Catshanghai

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I have read the first few chapters, but it is a dense tome that demands your full attention. I have been too busy and exhausted to be able to get into this book so far, but I have three weeks of holiday ahead of me and I am looking forward to learning more about his ideas on the future of evolution and artificial intelligence. His basic idea is that technology is accelerating culture exponentially to the extent that we are rapidly approaching a stage where computers will become smart enough to merge with people. Think of it as the Matrix with benefits. As scary as it sounds, I like the idea of being able to plug my brain into a database that will allow me to upload Mandarin as a new langague skill almost instantly.