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Kurzweil: "Technology is a double-edged sword" is a new interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil, by Natasha Lomas at silicon.com.

Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?

The soul is a synonym for consciousness... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul - there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entities... will be convincing.

It also won't be clear - you won't be able to walk into a room and say, 'OK, humans on the left, machines on the right', because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence starts... [So] we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement...

I think he trips over words when he calls consciousness an "emergent technology" while equating it with "soul."

Nevertheless, it's easier to understand merging machine and consciousness in some form when you play around with something like Nintendo Wii. Its earliest apps are interactive games, but it need not be limited to that use. Games and the Wii Fit workout exercises promote mass adoption of a platform in which gestures can be interpreted as actions in a virtual world. All sorts of other uses can follow, with input devices so much less clunky than keyboard, mouse and joystick.

via Slashdot, with hundreds of comments.

Related: IBM to build brain-like computers

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.

The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain

I'm not sure that's a good plateau to linger on.

Degrees of separation: :

Michael Edwards
Dean Kamen, with his electric car on his private island off Connecticut, North Dumpling, which author John H. Richardson visited to profile him for the November issue of Esquire.

How Dean Kamen's Magical Water Machine Could Save the World begins,

Here comes Dean Kamen on a Segway, zipping down the hill of his private island like something out of a Bond movie. He floats past his private helicopter. Past his amphibious landing craft. His lighthouse rises up behind him. He's wearing his uniform, the one he wears whether he's tinkering with an engine or visiting the White House: work boots, blue jeans, and a short-sleeved work shirt. He's fifty-seven but still skinny as a ten-year-old, with a lean face and full head of Superman hair. He wears a dead-serious expression as he's perched up there on his electric gizmo, even looks a bit regal, which is sort of appropriate when you consider the rules of his alternate universe -- on his tiny private island off the coast of Connecticut, he's not just the man who invented the Segway and the stair-climbing wheelchair called the iBOT and the first portable dialysis machine and a new water filter called the Slingshot that could literally change the world, if he could only get the damn world to cooperate. He's also Lord Dumpling, leader of the Empire of North Dumpling. Dumpie to his friends. He sort of seems serious about this, in a whimsical way, and now Lord Dumpling sweeps right by on his royal scooter, heading down to the landing to greet his guests from America....

He has seceded from the United States, you see, having notified the president himself...

Soon there may be an opening for all sorts of visionaries-in-waiting, now that we may need what they've built for us.

The 21-st century finally seems about to begin.

A short list: More from Esquire:

The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine... in Full. The first is The School by former marine C.J. Chivers, at right, a former Journal colleague now at the New York Times.

The blurb for Chris's story:

On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism..

Others are by Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe.

via Kottke, who blogs links and leads for each.