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"No chance"

That exactly right: No chance.

FRAUD ALERT: Apparently something sneaky is happening, or something extremely stupid. The parent post is correct, there is no chance there will be "Artificial Intelligence" by "2029". What is known about how the brain works is less than 0.1% of what there is to know, in my opinion, maybe far less.

Larry Page and Dr. Craig Venter, and the BBC, are embarrassing themselves by being a part of this.

Ray Kurzweil, if you are such a "Futureologist", please post stock prices for next week. Hey, that's only a WEEK in advance, and far, far less complicated -- It's only a list of numbers.

Perhaps 99% of what is called science in the media contains some element of fraud. Someone is wanting attention, or wanting money, and taking advantage of the fascination of the average person with science and the ignorance, too.

These examples illustrate the importance of observation and appeals to evidence in defeasible reasoning. The idea of defeasible reasoning may not sound very good -- after all, defeasible is a synonym for "fallible" -- until we realize that scientific reasoning is always defeasible, and we know the power of scientific reasoning from our everyday life. It is a commonplace of basic scientific method that experimental evidence is never quite conclusive -- it is always a logical possibility that the next experiments will go differently. Indeed, philosopher John Pollack developed the idea of defeasible reasoning largely (as I understand it) to give a stronger basis for the philosophy of science.

-- the page on Defeasible Reasoning

Now, we've come across this word "fact."

You've invoked it in a scientific sense, in the sense of "an empirically observed truth." But we are having an epistemological conversation: We can speak of mathematical truths as facts, even though we cannot empirically determine them- not in a justifiable way, at least: We cannnot know if the universe is playing tricks on us, after all. But if our reasoning in our minds is not interfered with, we can reach justifiable mathematical truth, without any reference to the universe at all. And in the language of philosophers, we would call these discoveries "facts."

Let's look at the Wikipedia page on "Reason." Somebody wrote a line there, "No philosopher of any note has ever argued that logic is the same as reason." Quite accurate.

Do you believe it? Is the Wikipedia article wrong here? We know that Wikipedia is wrong in many places; Is this one of those places?

Maybe there is a notable philosopher, somewhere, who said that logic is the same as reason. Can you find this philosopher?

Let me tell you my theory. You can disagree with it, but let me communicate it to you. My belief is that, in say, 4 years, in the quiet of your own thoughts, you may come to value this theory.

I'm going to suggest that the reasoning of all people is supported by a "thinking goo." It's not a rational thing, though it's not totally irrational, either. There is a quirky logic to it (the laws of physics, the emergence of human desires and interests and needs and so on,) but it's certainly not spock, no matter how much the person is revered for their skills at logic, no matter how they hold their glasses tip in their mouth, no matter how many puffs of the pipe they take, before speaking something penetrating and wise.

We can isolate pieces of logic in our thinking, but they are just little islands of logical constistency. To be entirely logical and reasonable is utterly impossible; It's simply too costly for any system. Even Ray Kurzweil's most ideal computer will still have these problems. (And I speak as a bona fida TransHumanist, and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast, not as a critic of the intellectual capabilities of computers.) One argument (that I'll present briefly) is that thinking is a evolutionary process; For thinking to work at all, it must include irrational components. Something that works consistently in the same way is a dead somethin

You missed the call by about 2 decades.

Kurzweil was given yet another honorary degree by Depaul University's School of CTI. At the ceremony (which I attended as a degree recipient), he gave a demo of the device and in his speech he talked about timing being crucial to success. Assuming he wasn't being hypothetical, it took his around 5 years to develop the software "while waiting for the hardware to become available." His CV is here -> http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raycv.html Considering the advantages (and patents) Kurzweil has in pioneering both OCR and text-to-speech, I'd imagine a comparable FOSS platform would, unfortunately, not appear in the near term future.

I guess the first point is negative and the second positive. The combination leaves a situation where a computer doesn't have to generate anything sophisticated to be tagged as human.

I once administered an informal Turing test using Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet. I presented to 6 friends several dozen poems, some of which were computer generated (the poems, not the friends...).

People who were computer savvy tended to overestimate what a computer was capable of doing and did rather poorly. Similarly, people who were artistic but not very techie tended to have a very open mind regarding what constituted human poetry (bad grammar, non sequiturs, etc. were ok in an e.e. cummings sort of way) and also did poorly.

The people who did consistently well were those who were neither computer types nor artists, but rather "pure" academics (language specialists, classicists, etc.). They simply used grammar and puncutation as their guide.

I didn't know either, but he seems like an inventor of sorts.

clicky.

What is interesting is that the time it took to pass from condensed order into uncondensed and expanding chaos from which matter could form, on through today, has happenned along a seemingly reverse exponential curve. One could argue that we are at or slightly beyond the knee of this curve. This is the essense of the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the second law of increasing entropy in a closed system. Unless of course there is something feeding the universe from the outside of it, in which case all bets are off. We have no evidence of this case, though.

Assuming the universe is a closed system, and from order will ultimately come chaos - where does that leave us? Well - what about evolution and intelligence, particularly sentient consciousness? If we look at the system as a whole, we see the universe going from an "ordered" singularity to a chaos of atoms and such, while at the same time, at least in our neck of the woods, we see from this chaos arise life and intelligence. From the general chaos, local order and intelligence arises. This isn't in violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Life and intelligence seems to have arisen from the chaos of the general universe. We know of at least one case. Furthermore, given the immenseness of the universe, there is ample reason to believe that there are other intelligences "out there" as well.

What is further interesting is to look at the advancement of life on the one case we do have that we can look at, here on Earth. Particularly the development of intelligence and technology. Technology can be defined as "improvement of tools in a culture which utilizes tools, along with a record of those advancements". Some insects, birds, and other lesser primates utilise and build tools, but they do not have technology, because they do not keep a history or knowledge of what tools worked best in the past, and how to improve upon them. Only humans have done this (particularly homo sapiens neanderthalensis and homo sapiens sapiens - of which only the latter survived to become us - some have postulated that this may have occurred because of "violent conflicts" between the two groups, with our line winning the conflicts). In a very, very short span of time (compared to the age of the universe), our technology and intelligence has pushed us from hiding in caves to exploring other planets and beyond. Furthermore, our intelligence has enabled us to create machines which in theory, someday soon, could rival our intelligence, and beyond.

Indeed, if you follow the progression of intelligence, technology, and communications among humans (pick a point, say the approximate date of the development of the abacus, and move forward from there with other devices and technology to measure, calculate, and communicate - everything our brains can do) - you will find that if you graph "computing capacity/capability" against "date/time of advance" - that this curve follows on its own, an exponential curve. According to this curve, we are at (or once again, just beyond) the knee of this curve.

These two curves, that of the universe becoming more chaotic, and intelligence becoming more, well, "intelligent" (due to mainly convergence and synergy between technological advances, particularly those which utilize computational technology - a feedback loop of sorts) - have been coined "The Law of Time and Chaos" and "The Law of Accelerating Returns" by RayKurzweil, principally in his work The Age of Spiritual Machines. Interestingly, as the universe moves from order to chaos, life and intelligence seems to arise from this chaos, and from there, intelligence, and

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?

By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.

I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall

If these trends continue, we're in for a very intereseting time.

And Ray isn't just any old crackpot. He has a good track record at not just forseeing the future, but executing well on it - he's responsible for the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition....

• the first omni-font optical character recognition system
• the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind
• the first CCD flat-bed scanner
• the first text-to-speech synthesizer
• the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments
• and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition

I knew that name sounded familiar.

Ray is also the man behind Kurzweil Music Products who make a lot of high end and mid range gear, including very nice keyboards.

A very well attended symposium was held at Stanford in 1999 that covered this very topic (in even more optimistic depth, in the case of the majority of the speakers). Entitled, Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100?, the symposium was organized by Doug Hofstadter and was themed around two books that expoused very similar views and were written independently of each other around that time: Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines and Hans Moravec's Robot.

Kurzweil has actually been preaching about this for quite a while now, and the details of Marshall Brain's article are eerily reminiscent of both of the above mentioned books.

The next big step in evolution is ditching the wetware. Some people think we may live to see it.

If you want a different view, read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. He's a smart guy, whos won several prestigious awards. The National Medal of Technology and The Lemelson-MIT prize.

If you haven't already, let me highly recommend reading the book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. It's got some amazing insights about the next 100 years, as well as a fairly in-depth discussion of neural networks and algorithms for them. It also covers other methods for creating "intelligent" machines such as recursion (used in chess-playing).

Here's the Web site for the book, and also Ray Kurzweil's site.

While I agree on a preliminary level with your statement that as a programmer, your job is to "Write computer programs to store and manipulate data so that businesses can operate more efficiently and effectively", I think it's denying a central aspect of our culture in the year 2000 to simply state that the effects of learning how to program are akin to those of "mechanics who learn how to fix cars". Yes, both are technical, aquired skills, but the similarities end there; it is unwise to discount the incredible cultural capital currently invested in "the programmer", and by extension, technology/computers.

Like it or not, programmers are now seen by the large majority of politicians and the non-programming public at large as people who aren't just "fixing cars" - read a tech product press release or two and you'll see what I mean. Instead, it's all about "creating the future", whether it be the future of the economy or humanity or both. (Ray Kurzweil's moderately disturbing book The Age of Spiritual Machines takes up these issues, and I think drives home the fact that the way things are heading, technology, politics, and society are increasingly inseperable domains.)

I think your post raises some excellent points, and I only really disagree with your first statement: The "burdens" being placed on programmers (while perhaps made more onerous by current marketing hype and politicians ignorant of the issues) are neither unessecary nor unrealistic. Like it or not, the future of society has a lot more to do with what programmers are up to (both individually and as a whole) than the actions of car mechanics.

-flaneur

Also, if you haven't read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, thats a mind blowing book you definitely want to read. AI is already composing poetry, creating art, and it is beginning to be able to hold conversations. Kurzweil is another elite scientist in the same league as Bill Joy, having started Kurzweil Music Systems, and his speech recognition software, which became Lernout & Hauspie. The book especially demonstrates convincingly that AI is reaping the benefits of Moore's law and will meet human levels of intelligence by the year 2020.

Where did this idea come from precisely? Maybe i don't read to same books, see the same movies, etc. but I've never seen computer porteyed as all knowing and/or all powerful.

Read some stuff from Ray Kurzweil. The Age of Spiritual Machines might be best. And understand that he's considered a serious author; not just some blabbering idiot. Among others, he's credited with inventing OCR and pioneered text-to-speech synthesizers.

Or, read Bill Joy's essay in Wired on the soon-to-arrive almighty robots.