Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/5203
38 winter 2009 Ray's writing career rivals his inventions and entrepreneurship. His seminal book, The Singularity is Near, presents the Singularity as an overall exponential (doubling) growth trend in technological development, "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." With his upcoming films, Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near: A True Story about the Future, he is becoming an actor, screenplay writer, and director as well. Sponsored by the Singularity Institute, the first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford university in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of technological progress. Founded by Ray, Tyler Emerson, and Peter Thiel, it is a venue for leading thinkers to explore the idea of the Singularity — whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic. Ray also founded Singularity university in 2009 with funding from Google and NASA Ames Research Center. Singularity university offers intensive 10-week, 10-day, or 3-day programs examining sets of technologies and disciplines including future studies and forecasting; biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing; and finance and entrepreneurship. Ray headlined the recent Singularity Summit 2009 in New York City with talks on "The ubiquity and Predictability of the Exponential Growth of Information Technology" and "Critics of the Singularity." He was able to take a little time out after the Summit for two separate interview sessions with h+ Editor-in-Chief R.u. Sirius and Surfdaddy Orca on a variety of topics including consciousness and quantum computing, purposeful complexity, reverse engineering the brain, AI and AGI, GNR technologies and global warming, utopianism and happiness, his upcoming movies, and science fiction. Consciousness, Quantum Computing, & Complexity Ray KURZWeIl: One area I commented on was the question of a possible link between quantum computing and the brain. Do we need quantum computing to create human level AI? My conclusion is no, mainly because we don't see any quantum computing in the brain. Roger Penrose's conjecture that there was quantum computing in tubules does not seem to have been verified by any experimental evidence. Quantum computing is a specialized form of computing where you examine in parallel every possible combination of qubits. So it's very good at certain kinds of problems, the classical one being cracking encryption codes by factoring large numbers. But the types of problems that would be vastly accelerated by quantum computing are not things that the human brain is very good at. When it comes to the kinds of problems I just mentioned, the human brain isn't even as good as classical computing. So in terms of what we can do with our brains' there's no indication that it involves quantum computing. Do we need quantum computing for consciousness? The only justification for that conjecture from Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff is that consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so there must be a link between the two. I get very excited about discussions about the true nature of consciousness, because I've been thinking about this issue for literally 50 years, going back to junior high school. And it's a very difficult subject. When some article purports to present the neurological basis of consciousness... I read it. And the articles usually start out, "Well, we think that consciousness is caused by..." You know, fill in the blank. And then it goes on with a big extensive examination of that phenomenon. And at the end of the article, I inevitably find myself thinking... where is the link to consciousness? Where is any justification for believing that this phenomenon should cause consciousness? Why would it cause consciousness? In his presentation, Hameroff said consciousness comes from gamma coherence, basically a certain synchrony between neurons that create gamma waves that are in a certain frequency, something like around 10 cycles per second. And the evidence is, indeed, that gamma coherence goes away with anesthesia. Anesthesia is an interesting laboratory for consciousness because it extinguishes consciousness. However, there's a lot of other things that anesthesia also does away with. Most of the activity of the neocortex stops with anesthesia, but there's a little bit going on still in the neocortex. It brings up an interesting issue. How do we even know that we're not conscious under anesthesia? We don't remember anything, but memory is not the same thing as consciousness. Consciousness seems to be an