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Kurzweil on the Future
dwrugh writes "With these new tools, [Kurzweil] says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly. 'My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,' Dr. Ramachandran said. 'You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking.'"
How is haphazardly hacked together code any harder to reverse engineer than intentionally obfuscated code? We know the latter isn't a problem for a determined hacker....
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Taking into consideration computer security issues, I think I'll pass.
Proverbs 21:19
Furthermore, looking at the broader picture, I was reading an artificial intelligence textbook that was available online (sorry, can't recall it offhand) which said that current AI researchers have shifted their focus from "how do humans think?" to "how would an optimally intelligent being think?" and therefore "what is the optimal rational inference you can make, given data?" In that paradigm, the brain is only important insofar as it tracks the optimal inference algorithm, and even if we want to understand the brain, that gives us another clue about it: to improve fitness, it must move closer to the what the optimal algorithm would get from that environment.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Right on track, maybe a little slow....The Terminator was sent back from the year 2029...
My blog
I attended a talk by Kurzweil a couple of weeks ago at the Broad Institute in Cambrige, MA. Absolutely fascinating what he foresees in the near future (~20 years). I believe it is 2028 when he believes a machine will pass the Turing Test. Even sooner, he predicts that we will have nanobots roaming around inside our bodies, fixing things and improving on our inherent deficiencies. Very cool. He also addressed a similar complaint about being able to reverse-engineer the brain, but it was of the nature that we may not be smart enough to do so. I (and he of course) doubt that that is the case. Kurzweil thinks of the brain as a massively parallel system, one that has very low signaling rate (neuron firing) compared to a CPU which it overcomes by the massive number of interconnections. It will definitely be a big problem to solve, but he is confident that it will be.
Kurzweil's predictions will come to pass, by not on the time-scale he envisions. probably centuries. He has been hoping for personal immortality through technology and takes over 200 anti-aging pills a day.
You can't reverse-hack? Who says?
You can reverse engineer anything. Whether it has a well-thought out design or not, its functions can be analyzed and documented and re-implemented and/or tweaked.
If anything, the timetable may be in question, but not the question of whether or not it can be done. I have no doubt it can be done, it's just a matter of how long it'll take given the right resources, the right talent, the right technology, and the right knowledge.
Granted, I'm just an idiot posting on slashdot, and not an inventor or neuroscientist, but I still think I'm right on this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
AI is our generation's flying car. It's what we see in the future, not what will be. Instead of the flying car, we got the internet. It isn't very picturesque (especially over at goatse.cx), but it is cool.
The future will be like that: something people aren't really predicting. Something neat, but not flashy.
Alternatively, the future will be the "inverse singularity" -- you know, instead of the Vinge godlike AI future singularity of knowledge, there could be a singular event that wipes out civilization. We certainly have the tools to do that today.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I said pretty much the same thing Ramachandran said in a Kurzweil related thread yesterday. Funny how that works.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Where's my motherf'ing flying car?
Will people move data like in Johnny Mnemonic in there heads?
Was Mulder also there?
All of th bi-polar, latent hallucination filled, occasional freezing and rebooting, hacked, whacked, twacked mess it is. I wouldn't change it for the world. It took me thirty odd years to figure out what to do with it but suddenly I found out of this mess I can get creativity! Now I am doing marketing for a nightclub (with no experience no less) and started my own magazine! Not going to post a link as I don't want godaddy taking a shit on me quite yet.... That ans they may notice the string of noscript tags that eliminate all of their ads... But back to my occasionally wandering brain I am going to leave it alone, I like it here, and you will never be able to program into a computer one thing, experience, you can make a computer emulate empathy, but you cannot make it learn past a series of yes & no questions into the wonderful world of angels dancing on the heads of pins.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
I have a hard enough time keeping my PS3, Macbook Pro, iPhone, and desktop machine at the latest patch level. Thanks, but no thanks.
No thanks!
One of the great things about current technology is the ability to unplug and sometimes I just want to do just that.
Gone!
A claim that was made saying we would no longer need "paper" by the year 2000. Even with this guys previous track record about the sudden internet boom, computer chess champion, etc... Com'on now, adding computers to the brain? Don't get me wrong, I think i will eventually happen, just not by the year 2020. At one point in the article it says by the 2020's and in another part it says he made a $10k bet that it would happen by 2029. I know its still considered the 2020's, but still, seems a little too early for those types of advancements. It just seems to me that for any significant progress to be made in neurotechnology specifically, the area of "adding computers to the brain", espically with all the hoops you have to jump though before you can even get to the human testing phase, 2020 is way too soon. 2029 might be a better bet IMO -- oh wait, Dr. Kurzweil already made that bet. I think hes going to be off by at least another 10 to 20 years before we have any Johnny Mnemonic's running around (and yes, i know the movie takes place in the year 2021).
With current technology I can very easily move some 20-30gb in my stomach (2gb microsd cards in some small pill-like protective case). But download is then a little shitty...
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
IANANS (I am not a Neuroscientist), but as with other approaches of interfacing the human brain with periphery it seems to work really well to let the brain do the hard interfacing work.
;)
So, as haphazardly as the brain structures, memory storage, sensory input, etc. might have evolved, it might still be flexible enough to figure out a sufficiently simple interface with anything you might connect to it. Given a smart training of finding the newly connected "hardware", it might be possible to interface with some really interesting brain extensions.
The complexity and the abstractness of the extension might be limited by the very pragmatic learning approach of the brain, making it more and more difficult to learn the interface if the learning progress is too abstract/far away for the brain to "stay interested". Though maybe with sufficiently long or "intense" sensory deprivation that could be extended a bit.
My problem with the argument of the "haphazard" structure of the brain is that it could have been used to deny the possibility of artificial limbs or artificial eyes, which both seem to work pretty well. Sure, these make use of already pre-existing interfaces in the brain, but as far as I know (not very far) the brain is incredibly malleable at least during the first 3 years of childhood.
So, as ethically questionable as that may sound to us, it might make sense to implant such extensions in newborn babies and let them interface to them in the same way they learn to use their eyes, coordinate their limbs and acquire language.
Good times
He not only makes predictions about technology (which is a feasible endeavor, though fraught with difficulties), but also about the universe that the technology will interact with. Predicting that brain scan technology will improve is (pardon the pun) a no-brainer. Predicting that we will map out hundreds of specialized areas within the brain is a prediction that is completely off the wall, because we don't know enough about brain function to know if all areas are specialized.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves
As a cyborg myself, I don't see any sane person adding a computer to his brain for non-medical uses.
I was going to say that sane people don't undergo surgery for trivial reasons, then I thought of liposuction and botox for rich morons, and LASIK for baseball players without myopia. I don't see any ethical surgeons doing something as dangerous as brain surgery for anything but the most profound medical reasons, like blindness or deafness.
As to the "as smart as ourselves", the word "smart" has so many meanings that you could say they already are and have been since at least the 1940s: "1. to be a source of sharp, local, and usually superficial pain, as a wound." Drop ENIAC on your foot ans see how it smarts. "7. quick or prompt in action, as persons." By that definition a pocket calculater is smarter than a human.
Kurtzwiel has been saying this since the 1970s, only then it was "by the year 2000".
We don't even know what consciousness is. How can you build a machine that can produce something you don't understand?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
All concerns of security aside, I do think that sophisticated direct brain connections with computers will be coming along pretty soon - think along the lines of what they're doing now with robotic limbs and such. It absolutely won't surprise me if within a few more years (5-10?) that kind of stuff, an artificial limb being controlled by the brain exactly as a natural limb is, is completely commonplace. And direct brain control is the best interface around, really.
For me, the huge thing will be when I'm able to control a computer's inputs directly with my brain to do tasks I currently do now. For instance, while I'm a decent typist, it's still much slower than my thoughts, and I will often race well ahead of what I'm able to type while I'm writing. I'd love it if I could interface directly and just think out what I want to say and then edit out all of the noise. I've got ideas for images I want to create but, unfortunately, I've not got the steady hands necessary to translate those images from my mind to paper or screen. A direct interface might, if advanced enough, allow me to at least put the basics of an idea out there and then repair it later.
I'd love it if I could interact with objects around me as well - for instance, at university I have a swipe card that lets me into the research lab I work in, but it'd be much better if doors and elevators and such could know I'm there, know I'm me, and make a judgment - "Oh, she's alone, she's authorized to enter, open the doors" or "Oh, she's authorized to be here, but she's with someone else, so I will ask her to verify their guest status" or even "She's authorized and not alone, but she's activated a panic button, so I'll alert security, record the scene" or whatever. Basically, a smart environment with my implants acting as the key.
None of that seems particularly unrealistic to me - yes, it'd require a lot of training/calibration to get things working accurately, but it all seems reasonable at this point. I'm not asking for Neuromancer-like "jacking in" or anything - I mean, visual implants would be great, and I can think of thousands of things I'd do with them - but for right now I'd settle for much of what I've described. Heck, I'd settle for implants that'd only let me do what I can already do with a mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera - I can think of lots of neat tricks that could be done to make my life easier like that.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I don't want the govt to read or control my thoughts. Yet another day the elites want to attack the weak, common people and steal what little they have (their minds).
I remember seeing a article about houses that controlled the lives of their inhabitants for them. It wouldn't work because people aren't willing to give up control.
It's one of the things I always think of when I hear `technological singularity': people won't be willing to give up control. They want to be the smartest. So they won't make machines that are smarter than them: they'll make themselves smarter.
Not only could basic arithmetic functions and memory be built in, but also internet connectivity and even interfacing with body-protecting nanobots (personal control side steps the privacy problems). They could be designed to pass on to offspring (sperm and ova carry them)(would be necessary because it makes them permanent and secure in the perception of the general world).
The implications would be massive. We'd probably see the disappearance of most other computers, decentralization (why live near by when we can VOIP in our heads?), longer lifespans, and many other things.
This is of course overlooking ethics. Should we really mess with our bodies like this?
Once we would be able to connect our brains up to computers, would you really trust it to run on windows? I dread to think what would happen if you downed a pint of something it didn't know about.
would bring a new meaning to BSOD
Won't zombies love us even more then because of the crunchyness of our brains?
Sort of like a perfect playoff run in the NBA. You can be for or against it--it will happen either way.
*shudders and nuts in trousers*
Oh shit, someone get me a Kleenex please...
And there have been some remarkably bad ones.
What new tools? What festival? Why doesn't Kurzweil get a first name while Ramachandran gets not only a first name but an initial? Has Ray dropped the Ray?
The brain is an adaptive system. Provide it with a stimulus, and it will reprogram itself. How do you think the monkey learned how to use the robotic arm? Did they hack into the neurons and input code to work a third arm?
No, the monkey's brain spontaneously created the neural network to control it. Sentient beings aren't computers, at least not in the conventional sense, because they reformat themselves to process new data (learning), and even to process new types of inputs. One might be able to build a computer advanced enough to handle this level of functionality, but once it is built, you won't be programming it with code. Instead, you'll be teaching it just like you do a child.
I hate naysayers such as you. Now if you'll excuse me, my robotic butler is informing me that my space elevator car to moonbase 23 has arrived.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You know that form factor us up to 8GB now.
Never leave a dead horse unbeaten!
From TFA:
Two decades ago he predicted that "early in the 21st century" blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
I'm guessing that 20 years ago he was thinking of a handheld device that would actually allow blind people to literally "see" the text - not have it read to them. In 1976 Kurzweil invented the Kurzweil Reading machine that could read text to the blind. It covered an entire table top. With an exponential decrease in size, this would have been projected to be a handheld device in the early 90s. So why add the extra 10-20 years to the prediction?
I'm guessing, and I could be wrong, that he added the extra time to allow for the development of the required neural link for visualizing the text. So, this really isn't the device he envisioned, but a simpler concept that does a similar thing. Kind of like a rocket belt is like a jet pack, but doesn't let you fly from New York to L.A. at 300 MPH.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
The guy used to be okay then he went coo-koo for cocoa-puffs. Jeane Dixon is more often correct.
just like everyone else.
The future Conan???
PS Anyone having trouble getting their rightful Karma bonuses despite still having 'excellent' Karma?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Without the ability to install properly open code, I suggest a good security patch, like zen, or some other semi-mystical skepticism.
Damn those pesky terrorists
...In the worst sense.
Evolution only needed to be good enough to just about work, and then stops, does not tidy up behind itself and moves onto something else more interesting.
This is why we have blind spots, and our backs ache.
The only reason anyone thinks that human brains are neat, logical is that that is how computers are and that is the only way we can get them to work.
I think we will get artificial minds, but not until we have reverse engineered by brute strength an increasingly complex series of real minds, starting at slugs and moving up. We don't really know the underlying rules behind a brain and it's organisation (however this weeks new scientist is interesting)
In relative terms, cave paintings started about 40000BC but the rules of perspective only came into general use in 14th (?) century Italy.
I am not sure where we are on that scale as far as AI is concerned
...that means, in 12 years we will be able to write code as complex as our brains without any catastrophic bugs that crashes it frequently or leads to totally useless results?
I don't think so. Computers are now faster and "bigger" (not physically) than 30 years before. Programs have more functions than 30 years before.
But essentially, they do exactly the same thing as 30 years before, just MORE of the same thing. And they don't do it BETTER, they still have the SAME BUGS, and the SAME NUMBER of bugs per lines of code.
Computer programs are made by humans, and I don't think that we - the humans, the creators of these computers - will evolve faster in the next 12 years than we did in the last 30 years.
We may grow it in silica, but at core, it'll be genetic algorithms in an environment tuned to making neural nets. It'll be messy, hacky and probably more than adequate for our purposes.
But don't expect it to be any more well behaved than your cat.
To call God a "hacker" reminds me of the three blind men feeling an elephant... Why reinvent the wheel when all you need to live forever is a modicum of faith?
I'm an extremely experienced programmer with more than a passing interest in how human brains are set up. What the good doctor says about brains being designed by hackers is pretty accurate, but he misinterprets the description.
"God" (and I presume he means Einstein's God here) isn't the hacker that creates the human brain, the human behind the wheel is. We have varying genetic predispositions, but even after initial conditions are set, our brains develop differently based on our experiences. It's well known that musical instruction early in life will adjust how much of your gray matter is dedicated to mathematics, and this is pretty much true about all of our faculties.
Put another way, our brains work out the rules one step at a time, similar to your typical basement hacker. It doesn't have access to things like "best practices" or "design patterns", and so it results in about 100 billion cells of spaghetti code.
This doesn't mean that it isn't reverse-engineerable, but it does mean that results from reverse engineering one brain won't be 100% applicable to other brains. This means that we'll have to have some pretty smart automated systems to help us figure out how any one brain is wired.
In Kurzweil's defense, even researchers in these fields tend to fall into the same mental trap, that of "we can't do it now, so we won't be able to do it any time soon." These are the days where we're constantly proving that adage wrong.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
There are two questions: First, can computer have Consciousness, and answer is maybe yes, some kind of Consciousness, very limited in scope, but definitively not based on the computer that operate on existing logic. What have been accomplished so far is barely simulation of very limited Consciousness. Second question, can computer have Self-Consciousness and definitive answer is NO! We human are only beings that have Self-Consciousness. Of course, Ray Kurzweil uses very limited mechanical definition of the humans.
i'm very surprised no one has seen fit to link to this article.
... well i think you get the picture.
i think that man-machine interface in general is vastly overlooked, and i'm going to get specific. a senior partner of an mid-sized architect firm keeps asking me why it takes so long to produce a drawing, given that the parts can be created quickly on the command line. what if you could just think of it, and it appeared? sure there would have to some scaling algorithms involved, and it would probably take some practice, but it would ultimately result in a higher level of productivity.
now apply that to everything, and when i say everything i mean chip design, finance, medicine,
is it the 'singularity'? no, it definitely isn't. is it a precursor state to some type of singularity? i'm taking bets. does this involve machine consciousness, at least at any point in the near (20 years) future? i don't think it does; thats a pipe dream.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
I think you're misinterpreting the concept of the singularity. What we hit there is a point where things will change so drastically and quickly that we are currently completely unable to predict what might happen afterwards. Think of it as an immense chaos injection. We really don't know what will happen afterwards.
The primary things influencing the outcome are our current state of mind. Considering the drive humans have to prove themselves superior by wiping out anyone even slightly different than themselves, the most probable outcome that I see is the complete subjugation of the human race by machines, with the exception of the genetic pattern of the person who initiated the singularity. Yes, I live in a dark world.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
lol skeptic
"facts? facts? we don't need no steeenking facts!"
âoeYou can do reverse engineering, but you canâ(TM)t do reverse hacking.â
:)
Not true... engineers reverse hack Microsoft's crap all the time.
Kurzweil is the ultimate optimist. The technology will be there for solar power for sure. But one thing will stand in the way, oil companies.
I read somewhere, I think it was the BBC, that a study an aging revealed the following surprising results. Anti-oxidants taken to extend your lifespan or at least extend your healthy years, actually didn't help. As a matter of fact, there was some evidence that they actually shortened the life span. We know so little about the aging process at this time. In my opinion it's probably best not to make yourself a human guinea pig in the hope that something might help.
Check out the Wiki bio on Ray Kurzweill. The summary didn't mention it, but he's an amazing fellow, with a long history of prominent inventions.
He created the first omni-font OCR system. You may have seen the name Kurzweil associated with both voice recognition and a line of music keyboards and synthesizers; they're both his creations. He's also done stuff in the medical field among others. The Wiki article is worth a read.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is simply derived by looking at the only sentient, and seemingly conscious being, us.
This is why I believe mimicking the brain is just one part, but it's not the whole thing, and why it's much more complicated than Kurzweil thinks.
If so, let's hope there's a grammar check on the data beforehand.
The only difference, he found a way that actually works. Well, at least he made it a LOT less trivial than anyone else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For the sake of argument, lets say that there was a way to become immortal. Statistical studies say that the actual lifespan of such a person would be about 500 years because in that period of time we would become a victim of some sort of fatal accident. That having been stated, can you imagine a world where "immortality" would be possible? There are many implications to society as a whole. 1. If it was not cheap, would we want to let anyone with the money to take the treatment? What about geniuses that couldn't afford it. 2. If it was readily affordable, and everyone was treated. What about overpopulation. One of the promises of most religions that you would attain immortality in the afterlife would loose its appeal. After all, why die when you have immortality right now. The list of changes in society is very long. I think that I would not like to live in a world where everyone or just a few people could live forever. Can you imagine a world where Rupert Murdock, Dick Cheney, Bill Gates and a host of others could lord it over others forever?
Kurzweil is one seriously messed up scientist. This guy extended the Moore's law (look up Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns) to predict that civilization as we know it will cease to exist and will effectively become the civilization of super/trans-humans or artificial intelligent beings by 2020.
Never mind all the scientific or technical obstacles that even non-scientific person could think of, let alone once we get into philosophical issues (for things we don't even have words to talk about yet).
Yet there is still a very simple reason why the prediction will not happen. Does he know how long it takes for FDA to approve a brain implant of the kind he is suggesting (even if we had one)?
I've said it before and I will say it again. This is nothing more than a religion posing as pseudo-science from a guy who takes 200 anti-aging pills hoping to reach immortality though technology.
But one thing is for sure, Kurzweil will die just like every other "prophet" before him.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
From the RZA as Bobby Digital: "F*ck you analog n!ggers I be digital" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RZA
What I'd like to see is Kurzweil predict a new version of the K2600. Preferably one that doesn't cost $4000.
Humans could add and subtract numbers for millennia, yet it wasn't until a few hundred years ago that calculus was disovered. True AI can be as far from what we can do today (e.g. speech recognition) as arithmetics is from calculus. I strongly doubt that anything exciting will happen in 20 years. We might have the next iteration of facebook, but machines that think like humans? Not very likely.
It might be less low hanging than most people think. Most predictions I've seen for, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, computers are gonna be as intelligent as humans" are based on, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, we'll soon have as many transistors on a chip as there are neurons in a human brain." Especially marketing depts love to hint that way now and then, but they're not the only culprits.
Unfortunately,
1. A neuron isn't a transistor. Even the inputs alone would need a lot more transistors to implement at our current technology level.
An average brain neuron takes its inputs from an _average_ of 7000 other neurons, with the max being somewhere around 10k, IIRC. The vast majority of synapses are one-way, so an input coming through input 6999 can't flow back through inputs 0 to 6998. So even just to implement that kind of insulation between inputs, you'd need an average of 7000 transistors per "silicon neuron" just for the inputs.
Let's say we build our silicon transistor to allow for 8k inputs, so we have only one modul repeated ad nauseam, instead of custom-designing different ones for each number of inputs between 5000 and 10000. Especially since, we'll see soon, that number of inputs doesn't even stay constant during the life of a neuron. It must accomodate a bit of variation. That's 2^13 transistors per neuron just for the inputs, or enough to push those optimistic predictions back by 13 whole Moore cycles. Even if you believe that they're still only 1.5 years each, that pushes back the predictions by almost 20 years. Just for the inputs.
2. Here's the fun part: neurons form new connections and give up old ones all the time. Your brain is essentially one giant FPGA, that gets rewired all the time.
Biological neurons do it by physically growing dendrites which connect to an axon terminal. A "silicon neuron" can't physically modify traces on the chip. You have to include the gates and busses that switch an input to another nearby source from thousands available outputs of another "neuron". _Somehow_. E.g., a crossbar kind of architecture. For each of those thousands of inputs.
Now granted, we'll probably figure out something smarter out, and save some transistor for that reconfiguration, but even that only goes so far.
There go a few more Moore cycles.
4. And that was before we even get to the neuron body. That thing must be able to do something with that many inputs, plus stuff like deciding by itself to rewire its inputs, or even (yep we have documented cases) one area of the brain decides to move to a whole other "module" of the brain or take over its function. It's like an ALU deciding to become a pipeline element instead in a CPU, because that element broke. In the FPGA analogy, each logic block there is complex enough to also decide by itself how it wants to rewire its inputs, and what it wants to be a part of.
There are some pretty complex proteins at work there.
So frankly even for the neuron body itself, imagining that one single transistor is enough to approximate it, is plain old dumb.
5. And that's before we even get to the waste we do with transistors nowadays. It's not like old transistor radios, where you thought twice how many you need, and what else you could use instead. Transistors on microchips are routinely used instead of resistors, capacitors, or whatever else someone needed there.
And then there are a bunch wasted because, frankly, noone ever designs a 100 million transistor chip by lovingly drawing and connecting each one by hand. We use libraries of whole blocks and software which calculates how to interconnect them.
So basically look at any chip you want, and it's not a case of 1 transistor = 1 neuron. It's more like a whole block of them would be equivalent to one neuron.
I.e., we're far from approaching a human brain in silicon. We're more like approaching the point where we could simulate the semi-autonomous ganglion of an insect's leg in silicon. Maybe.
6. And that's before we get to the probl
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Kruzweil wants to upgrade the 'suboptimal software in your brain'.
Geez - I sure hope he doesn't use Vista...
I do not see any super major advances happening anytime soon. One can only hope the environmental movement takes root in American society soon to stop people from swapping gadgets that can last for 10 years every year. That would reduce the associated pollution with current gadget frenzy, but at the same time slow the adaptation by general public of the next generation devices. You can't look at 12 years from now as being 12 generations of new devices, leading up to some miracle gadget that plugs into your ass and runs on your refuse (optional adapter for Politicians that plugs into their mouth instead).
"Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that itâ(TM)ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years"
I'm not sure that cost-competitive is the right way of looking at this. It's a matter or absolute versus comparative advantage. With the increase in fossil fuel prices, teleportation may soon be a cost-competitive alternative...
We may just create a Ghost-in-the-shell-style data port (for the brain) so people can jointly jack in to a single computer (or directly to each other).
Transcendence wouldn't necessarily take the form of leaving the brain behind, but rather, making each brain become a node in a greater distributed parallel processing network. To transcend would be to sacrifice your individual identity in order to be come part of the meta-brain....a brain which can think thoughts of limitless depth and complexity.
In my opinion, that is going to happen sooner than the sort of transcendence you are talking about. And when it does, the metabrain will have complete control of the destiny of the human race.
Prepare yourselves! The metabrain comes!
He really doesn't seem to look any younger or stay the same age either. He does look a bit better than smokers of his age, but not by a whole lot, in my opinion.
Have you seen him lately? He was on Glenn Beck the other night, and he looks (to me) like a mid-40's-er, when he's more like 60. It wasn't just make-up, either - skin tone and everything was better. I saw him just a few years ago and he looked _much_ older. Some things like ear growth apparently don't reverse, so the look is a bit confusing really.
I've been skeptical of his health regime, but he seems to be proving himself correct.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Its often dangerous to extrapolate an exponential trend, much less a linear trend because they can have the nasty effect of flattening out or even turning over (bubble investing). Who knows whether we are at the middle, base or top of the curve for computing or biotechnology?
That was the conclusion of a pre-Reaganomics book called The Academic Marketplace that turned the light of sociology back upon academia.
And it still seems to be true. Kurzweil is a court jester.
Let's all hope for a quick and painless stroke for Kurzweil. The worst thing that could happen to him is a lingering (and damned embarrassing) cancer of several years that science actually _can't_ with just a little concentrated thought cure "real soon".
Mr Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor. Beyond that, he is an evangelist for technologies of the future. If he wants to be the announcer for new stuff, well then be my guest. But don't forget, he's only a messenger. He's not coding or creating any of the future technologies that he's always repeating to anyone that will listen. So don't shoot the messenger. As for the singularity, its a technological singularity, and the clock has already started, It has moved in the last year to 4 percent. And it's all about a thinking machine processing and understanding it's thoughts at a human level and beyond. Mr Kurzweil's inventions while notable, have nothing to do with the Technological Singularity.
...and building software that will actually do what we want it to do.
Hasan
"Singularities" happen all the time as technology progresses. It is a form of subjective illusion analogous to perspective. If I stand on a very long, straight highway, I see all the lines converging in the distance to a point. Beyond that point, I cannot see any further. This is an apparent singularity, not a real one. If I travel down the highway, I will eventually pass the point beyond which I could not previously see. Yet, my motion continues in much the same manner as before.
Could the Romans have conceived of electric motors or nuclear bombs? These are just some examples of how technology has dramatically augmented human capability in unforeseen and iterative ways. Between the Romans and us, we passed through a "singularity."
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Obviously this is a great idea--just look at the unmitigated success we've produced with human MBAs.
Here's a thought--before we can construct a machine to do a task, we might need to have a good understanding of the task itself. How can we create artificial intelligences that are smarter than us, when we are so spotty at educating our own already-existing intelligences?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
When it comes to The Singularity he is Stone Cold Crazy, and doesn't know the meaning of curbing his enthusiasm. As I said somewhere else, he's so good at glossing over issues he should patent his methods and make a killing in the magazine industry.
I noticed that the summary referred to him as "Dr." Kurzweil. According to Wikipedia:
Kurzweil's definitely intelligent, but I don't think it's standard practice to call someone "Dr." when all they have is honorary degrees. I'm not going to call Paul McCartney "Dr." even though Yale did just give him an honorary doctorate.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
are all morons. If they really knew anything, they would be doing research, not trying to sell books full of bullshit predictions about human immortality (blatantly impossible and stupid) and the rise of a supreme race of machines.
Unbridled and irrational optimism is not science. It is at best science fiction, and at worst religion.
From wikipedia, Kurzweil's only research into AI comes from working with OCR systems and text to speech... which technically aren't even considered part of the AI field anymore. It hardly makes him qualified to predict where these fields are going.
Usually, futurists predict fast paced technological progression, or even exponential progression. Some even predict something called the "technological singularity" that has no clear definition, other than that basically all of your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled by advanced technology.
Why do they predict these ridiculous things? They might show some graph of how computers have gotten exponentially faster over time from Moore's law. However, this isn't a real justification for AI. A computer that runs windows twice as fast doesn't suddenly become self aware. Furthermore, we've *always* known the progression in the speed of computers will *stop* at a certain point, when making transistors any smaller would be impossible since certain quantum effects would come into play.
Why then, do fururists predict such things? Here's why:
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0670033847
Because a futurists *job* is to sell books and do speaking engagements, and books that say something like "AI is moving forward *very* slowly right now, and it will probably be a few hundred years before we have anything that is even a rough approximation of human" aren't very inspiring to science fiction fan boys, and so they don't sell well.
Thus, the technological singularity. The poorly defined event that guarantees that whatever nerdy science fiction fantasies you have, they will be realized within your lifetime.
What could possibly sell better? Other than the idea of human immortality (also promised by kurweil and other futurists!). Here's another book by some futurists that makes similar predictions about human immortality and a single event that transforms the human race:
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Authorized-James-Version-Apocrypha/dp/0192835254
I place both Kurweil's book and that book in the same category. Religious texts. You can believe in them if you *want* to believe in them (I mean, I'm not going to stop you) but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a rational justification.
And all this description concerns handling the neurons at the synapse level.
Now there are all other factor that influence the work of neuron cells, including presence of substances in the surrounding liquid, interaction with the support cells, substances in the blood flow, etc.
(think of hormones, growth factors, etc...)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A lot of comments have been harping on Kurzweil for making worthless predictions that are too far out to be worth examining. In other words, they want to just be left alone.
But I think there is fundamental value in such futurist thought, even if essentially none of it pans out, and even if what does work out is late. Most of the people that really create things tend to be very focused on their own domain. Thinkers like Kurzweil tend to branch out, look at many domains, and then provide imaginings about how those domains might be combined.
I think this is essentially the process for progress in the world we live in today. Perhaps 100 years ago, someone could research just radio waves and come up with a great idea for a radio device. Now, things are more integrated and complicated than ever.
So in short, even if nothing he predicts comes about, the fact that it inspires is perhaps valuable enough.
Ok, let's consider it.
Which is basically a non-factor, since the wiring gets it back to the right orientation anyway.
And it does saccades that not only allow it to see in any direction anyway, but also greatly increase resolution.
It's got a low light mode, unlike most modern cameras which become 100% useless in low light. Most cameras you can buy need a flashlight even in relatively well artificially lit rooms, and become freaking useless at the light levels where the eye becomes predominantly B/W. So, hmm, between going monochrome and going blind, it seems to me that the eye wins, hands down.
Only in as much as any other piece of biology is. Even so, it can withstand a lot of things which would render a cheap camera useless. And it can self-heal from most things.
But it's wired to something which can do a reasonable job even with an unfocused image. Try an OCR or, better yet, image recognition in the same conditions, and you'll see some epic fail.
But let's talk about some other advantages:
- better resolution than almost any digital camera
- saccades help increase the effective resolution even more
- some image processing and compression is built right into the retina, so it needs _far_ less bandwidth on the optic nerve than a modern camera would
- takes up less space than a camera able to focus over the same range of distances, and get similar image quality. (Hint: it doesn't need to move the lens waay forward and back to focus.)
- can deal with a wider range of brightness in the same image (most cameras need postprocessing so if the bride looks ok, the groom doesn't look like a light-sucking black hole, or viceversa)
- it can even rewire itself to deal with stuff it wasn't designed to deal with. E.g., you can get a camera-style photo-receptor as an implant against blindness, and the neurons in the eye and brain will rewire themselves to work with the fundamentally different image it gives. (That's one amazing thing about neurons: they can essentially reverse-engineer almost any kind of body, and learn to use it.)
Etc.
Now I'm not saying it's _perfect_, nor "proof of creation". But it's a lot better than you seem to assume, anyway. We're not quite at the point where we can equal it. Yet. We will be eventually, but not yet. We can do better in _some_ aspects, but often at the price of doing something else worse.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For my thesis project in grad school I worked on modelling a Mauthner neuron from a goldfish, using as accurate a physical/chemical model as possible. This meant multiple ion species and various kinds of ion channels all governed by Maxwell's and the drift-diffusion equation, solved using a FEM and multigrid approach. We did this with a rack of 32 Apple servers running Linux as a Beowulf cluster. Calculating a second's worth of activity took hours.
The goal was to mimic the calculation the two Mauthner neurons made in deciding whether and how to flee from danger. Simulating something as complex as the activity of a mammalian pyramidal cell in this manner is probably still a couple Moore-cycles away.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Think I'll have myself a pint'o that
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
For anyone doubting our ability to model a brain in computer hardware, I very much encourage you to read this.
"War makes me sad." - Me
Kurzweil's argument is that if you make an estimate of the processing power of the human brain, computers will reach that level of processing power for a cost of $1000 by around the year 2020. He says nothing about the number of transistors, which, by 2020 will be about 250 billion, considering a doubling every 1.5 years and that Intel just released a 2 billion transistor chip. The human brain is estimated to have about 100 billion neurons.
If you are going to attack his argument the place to start is his estimate of the computing power of the human brain, because it is there that he is fudging a little. We don't really know what it would take to simulate some of the finer aspects of the brain. What does it mean to speak of the processing power of the brain? It is so different from a computer, isn't it? I don't really know. I think some people would argue that you can reduce the actions of the brain to an equivalence with a digital computer, at least so far as the outward appearance goes. Let's not talk about consciousness because we are not even close to understanding what it is in scientific terms, let alone reproducing it.
It is a shame you spent so much time arguing against 1 transistor = 1 neuron, when no one has even claimed that.
There are many interesting points to be argued in his prediction. So please try to understand them a little before spouting off and wasting other people's time.
His predictions would be vaguely correct but delayed by several decades and wrong in specific terms.Just like flying cars.
Which spawns an interesting question in my own set of randomly evolved neurons: If you have a block of obfuscated code that compiles correctly, would it be acceptable to provide that instead of intelligible source under the GPL ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.