4 Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity

Kurzweil Admits to the Dangers of AI

Just to be “balanced,” Kurzweil is playing the “fair guy,” admitting that there are dangers with these new technologies. As I wrote earlier; with his lectures, interviews, and his books, he wants to welcome us all to debate these subjects, (he must love my book, then). This is how he presents a few of the dangers with the technology he so eagerly is promoting:

G, N, and R [GNR, “Genetics Nanotechnology Robotics,” Wes’ emphasis] each have their downsides. The existential threat from genetic technologies is already here: the same technology that will soon make major strides against cancer, heart disease, and other diseases could also be employed by a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered biological virus that combines ease of transmission, deadliness, and stealthiness, that is, a long incubation period. The tools and knowledge to do this are far more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an atomic bomb, and the impact could be far worse. [singularity.com].

Elsewhere, Kurzweil tells us that his greatest fear with GNR is the risk of bioterrorists. He says he can see the danger of this technology falling into the wrong hands, but then he turns it around and “convincingly” reassures us that the positives “convincingly” outweigh the negatives. Kurzweil is not a dummy, and I don’t think he is as ignorant as he pretends to be; he must know our history and how inevitable it is that all technology that can be used for power over others is falling in the wrong hands; just look at what happened to Nikola Tesla. The Controllers promoted Thomas Edison at the expense of Tesla. They took Tesla’s inventions and used them against us in HAARP weather wars and more, resulting in Tesla dying as a poor man, while Edison got rich from his “inventions” that were most likely not even his to begin with, but that’s another story. The Administrators wanted to use energy that they could control and charge for instead of using free energy.

Other dangers brought up in the same interview that I just quoted from is self-replicating nano-technology and super-intelligent AI being unfriendly, but Kurzweil defends his passion, saying that he is presenting remedies for this in his book, which we will come to soon.

Furthermore, he states that when all the energy sources in the solar system have been used up in order to support the ever-growing needs of AI, “[t]hen we’ll expand to the rest of the Universe.” [singularity.com] Thus, the story told by the Pleiadians, how we humans in the future, as cyborgs, will reach the Pleiades and create a tyranny there, seems to be underway. The reasoning behind Kurzweil’s statement is the Kardashev Scale, which discusses a civilization’s technological development from planet-bound beings to spacefaring beings, who eventually will obtain the ability to control the energy of an entire galaxy. Kardashev postulated that all civilizations are developing around the same pattern by taming more and more energy and thus they will expand out in the Universe. He separated these different phases in a species’ development in three stages, Type I-III.

Type I is a civilization that can control the resources of an entire planet (including weather and earthquake control, but it also includes exploration of the solar system).

Type II is a civilization that can control the energy of their sun and begin to colonize other star systems.

Type III is a civilization that can control the energy of an entire galaxy.

On this scale, we are still a Civilization Type 0, but Kurzweil foresees that once we have the Singularity in place and have been able to use our collective brain power, downloaded into the SBC, we will quickly become a Type I Civilization. When this is accomplished, Human 2.0 will “ascend” to a Civilization Type II and eventually a Type III, which includes colonizing other star systems, the entire galaxy, and ultimately the rest of the Universe, which is beyond Type III (Type IV). This is, of course, possible, says Kurzweil, because after all, we’re alone in the Universe, and we will meet no resistance from other species elsewhere in cosmos. This may sound ludicrous, but the logic behind this is that if we conquer the entire Universe, despite the fact that we are alone, we can control it and its energies, and we will become God, as we shall see in the next section.

Next page: A Peek Inside Kurzweil’s Book