In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:
The human ability to understand and respond appropriately to emotion (so-called emotional intelligence) is one of the forms of human intelligence that will be understood and mastered by future machine intelligence. Some of our emotional responses are tuned to optimize our intelligence in the context of our limited and frail biological bodies. Future machine intelligence will also have "bodies" (for example, virtual bodies in virtual reality, or projections in real reality using foglets) in order to interact with the world, but these nanoengineered bodies will be far more capable and durable than biological human bodies. Thus, some of the emotional responses of future machine intelligence will be redesigned to reflect their vastly enhanced physical capabilities. (ISBN 0-670-03384-7, pp. 28-29)This is important to videogames somehow. He explains that foglets are nanomachines that can alter audio and visual signal at a molecular level. This will be the kind of technology that lets you have Street Fighter IN YOUR OWN EYES AND BRAIN.
Ray Kurzweil has some really amazing ideas. He is a future predicter, an inventor (made one of the most successful lines of synthesizers and music equipment), and a writer, among other things.
I have read a bit of this book and it has been a great time. He writes in a way that explains some really far out concepts (like the implications of nanotechnology, the merging of human intelligence with machine, basically how everything will be solved with technology). He is very optimistic; I kind of see what he talks about as The Matrix, but all the good things about it. I suppose his future is very charming and bright with fresh fruits and clean water everywhere and also clean air and no health problems, also, immortality.
I'm sure one could debate his ideas and find evidence as to why the future will be crap and all that, but since the future is still up in the air, I'd like to be optimistic about it.
Thank you, Ray Kurzweil, you are truly a hero of video games.
2 comments:
I attended the keynote address that Kurzweil gave at GDC last week. You could've heard a pin drop as he spun out his vision of the future, and his demonstration of an electronic reader for the blind was just plain staggering. It didn't have much to do with video games, but nobody much minded, that's for sure. He's a fascinating man.
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
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