Jurgen Schmidhuber

Jurgen Schmidhuber presented the simple yet fascinating idea that we get all of our pleasure from finding better ways to compress the information we see.  We do so by detecting patterns in the information, which allows us to compress it by describing it at a higher level.  Google: “artificial curiosity”, “theory of beauty”, and “converging history”.  The last term describes his theory that everyone sees history accelerating towards their own time.  He showed how similar evidence could have convinced a Ray Kurzweil that the singularity was near in the 16th century.  There’s never been shortage of crazy people claiming “The End is Near”.  This is why so many people think the Singularity is near.  It’s a bias from living in this time.  So far nobody has had the guts to respond to that criticism.  Today’s Kurzweil is supposed to address critics tomorrow, so we’ll see if he talks about Schimdhuber’s theories.