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

Obfuscation

[kalirion]

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....

Re:Obfuscation

[PainMeds]

I think his point is the belief that hacked together code is more nonsensical and therefore would be more difficult to reverse engineer. It's like the difference between tracing back ethernet cables in a clean colo facility vs. tracing back cables at something like Mae-East, which (the last time I looked, at least) largely resembled a post-apocalyptic demilitarized zone. At least that's how he seems to view hackers. I personally see hackers as codifying something even more beautiful, logical, and well-articulated than the mundane corporate programmer, delivering a much higher level of intelligence and complexity than most could understand. Either way, you end up with the conclusion that it's a real pain in the ass to hack something that someone smarter than you wrote. Going inline with the quote, if God is a hacker, then you'd expect him to be one of the super geniuses and not some poor yahoo not quite knowing what he was doing.

Apply that to the brain, and we're worlds behind. Considering we're still on the binary system, when DNA uses four base pairs for its instruction code, I think Crick grasped the complexity of the human body much more than Kurzweil seems to. To compare the brain to a computer chip is, I think, a grossly unbalanced parallel.

Re:Obfuscation

[PainMeds]

Crick was a militant atheist, but he had at least a few philosophical feelings about God in his later years. I recall a quote of him talking about how we couldn't explain the origin of life, and cited it as "nothing short of a miracle". What his mixed signals tells me is that at heart he was a scientist, and wasn't prepared to make a biased judgment in either direction whether God did or did not exist - because he likely knew that either of those positions could bias his work. He was an interesting fellow to study, at least. Far more multidimensional than the dry scientists of this age... and I suspect he's answered any of his questions about God by now.

Re:Obfuscation

[jahudabudy]

Humans are formed from the coding in DNA so therefore the function of a brain is also contained with DNA. Therefore in time, it can be entirely understood.

Except it is much much more complicated than that. Read up on transposons, recombination, the entire field of epigenetics (I personally find methylation to be fascinating), etc. There are an entire range of factors and functions that make it impossible to reliably extrapolate biology from DNA sequencing alone.

Re:Obfuscation

[Orne]

When I was in college in the '90s, our EE lab had just start experimenting with combining FPGAs with a genetic algorithm to model a non-linear function. Setup: pass in hundreds of random control streams of 0's and 1's that set up the logic of the FPGA, feed inputs and measure output pins, compare against a desired, then use the genetic algorithm to pick the "winners" that correctly modeled the function. The algorithm would randomly combine winners, then feed that back into the control stream, rinse and repeat until you have the "best" stream.

After that, the researchers took the control stream, mapped it back to find out which logic gates were activated / deactivated / multiplexed to route to one another. What they found was that there was no direct data path from the input to the output ! so how on earth were the output pins being generated?

What we were then told was that, somehow, the FPGA control pattern had created loops in certain parts of the circuit that was inducing current in the neighboring bus lines, like little radios and receivers. Totally non-intuitive, but mathematically it worked.

That is what I expect to see when we finally decode the human brain -- an immensely complex network of nodes whose linkages to one another were created in real-time using whatever resources were available to the "trainer" proteins at the time. No two individuals will encode the same event the exact same way: not the same locations in the brain, not the same method of linkages, or the number of linkages.

This is why I see the "singularity" not as a machine that we can walk into, have our brains scanned, and bam our consciousness can be copied to a computer. I think that every individual that "transcends" will have to do it incrementally, gradually replacing and extending the nodal functions that make up the brain. The brain needs to replace its neural network mesh with electronic blocks, and do it in such a way that the mesh's functionality is maintained while the material that makes up the mesh is replaced.

Over a period of time, there will be no more "meat mesh" and your conciousness would be transcended into a medium that we know can be copied, backed up and restored. And when that happens, well, our whole concept of what makes up a "person" would need to be redefined.

-- Scott

Wouldn't that *help*?

[DriedClexler]

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. I'd always thought that this constraint would *help* because you know, in advance, that the solution to the problem is constrained by what we know about how evolution works. You have to start with the simplest brain that could have genetic fitness enhancement, and then work up from there, making sure each step performs a useful cognitive function.

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.

Re:Wouldn't that *help*?

[cnettel]

Any work with genetic algorithms show that you can very easily get a solution containing a lot of crud. Pruning too heavy on fitness in each generation will give you far from optimal results. The point is that each incremental change in our evolutionary history did NOT improve fitness. It just didn't hurt it enough, and might have combined with another change to increase it later on.

It all boils down to the result that an intelligent organism capable of building a social, technological civilization could have been quite different from us. Even if it looked like us, details as well as overall layout of the brain could supposedly have been quite different, but still giving an equivalent fitness. A simulation reproducing everything is not feasible, so how do we find out which elements are really relevant?

Kurzweil Talk in Cambridge, MA

[yumyum]

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.

Re:Kurzweil Talk in Cambridge, MA

[VeNoM0619]

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. Mod me offtopic or whatever, I don't care, but I've been thinking about this for a few weeks. If our brains are so well interconnected, how is it that we instantly die if a bullet merely passes through it and destroys a few of those connections? We can shoot bullets through most parts of a computer and more than likely only a piece of it will be damaged (I have never done this, but we could in theory just reroute the processing through the non-damaged parts correct?)

How is it that we can have brain damage and "destroy" some parts of the brain, but the minute we pass something through it physically, the entire thing ceases to function- instantly, instead of certain areas slowly fading away. I'm sure there is a simple answer and this may more than likely be a stupid question, but it has been making me curious.

Re:Kurzweil Talk in Cambridge, MA

[yumyum]

Whether one dies from an injury depends on the amount and the kind of damage. A famous example of non-lethal brain injury is Phineas Gage. Also lookup lobotomy.

Re:mid-age life crisis

[yumyum]

He has been fairly accurate about his past predictions, so I don't think centuries will be what it takes. Basically, he sees medical/biomedical advances starting to heat up and exponentially grow just like the electronics industry has.

IMO, a very controversial prediction of his is that around 15 years from now, we will start to increase our life expectancy by one year, every year, a rate he also sees taking on exponential growth...

Re:mid-age life crisis

[Jeff DeMaagd]

He has been hoping for personal immortality through technology and takes over 200 anti-aging pills a day.

Which is pretty funny given that dietary supplements haven't been found to be very useful on a whole.

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.

The ultimate in interface design

[thesandtiger]

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.

Re:Will not happen...

[Creepy Crawler]

---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.

A scientists job is not to criticize the results when one doesnt "like" them. Instead, one interprets results, and this is what he did. The math works, and he stands behind that result.

---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).

Let me pose this question to you then: What happens when capitalism and high technology blend? The people who matter want this tech he describes: genetic tailoring, nanotech, and robotics.

Gene manipulation and immunoresets are possible, but for the elite few who can afford it. Genetic diseases are rid of by tailoring non-disease marrow and injecting them. I remember when the Human Genome project started... almost 15 years to complete. SARS took 29 days.

We already use nanotech in our everyday life. Exactly how do they rate CPUs and GPUs? That's right, by the process they used to create it. Nanotech doesnt mean nano-robots, but will eventually. Nanotech means we can manipulate 1/10^6 m. We also see nanotech by the labs on a chip used in biowarfare detection the military is currently using. It's there, hiding in plain sight.

Robotics is the hardest now, but that's only because we dont have a powerful enough vision system processor. Once we have that, things will get scary crazy (as in Story of Manna crazy). And along with "robotics" we have plenty of software to run some interesting things right now. Some guy in his garage built a fully automatic heart-targetting gun turret ala Team Fortress Classic using homemade gear and COTS parts. 2 webcams with parallax was all he needed for basic motion/depth detection.

---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)?

Which is why the USA will stagnate. We need less of these BS laws and allowances for scientists to experiment with accepting subjects who qualify as sane. We could have a working bionic plugin eye if it wasnt for the stranglehold the FDA and AMA hold on the USA. I'd say the FDA needs to be neutered to a "recommend/do not recommend" if exist at all.

---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.

My parents started taking supplements after hearing from news broadcasts and Dr Oz on Oprah. I chose not to, while observing what happens. One such drug is resveratrol, along with l-lysene and massive dosages of vitamin C(4g a day). My mom took glucosamine and chrondroitin sulfate for her back after a friend (who is a veterinarian) recommended it to her. Animal clinics use that complex specifically for severe arthritis for animals. No company can make money for paying the required fees for the FDA and stays a "supplement". My mom with glucosamine/chrondroitin healed her back with it to 100%.

Well, back to he new drugs.. My mom and dad started the cocktail. My dad's bald on the top, or was. One of those drugs is actually regrowing his hair. We're not sure if it's C, resveratrol, or l-lysene, but it's something. Rogane (?) never worked. My mom's knees also cracked and stuff in the joints. Now she can feel her knees healing.

They took Linus Pauling's recommendation on massive C dosages and seem to work as he claimed. Considering he won 2 Nobels in 2 fields, we respect him, even if the medical society does not. I have thought about following this same regimen and recording my progress, as it does seem to work for them (placebo is not strong enough to grow hair that hasnt in 20+ years).

---But one thing is for sure, Kurzweil will die just like every other "prophet" before him.

Maybe.