I don't fear death. And I won't fear death--unless and until there is an alternative.
A group of scientists and science popularizers are creating the expectation of an alternative to death. It's a pretty important concept, and a powerful hope to offer. The account I've read most recently is by Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near. (If you're shopping from the UK, as I do, click here.) Kurzweil, as well as many of the other popularizers of the exponential growth of knowledge, argues that... well, something is growing so fast that within the lifetimes of many of us, machine generated knowledge will sort of take over from us. I'll be talking a lot about that 'something' in future posts.
For now, let me just say that if human knowledge is not doubling quickly enough to give exponential growth rates, a lot of what these people predict kinda falls on its face. Now, I want this future to come to pass--it holds too many potential benefits to ignore or wish away. (I do wish, however, that a more manageable version of this idea was available). But it all depends on the exponential growth of human knowledge.
Now, these people (and I'll be naming who I'm talking about later) talk a lot about exponential growth in information technology, etc., and I can well believe that the price of computing and storage is dropping exponentially. In fact, I know it has from personal experience. But having free memory (stored on a free weblog server, for example) and infinitely fast access to that memory does not mean a blessed thing if I don't have useful information to store and/or access.
So what's at stake is our future--gee, that sounds somewhat dramatic. But a lot of people who read these Singularity/Immortality/SENS/etc. protagonists need to know if this is science or science fiction. I'm one of those who need to know. That's why I'm doing this. Just so you know.
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