Out of his arse

Oh so much to ramble about. Fidel Castro has announced he is to retire. One wonders whether anyone else is powerful enough to keep Cuba in its current form. I can't say I care very much.

I wanted to make a comment about about a news story I read yesterday from the BBC, but I decided to wait as I was talking about my ill fated Hong Kong flight yesterday. The headline "Machines to match man by 2029" caught my eye. It seems that Ray Kursweil has come out with a number of wild claims regarding the future of technology. Mr Kursweil is apparently, "one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering". That sentence really could do with a little punctuation if you ask me, but it's a quote so I won't mess with it.

Among other things, Mr Kursweil believes, "we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029". Not only that but, "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons". He doesn't of course define what the hell intelligence is, or back up his claims with any research findings. In fact, it's almost as if he just pulled these ideas out of his arse.

I'm slightly troubled by the whole concept of a team of "influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century". Challenges facing humanity don't really need identifying do they? I was under the impression that challenges kind of present themselves. The list of challenges identified also seems very odd to me. There are inevitably a number of politically correct environmental challenges listed, like providing energy from fusion and solar power. They also seem to think that managing the nitrogen cycle is a pressing problem, as is finding a method of carbon sequestration. These things are not something anyone should be messing around with if you ask me. The only way to manage chaos is with negative feedback. And that's already in place.

Other challenges just seem ridiculous to me; "Prevent nuclear terror" for instance. That's not a technological problem, that's a political problem. All the challenges listed are being worked on in one form or another anyway.

The most interesting challenge listed is, "Reverse engineer the brain". This of course presupposes that we don't know how the brain works, which is largely true, but it makes me wonder how Kursweil managed to reach his conclusion about brain enhancing nanobots. He seems confident that by 2029 we'll have nanobots dancing down our capillaries on their way to our brains, but then admits he hasn't got the faintest idea what they should be doing there.

Still to come this week:

My adventure on the Bullet train...



..and the foul Chinese alcohol experience...