When Humans Transcend Biology
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When Humans Transcend Biology
''The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology'' is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. A sequel book, '' The Singularity Is Nearer'', was released on June 25, 2024. The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil's previous books, '' The Age of Intelligent Machines'' (1990) and '' The Age of Spiritual Machines'' (1999). In the book, Kurzweil embraces the term " the singularity", which was popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity." Kurzweil describes his '' Law of Accelerating Returns'', which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. The singularity is also the point at which machines' intelligence and human ...
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Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futures studies, futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He received the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the app ...
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Positive Feedback
Positive feedback (exacerbating feedback, self-reinforcing feedback) is a process that occurs in a feedback loop where the outcome of a process reinforces the inciting process to build momentum. As such, these forces can exacerbate the effects of a small disturbance. That is, the effects of a perturbation on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation. That is, ''A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A''.Keesing, R.M. (1981). Cultural anthropology: A contemporary perspective (2nd ed.) p.149. Sydney: Holt, Rinehard & Winston, Inc. In contrast, a system in which the results of a change act to reduce or counteract it has negative feedback. Both concepts play an important role in science and engineering, including biology, chemistry, and cybernetics. Mathematically, positive feedback is defined as a positive loop gain around a closed loop of cause and effect. That is, positive feedback is Phase (waves), in phase with the input, in the sense that ...
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Internet Growth
The history of the Internet originated in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France. Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at ...
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Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It was the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project began in 1984 by the US government, and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on 14 April 2003, and included about 92% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021, with only 0.3% of the bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022. Funding came from the US government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as numerous other groups from around the world. A parallel project was conducted outside the government by the Celera Corporation, or Celera Genomics, which was formall ...
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Internet Traffic
Internet traffic is the flow of data within the entire Internet, or in certain network links of its constituent networks. Common traffic measurements are total volume, in units of multiples of the byte, or as transmission rates in bytes per certain time units. As the topology of the Internet is not hierarchical, no single point of measurement is possible for total Internet traffic. Traffic data may be obtained from the Tier 1 network providers' peering points for indications of volume and growth. However, Such data excludes traffic that remains within a single service provider's network and traffic that crosses private peering points. As of December 2022 almost half (48%) of mobile Internet traffic is in India and China, while North America and Europe have about a quarter. However, mobile traffic remains a minority of total internet traffic. Traffic sources File sharing constitutes a fraction of Internet traffic. The prevalent technology for file sharing is the BitTorrent proto ...
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History Of The Internet
The history of the Internet originated in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet protocol suite, Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France. Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. J. C. R. Licklider developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States United States Department of Defense, Department of Defense (DoD) DARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Independently, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the ea ...
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Magnetic Storage
Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is accessed using one or more disk read-and-write head, read/write heads. Magnetic storage media, primarily Hard disk drive, hard disks, are widely used to store Data (computing), computer data as well as sound, audio and video signals. In the field of computing, the term ''magnetic storage'' is preferred and in the field of audio and video production, the term ''magnetic recording'' is more commonly used. The distinction is less technical and more a matter of preference. Other examples of magnetic storage media include floppy disks, magnetic tape, and magnetic stripe card, magnetic stripes on credit cards. History Magnetic storage in the form of wire recording—audio recording on a wire—was publicized by Oberlin Smith in the Sept 8, 1888 ...
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DNA Sequencing
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The advent of rapid DNA sequencing methods has greatly accelerated biological and medical research and discovery. Knowledge of DNA sequences has become indispensable for basic biological research, Genographic Project, DNA Genographic Projects and in numerous applied fields such as medical diagnosis, biotechnology, forensic biology, virology and biological systematics. Comparing healthy and mutated DNA sequences can diagnose different diseases including various cancers, characterize antibody repertoire, and can be used to guide patient treatment. Having a quick way to sequence DNA allows for faster and more individualized medical care to be administered, and for more organisms to be identified and cataloged. The rapid advancements in DNA seque ...
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Microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, Clock signal, clock-driven, Processor register, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary code, binary data as input, processes it according to instruction (computing), instructions stored in its computer memory, memory, and provides results (also in binary form) as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential logic, sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system. The integration of a whole CPU on ...
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Computer Memory
Computer memory stores information, such as data and programs, for immediate use in the computer. The term ''memory'' is often synonymous with the terms ''RAM,'' ''main memory,'' or ''primary storage.'' Archaic synonyms for main memory include ''core'' (for magnetic core memory) and ''store''. Main memory operates at a high speed compared to mass storage which is slower but less expensive per bit and higher in capacity. Besides storing opened programs and data being actively processed, computer memory serves as a Page cache, mass storage cache and write buffer to improve both reading and writing performance. Operating systems borrow RAM capacity for caching so long as it is not needed by running software. If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to storage; a common way of doing this is through a memory management technique called ''virtual memory''. Modern computer memory is implemented as semiconductor memory, where data is stored within memory cell (com ...
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