Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil

“A comprehensive archive of works written by Editor-in-Chief Raymond C. Kurzweil. Also, a directory of selected articles about Kurzweil or the Kurzweil companies.”

“After the Singularity: A Talk with Ray Kurzweil By Raymond Kurzweil

John Brockman, editor of Edge.org, recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity and its ramifications. According to Ray, “We are entering a new era. I call it ‘the Singularity.’ It’s a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It’s the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it’s actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there’s no indication that it’s occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that–to think human beings are fine the way they are–is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it’s the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that’s what we’re talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology.” (Added March 27th 2002)”

Plenty more there along those lines…

The Singularity – interesting – originates with Vinge and links cyber c with the romantics?

CyberPsychology

CyberPsychology

“This page has links to a number of papers by Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold, of the Department of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, about identity and Web pages.
We’ve also included links to a number of other sites that we’ve found useful and interesting.
We’re keen to make contact with other people who are interested in this area, so feel free to email Hugh or Jill, especially if you’re thinking of linking to this page or to any of our papers: we’d probably like to see your site.
Jill has a questionnaire (and an opportunity to contact her for an interview) about identity and personal home pages.”

This is a site worth having as it identifies something very vital – web pages and identity. Virtual life does not require the paraphernalia of The Matrix, just the Net as we know it.

Later: Friday, 6 June, 2008

The link is now behind a password, but here are some related ones:

Jill Arnold

Article

11306305

Matthew Broersma doing an Eric Raymond interview.

Centralization doesn’t scale

“If you want to go to a really fundamental analysis, what we’re perpetually rediscovering on a scale of complexity is that centralization doesn’t work. Centralization doesn’t scale, and when you push any human endeavor to a certain threshold of complexity you rediscover that.”

Validating Web pages

Update

Having a busy time in the Psybernet website. Been updating the pages. I am happier with all those that have the

Valid HTML 4.0!

sign on them. They validate, are up-to-date and have been spell-checked. If there are glaring errors, or even minor ones on those pages – let me know.

Ontology of Cyberspace

koepsell (link dead Tuesday, February 22, 2011 but rescued from the archives now here.). (and in Google DriveĀ 

David R. Koepsell, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2000.
Reviewed by Arthur L. Morin

Law is a system of categorization. At the ideal level, one purpose of this system is to help the social system achieve justice. Though not stated so straightforwardly, this is David R. Koepsell’s position in his book The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property.1 There is, of course, a dynamic interrelation between the legal system of categorization and the socio-cultural system(s) of categorization of which it is a part. Koepsell realizes this, or else he would not have been able to detect the disjunction between what software is and how it has been treated in the legal system. But what he does not seem to fully appreciate is that ontology does not necessarily beget justice. This is the First Problem — the distinction between ontology (what something is) and justice — and I will return to it later.