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Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near"
popo writes "The Wall Street Journal has a (publicly accessible) review of "The Singularity is Near" -- a new book by futurist, Ray Kurzweil. By "Singularity", Kurzweil refers not to a collapsed supernova, but instead to an extraordinarily bright future in which technological progress has leapt by such exponentially large bounds that it will be... well, for lack of a better word: 'utopian'. "Mr. Kurzweil... thinking exponentially, imagines a plausible future, not so far away, with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual), vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today), other miraculous machines (nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt) and, thanks to these technologies, enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today)." On one hand its fantastically (even ridiculously) optimistic, but on the other hand, I sure as hell hope he's right." Got mailed a review copy; I'm not finished yet, but I agree - optimistic perhaps, but the future does look pretty interesting.
You can sell more copies of a book that talks about how we will all be rich and immortal than you can of one that predicts more of the same.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
For those of you who enjoy fiction, Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the best fictional treatments of the Singularity I've had the pleasure of reading. In Accelerando one of the characters refers to the Singularity as the 'rapture of the nerds'. Great stuff.
Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'? I'm sure that a person from the 19th century, when confronted with the complexity of life today, would contend that the Singularity has already happened, but this time is still (largely) comprehensible to us. As time marches on, and things become steadily more complex, won't humans, augmented by increasing levels of technology, maintain at least a cursory connection?
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
aren't with the technology. We have "utopian" level technology compared to 80 years ago right now. The problem is with the people.
Look at Russia. Rampant alcholism, suicide, murder, gansterism, etc. Yet it is perfectly capable of sending off spaceships and creating high level technology.
I appreciate and welcome all the anticpated advances- but unless we create a worldwide civil society that is robust, honest, and representative; it won't make a dime's worth of difference.
Yes, I'd much rather be plowing fields daily and walking by foot in the snow to the store. Oh yea, things may seem suckey, but only in comparison to your wishes. Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
From what I hear, the "peak oil" crisis stands a decent chance of obliterating human society as we know it before any of this wonderful stuff can happen. I would love it if someone would make a good argument why this isn't the case, but I've yet to hear one.
Unfrortunately this will only be accessible to the super mega ultra rich.
:-)
I really have no idea why people keep holding to this idea. The "super mega ultra rich" are by no means the powerhouse they once were. Today's society instead revolves around the needs of the middle class. If the middle class will be unable to afford it in the near future, the "super mega ultra rich" aren't going to be able to afford it (or even have it available) now.
Sure, the "super mega ultra rich" can afford nicer stuff than you and I, but they certainly don't have much that you and I don't have. A quick comparison list:
They have -> We have
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car
$3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone
Jet Plane -> Cessna
Mansion -> Spacious Home
Ming Vase -> A Vase that you can use
The world isn't what it was in the time of H.G. Wells. I seriously doubt you'll be seeing the "poor" eating the "rich" anytime soon.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The accompanying graph is staggering but only shows five points of data. Its top point shows a life expectancy of 77 years in 1999 or so, which of course is not human life expectancy. Human life expectancy is about 65, ranging from about 43 in poor countries to 79 in the richest country. Kurzweil's statement only applies to the wealthy; in much of Africa, life expectancy fell dramatically during the 1990s.
And since he's clearly talking about life extension, the reader should be aware that there is no exponential curve at the top of the lifespan. His numbers gained mostly from improvements in child nutrition and antibiotics, and there aren't any continued improvements to be made in those (quite the opposite, actually). If we look at the average continued life expectancy for Americans aged 75, between 1980 and 1985 they gained 0.2 years; 1985-1990, 0.3 years; 1990-1995, 0.1 years; 1995-2000, 0.4 years; 1997-2002, 0.3 years. This is good. But it's not exponential lengthening of lifespan.
Oh, and the "decade" within which he promised we'd be ahead of the curve is now half over. The above quote is from 2000.
The main logical error Kurzweil makes is simply that he thinks computers will get smarter because they get faster. Readers who believe the one has anything to do with the other need to go back to Dreyfus' 1972 classic What Computers Can't Do. From there, start reading over the painful history of what is now called "strong A.I.", and what used to be just called "A.I.", to see how necessarily limited our efforts have become. Kurzweil elides over this distinction in the worst way. He starts by saying that computers are now as smart as an insect -- which is unrefutable because nobody can quantify what that means -- and proceeds to predicting that they will be as smart as people once they get n times faster. No, I'm sorry, all that means is that they will be as smart as n insects. Whatever the hell that means.
Mostly I wouldn't care. Fantasy is fun. Except that Pollyannaish predictions of paradise-yet-to-come persuade people that the problems we create for ourselves are irrelevant. If you think the Rapture or the Singularity is going to make all currently conceivable problems laughable, little things like massive extinction and global warming turn into somebody else's problem. They're not -- and our grandchildren, with their very fast and non-sentient computers, and their non-300-year lifespans, are going to be kind of ticked that you and I spoiled the planet.
The whole premise is actually kind of simple I think. There's three basic components to everything that we use in our lives. Raw materials, Energy, and Design. Stuff needs to be thought up(design), it requires ingredients to build(raw materials), and it takes energy to make/use/operate it. Some things, like digital media, have negligible raw material requirements, but they still fit the mold.
So if we can make computers that can actually think well enough to do the design, then getting design done faster just requires better computers. I think it's safe to assume that computers will continue to increase in power. Whether or not they'll become "intelligent" is harder to predict, but lets say for the sake of the singularity that they do.
We also need plentiful energy. If this whole fusion power thing ever pans out, we'll have that.
Raw materials are a little harder. Making things just out of dirt is a bit simplistic. because there's lots of different minerals and such present in dirt, and they're not all suitable for any purpose. There's lots of stuff available in the earth, but extracting it, even if it becomes easy, will most likely be rather destructive. The solution is to make spaceflight reliable enough that we can mine other places, asteroids and the like.
Although that seems to me to be a short term solution, because most things in space are pretty far away. Unless there's some sort of major star trek-ish breakthrough in propulsion, it's never going to be all that simple.
I guess the point is, design and energy are almost like a switch. Either we'll have a couple big breakthroughs that'll bust those two wide open, or we won't. But even if we got cheap brains and cheap energy, the raw materials issue seems like it'd be a harder problem. If you're looking for a long term investment, land would probably be a good one, because it's the hardest thing for us to make more of.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
" Things have pretty much sucked up to this point."
Yea we still have thousands of children with Polio in Ironlungs...
Actually the world is a pretty good place in most developed countries. It is even a lot better than it was 50 years ago in the developing countries.
The correct way to look at it is not that the present sucks, but how can we make the future better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
Exactly. Without a significant shift in human cultures any utopia cannot happen, whether we have the technology or not. We could never agree on what utopia should be like, and would fight about it.
It didn't happen.
Fast forward to the 1970's at the advent of the personal computer revolution and read magazines like "Byte" or similiar. The coming of age of the PC was to free us from mundane tasks, make work easier, give us more leisure time because things were simpler.
That did not happen either, even if Byte and others were correct in saying that the computer revolution was here to stay.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
Or, if you prefer, back to the PC analogy: PC's have made things like spreadsheets, memos, etc., far easier for the average office worker, but instead of being rewarded with more leisure time, more spreadsheets and memos etc. are expected instead. In other words, instead of making life easier, more work has been created and now we are more or less enslaved to the technology that it is done on.
History is rife with examples of this: cellphones, for example. Now you cannot get away and work goes with you everywhere, all too often 24/7. Enslaved to the never-ending communication, instead of better, we got more.
George Santayna said those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. True. And history here will repeat itself. Technology will make things easier, and when they are easier it will be expected that more of it will be done.
And, as anyone who has sat on a beach with only a cool drink and the waves to contemplate, more work, no matter how "easy" is not Utopia.
Folks, I've met Ray and done business with his KAI company. He is freakin' brilliant...and then some. That's not to say his "utopian future" is any more likely than "Jetson flying cars", but he's certainly NOT a goofball or charlatan. I'm currently reading "Fantastic Voyage", his book about life extension. Having a background in medicine, I can say that the things he and the doctor co-author cite are both plausible and in agreement with current research for the most part. Ray is a diabetic who no longer requires insulin injections; he manages his illness through diet and exercise. This quest to fight his illness led to the book. So from his own experience, the quality if not the length of his life has improved through application of some of the ideas in the book. SOO, I'm not going to dismiss the new book until I've read it...he might be right! :o)
I am my own gestalt.
What are you on about? Let me guess: you live in a gated community and you and your other nouveau riche friends occasionally take your Cessna down to Mexico for the weekend. While there you stay in a secure resort, safe from any undesirables. In your Calvinist world, decent people are well off and if anyone has to struggle to pay the bills, you're pretty sure it's due to moral failings. And like any decent American, you would never call yourself rich. You're average! Middle class! "I buy vases you can use, not like those RICH folks with their ridiculous Ming vases! HA HA HA!!"
Wake up. You're upper class. We will eat you.
*cough* so... yeah, crazy weather lately, eh?
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.
That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.
There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.
You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.
Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Johnny Cash: "Satisfied Mind":
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
(this is what Bud was listening to in his trailer in Kill Bill 2)
WTF do people WANT? There are people who all they do is go to parties all day, being chauffered around and catered to at every turn who are MISERABLE. Conversely, there are people who literally shovel shit all day who are happy as clams. Jesus H. Christ, Kurzweil has absolutly no clue what a 'utopia' would be like.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I'll tell you a secret: The world produces enough food to feed everyone.
But some of that food is fed to livestock to create other food (which isn't an efficient task). And a lot of food doesn't get to where its going because of corrupt governments and economic factors.
Which is probably the problem right there -- we have the technology to make the world a pretty nice place. But we don't. Magical future technology is unlikely to change our behavior.
Though I understand your point, I don't completely agree. I think one of the best example would be the internet and the revolution it brought. Yes, I call a revolution having access to such an infinite source of knowledge, having to rethink many business models because of new consumer habits (*ahem*RIAA*ahem*), allowing people to publish their own thoughts and receive feedbacks without having to be ripped off by some publisher (blogs), letting people compare the news and judge by themselves what's true/right or not (CNN vs AlJazeera, for an extreme exemple), and I could go on and on.
And that's just ONE innovation. A major innovation that brought so many changes that we can tell right away it is revolutionary. Even if in 30 or 40 years, the internet is a thing of the past, some other new type of network will emerge to replace it. The internet changed our way of life so much that we can hardly imagine living without it, IMHO.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
As William Gibson remarked (quoting from memory), "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth
We "put plow to earth" because it turns out that burying your children who starved through the winter is not so much fun after all.
no amount of technology will bring it back without a funndamental shift in our culture.
If you want it back that badly, you can have it easilly. Go deep into the mountains of Asia or Africa. Leave everything, including your clothes, behind you when you go. Enjoy the three or four weeks you manage to survive in your primative utopia. I'll just stay home and watch TV, thanks.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We have Utopia today! Like the future it is available only to the elite. In the Utopian future it will be the same - the rest of us will live to 40 and die of easily curable/preventable disease.
This shit will not come cheap, those in power will do everything in their ability to stay in power. These are the rules of the world and have been since day 1.
You are damn right. So much technological progress but we know almost nothing about our brain. We understand how 20 million transistors work together to form a computer but we do not have any idea what makes us love or hate each other.
It is only the environment that changed in the past 100 years not peoples lives. Just take the following basic stuff: love, work, power, friendship, kids, getting old, etc. Now people have the same problems, or similar problems in different context. Technology does not really change our lives, it changes only the circumstances.
Just like hoping to get your favourite pancake in a nicer packaging next year. Lets say easier to open box, instant delivery... is there anyone out there believing this would mean a significant change in his life? Yes, unfortunately...
Except they don't have all the same things... at best they have one of those things, usually with some sort of sacrifice involved.
It doesn't matter. Viewed as a whole, the middle class is still a larger economic power house in all of these areas than the "rich" are. The fact that one man choses a plane, while another man choses a sports car, while another man choses a 2000sqft home near a city still adds up to more $$$ than the upper class puts into these areas.
Luxury goods are directed to those with lots of disposable income, which, IMO, does not typically include the middle class.
That doesn't seem to stop a large portion of the population from purchasing an SUV they don't need, a home entertainment center they don't need, a boat they don't need, and hundreds of other luxury items that they don't need. The middle class has some disposable income. They key is that they have to decide which things they really want with that disposable income.
It really is the same for the rich, except that they are looking on a more lavish level. Sure, they could afford all the same stuff middle class people do, but that's not necessarily what they want. Thus their $10,000 suits, $500,000 Exeleros, $10,000,000 private jets, and other nicities that can drain their bank just as fast as it can drain yours or mine. That's why many of these rich folks are attached these nicities as part of their position. i.e. They can't really afford a private jet, so their company pays for them to have one.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You know, it used to be that people who wrote books like these were called science fiction writers. Only they added an intersting story, and usually used concepts they themselves had thought of. And if they did a near-future extrapolation, they usually thought of the good, the bad and the ambiguous (ie everything).
/..
This guy has just ripped a few idea's from popular sci-fi, penned them down in a 'this will happen' fashion, and is now raking in the bucks. But then again, he is a futurist.
I'll have to explain that last thought. I've seen a few clips from futurist presentations. A couple of the more enlightening ones come from futurist conventions (where the best and brightest futurists speak, so I assume). These guys are freaking aura-loving, really-bad-motivational-speaking, awfull-presentation giving hippies of the most hazy, fingerwaving, dressed-up-in-wierd-shit stripe.
And I like hippies, too.
It just saddens me that a loon without an idea of his own beyond what has already filtered down to the public meme through the likes of Micheal Chrichton (Chrichton, for chissakes! Not Stephenson, Brin or Bova...Chrichton! [I liked Jurrasic Park as a book, ditto Rising Sun...but...I think you know what I mean here]), that a rip-off artist like that can pen down widely known concepts (without even a decent narrative), add nothing new or of value and then get plugged on
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Be careful. If farming's more reliable at preventing, say, a whole tribe from extinction and increasing its overall size, farming passes evolutionary muster. That doesn't mean life isn't, overall, shorter and nastier for most of the individuals in it. They might be able, for example, to feed more children - indeed, need them - to keep this whole farming pyramid scheme going. But with diseases and a social structure that demands stratification - chiefs to count grain, soldiers to steal grain from other tribes and repel invaders - you might need those extra little hands to weed and feed chickens so you don't all starve.
So, yes, farming had to yield some benefits immediately, but benefiting the gene pool as a whole could still mean overall suckage (shorter, nastier lives) for the majority of individuals in the system.
I thought that the most interesting idea in Guns, Germs & Steel was the suggestion that writing was primarily an invention designed to steal from the farmer class. In fact, if you look at the main things social conservatives of all religions are "for", it amounts to supporting this stone age social structure. Have lots of kids, be fearful of your lord, keep the young folks locked up until they can be indoctrinated in the system, don't question any of this or we'll knock the shit out of you. Actually, large parts of the world still work this way.
I wouldn't say your average 3rd world farmer is better off than a stone age hunter-gatherer. But I am.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Ray Kurzweil is a reknowned "futurist" who has accurately predicted the future literally hundreds of times. He sometimes is even responsible for it happenning, i.e. he created the first synthetic instruments, first electronic book reader for the blind, the first robot that creates truly original art, a robot that writes poems inspired by other poems ( from what I understand, he really just uses an elegant markov chain), and he is currently one of the industry leaders in Artificial Intelligence research. He owns like 12 corporations and is a millionaire not because he is a crazy lunatic, but because he is often accurate and good at what he does. In addition to the above, he is often paid hefty sums of money to do consulting at Lockheed Martin and some other major companies. This guy is no joke, take what he says seriosuly.
Regards,
Steve
"Look at the proportion of the world's population living on less than a dollar a day, or the local equivalent thereof. It's lower now than it has been at any point in history. Ever. "
By "any point in history ever" I assume you mean "since 1985" when this meaningless statistic was invented by the World Bank to justify neoliberal economic policies.
The relative price of the cheapest commodity foodstuffs increases at a different rate than average inflation. This $1/day statistic assumes that the poor spend their $1 on the same ratio of items as is common to the economy as a whole. So as the price of airplane tickets, cofee, long distance telephone calls, television screens, automobiles and consumer electronics imported from China, become cheaper, we deduce that fewer and fewer people live on less than $1 a day. Of course none of these poor actually got $1 in cash today or ever (but it is based on relative purchasing power of income compared to $1.08 USD 1993). However, the poor living in the poorest countries in the world do not benefit from the importation of cheap manufactured goods from China (compared to expensive american made goods), because they can barely afford to eat (in fact they can not afford it) let alone buy manufactured goods made anywhere whatsoever.
So is a person living in a third world country today with access to the equivalent of $1 USD (or $1.08 1993 USD to be precise, as this is the currently used standard) actually able to eat the same amount of food as he would have been able to in 1993? well... if he took his food in the form of coffee, tobacco, clothing manufactured in a sweat shop or some other locally produced product he probably would be able to. But since he is more likely today to need to import his food from a richer country in 2005 than he would in 1993 (let alone 1905) I am a bit skeptical.
In the meantime the export of manufactured goods produced by the inhuman exploitation of labour has helped push US prices down, increased the apparent value of $1.00 american, while the simultaneous virtual cessation of local food production in third world countries (in favour of cash crops as mandated by the IMF/WTO in exchange for assistance to corrupt local governments who strangely have a tendency to be propped up by the CIA before being accused of human rights violations and deposed as soon as they disobey their american patrons) has increased the local cost of foods, giving that $1.00 much less food purchasing power than in the past relative to purchasing power for goods in general.
And this says absolutely nothing whatsoever about the relative wellbeing of countries as a whole (only the critically poor), and also says nothing whatsoever about the wealth of those third world nations 100 or 200 years ago.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Yes, Kurzweil has the uber tech credentials to lend legitimacy to his predicting endeavors. However, He ignores many, many aspects of our current reality that will definitely impinge his utopian dreamworld.
1 138883/qid=1128375836/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002- 2835979-1699208?v=glance&s=books
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First off, the current fossil fuel based economy needs to be quickly and with as little disruption as possible, moved to a new and low polluting fuel. For the business side of his predictions to take place, this will have to be addressed. There are plenty of opinions about this, including this one:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/087
Perhaps we could look at what many biologists are saying is only a matter of time. A world pandemic, similar to what happened in 1918.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038
Last but not least, when technology gets to the point of enabling humans to live several hundred years, who gets to enjoy such benefits?
No, I think a combination of Kurzweils book and Bill Joys Why the future doesn't need us is more likely.
Let's not forget Murphys Law...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The more that becomes available the more that they want and as all ways the only way to achieve this is by taking it from everybody else. When you have 10 million why strive for 100 million and then for 1000 million and then for 10,000 million etc. , regardless of how much harm they do to society in achieving those petty goals.
Even when the real measure of their achievment is the harm and disruption that they cause to society as a result of their individual greed and their need to have more than anybody else (the celebrated sociopath). Of course the internet might yet create a change as we do get the oppurtunity to mock those individuals regardless of the amount of money that they can spend on self promoting PR, they need to because deep down the guilt and shame are still there (hello bog balls ballmer and wee willie gates ;-)).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen