{"id":6912,"date":"2016-04-23T11:03:16","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T17:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6912"},"modified":"2016-04-24T12:10:35","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T18:10:35","slug":"amy-adams-needs-to-copyright-her-body-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6912","title":{"rendered":"Gigantic, a big big brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"starlust\"<\/a>Ten years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn’t stop talking<\/a>\u00a0about their excitement at the prospect of extending or replacing the human brain with computers. For the last several years, they’ve been much quieter about their mind-disruption project. I sense that a soldier\u00a0in Google’s flack army warned\u00a0them that in voicing their fantasies they risked\u00a0weirding people out. Renovating the species is a job best done on the sly.<\/p>\n

Still, we’ll\u00a0always have Ray Kurzweil. (I mean that literally.) When, in 2012, Google hired the inventor and immortalist as a director of engineering, it also gained a new mouthpiece for its boldest ambitions. Playboy<\/em> has just\u00a0published a wide-ranging interview<\/a> with Kurzweil in which he discusses everything from his hobbies (“I like to take naps”) to his anxieties (“unstructured social situations make me nervous”).\u00a0The big thrust, though, is the imminent upgrading of homo sapiens:<\/p>\n

By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud. So we\u2019ll have an additional neocortex, just like we developed an additional neocortex 2 million years ago, and we\u2019ll use it just as we used the frontal cortex: to add additional levels of abstraction. We\u2019ll create more profound forms of communication than we\u2019re familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes. We\u2019ll be funnier. We\u2019ll be sexier. We\u2019ll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He brings the discussion\u00a0down to earth with an example:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say I\u2019m walking along and I see my boss at Google, Larry Page, approaching. I have three seconds to come up with something clever to say, and the 300 million modules in my neocortex won\u2019t cut it. I need a billion modules for two seconds. I\u2019ll be able to access that in the cloud just as we can access additional computation in the cloud for our mobile phones, and I\u2019ll be able to say exactly the right thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think there’s a flaw in Kurzweil’s\u00a0logic here. He fails to anticipate the inevitable\u00a0arm’s race in cleverness.\u00a0Larry Page\u00a0is going to be plugged into that enormous\u00a0cloud neocortex, too, so surely Page’s\u00a0standards for what qualifies as a clever\u00a0remark\u00a0will have gone\u00a0up exponentially. Even with his new brain, Kurzweil\u00a0will still be in exactly the same boat, floundering to muster\u00a0the wit necessary to impress\u00a0the boss. Funny and sexy are relative terms.<\/p>\n

As to the expression\u00a0of loving sentiments, the interview goes deep into Kurzweil’s\u00a0views on the future of copulation, which would appear to be indistinguishable from the future of onanism. I’ll spare you the details, but when the interviewer, David Hochman, asks Kurzweil\u00a0whether there’s “anyone whose body you would like to inhabit” in order to have sex in\u00a0virtual reality, Kurzweil\u00a0replies, “Probably some attractive woman. If I had to pick one? Amy Adams. I like the perky way she uses her body.”<\/p>\n

Time for\u00a0a nap, Ray.<\/p>\n

Image: Ramona.Forcella<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn’t stop talking\u00a0about their excitement at the prospect of extending or replacing the human brain with computers. For the last several years, they’ve been much quieter about their mind-disruption project. I sense that a soldier\u00a0in Google’s flack army warned\u00a0them that in voicing their fantasies they risked\u00a0weirding people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6912"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6937,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6912\/revisions\/6937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}