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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.
Things have pretty much sucked up to this point.
Someone hates these cans.
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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.
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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?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Where is my flying car.
Get on it. I was promised one more than 50 years ago.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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.
"singularity" says nothing about "bright future" or "utopia" per sé, but more descripes a point where the ever increasing innovation rate makes predictions impossible.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Pessimist: "That glass is half empty."
Optimist: "That glass is half full."
Kurzweil: "The self-cloning milk in that glass will replicate thanks to nanobots and end world hunger."
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Iain M Banks (to be confused with the non-sci-fi writer Iain Banks) has written a lot of book about "The Culture" a man/machine symbiosis that has created a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Actually it sounds also like Robert Heinlein, Asimov and most other Sci-Fi writers I've ever read. But mostly like Iain M Banks who books are a cracking read.
Living to 300... of course we will, we'll have to work till we are 280 though.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
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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.
How cuckoo is Kurzweill really, when he makes another mint from selling his science fiction to the remaining U.S. population, not yet burning The Origin of Species?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Why stop there, fuck 300. How about we don't have to die. Why wouldn't the same chemical modifications that would allow for a 300 hundred year lifespan continue to work forever?
As described, this sounds just like the singularity Vinge always writes about. I hope he gets credit. I do think there's some sort of singularity coming, but I'm less sure than Kurzweil that we can predict much of what will be on *this* side of it, let alone on the other side.
BTW, for those who (like me) had always pronounced "Vinge" to rhyme with "hinge", according to Vinge himself it rhymes with "dingy".
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?
Well, that's easy enough to fix.
;-)
Vase
You can purchase a used Cessna for ~$20,000-$50,000, or you can build one for ~$20,000. You'd probably get a bank loan similar to your car loan, but you may be able to stretch the loan for a longer period than a car. (Planes usually last at least 20 years. With good care on the airframe, it can last two to three times that.)
Which isn't to say that you should run out and get a plane. Many people (myself included) don't have sports cars either, despite the fact that they can afford them. Only bother with a plane if you actually want to fly.
As for the vase... I take it you're not married?
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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.
If you people would RTFB, you'd discover that the Singularity has a history of intellectual discussion going back around two decades. The treatments in science fiction are a part of that, but just reading the SF isn't going to get you much (any more than reading SF will teach you physics, or math, though it might serve to get you interested).
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://singinst.org/what-singularity.html
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/
And let's not forget:
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Sin gularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity
The first person to use the term "Singularity" as applied to futurism was John von Neumann, and he used it to mean a disruptive change in the future brought about by a high level of technology.
The first person to postulate that recursive self-improvement in Artificial Intelligence would rapidly produce "ultraintelligent machines" was the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good. Today this is known as the "hard takeoff" scenario.
The first person to popularize the term "Singularity", referring to the breakdown in our model of the future which occurs subsequent to the (technological) creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, was the mathematician (and sometime SF author, and inventor of cyberspace) Vernor Vinge.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" belongs to the accelerating change crowd that includes John Smart. Their thesis is, first, that history shows a trend for major transitions to happen in shorter and shorter times, and second, that you can graph this on log charts, get reasonably straight lines, and extend the lines to produce useful quantitative predictions. I agree with the qualitative thesis but not the quantitative thesis.
In my opinion, Kurzweil could greatly strengthen many of his arguments by giving up on the attempt to predict when these things will occur, and just saying: "They will happen eventually." I think that it is just as important, and a great deal more probable, to say: "Eventually we will be able to create Artificial Intelligence surpassing human intelligence, and then XYZ will happen, so we better get ABC done first." Than to say: "And this will all happen on October 15th, 2022, between 7 and 7:30 in the morning."
Since I don't care particularly about when someone builds a smarter-than-human intelligence, just what happens after that, and what we need to get done before; and since I don't think that this necessarily needs to make life incomprehensible, so long as we do things right; I belong to the I.J. Good "hard takeoff" crowd. With a strong helping of Vernor Vinge, because I think there's a difference in kind associated with a future that contains mind smarter than human, which we do not get just from talking about flying cars, or space travel, or even nanotechnology.
On Slashdot, someone says "intelligence" and you think of all the computer CEOs with IQs of 120 and the starving professors with IQs of 160, and you think that means intelligence isn't important. But you will not find many excellent CEOs, nor professors, nor soldiers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor rationalists, nor scientists, who are chimpanzees. Intelligence is the foundation of human power, the strength that fuels our other arts. Respect it. When someone talks about enhancing human intelligence or building smarter-than-human AI, pay attention. That is what matters to the future, not political yammering, not our little nation-tribes. In 200 million years nobody's going to give a damn who flew the first flying car or
Planetary death rate: 150,000 lives per day. End the slaughter
They have -> You have -> I have
Expensive Sports Car -> Affordable Sports Car -> A 1984 Ford Ares
$3000 Cell Phone -> $0-$500 Cell Phone -> $0.35/minute payphone
Jet Plane -> Cessna -> Sometimes when I'm in my cubical I put out my arms and make airplane noises
Mansion -> Spacious Home -> Small 1 bedroom apartment next door to noisy @ssholes
Ming Vase -> A Vase that you can use -> No vase, but no plants so who cares
Private doctors -> public HMO -> My health plan: don't get sick (thanks to both Clinton and Bush)
Hot women -> fat women -> blind women
Electric heat -> Gas heat -> I just have gas
Gold plated Mozart records -> vynil Beatles records -> police record
Privacy -> a false sense of security -> run, Forest, run
Celebrity friends -> friends -> a socket puppet
Huge income, lots of time off -> modest income, unpaid overtime -> No income, lots of time off
Sex in a private jacuzzi -> sex in the community pool -> sex at the zoo (and not with other patrons)
Dashing good looks -> good hegine -> the roaches I live with are disgusted by me
Vote Republican -> vote Democrat -> Voted for the rabbit to get the tricks
Plays golf -> plays bowling -> plays with himself
Bogus diploma from Harvard/Yale because daddy is a major contributor -> diploma from community college -> Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science (yeah kids, stay in school)
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.
Utopia.
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.
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So far all that humans have shown any proclivity for is eating, crapping and sleeping. Any thing more complicated that this just turns into a total clusterfark.
word.
If one were to completely solve aging, the "average" longevity would be 2000-3000 years (limited by ones hazard function). If one adds to that nanotechnology based "enhancements" one is probably pushing 10,000 years. Taking uploading into account, ones lifespan could be trillions of years. Ray pushes the envelope but he may have some problems with where the actual limits are.
Speak truth to power.
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"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
5 479565/qid=1128376027/sr=5-3/ref=cm_lm_asin/002-28 35979-1699208?v=glance
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