Learn From It

Ray Kurzweil is a very interesting man. He's one of those scientists who is also incredibly accomplished; the intellectual rubber hits the practical road. Essence shapes Accident.

Some may look at his books as the pie-in-the-sky-ish or over the top, or cartoonish, but they miss the point: there's always value in blue-skying. And even more value in faith. Yes, faith. Not Faith like I'm sure the literalists will insist you accept, but the kind of faith that's based on prior accomplishments. The kind of faith that tells you the road will continue past where you can see, or the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the process of learning increases the rate at which you can learn. In other words, faith is the entropy, the free energy from which we humans can direct our own destinies.

A synopsis of Ray's new book, from one of his websites:

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

Tall order. But that's the beauty of exponential growth. I'm sure you've heard of the term, “exponential growth”. Most people, I think, have. But there's a difference in understanding it and really feeling it—that is, getting it on a visceral level.

Humans tend to think in linear ways. Velocity is an easier concept than acceleration. We know a thing. We can know things about that thing. But beyond that, we start to lose our own traction: consider what you might know about the things about the things about a thing? Meta-meta-meta. Meh-meh-meh. M-E-H-meh.

And see? I've introduced a new concept, gone and switched gears on you. I'm now talking about metadata. What does that have to do with exponential curves? Well, I'll leave that to you to think about (and after? try thinking about how you thought about it. And then, in having thought about how you thought about it, will understanding how you went about understanding help you understand more quickly in the future?).

Anyhoo. The Singularity is Near is the book I'm reading now. Kurzweil has some crazy-ass ideas, ones that fuck with my sense of the relationship between matter and energy and information. It makes me think of protein folding and IC fabrication and how some cafes will stack glasses or mugs between plastic trays. It makes me think of sub-atomic goings-on and the Egyptian pyramids and genetically-engineered square watermelons and a little brain game my 4th Grade teacher did with us involving a glass jar, marbles and sand. Yeah, it's one of those kinds of books.

I don't think it's going to sit well in my noggin. In fact, I know it won't. But I have faith in my own abilities to adapt to new and even radical ways of thinking, ways of looking at the universe. It'll stew for a good long time, and I'll reconcile it eventually with things that happen on our human time- and activity-scales, even if it means acknowledging that even those scales aren't fixed, and are, in fact, accelerating, and are relative—to their own prior iteration.

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