I once spent a few days with the late dolphinologist John C. Lilly, M.D. Talking about advanced intelligence in other species. I asked him, "How can you say that dolphins are more intelligent than we are? Isn’t knowledge tautological? How can we know more than we do know? Who would know it, except us?" 

We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence 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.

Introduction

Ray Kurzweil posits that we will soon be facing a similar question through the merger of human and machine intelligence. "One response is not to want to be enhanced," he says, "not to have nanobots. A lot of people say that they just want to stay a biological person. But what will the Singularity look like to people who want to remain biological? The answer is that they really won't notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants....there's a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won't actually notice."

Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur, has been pushing the technological envelope for years in his field of pattern recognition. Among his many accomplishments, he developed the technology behind the flatbed scanner, and he is a leading expert in speech recognition. In his radical view of the future the operant word is....exponential. For example, "One application of sending billions of nanobots into the brain is full-immersion virtual reality. If you want to be in real reality, the nanobots sit there and do nothing, but if you want to go into virtual reality, the nanobots shut down the signals coming from my real senses, replace them with the signals I would be receiving if I were in the virtual environment, and then my brain feels as if it's in the virtual environment. And you can go there yourself — or, more interestingly you can go there with other people — and you can have everything from sexual and sensual encounters to business negotiations, in full-immersion virtual reality environments that incorporate all of the senses."

— JB

RAY KURZWEIL was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition. He has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders.

Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received ten honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, and The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil 's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: John McCarthy, Forrest Sawyer respond to Ray Kurzweil; Kurzweil answers McCarthy

Danny Hillis, physicist and computer scientist, brings together, in full circle, many of the ideas circulating among third culture thinkers: Marvin Minsky's society of mind; Christopher G. Langton's artificial life; Richard Dawkins' gene's-eye view; the plectics practiced at Santa Fe. Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively parallel computer. He began in physics and then went into computer science — where he revolutionized the field — and he brought his algorithms to bear on the study of evolution. He sees the autocatalytic effect of fast computers, which lets us design better and faster computers faster, as analogous to the evolution of intelligence. At MIT in the late seventies, Hillis built his "connection machine," a computer that makes use of integrated circuits and, in its parallel operations, closely reflects the workings of the human mind. In 1983, he spun off a computer company called Thinking Machines, which set out to build the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture.

The massively parallel computational model is critical to an understanding of today's revolution in human communication. Hillis's computers, which are fast enough to simulate the process of evolution itself, have shown that programs of random instructions can, by competing, produce new generations of programs — an approach that may well lead to the first machine that truly "thinks." Hillis's work demonstrates that when systems are not engineered but instead allowed to evolve — to build themselves — then the resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simple entities working together produce some complex thing that transcends them; the implications for biology, engineering, and physics are enormous.

Burda has the discipline of Germany but he also has certain qualities that Powerful Germany may not have respected in the past. He is stirring the pot, bringing people together, searching for new ideas, making things happen. When he meets talented people he brings them into his network, combines them into his mix. This is his discipline. This is his power. In addition to new people, he attracts new ideas, brings fruitful chaos to a world of certainty, shakes things up, and makes a mess out of the old order, the old way of thinking. Science (and the technology that follows) does not have to be beautiful or pure. Things do not need to be symmetrical or deducible from first principles. That esthetic, a great motivating force in science since Plato, is over. The sciences of complexity, which are the hallmark of the third culture, can be very messy. Out of chaos comes creativity. Hubert Burda is Germany's agent of change.

HUBERT BURDA is Chairman of the Board of Hubert Burda Media Holding. Under his leadership Burda Publishing, which was consolidated into Hubert Burda Media Holding in 1995, has grown into one of the most powerful and innovative media enterprises in Germany. With 4,400 employees, annual revenue in excess of DM 2.07 billion for 1998, the group's main areas are in publishing, printing and new media. The company is divided into 26 independent profit centers and has close to 30 different publications. Burda's strategy has been to develop international alliances with publishing companies including Hachette (Paris), RCS Rizzoli (Milano) and Dogan (Turkey). His work is best known through the publication of such titles as Focus, Bunte, Elle, Freundin, Das Haus and Freizeit Revue.

In the middle of the nineties, Burda developed his vision of interactive electronic media.Today, Hubert Burda Media is the biggest provider of German language Internet content, which includes the #1 and #2 Web sites in the German language: Focus Online and Haus & Garten, as well as the business-to-business service Health Online Service for medical practitioners. Recent Burda initiatives include a number of innovative, wholly owned Internet startups including TalkingWeb, Interactive Content Production (ICP) and Cyberlab, as well as investments in Heimwerker.de, OnVista, JustBooks and Ciao.

Hubert Burda's Edge Bio Page

[Simultaneously published in German by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — Frank Schirrmacher, Publisher.]

Introduction
By John Brockman

On May 23rd, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published Frank Schirrmacher's manifesto "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech", in which he calls for Europe to adopt the ideas of the third culture. "Europe," he writes, "should be more than just a source for the software of ego crisis, loss of identity, despair, and Western melancholy. We should be helping write the code for tomorrow."

Schirrmacher is a publisher of the newspaper, and his manifesto, a call to arms, is the beginning of a effort byFAZ to publish articles by and about third culture thinkers and their work. His goal: to change the culture of the newspaper and to begin a process of change in Germany and Europe.

Schirrmacher's program, a departure for FAZ, has been covered in the German press and has caused a stir in German intellectual circles. FAZ has played an important role in shaping German culture, and that has meant, until now, culture with a capital "C".

In a few short weeks since publication of his manifesto, Schirrmacher has brought the ideas of Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, V.S. Ramachandran, Patrick Bateson, James Watson, Craig Venter, among other notable thinkers to the forefront of public discussion in Germany, while also initiating a collaboration between FAZ and Edge, the first product of which was the recent simultaneous publication in English and German of David Gelernter's manifesto, "The Second Coming."

—JB

FRANK SCHIRRMACHER became head of the arts and science department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most influential German newspapers . He has been one of the publishers of FAZ since 1994.

Frank Schirrmacher's Edge Bio Page

REALITY CLUB:  George Dyson, Stewart Brand, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Dave Myers, Clifford Pickover, Kai Krause, Jason McCabe Calacanis, Charles Simonyi, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, J.C. Herz, Lee Smolin.