When computers can perceive independently, will they be free of human-style prejudice?
KURZWEIL: Intelligence necessarily includes the destruction of information. We do get a torrent of information a million bits per second through our ears, hundreds of millions of bits per second through our eyes, and so on. We can t keep all that information around, so we have to abstract and understand it in a meaningful way. Again, we do that through pattern recognition. When we see print on a page, we recognize it as print without having to decode every bit of visual information. We re constantly boiling down a massive amount of data into a much smaller amount that s meaningful, and to do that we destroy an enormous amount of data. That is, in fact, the process of intelligence. Another form of data destruction is done by the elaborate censors mentioned earlier: internal censors that human beings use to prevent certain thoughts or insights from occurring. These censors can serve useful purposes, but they can also be a barrier to creativity. Specialists in any field learn a lot of rul
