The Age of Spiritual Machines

The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.

Yes, well, the subjective experience is the opposite of the objective reality

Technology is the continuation of evolution by other means,

Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light.

continued exponential growth of technology in the first two decades of the twentieth century matched that of the entire nineteenth century.

This established a pattern that would repeat itself throughout human history, in that the technologically more advanced group ends up becoming dominant.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of technology

heritage. Their DNA is 98.6 percent the same as the lowland gorilla, and 97.8 percent the same as the orangutan.12 The story of evolution since that time now focuses in on a human-sponsored variant of evolution: technology.

The further backward you look, the further forward you can see. —Winston Churchill

The twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future. Do we have the psychological capacity for all the good things that await us? Probably not.

The state of the art in computer technology is anything but static.

Furthermore, neurons are extremely slow; electronic circuits are at least a million times faster. Once a computer achieves a human level of ability in understanding abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and other attributes of human intelligence, it will be able to apply this ability to a knowledge base of all human-acquired—and machine-acquired—knowledge.

Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

The early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists that he inspired are often thought to have their roots in the philosophical investigations of René Descartes.9 Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” has often been cited as emblematic of Western rationalism. This view interprets Descartes to mean “I think, that is, I can manipulate logic and symbols, therefore I am worthwhile.” But in my view, Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from nonmind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming. Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition?