Is Google trying to alienate people here? Last week’s freakout certainly didn’t win it any new fans, and today there’s news that it’s helping to “back,” whatever that means, a new school whose Chancellor, Raymond Kurzweil, is a proponent of singularity theory. That is to say he believes that, one day, machines will become smarter than humans. Please, machines smarter than humans? Impossible.
The new school is called the Singularity University, but don’t let the name fool you: it’s not an accredited university. Its purpose is to study and prepare for, yes, the singularity, when robots and machines and whatnot finally outsmart human beings. (That’s supposed to occur before the middle of this century.) This, despite the fact that man is created in God’s image!
Google co-founder Larry Page is throwing his support behind the school, which is only a “stone’s-throw” from Google HQ.
Now, Drudge has the sinister headline right now, “GOOGLENASA BACK VISION OF COMPUTERS MORE CLEVER THAN HUMANS…” Given his reactionary readership, I fully expect to see plenty of “Google = Evil” musings before the end of the day; maybe even a lazy television producer will “run with it.” Because, as we all know, this is all leading to an I, Robot scenario, wherein the robots, smarter than humans, determine that humans themselves are a threat to their own existence, and must be exterminated. No big deal, I say: outside of a few nice paintings, what have humans done that’s so amazing?
via the he’s-lost-his-mind-hasn’t-he Drudge Report