Kurzweil's Schedule

Raymond Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In his estimate, current exponential growth of computing will continue until human-level intelligence is achieved around 2029. Merging with artificial intelligence will then follow, sometime in the 2030s as humans will be "a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking," wherein we connect our brains to the cloud to harness massive computational power. Beyond that? "As you get to the late 2030s or the 2040s, our thinking will be predominately nonbiological. The nonbiological part will ultimately be intelligent and have such vast capacity it'll be able to model, simulate, and understand fully the biological part. We will be able to fully backup our brains."

Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have a fundamental disagreement. Kurzweil thinks Artificial Intelligence is a faster, better computer. Musk thinks it is a nuclear weapon.

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The Brain

Singularity is NOT near! Stop complaining about overpopulation. Why try to mimic brains when there are so many brains out there, undernourished, underutilized?

Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses. An iPhone 6’s A8 chip has 2 billion transistors. (Though, let’s be clear, a transistor is not anywhere near the complexity of a single synapse in the brain.) .... The highest bandwidth neural interface ever placed into a human brain, on the other hand, had just 256 electrodes. Most don’t even have that. ..... The second barrier to brain interfaces is that getting even 256 channels in generally requires invasive brain surgery, with its costs, healing time, and the very real risk that something will go wrong. .............. the former editor of the journal Neuron has pointed out that carbon nanotubes are so slender that a bundle of a million of them could be inserted into the blood stream and steered into the brain, giving us a nearly 10,000-fold increase in neural bandwidth, without any brain surgery at all.

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Brain Mapping

Medial view of a halved human brain, labeled in latin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The brain is the true Final Frontier, the most unknown part of the universe. But this still ain't it.

Brain Mapping

At the start of the 20th century, a German neuroanatomist named Korbinian Brodmann parceled the human cortex into nearly 50 different areas by looking at the structure and organization of sections of brain under a microscope. “That has been pretty much the reference framework that we’ve used for 100 years,” Evans says. Now he and his coworkers are redoing ­Brodmann’s work as they map the borders between brain regions. The result may show something more like 100 to 200 distinct areas, providing scientists with a far more accurate road map for studying the brain’s different functions.

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A Little Bit Of Untidyness, A Little Bit Of Randomness, A Little Bit Of Chaos

Things Organized Neatly

Unless my workspace is a little bit untidy, my creative juices don't flow. I need a little bit of untidyness, or maybe even a lot. I could not say I am going to work out at seven in the morning every morning. That would be too much order. I need my days to be a little more random than that. Freehand exercise speaks to
Image via Wikipedia me like that. The chances of randomness are even greater. I rebel against the routine.

I am a late to bed, late to rise kind of person. It was such relief to learn - a long time ago - that that is a body clock thing. Otherwise wisdom was that the good people wake up early.