "cool."
And with that, I'm going to turn things over to Edward Rothstein, who
will give the first response. Afterwards, we will open it up for questions.
Edward Rothstein :
Before responding to specific ideas Ray has outlined,
I want to survey the cultural history of which Ray's predictions are a
part. In reading Ray's book I was reminded of a story I read as a child.
I think it was by Isaac Asimov.
It
was about a computer, maybe in the
fortieth century, that had developed an extraordinarily sophisticated
intelligence. Over the centuries it continued to evolve, teaching itself
about the universe, until it became a sort of world intelligence. So much
knowledge was absorbed by the machine, and so much was understood
by the machine, that it could hardly be thought of as a machine.
After tens of millions of years, it became clear that one of the press–
ing issues facing the human species (or the species that humanity had
evolved into) was what to do about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
That law declares that entropy in the universe is increasing and that
order is decreasing; it confidently asserts that ultimately everything will
dissolve into chaos. And in this story, that ultimate moment is fast
approaching. Sensing the crisis, the computer devotes
90
percent of its
energy to trying to address this issue, until, finally, it seems as if the
worst is about to take place. Humanity has disappeared. The universe is
on the brink of total chaos.
At that point, having absorbed millions and millions of years of infor–
mation until it understood everything about the cosmos, the computer
finds a solution. It looks around at the darkness and chaos and it says:
"Let there be light."
Now Ray's predictions about the evolution of the machine stop a
little bit short of this idea, but I would be surprised if he found this an
implausible scenario a few million years hence. In foreseeing the next
century, of course, he is far more modest. But the changes he predicts
are still quite radical and affect our ideas about what we consider to be
human. I want to put aside for now the question about how realistic or
probable or possible these predictions are, and instead consider the
long tradition of technological prediction in which Ray participates.
Ray points out in his book that almost all prophesies about technol–
ogy have been wrong in the past. While Jules Verne was right about
moon travel-he even imagined the automobile, the electric light, and
the fax machine-otherwise almost nothing has been predicted accu–
rately. Even inventors have gotten their inventions wrong: Edison
