Regular readers of this blog (of which there are only a few) may remember that I have from time to time blogged about my long-held belief that the "gaming idiom" will increasingly find its way into workplace social computing applications. I suspect that this is reasonably closely related to what Stowe Boyd terms "flow" as it relates to Enterprise 2.0 dynamics and the applications that will be used to work "in flow".
If I’ve got Stowe’s take more or less right, and if there’s something to my belief that gaming principles will figure more prominently in future workplace applications, then we’re in good company, namely Ray Kurzweil.
And I note here that David Weinberger recently noted during his FASTForward08 conference keynote speech that he thinks "Ray Kurzweil is insane" (seriously), with respect to Kurzweil’s strongly-asserted belief that humans will one day upload their brains and consciousness into computers.
I agree with David … I think this notion is nuts, and that there are some fundamental aspects and elements to human consciousness that will forever evade computing capabilities (and no, I am not expert enough to articulate why I believe that or point to any science or deep philosophical constructs that will support clearly my beliefs).
However … aside from the incipient insanity, I think Ray Kurzweil is a very smart guy, and I am more than willing to consider his points about gaming and how the idiom (I can never think of a better word) will penetrate a wide range of human activities.
Via the Toronto Globe & Mail
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Kurzweil sees a future in games
BLAINE KYLLO
Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.
The 60-year-old futurist, best knows for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.
“Games are a harbinger of everything,” said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. “In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.”
Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.
Mr. Kurzweil is what you’d call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest – he has a bachelor of science from MIT – he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.
Through his numerous companies he’s invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He’s the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990’s The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world’s chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.
[ Snip … ]
In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the ‘70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore’s Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.
But what does all this have to do with video games?
Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we’ll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we’ll have the software to do the same.
[ Snip … ]
But we’re already seeing changes in the gaming industry, and Kurzweil suggested that the rate of change is such that anyone working on a project that will take more than six months needs to be aware of this fact. “Pong was crude,” he said. “That was 1972.”
By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. “They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,” he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects “full-immersion” games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don’t forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We’ll have to “enforce reality,” maybe “by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.”
A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called “an intimate merger.” Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having “complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.”
“A kid can become a virtual Ben Franklin,” said Kurzweil. “Everyone will be able to expand their intelligence by virtue of using such devices.”
In a backstage interview after his presentation, Kurzweil said he thinks the descriptor “video games” is limiting “because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life … But it’s been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity.”
“Play is how we principally learn and create,” said Kurzweil.
The continuing growth of computers is already leading to a democratization of gaming, he said. The price of gaming systems means that more people have them and they are more powerful than the supercomputers of the sixties. “The tools of production are also being democratized,” he said. Creating a new game that can be played by multiple players around the world can be done with a $1,000 laptop.
Massively multiplayer experiences, in games or in virtual worlds, harness the ability to interact. The “dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication” harnessed by the gaming industry will “create new, emerging forms of intelligence.”
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Tags: Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity, Stowe Boyd, flow, FASTForward08, video games, gaming, future work
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