[From PopTech]: Kurzweil is an excellent speaker. Wicked smart. Primarily he made the case that the rate of innovation, and the rate of “paradigm shifts” (in quotes because he doesn’t mean the term in Kuhn’s sense) is increasing. Then he paints a picture of life in ten and twenty years: By 2010, computers will disappear will write directly to the retina and we’ll be able to dip into virtual reality whenever we want. By 2029, we will have reversed engineered the human brain, and nanobots will do the red pill thing of putting our brain fully into the virtual world. And, of course, we will have computers large enough to hold an entire set of data about a brain. The brain is hardware, and by 2029, says Kurzweil, we’ll have deciphered the brain’s software.

I got to ask him my question from the audience. I said last summer I stood in a wheatfield that 100M stalks of wheat. If we take left-leaning is on and right-leaning as off, for 5 minutes, that wheatfield completely represented Casear’s brain state when he was stabbed. So, I asked, it seems to me that hw-sw is entirely the wrong paradigm for the brain, intelligence, consciousness. (Unfortunately, I chose not to draw the explicit connection, in order to save time, and thus sounded like a lunatic.) So, I asked Kurzweil, how confident he is that by 2029 – given the rate of p aradigm change he pointed to – the sw-hw paradigm of the brain will still be in effect.

Kurzweil replied by distinguishing intelligence and consciousness. Whether machines will be conscious is a philosophical question that he stays away from. [Well, not in The Age of Spiritual Machines.] But, he said, he’ll make a political prediction: we will take computers as conscious, “because if we don’t, they’ll get mad at us.” Plus, he said, our consciousness will be augmented by computers so the line will be fuzzier.v

I remain convinced that the brain is no more hardware and software than the liver is. The issue is that software is symbolic. The eight light switches in my house have on and off states, but they only become a byte of information if I choose to take them that way. And the specific number the byte represents depends on my deciding to read from the top floor down, bottom up, east to west or west to east. A computer that mirrors the brain state only does so because we have supplied symbolic meaning to it. It thus is a picture of a brain but is not a thinking machine. That’s what I think, anyway

Killer soundbyte from Kurzweil: The genomic information about the brain is 12 million bytes of compressed data, “smaller than Microsoft Word.”

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