Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Scientific 
American
(May 1999): 41–47; Stephen Hawking, 
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
(New York: Bantam, 1988). 
18.
Joel Smoller and Blake Temple, "Shock-Wave Cosmology Inside a Black Hole," 
Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences
100.20 (September 30, 2003): 11216–18. 

---

19.
Vernor Vinge, "First Word," 
Omni
(January 1983): 10. 
20.
Ray Kurzweil, 
The Age of Intelligent Machines
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 
21.
Hans Moravec, 
Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1988). 
22.
Vernor Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," VISION-21 
Symposium, sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 1993. 
The text is available at http://www.KurzweiW.net/vingesing. 
23.
Ray Kurzweil, 
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(New York: 
Viking, 1999). 
24.
Hans Moravec, 
Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 
25.
Damien Broderick, two works: 
The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future
(Sydney, Australia: 
Reed Books, 1997) and 
The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing 
Technologies
, rev. ed. (New York: Tor/Forge, 2001). 
26.
One of John Smart's overviews, "What Is the Singularity," can be found at 
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0133.html; for a collection of John Smart's 
writings on technology acceleration, the Singularity, and related issues, see http://www.singularitywatch.com 
and http://www.Accelerating.org. 
John Smart runs the "Accelerating Change" conference, which covers issues related to "artificial 
intelligence and intelligence amplification." See http://www.accelerating.org/ac2005/index.html. 
27.
An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system would run much faster than our biological 
brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of one hundred trillion 
interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the reset time of the connections is 
extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics. 
28.
See notes 20 and 21 in chapter 2. 
29.
See the appendix, "The Law of Accelerating Returns Revisited," for a mathematical analysis of the exponential 
growth of information technology as it applies to the price-performance of computation. 
30.
In a 1950 paper published in 
Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy
, the computer 
theoretician Alan Turing posed the famous questions "Can a machine think? If a computer could think, how 
could we tell?" The answer to the second question is the Turing test. As the test is currently defined, an expert 
committee interrogates a remote correspondent on a wide range of topics such as love, current events, 
mathematics, philosophy, and the correspondent's personal history to determine whether the correspondent is a 
computer or a human. The Turing test is intended as a measure of human intelligence; failure to pass the test 
does not imply a lack of intelligence. Turing's original article can be found .at 
http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm; see also the 
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test, for a discussion of the test. 
There is no set of tricks or algorithms that would allow a machine to pass a properly designed Turing test 
without actually possessing intelligence at a fully human level. Also see Ray Kurzweil, "A Wager on the 
Turing Test: Why I Think I Will Win," http://www.KurzweilAI.net/turingwin. 
31.
See John H. Byrne, "Propagation of the Action Potential,"