Maybe now's a good time to brush up on assimilation. Resistance is futile

I am Dyslexic of Borg.  Yo Ass is Malted ...

We're not there yet.  I think around 2030 it'll start to become apparent.

I highly recommend reading Kurzweil's books.  He talks about the law of accelerating returns.  Basically, at some point in the next decade and a half, the technology we'll personally have access to will seem practically magic to what we have today just as what we have today would seem crazy to someone in 1993.

Things are progressing exponentially now. To imagine the difference between 2013 and 2023 you can't look at 10 years ago. You have to go 20 to 30 years ago.  Similarly, the progress from 2008 to today seems insane (cloud computing, iPhone/Android, gains in voice recognition).

If it involves computing (as opposed to mechanical) the tech is going crazy.

Pretty soon we'll have some sort of Aug glasses. Then we'll have some device that feeds into our neocortex. Then we'll have an Aug chair or something. Then we'll have a Metaverse where we do most of our "stuff" rather than running around in our meat bodies. Then we'll start to off-load more and more of our neocortex components into "the cloud" and then we'll just think of the "meat" as an interface for dealing with the physical world.

Humans (as meat) will never go to Mars. In 25 years, it'll seem hilarious that we ever wanted to send humans to the moon or other planets (we'll certainly go to other planets but it'll be through our constructs, not through sending fragile water-carbon based meat bags <g>).

We'll never have robots in the sense that people imagined. We'll never have an R2D2 type thing. We'll never bother with hypersonic travel (again, meat).

Right now, everything I wrote above probably sounds crazy or extreme.  In 10 years, it'll be patently obvious I think.  In 10 to 20 years, the only reason we'll still want to "see" things with "our own eyes" will be cultural lag. If it weren't for cultural lag, the idea of humans needing to experience everything via their biological sensor array (i.e. our own nerves) would be absurd in 10 years.

I haven't read any of Kurzweil's books. I just picked up and read How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed for a while at a Barnes and Nobles, and it seemed like the kind of wild claims you make to sell a lot of books, which he does very well. No one is even close to understanding the title content, and it seems like a backward way of looking at what AI technology is. We try to understand our minds through creating algorithms and the effort expands our minds, but never in any way contains them. The jeopardy machine will only ever play jeopardy, but the ideas that come from the effort increase our intelligence to build better ideas, and we are forever flexible in ways that the ideas we solidify (machines and the programs they run) are not.

The biological machine integration, such as plugging jacks in to our brains like the matrix, seem like flying cars to me. There doesn't seem to be much of any progress with that whatsoever right now, and the brain is as mystifying as ever. The leap from tech to biological tech is a big stretch to me, and I think it stems from a misunderstanding of what tech is. Technology seems like devices and things we see, touch and hear, but really the exponential growth has been in human ideas, education, and knowledge sharing. A device to one person is a connection of concepts to its creators, and the people who understand the creation. It is diagrams, chunking and boxing of tasks and concepts, and the steps to make the parts and put the whole together. The devices execute ideas, and the structure of the devices are ideas, and devices pass between us but they are more like a better manifestation of paper than things which will take off with intelligence of their own. I think the best way to think of it is: Technology is ultimately the human mind, of it and for it but also the manifestation of it. The iPhone is our mind jacking the universe in to us, and the other way may never be possible.

I am not a skeptic of radical changes through technology, but I think R2D2 will have a bigger role than microchip brain enhancements. We build Turing machine after Turing machine for each task, put them together to do multiple tasks, and build on the repertoire to better think about problems. Time is what we all want more of, and the less labor we have to do the more time we have, so I think building incrementally the tasks necessary for labor robots will be where the biggest incentive is. 

I'm not smart enough to comment on this topic, but I will say this: It's 2013, where's my freaking Hovercar????!!!! 

Not to mention, Nuclear Fusion reactor? (been 50 years away for 50 years now...)

Personally, I believe the biggest advances in the coming 15 years will be in biotech (stem cell technology and such).

What "willful ignorance" are you referring to?

Kurzweil's made his fortune by predicting what would be technologically possible at the right time and creating it.  Millions of people use his creations every day (the voice recognition at the heart of Siri was invented by him for instance).

@Burress, we're no more going to put "jacks" and "microchips" into our brains than we have steam powered horseless buggies.

If we can simulate a human brain, down to the very atom (and we most certainly will be able to do that in coming years), I don't see any reason why we won't be able to simulate a mind soon after.

I suspect we'll be able to replicate a mind long before we can understand the mind.

Really?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/07/tech/brain-memory-implants-humans

Not far off at all. 

Over time, more and more of what we think of as "ourselves" won't be contained in our "meat" or processed via our neocortex. It'll happen so gradually that we won't think anything of it.

there are some great books by Bill Bryson that make it obvious how we take radical change for granted. People a century ago lived radically different lives than today.

The universe is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. All of the ponderings in this thread will eventually be swept aside as one idea with its basic core, but with a radically different form emerges to take everyone by surprise.

I think we'll see the singularity before the next century. The purpose of life (on a grand scale) is to grow and progress.  It's only logical that any conscious entity with the ability would progress toward extending its own life to continue to progress.  

At first I thought it would be impossible to leave our bodies.  But the more I think about it, I think humans thought the same about sailing the oceans and reaching the moon.  I think the hard part will be how to transport a unique consciousness from a brain to a machine.  How can we ensure there is no loss in mass?  Even energy has mass and if some of that energy is lost is that lost consciousness or memories?  Would we be "reborn" and not be aware of this transport (just like we don't recall being born from our mothers?).     

It'll start with our perception becoming digitized to the virtual world--- so far we have sight and sound...but the next step are the other 3 senses--smell, taste, touch.  Think of it as digitizing our central nervous system.  Full Perceptual VR.  We'll live in one body (our own) but experience life in another.  Once we do that, the next step will be digitizing the rest of our mental functions and leaving our bodies for good. Heck I think that tech would make a better brain---because we wouldn't need to replicate the parts that deal with regulating our organs and muscles, etc.  Only the higher order consciousness. 

I for one am excited. I hope I'll be alive to see this happen.  It will surely make video games more exciting.