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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (1116)	5/9/1999 10:10:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

Forbes Magazine - November 30, 1998 Ray Kurzweil's new book is a real stunner. He predicts that in the fairly near future people will be half-human, half-machine. By Daniel Lyons In four decades computers will be smarter than we are. Their software will imitate our brains so well that you won't know whether it's a person or machine you're dealing with on the phone or the Internet. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a big disappointment to many early backers, but that's because they expected too much too soon, according to Raymond Kurzweil, AI guru and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, January 1999), his third book. Kurzweil doesn't care much about expert systems such as those spawned by Edward Feigenbaum; they're useful, he says, but limited. He's more interested in finding a way to "reverse engineer" the human brain so that we can download everything about ourselves—our memories, our dreams, our personalities—into a computer, a process he calls "reinstantiation." Immortality at last. The line between machines and people will blur even further as we age and we'll be inserting machines into people to replace aging or inadequate body and mind functions. Just as artificial hips now restore human body functions, so too will neural implants enhance our hearing, vision and memory. Kurzweil, 50, is not just a dreamer. Over the past 25 years he has built and sold four companies. His first, Kurzweil Computer Products, built a reading machine for the blind and was bought by Xerox. One of its first customers was musician Stevie Wonder, whose friendship with Kurzweil led to the development of computerized music synthesizers. An upcoming project is a program for fund managers creating an artificially intelligent financial analyst that outperforms humans. "This technology is going to be huge," he says. FORBES recently met with Kurzweil in his small Waltham, Mass. office, where the walls are decorated with newspaper clips about the performances of his father, Fredric, a concert pianist, and a picture drawn by an AI-powered computer. Forbes: Is your new book science or science fiction? If anything, my views are conservative. The predictions are based on technologies you can touch and feel today. I don't think anyone who studies this stuff carefully would say these things are never going to happen. Your book gets pretty weird: People scan their brains into a computer and create self-replicas. By 2040 it will be routine. If you build a computer based on the design of the human brain and instantiate information from a human being onto that computer, it will emerge in the machine and claim to be that person. The machine will say, "I grew up in Brooklyn, I went to MIT, then I walked into a scanner and woke up here in the machine." How are you going to reproduce a human brain? We can just copy it, bit by bit, connection by connection, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. It's right there in front of us.Human neurons are not so vastly complicated that we can't understand them or replicate them. We've already replicated the input-output characteristics of clusters of hundreds of neurons. The question is: What is the feasibility of scaling up from hundreds of neurons to billions of neurons? And that's not a big deal. You say reinstantiated humans will have bodies created with nanotechnology, which will let us build devices—even fake human organs—at the atomic level? Things like nanotubes are not actually fully working yet. But it's already well under way in laboratories. Nanotechnology is a $5 billion industry. All I'm doing is looking at trends to see where we are likely to be in terms of computational capability and the sophistication of software and the dexterity of certain physical technologies, like nanotechnology. Would you reinstantiate yourself? Probably. But I may end up jealous of the new Ray in that he shares my history, my desires and my longings, but will be in a far better position than old Ray to fulfill them. These are going to be very smart entities—much smarter than humans. And that's really where power lies. Ultimately these entities will have political power. They will have all the political power. This is good news? Some people who've read the book have come away feeling depressed. They get the idea that human beings are ending, that civilization is ending. Actually we will continue, but in a much more profound way. The human race is going to evolve. We are going to become smarter by merging with our machines. A lot of folks will say, stop the world, I want to get off. It's unstoppable.It's part of the fundamental laws of the universe. This is not an alien invasion. It's emerging from within our civilization. We're already pretty intimate with our computers. As we move forward, the nexus between machines and humans will become even more intimate.

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (1116)	5/11/1999 9:23:00 PM
From: SOROS	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1151

Some of the latest findings in the Bible Codes are: 1. The words rapture and computer show up in numerous locations together. Yacov Rambsel seems convinced that the rapture will take place simultaneously with a world-wide computer event. He believes that 9/11/99 falls on the Sabbath and Rosh Hashanah, or the great GATHERING celebration, would be the 6000th anniversary. Avi Ben Mordechai also sees 9/11/99 as the beginning of the 7th millennial day. Then Zola Levitt points out (stretching, granted, but nonetheless interesting) that if we are in the year 5998, that in Hebrew, 5998 is heh, tet, tet, peh which could stand for http: These men point out that 9/9/99 is being touted as a logical day for the so-called Y2K disaster to occur (note that everyone except those labeled as crazies or at least alarmists have all but dismissed the Y2K problem as something that might cause anything more than minor disruptions -- SOROS note: man is usually confounded when he thinks he's smart). Many scholars believe that the Rapture will occur during the Feast of Trumpets, which happens to begin at sundown 9/10/99 this year. More to come. I remain, SOROS