What
Headache!
Exclamation points bring a thrill to un-thrilling things.
A teacher in high school asked the class what we thought of “The Mayor of Casterbridge. Someone replied that the title was boring, to which the teacher disdainfully replied “Maybe we should put an exclamation point after it.” There was much laughter from the class of students who had evidently never heard this joke. I laughed too, having never heard it, but that may have been the first time I heard a joke for the first time and knew that it was an old, old joke. Sometimes you can just tell!
Yah, this head hurts. Time for a replacement. There have been amazing advances in decapitation technologies lately and I might take advantage of these new techniques to trade in this inferior vessel.
I read today where Ray Kurzweil was talking about some of the things I’ve been saying about human consciousness becoming a digital product. He didn’t say it quite like that, but he thinks that by 2029 computers will pass the Turing Test and technologies of today will become small enough to fit inside a human blood cell. I think this sort of thinking is generally considered crackpop because humans assume progress in things is linear. Kurzweil says that technology progresses exponentially, and that the record of progress in computing devices from the 1960s to today corroborates that statement.
Kurzweil says that computers could develop what, for lack of a better term, could be called a soul or a consciouusness; but I feel like he is hesitant to go too far for fear of sounding too sci-fi. I think that technology will develop capacities to nurture and procreate self-aware network entities that do things without human instruction. I also think that the technology gap between human DNA and network environments will bridge. I can even imagine computers outsmarting humans in sophisticated ways by the time Kurzweil says computers will merely be taken seriously as organisms capable of organic thought.
Anyway, it was neat to spot a like-minded person in the computer consciousness realm.
