Ray Kurzweil – The Age of Spiritual Machines

URL: Amazon

Why: I think this was an x-mas present from my cousin (x-mas ‘03) – but i only just had time to read it.

Thoughts: What did this book do for me?

I’m not entirely sure what i thought about this book. It felt like quite an ego boost for not only the author but his products. It’s interesting to read the book in retrospect, as his predictions in 1999 seem to be way off, even 5 years later – example: direct retinal displays, that were meant to go commercial in 1999.. where was I when this happened?

The book stinks of transhumanism, not that i’m against it – just sometimes scared of it. A close friend of mine once told me that for millenia people had to rely on themselves for survival, they couldn’t just go down to the “quick-e-mart” and purchase food, they had to scavange or hunt for survival, and even though i was aware of this situation – and of it’s current incarnation in certain environments, i’d never really thought about it. He finished in saying that to these people the wilderness was home – it wasn’t considered the “Wilderness”, it was just their environment, so when people now-days go out *bush*, so to speak, they are entering an environment that used to be completely comfortable to the majority of the population.

So what if we’ve practically reduced the principle of “only the strong survive”, is that so bad? So what if we’re overpopulating the planet, at least we’re giving more people a chance to make *some* sort of difference to the world – good on us. My old economics teacher once told me that a great sign of a civilisation was how they treat their elderly – and i think with our ever-extending lifetimes and research and resilience to current problems our civilisation is starting to look fairly great. (well, at least from my bias)

Do i think that in 100 years there will be no distinction between the human mind and artificially created personalities? Some parts of me are hoping yes, but other parts just dismiss this as fantasy. Kurzweil would like to think so, and also claims to have correctly predicted many of the things that we take for granted – i just don’t know.

As a comp-sci student, i must admit that most of this text felt fairly dry – and ended on a pretty disappointing note – the three paradigms for creating an intelligent machine? I mean come-on – i don’t think it’s as simple as creating a machine that combines evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural-nets and recursive algorithms – there is still some mystery left.

Oh – and end-text footnotes *shudder*.

Aw Damn. I just updated my thunderbird to version 8 and attempted to convert all of my previous RSS feeds (which were being controlled via the Forumzilla extension [refer]) to the new in-built RSS handling mechanism. Unfortunately the thing doesn’t appear to be getting any of the feeds.

I’ve created a new “RSS & News Blogs” account, and then added all the subscriptions from my old list of subscriptions, and the folder appears to have the messages – but upon clicking on any of the titles the messages appear blank – not only in the preview pane, but upon double-clicking as well.

I have a *feeling* that this problem might be related to converting my seperate email-accounts into the single “Local” folder, instead of having 3 collections of Inboxes (one per email account), having a single Inbox for all my incoming mail. This functionality is new for version 0.8 and is great, especially because it was my main complaint with the previous versions, but i would gladly go back to have the 3 seperate inboxes if it meant that this RSS-Feed reader would work again.

My problem obviously now is, do i re-install the forumzilla extension and go back to the old way of handling my RSS feeds? Do i just hang-on for a while and see if this problem vanishes?

**Update**
It appears i have to have uninstalled the Forumzilla plugin before hand, and possibly re-created my Profile for the in-built RSS Aggregator to work (Thanks to Brian Duff) – i’ll comment on whether this works when i get around to it.

**Update 2**
All is well, i simply deleted my “RSS” account, then went through my “Mail” folder (see: Docs & Settings/User/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/default/*.slt/Mail) and deleted all the folders which i thought should’ve been modified when i updated Thunderbird to version 0.8 (I made backups, not just deleted :P) – So after re-creating all my RSS entries everything appears to be working great.

So uni has started to look a bit more promising, but not by too much. For the first time in about 3 or 4 weeks, the end doesn’t seem to be an impossible peak to reach, i mean – how hard can it be to write 30 to 40 top-quality, 1st-class-esque pages of thesis? Not that hard Surely!

In other good news related to my studies my john the ripper stuff is looking quite good on the small Opteron cluster we have running. After my first initial failure at getting the MPI mod of JTR to compile on the Opteron’s (as x86-64) i was a bit dismayed, but my second attempt seems to be working fine. I’ve let it run on 3 of the Opteron nodes (being dual that’s 6 CPU’s) and for the last 4-5 days it seems to be crunching passwords nicely.

In news that’s related to here, i’ve done up a syndication page fairly similar to how Jina does it (teehehe u motivator you!) – so yeah, get those news-readers a cracking. If you’ve made the switch to Thunderbird lately you should check out Forumzilla – a simple and conveniant way to get your feeds directly into your email client :D

Anyway, i leave you with a link to my screenshot – which i will have to put into the “Christian” page when i get that going – because – you know.. everyone loves this stuff right?