IEEE Spectrum Special Report - The Singularity

This month in IEEE Spectrum:
<ul><li>Human senses and body parts are increasingly augmented by a stunning array of high-tech devices.</li><li>Today, robots are pushing the envelope of humanoid design—they can play the violin, unload a dishwasher, and climb stairs.</li><li>To David Adler, the human brain is just really advanced nanotechnology.</li><li>Countervalent: One day a machine will blink into consciousness, but it’s just wishful thinking to believe that people could escape death by uploading their minds.</li><li>Vernor Vinge on the run-up to the singularity and what technologists can do to engineer the best outcome for humans.</li><li>Jaron Lanier, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld, and technology futurist Ray Kurzweil.</li><li>Countervalent: How can we hope to create consciousness if we don’t know anything about it?</li><li>Rodney Brooks on why the evolution of superhuman intelligence will be a slow process.</li><li>Christof Koch explains how we can use visual illusions and scenes to explore the difference between our conscious and unconscious perception.</li><li>Machines of merely human intellect could put humans out of work if they were cheap enough. (In this blog, I continue to argue that this is HIGHLY DESIRABLE and that we must begin now to prepare for the End of Scarcity. I see the UNWILLINGNESS to make this adaptation as an equally consequential risk to any of the more sensational nanites gone mad scenarios).
</li><li>Candid assessments from leading voices such as Steven Pinker, Gordon Moore, Esther Dyson, and more.</li></ul><blockquote></blockquote>