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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.'"
Taking into consideration computer security issues, I think I'll pass.
Proverbs 21:19
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!
Nonetheless there is something to what Kurzweil says, futurist (or in my language 'bullshit-artist') though he is.
The brain is probably impossible to 'reverse-engineer', not because of its evolution but because to come up with a brain you need to have 9 months in-utero development followed by years of environmental formation, nurturing and so forth, by which time the brain is so complex and fragile that analyzing it adequately becomes practically impossible.
I mean, take the electro-encephalogram (EEG). It gives us so little information it's laughable. Electrical signals from the cortext mask those of deeper structures and still we just end up with an average of countless signals. Every other form of brain monitoring is also fuzzy. Invasive monitoring of brain function is problematic because it damages the brain and the brain adapts (probably) in different ways each time. Sure, we can probably get some of the information we are after, but the entire brain is, I would suggest, too big a task.
But we can use the same principles that exist in the brain to mimic its functionality. But it ultimately is a new invention and not a replica of a brain, even if it does manage to demonstrate consciousness.
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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.
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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
It's a metaphor. The literal meaning is irrelevant, the point is that that scientists thinks our biology is rather haphazard and jumbled, not well-structured. I think you're reading the statement too literally.
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A hack can be beautiful or ugly. A hack that uses a property of the programming language in a clever way to achieve a speedup is beautiful, but a hack that relies on the processor violating its own spec in a certain way is ugly, especially if the programmer who wrote it didn't bother documenting what or why he did. Not only is the latter incredibly fragile, you can also not just take the specs and understand it - you have to know what's not in the spec to be able to fully grok it.
/>* is as unreadable as the worst spaghetti code, but a web dev who needs to deliver a prototype within hours might actually do that. He quickly hacks things together, (ab)using PHP's proprocessor nature in order to deliver quickly, even though not even himself will be abe to maintain the document afterwards.
Also note how "quickly hacked together" usually implies that conceptional and code-level cleanliness were forgone in favor of development time savings. A dynamic webpage that consists of PHP and HTML happily mixed together with constructs like <?php if($d = $$q2) { ?> <30-lines-of-html
The human brain consists of patch after randomly applied patch. I'd think that it would be the equivalent of a byzantine system with twenty different coding styles, three different OOP implementations and a dependency tree that includes four versions of the same compiler because parts of the code require a specific version. The code works, it's reasonably fast but it's miles from being clean and readable.
* Yes, it is supposed to have an assignment and a variable variable in the if block.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
Wishful thinking has made fools of better thinkers.
Biomedical advances will never increase at the same rate as computer technology, simply because experimenting with silicon (or whatever) doesn't have any health and safety issues tied to it, more less any potential moral backlash (barring real AI, which I think is farther away as well).
It takes 15 years, sometimes, for a useful drug with no proven side effects to make it to market. Even if we made theoretical breakthroughs today, it'd be a decade or more before they could be put into practice on a meaningful scale, assuming that they were magically perfect and without flaws/side-effects/whatever.
It's very dangerous to look at our advances in computer technology and try to apply those curves to other disciplines. It's equally ridiculous to assume that the rate of increase will remain the same with no compelling evidence to support the assertion. In terms of computers and biotech, we're still taking baby steps, and while they seem like a big deal, we still have a long way to go.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ten years ago he was saying 2010.
Kurzweil's timelines have no foundation in reality, and never have.
We're not even CLOSE to anything resembling some magical singularity.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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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
...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.
Let's say you have this guy, he's about 15 billion years old. He's been working on this code for about half that long, on and off, learning as he goes. He doesn't document, at all, no comments, and while it all compiles properly (though depending on the base OS the quality of the compilation varies), the number of separate files and custom libraries he's using is in the petabyte range.
He's not trying to obfuscate the code, he's just not trying not to. Purposeful obfuscation implies organization. Hacking together humanity's brain is just a million billion messy miracles.
Immortality might be boring. Would I like to live forever? I don't know, ask me again in three hundred years.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this before, but where did you get the crazy idea that DNA is somehow 'worlds ahead' of us since it uses a way of storing information that can, with a little imagination, be seen as a base four system. The way you store your data has NOTHING to do with the data itself. If I were to post this message in both binary and hex, would the latter be more advanced that the former? I'm sure we can build a computer that stores data in base 8 by the end of this year. But there is no point in doing so at all.
I do not disagree with you on the whole 'the brain is pretty complex compared to a computer chip'-thing, but comparing DNA to binary makes no sense at all.
Which predictions? I'm looking at Wikipedia and so far his track record doesn't seem good.
Robotic limbs are in research, but we don't have anything thats production ready soon. We don't have translating telephones. We do have software that can transcribe speech into text. Poorly, but I'd still chalk that one up to him. Cybernetic chauffeurs have not materialized. Unless you count phone menus as intelligent (which I don't) then his intelligent answering machine one hasn't materialized either. About the best I've seen is ones that could, poorly, parse and english sentence and look for key words. Most have trouble with "Yes" or "No."
Moving on to the next section which, as the text indicates, is supposed to happen before 2010... The classroom is not dominated by computers in any real sense, much less generated course-work tailored to students. The production sector is not dominated by a small number of highly skilled people. Just look at how things are in China. That is unless you mean economic domination (and sub "highly skilled" with "rich"), which he didn't. Tailoring for individuals is not common by any reasonable sense. We are just beginning to use simulations for things like protein folding. We are far away from using them for drug testing. About the only one that could be considered accurate is handheld image recognition for blind-people, which I would imagine is technically feasible. However since this tech is not widespread (haven't seen a single blind person using it), its only a half-win.
So no, his predictions are not good, and he is wrong at least as often as he is right.
Moving on to your next statement... Sure he has doctorates, works with a nice-sized team of people, and does a lot of research. None of these things make him right. People can be highly educated and hard working, and still be wrong.
And yeah it is easy to spout negativity, but that doesn't mean the negativity is wrong either. Likewise, wishing really hard for something to be true doesn't make it true.
And seriously, the singularity has always seemed to seem like a lot of wishful thinking. There are real theoretical upper limits to computational ability and information storage. Granted, we are nowhere near those theoretical upper limits, but there are also practical upper limits as well, and we have no idea how close we are to those. Humanity cannot break the laws of physics, and thus we will, at some point, plateau in our development. Singularity advocates always seem to ignore this in favor of predicting unbounded exponential growth, which makes me question their conclusions. A plateau seems just as likely to me as exponential growth.
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?
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.
Why exactly are you saying that you're putting credentials aside, and then asking for my credentials? I'll say you the trouble and say I don't have any. That doesn't make me wrong, just more likely to be wrong than people with credentials.
But putting aside credentials (for reals this time), you're not addressing my main point that there are theoretical and practical limitations to things. There are physical laws. You can't go faster than the speed of light. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. Humans will never break these laws. There are theoretical limits on the amount of computational power we can extract, and also practical limits based on the type of problems, parallelism, and so forth.
I ask again, how do we know that we'll see exponential grown instead of a plateau? How do we know that we are not close to hitting serious practical computational limits that will slow down our growth significantly? His predictions were wrong. We're already seeing CPU manufacturers focus on multi-core because they're having trouble making gains in raw processing power of a single CPU.
Humanity also has a track-record of failure in terms of technology. People thought that we would be a space-faring nation by now, and they were wrong. It turns out that space travel is very hard and very expensive, and its hard to get around the limits in energy density in chemical reactions, plus the efficiencies in turning that energy to thrust. People thought that we would find a way to go faster than light, and we've failed, as its a physical law. People thought we'd have flying cars and we've failed, because we can't make flying a car through the air more energy efficient than driving it on the ground.
Technological miracles happen every day, but so do failures. And past performance is not proof of future success.
To paraphrase someone (who I can't remember), they laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown. The fact that humanity has, in the past, overcome difficulties to progress technologically is not proof that we will do so again in this case. Otherwise you might as well hold out hope that my perpetual motion machine is going to work.
As far as the prosthetic limb goes, I believe I mentioned that we are researching robotic limbs and making progress. Thats not the same as having a production-ready mass-produced robotic limb. I'll count us as having robotic limbs when I see handicapped people walking around with them on the street.
Its fine if its your opinion that he's right. Its my opinion that he's wrong, and I've stated why I think that. You haven't given me anything other than "People have been naysayers before and they were WRONG!" and "So wheres your degree?" which are incredibly weak as far as arguments go. As far as your demand that I prove my position or shut up? One, I am free to state my opinion however I wish. Deal with it. Two, the burden of proof is on the people making the claims and predictions, and thus Kurzweil, not on me. Deal with that too.
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.
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