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

[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.

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

poverty of expectations

[Bastard of Subhumani]

we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

Sigh, talk about picking the low-hanging fruit...

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

[c6gunner]

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

Have you seen the mess that a bullet going through a skull makes?

It's not the bullet that's the problem, it's the shockwave generated by it's passage that does all the damage. It's called "cavitation" - this video should help you understand it. If you carefully watch the last part of that video, you'll see that it causes the entire melon to explode outwards. Now imagine what that kind of force does to brain tissue confined inside a skull.

You can't compare that to shooting at computer components - they react completely differently, and are not affected at all by the shockwave. When you shoot a computer, only the part you hit is affected.

mid-age life crisis

[peter303]

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.

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.

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.

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: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?

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.

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.

Maybe not THAT low hanging

[Moraelin]

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

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.