Interview with Charles Eisenstein

Play has been on my mind. And I just listened to this which sounds ok to me about halfway through there is a good bit on play.

From http://www.futureprimitive.org/

Joanna Harcourt Smith interviews
[Charles Eisenstein] June 27, 2009 – Interview with Charles Eisenstein
(50 minutes – 17.3mb)
Charles Eisenstein is the author of The Ascent of Humanity: The Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion, and the convergence of crises that is birthing the transition – a book about the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the evolution of the human sense of self.

Joanna Harcourt Smith interviews
[Charles Eisenstein] June 27, 2009 – Interview with Charles Eisenstein
(50 minutes – 17.3mb)

Singularity

Staring Into The Singularity

by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

The short version:
If computing power doubles every two years,
what happens when computers are doing the research?
Computing power doubles every two years.
Computing power doubles every two years of work.
Computing power doubles every two subjective years of work.
Two years after computers reach human equivalence, their power doubles again. One year later, their speed doubles again.
Six months – three months – 1.5 months … Singularity.
It’s expected in 2035. (Oops, make that 2025.)

Ok, so that is what it’s about. There is an old idea that the soul is infinite. Things can go at any damn rate they like the soul will match it. In fact these perhaps dubious scientific notions have more power as a metaphorical expression of our psyche than they do as actual events in the world. Hence we have Carl Jung writing about UFOs. If they did not exist we’d have to invent them! Singularity is like that too. Or is it?

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?