Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change

Re:Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change by Houshalter on Monday January 13, 2014 @01:27PM (#7052358)

These are not mutually exclusive goals. A singularity would fix scarcity as well.

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Re:Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change by michaelochurch on Monday January 13, 2014 @02:05PM (#7052591)

These are not mutually exclusive goals. A singularity would fix scarcity as well.

Could, not would.

My point is that if it doesn't, it's not worth having. There are dystopian but plausible future scenarios in which (some or all) people live forever but scarcity still exists. My point is that those are extremely undesirable. Life under scarcity is only tolerable because it ends, and because the embittering, emotional irritation of economic scarcity is minuscule in comparison to the much greater natural scarcity of time imposed by nature (memento mori).

If we had eternal life, or (more relevantly) the billion-year lifespans possible were we to solve aging and accidents, would the sorts of people who hold power and (left unchecked) enslave the world, do so? Or would they, recognizing their (near-)infinitude of time, lighten up and hold back a bit? The big unknown is human nature, and that I could fill pages on that, only to conclude: I don't know.

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Re:Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change by kamaal on Monday January 13, 2014 @10:33PM (#7055203)

According to Singularity guys, some point of time in the future one could download his whole brain as-is as a file. Then if you are old enough, they could just kill your body. Upload your file to a super computer hosting many such files. Or a VM running on a super computer. Each file gets it own VM.

Inside that VM they can possibly simulate a paradise. Since its happening inside a computer. Resources are hardly a problem. They can retain the best parts about us. They kill all negative traits inside humans(disease, boredom, violence etc etc) and just let the VM run as long as it possibly can.

The point is Ray Kurzweil thinks, we would no longer need a biological body to stay alive.

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Re:Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change by krapp on Saturday January 18, 2014 @10:11AM (#7081140)

But... the servers, while not biological, are still physical constructs requiring energy and maintenance which are, themselves, subject to entropy and eventual breakdown or simply being shut off. You're just trading bio-rot for bit-rot but it's essentially the same thing.

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Re:Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change by eli_gottlieb on Saturday January 18, 2014 @09:59AM (#7081113)

Now I feel as if there ought to be some scifi novel about a war among emulated people over whether their server should use fairness-focused scheduling algorithms or a capitalistic lottery scheduler.

This would be amusing for all the other nine OS nerds in the world who get the joke.

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