News items of possible interest to fans of Rapture For The Geeks:
- IBM Blue Brain’s Henry Markram at TED on Building An Artificial Brain (video);
- Artificial Brain ’10 years Away’ – A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, so says Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
- Ray Kurzweil Speaks at Google, July 1, 2009;
- Scientists Worry That Machines May Outsmart Man – Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture, by John Markoff in the New York Times.
- Unix Turns 40 – Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS, by Gary Anthes in ComputerWorld;
- The Coming Superbrain – Computers keep getting smarter while we just stay the same, John Markoff in the Sunday New York Times, 24 May 2009;
- Robot Warriors Will Get Ethics Guidelines – When and what to fire will be part of hardware and software ‘package’;
- Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip – A chip developed by European scientists simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain.
- I Robot? – A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm.
- Deep Blue Does Jeopardy! – For nearly two years, IBM scientists have been working on a highly advanced Question Answering (QA) system, codenamed “Watson.” The scientists believe that the computing system will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show.
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@Chris
She might like this story:
http://www.richarddooling.com/index.php/2006/02/11/diary-of-an-immortal-man/
This is basically what happens to the protagonist. It’s a bit of a spoof, though, but an educational one, I hope.
I’ve been a professional software developer for about 15 years. I’m in the middle of reading your “Rapture for the Geeks” and found that you hit on a subject that has been of much interest to me lately. It’s been something that I’ve pondered in the back of my mind often. That is the concept of our “conscience” living forever.
I’d mentioned this concept to my wife before and she doesn’t seem to comprehend what I’m trying to say. In a nutshell, the idea that the human mind could eventually be downloaded and then placed on a hard drive and run by a computer processor is something that is beyond fascinating. It is in fact, IMO, inevitable. When this is done, the “copy” of the mind can, in effect, live forever. The question I still ponder however is will the “copy” understand that it is a copy? The “original” mind still has to accept that it will in fact die eventually. Therefore, we aren’t really living forever, we’re simply creating a copy that can live forever.
I believe this would be of interest to “Rapture For The Geeks” readers:
http://igoogleit.shackspace.com/