Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
By Lev Grossman
[1] (…), Kurzweil believes that we’re approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more
intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity – our bodies, our minds, our civilization – will be completely and irreversibly
transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human
civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.
[5] Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster – that is, the rate at which they’re
getting faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of
something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating
[10] whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness – not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music
but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail
parties.
If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no
reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than
[15] we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their
slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibility
quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.
(…)
http://www.time.com/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html. Acesso em 07/04/2011. Adaptado.
From that point on (linha 13), refere-se a
