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.'"

Comments

Silliness

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Nah

[Hoplite3]

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.

Re:Obfuscation

[mrbluze]

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....

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.

Adaptation

[jonastullus]

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 ;)

My biggest problem with Kurzweil

[jeiler]

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.

Re:mid-age life crisis

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

wetware security

[gobbo]

Taking into consideration computer security issues, I think I'll pass. Why? There are already trojan horses for the brain, like religion; worms, like jingles and product design; and zero-day exploits like money, not to mention rootkits like crack. I'd say the average brain is worse off than an unpatched WinXP install hooked up to broadband with no firewall.

Without the ability to install properly open code, I suggest a good security patch, like zen, or some other semi-mystical skepticism.