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advanced civilization in many respects than Europe. But once the Western
concept of a scientific law emerged-a law that held true not just in par–
ticular instances but in all cases at any place-something must have
changed in how we thought about what we knew and what we didn't
know. The scientific project was an attempt to expand and explore this
notion of law. This led to a progressive way of thinking about knowledge.
Jacob Weisberg :
Ray, would you like to respond to Gunther Stent?
Ray Kurzweil:
I appreciate your comments, Gunther. I'm glad we had an
opportunity to interact; I think you have made some good points. Let me
respond to a few of them. First, the Second Law: I'd certainly agree with
you that the Second Law is not terribly relevant to the century we have
ahead of us. There's more than enough chaos in the world already to see
us through it. But there is a difference between closed evolution and open
evolution: when we simulate evolution in the computer, we have a very
closed system and we provide it with a certain opportunity for chaotic
behavior, but it's limited by the simulation that we've set up, the para–
meters we have, the size of the computer, the amount of data, and so on.
These systems will follow an exponential curve: the evolutionary process
accelerates, then levels off because there's only a certain amount of chaos
that we've provided in this little simulation. It's sufficient to do a very
good job on some tasks-like making predictions of the stock market–
not perfectly, but enough
to
actually make money. But it is limited by the
amount of chaos in that system. The evolutionary process we see on
earth, which started with the evolution of life forms and has now been
supplemented by an evolutionary process guided and graded out of the
brains of a technology-creating species, takes place in a relatively open
environment, and at least has available to it all of the chaos in our midst
and not necessarily just on earth.
This human-machine civilization will extend beyond the earth. It will
be open to the universe and take advantage of all the chaos available
to
it, all of the entropy.
If
you want to talk about the ultimate destiny of
this evolutionary process, then I think the Second Law of Thermo–
dynamics is relevant, but I would agree with you that it's not relevant to
the predictions over the next decades or even the next century. Your
point on the Industrial Revolution is a good one because it was around
that time that change occurred frequently enough to occur in the midst
of, and affect, people's lives.
A thousand years ago, change was much faster than it had been five
thousand years before, but paradigm shifts were far greater than a
