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NASA and Google To Back New "Singularity University"
Slatterz and Keith Kleiner were among several readers to send in word of Singularity University, announced at TED today by Ray Kurzweil. He and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis began talking about creating the school last year, after Diamandis read Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity is Near. NASA and Google are both supporting the project, NASA with space and Google with cash. The school aims to foster "disruptive innovation." As envisioned, Singularity U. will sponsor 3-day and 10-day courses for executives year-round, and its main offering will be a single 9-week course of study over the summer for 120 students, each of which will pay $25,000 for the privilege. Announced faculty so far includes Nobel Prize winning physicist George Smoot, NASA Ames chief scientist Stephanie Langhoff, Vint Cerf, and Will Wright, creator of the video games Spore and The Sims.
Watch out. I hear the bang the follows is a doozy!
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I don't think this is going to work because although these people are the top in their fields, it doesn't make them good teachers, which is important if you're paying $25,000 for a 10 day course.
Will it blend?
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
Is it just me or is Kurzweil turning his cult into a religion?
How we know is more important than what we know.
its main offering will be a single 9-week course of study over the summer for 120 students, each of which will pay $25,000 for the privilege
Well, that should help them get rid of that surplus cash. It's really in the spirit of TED, though. How much are the tickets to get into the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference -- $4k? $6k? It's basically an event where you pay for the privilege of schmoozing with famous people, be they celebrities, scientists, politicians, etc.
Still, some interesting news has come out of the conference (re. Aptera).
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
But that's OK, I can wait a few more years for my life to be that fucked up.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
They're charging $25,000 and recruiting from grad students and post-docs? I don't see any mention of scholarships to make this an opportunity based on merit. The students will either need to go into debt (even further) for this unfocused opportunity, or will need to convince some faculty sugar daddy to spend grant funds. Meanwhile, the curriculum is too general to align with very many dissertation topics in any discipline. Disruptive innovation is all well-and-good, but first you have to disrupt the educational paradigm...
...that said, sounds like fun!
Is this the prequel to ringu?
I have several (mostly intelligent...) friends who believe this tripe. It's magical thinking for nerds.
It is complete and utter nonsense. These people are so obsessed with the idea that science and knowledge and inventiveness can solve all our problems that they've neglected the actual process of technological development, which is filled with ideas that look good on paper but don't work when you try them in the real world. When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work, not even the "singularity".
I believe we will reach a point when technical progress will create a society completely different from anything we have ever seen, before the mid of this century.
But this does not mean I believe any of the participants in this event has something significant enough to say to make it worth paying $25000 to listen to them.
Outside of the geek world, Singularity is mostly unknown.
This will generate some media attention.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Singularity Hub just posted the slideshow presentation given by kurzweil/diamandis at TED today to officially launch singularity university
The Singularity is Scientology for the 21st century.
Blah blah blah singularity blah blah blah TED blah blah blah NASA blah blah blah Ray Kurzweil blah blah blah Ames blah blah blah disruptive blah blah blah innovation blah blah blah Nobel Prize blah blah blah Vint Cerf blah blah blah information technology blah blah blah Will Wright blah blah blah $25,000 blah blah blah executives blah blah blah Google blah blah blah Singularity U blah blah blah tackle huge issues facing humanity blah blah blah San Francisco Bay Area blah blah blah cross section of emerging disciplines blah blah blah nanotechnology blah blah blah biotechnology blah blah blah pandemics blah blah blah global health care concerns blah blah blah.
It really is too bad it costs so much. I can't really fault them for it though, I suppose you've got to keep the prices high to keep the number of people maintainable. Plus, if you can afford to just drop $25K, chances are you are a person who can actually help the singularity HAPPEN from a financial support standpoint, rather than just a passive onlooker.
I hope they are courteous enough to share the course content and vids online though. That would be nice.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Lets see:
Pay lot's of money.
Sit in a room tightly packed people.
Have people repeat stuff at you
Believe.
Sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think the idea is that people with $25K go to Singularity University in order to "learn" how to spend their money on more singularitarian bullshit.
Any place of learning, from high school through community college and up to grad school, is Singularity University. Hint: take math and science classes. I think I'd rather take linear algebra and diff eq. at a community college than pay $25K to hear a blowhard's dream for the future. Hell, if you take a decent statistics class you can outsmart these guys by learning about what's wrong with extrapolating a fitted curve past its support is not valid...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
If you can get past the event horizon.
A lever makes one man capable of lifting several tons by means of his own strength.
Where is the lever for the mind that makes thousands of brilliant technological advances out of a single man's half-baked brain fart?
Where is the force-multiplier for the mind?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
When I was a child I loved to dream about the year 2000 and about the predictions of flying cars. Since I learned why things didn't go as expected, I've been following the field of future predictions as a source of entertainment. You would think they would be more modest, considering the 100% empirical fail score, but nooo...
Anyway, the singularity will not happen anywhere soon, because they fail to take the following three points into consideration or appreciate their weight: 1) In the past technologies changed over lifetimes. When you lived the past century, you have seen many new technologies come. Closer to the Singularity, humans are not capable or willing to change so many times. Humans slow it down. 2) Economics. Products are tied to an economic life cycle of cost and win. If all human effort was concentrated, we could have a base on Venus. Or Flying Cars. Instead, we have Windows Vista and low power PC's. 3) Their own egos, fantasies and projections. Fiction at best.
How bad are the +1 funny comments? Obligatory comments? This was announced at the Singularity Summit, which caused quite the buzz. 2030? 2015? Who cares, it's coming (the Singularity, that is).
It's like you trivialized my religion--and I'm atheist.
Take a look at http://singularity-university.org/.
They have 3 programs. The one that makes the news is the graduate student program with 30 students total.
But if you are 'interested' you can send them your CV over internet. Is this because they are actually going to accept random applications from internet to fill 30 spots?
Of course not. They are going to deny you the big prize by implying that you are not good enough, and then offer you the 10 or 3 day 'executive' programs.
Yup, you are going to learn how to achieve the singularity in a 3 day 'c-level' executive seminar.
[The hubris of calling your potential clients 'c-level' boggles my mind]
will sponsor 3-day and 10-day courses for executives year-round
Does ANYONE believe this is anything more than a paid vacation for highly-placed schmucks?
Went to $Big_Industry_Event in $Famous_Convention_City this year. Me and my guys spent the week in the convention center hashing it out with our $Sponsoring_Company counterparts getting stuff to work.
The business "executive" side of the house spent the week in activities that were immoral, illegal and unproductive.
Damn right I'm jealous. :-)
Then again, those $25,000 are probably coming straight out of the idiots' bonuses, which makes the, er, idiots, ... I'm lost.
It goes without saying that NASA and Google are using Ninnle Linux for this. Ninnle Labs has been a silent partner.
.
Geez, all this is just a cycling of hype .
Anyone with half an ounce of sense knows it will never happen, for oh-so-many reasons.
That he proposed this Singularity University is just the latest moment in his diefication of technology. He needs a brueaucratic infrastructure to maintain the illusion of the viability of the source of his casuistry. This is straight out of "Techgnosis" by Davis.
It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic and wasteful of resources.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm just saying....
Only Kurzweil and his cult will be impressed when computers are smarter than him. The rest of us will still see a lot of room for improvement.
Except this time there are graphs - there are graphs!~
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Participants fork over an inch-high stack of Benjamins for a few days of dabbling. This hardly seems to be the stuff of lasting impact. Ugh.
So did they announce financial aid options? Now that most people's stock options (and a good deal of stock) are worthless, finding money for "summer school" might be hard.
Think Deeply.
just use you're university's journal database subscription to download the latest papers. If you don't need to know this information then you probably don't even know that you don't need to know it and you will pay 25gees for an entertaining multi-day theatrical performance.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
This farce is intellectual masturbation for the rich in its purest form.
yes. It started happening a long time ago :D.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Although this is a strange way of implementing it, the idea of a broad university that gathers together thinkers from across disciplines and teaches them how to think both convergently within their fields and divergently across them is a good one. Current schools don't do a very good job of the latter. However, it is not something that can be done in 3-10 days (or even 9 weeks), with an emphasis on only the problems posed by "the Singularity" (look at the subjects in each track), or in a manner that fails to unite the principles (and not just the people) from the different disciplines.
But it's Google and NASA, so whatever. If anyone could make it work, it would be them.
If you come away having learnt just 1 thing, then Singularity U was worth it. All they need to know is how much a "worth it" is worth.
So, I can now pay $25,000 to have Will Wright teach me about the "Singularity"?
Awesome. That was just about the only thing missing from my life.
sic transit gloria mundi
Do they accept transfers from Armageddon U?
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't having a degree from Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity University" make you seem kind of like an AI kook?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
swollen nut and stumble home like Quasimodo with my scrotum in an ice-packed jockstrap and instructions to lie in bed 5 days and take Tylenol if it hurts. This is progress? I'll just bite my nut off myself next time! It couldn't be any harder.
Medicine has promised a cure for cancer for 50 years and still are taking our money. The war on cancer is like the war on drugs, neverending and self-serving for the providers (doctors and hospitals on the one hand, police departments on the other).
Doctors probably kill more than they cure, even today in the West.
PCjr displayed that it would be more efficient for computers to attend the course rather than middle men
I told it CLS and bring up the Flight Simulator
No, no, no. If extrapolating a curve past its support was invalid in general, then you couldn't predict anything at all, and many, many extrapolations are extremely useful. It entirely depends on what type of curve you're fitting, how you fit it, and what data it's fitted to. If you want to extrapolate based on a curve, you need to have an argument that explains why the extrapolation is justifiable; lacking this, yes, you've made a basic statistics error, but if you have a reason to expect the extrapolation to work (usually a reasonable assumption of some invariant), then the argument is domain specific, about that invariant, and not related at all to statistics.
Kurzweil has an argument to justify his exponential Moore's law extrapolation, which is one of the main points of his book. Feel free to criticize that, but don't try to pretend that he's wrong based on Stat 101, it's missing the real point that needs to be argued.
Ahhh, TED. The conference only the best yuppies get invitations to, and then have to pay 8 grand to attend. Don't worry, there is no class discrimination- they give out a few invites to select token poor who have some redeeming quality like picking up trash or campaigning against global warming.
The rest of us only average people will never have the opportunity to attend- unless its to one of the other less-desirable incarnations they hold in 3rd world countries.
....in your head.
As in Computer Numeric Control. I'm familiar with machine tools, the tools that shape metals and other solid materials thru material removal, but don't tell a pilot that a computer doesn't help with any physical work.
Of course, you still have to tell it where to go.
The force multiplier for the brain? Civilization. Other human minds. And their products (libraries, universities, etc.).
I don't think that NASA is actually involved with this, except as the landlord. When the Navy moved out of Moffett Field, NASA took over management of the base. It's a collection of old military buildings from the 1930s to the 1960s, including three airship hangars. (One of them now houses the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT) Not much is going on there, and there's plenty of vacant space. Back in 2005, Google was interested in leasing much of the space, but that didn't happen, and it's not likely to now.
Yeah, but then we have the quite reasonable fallback: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A completely physically-naive person would look at hard drive capacities from 1960-1990 and extrapolate a trend to infinite capacity. Physicists and the hyper-specialized niche of hard-drive boffins know better.
Now, which one does Kurzweil sound more like?
The thing about stat 101 is that anyone can be wrong based on it! Statistics should be called "numerical skepticism".
Singularitarians, being primarily hopeful, lose out on the selling point of the nearly-defunct Christianity: there's no skin off my back if I'm wrong. Since I'm a technical person, I'm contributing to the singularity if it's going to happen; and merely making a living if it's not. There's no hell for me to go to, so I don't see the need to believe in a Miracle.
(In case the last paragraph is misleading, I do what I do for the love of it, not for the money.)
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
AFAIK Wilbur Wright said that just 2 years before he and his brother managed to build a feasable heavyer-than-air airplane. While Kurzweil is quite a crackpot dreamer at times, it doesn't mean he's totally wrong. Look how far we have come in the web in the last 10 years. Things that would've seem impossible back then are standard fare today (Google Maps for free, Webapps for free, Wireless Broadband everywhere, totally cheap-ass standard fare available-at-every-corner 1,6 GHz CPU clocked miniature PCs (aka Netbooks) with 1-2 GB RAM(!) and lowish (!) 8GB SSDs or smallish 160GB miniature HDDs built in.
It is absolutely not unlikely that 10 years from now a growing Google AI or synthetic Humanity/Google hive-mind will start taking over on certain everyday issues of each individual. We are not so far away from a world currency, given the financial crisis at hand. The dollar legend is (hopefully, finally) going belly up and once a world currency is established in exchange for the euro, dollar, yen, etc. handing over generic public finacial decisions to a large computer/AI that is a synthesis of everyones everyday behaviour isn't that far fetched. Imagine a Google Bank with zero-fuss micropayment capabilities which is used by billions of people with INet access to handle their daily transaction stuff. Not hard at all extracting autmatable financial expert knowledge from that. And such a Bank is very close. And you've got your miniature singularity right there allready.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
They may know better, but I don't know how much they really know. I would bet that the hard drive experts of the 1980s would never have thought that the exponential growth in capacity would continue all the way to 2010, but it has nonetheless. Trivially there is some upper physical limit to storage density, of course, but there are a lot more tricks to increase storage capacity before we get there, they just may require abandoning the current data storage techniques. Notice that Kurzweil is very specific about this - while there are hard and fast limits on a particular solution to a problem, when we start to hit those limits other solutions are more fiercely researched and tend to win out eventually because they can be pushed further. Then there's a new "theoretical" limit where people say the growth must end, which is true, but only for that particular solution, and so on.
And it's true that it must end somewhere, but the question is, does that mean in 10 years or 1000? Kurzweil seems to think even 20 will be more than enough for AI, and I don't think that's a very off the wall extrapolation; beyond that, I'll definitely agree, there's a lot more uncertainty. But I wouldn't discount the fact that if we can pass the AI threshold, there will likely be quite a boom in innovation from that point on, so to me it's really a question of whether we get there or not, and I think Kurzweil makes a pretty compelling claim for why we can (which amounts to noting that early AI attempts were doomed to fail because we didn't have the power to do what the brain does, so it would have required some exceedingly clever algorithm to reproduce its function, and that once that restriction is gone it will be much easier software-wise).
Interesting, that's probably a fair goal. From what I remember of the class (which wasn't so great, and I'm very thankful I got to take some higher level stuff), the message most people took from it was "Almost everything is normally distributed, always assume the normal distribution, and if you can't...well, it won't ever happen, so...err, well, actually, I mean, forget I said anything, it won't be on the test!" No wonder most people get nothing out of the class...
And there you've hit upon the main problem with Kurzweil's campaign - he goes around screaming about how this is absolutely destined to happen, with a lot of argument about why, and how great it will be, and all that. But if he's right, who cares? We'll be there, too, and fantasizing about it for 30 years beforehand won't make a shred of difference if it's as inevitable as he claims.
I suspect a lot of it is that he meets such strenuous resistance to the concept, which means that it's really touching a nerve. He's clearly a bit of a media whore, too, and I think he enjoys the attention.
This guy is a quack.
Hey hey, everyone forgot about the September 2005 CNet interview with Kurzweil, when bragged about how his algorithmic driven hedge fund would be " in the position of being the house in a casino ". So how is that hedge funding doing today in today's economic turbulence where hedge funds are getting redeemed and some might not make it? So now he's going to take people for $25K ride to make up for his probably flailing hedge fund that's flapping in the wind? I smell megalomania!
Here's the trip down memory lane:
http://news.cnet.com/Ray-Kurzweil-deciphers-a-brave-new-world/2008-1082_3-5885116.html?tag=mncol
You said at a speech last week in San Francisco that you were working on a project with former Microsoft CFO Michael W. Brown that'll result in a hedge fund. Can you tell me about that?
Kurzweil: It's been a major project for about six years. It's applying my field, detecting subtle patterns, and using technology forecasting. Six years ago the project wasn't fully feasible because we didn't have rapid access to all ticker data for stocks. You really couldn't place trades very effectively online. The technology wasn't there--it can't take two weeks for the computer to make a decision that needs to be made in five seconds.
(My system) doesn't make perfect predictions. But what we can do is predict them substantially better than chance. That puts us in the position of being the house in a casino. It places lots of bets, some win and some lose, but it consistently makes money. We haven't had a down month yet. It makes 80 to 100 percent returns a year.
And there you've hit upon the main problem with Kurzweil's campaign - he goes around screaming about how this is absolutely destined to happen, with a lot of argument about why, and how great it will be, and all that. But if he's right, who cares? We'll be there, too, and fantasizing about it for 30 years beforehand won't make a shred of difference if it's as inevitable as he claims.
Well, it's useful (and profitable) to know what's going to happen in the future. Kurzweil for instance brought to market a reader for the blind (knfbreader.com) before anyone even started working on one. He predicted that the hardware for such a device would be available in 4 years and that it would also take about 4 years to write the software. So, his company was writing the software for 4 years in the faith that the hardware would be available when they were done. It was. Other companies just got started working on the software when he already had a finished shipping product . C-SPAN's BookTV did an in-depth (3 hours) interview with him recently where he talks about this: http://www.booktv.org/ram/feature/1106/arc_btv110506_4.ram
Spread your ideas as fast and as wide as you can (do not charge $25,000 for the privilege)
And not in a work of fiction. In a technical paper he wrote during his "day-job" as a math professor at San Diego State.
"The Coming Technological Singularity:
How to Survive in the Post-Human Era
Vernor Vinge
Department of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge
Abstract
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented...."
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html
Except this time there are graphs - there are graphs!~
Chicken chicken chicken
Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken
When was the last time you went to your local library to look up some information in a set of encyclopedias or looked up an newspaper article on microfilm?
Diamandis just recycled his business model from the International Space University (www.isunet.edu):
Executive Space Course - April 20-24, 2009 - ISU's 3-day short course.
Space Odyssey Institute - August 3-7, 2009 - "12-day short course is designed to meet the needs of experienced professionals from mid-level to senior leadership positions in the international aerospace community." Odd that it's not 12 days this year.
Space Studies Program - June 29-August 28, 2009 - 120 international students participate in a 9-week summer program. This year's host? NASA Ames.
Note that ISU also has a Master's Degree program at its main campus in Strasbourg, France. I can only assume that a Master's in the Singularity (Master's in Singularities?) is just around the corner.
"However, some green anarchist militants have taken singularitarian rhetoric seriously enough to have called for violent direct action to stop the Singularity."
That's awesome. :-)
The Singularity needs to be green anarchist for this very reason alone.
If you can invent some revolutionary thing in 9 weeks for $25000, what do you need this school for?
In order to determine what a person is all about, memory is vital. In the world of "Forgive & Forget" and "Turn the Other Cheek" we fail to see patterns and find ourselves at a disadvantage.
-FL
"Right around the point where they run hospitals, schools and soup kitchens."
Running organizations is Completely irrelevant to being a cult.
Don't forget they also use Mother Teressa to get money for the poor...almost none of that money actually went to the poor.
Scientology donates to organization, so suddenly there not a cult?
Pretty much ANY cult would love to run those parts of society.
I suggest you take your own advice before looking more foolish:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cult
1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
7. the members of such a religion or sect.
8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So the bottom line is wealthy people get yet another chance to hear presentations from and network with smart famous people. That's such an original concept!
Oooh it's like People magazine for nerds.
In other news...
Record company execs take classes on pop dancing from Brittany Spears and rapping from Missy Elliot.
Essentially, the Singularity is a mirror. It is in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues or lack thereof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
LIke Harry Potter looking into the mirror or Erised, Ray Kurzweil looks into that mirror of the Singularity and sees himself: a very logically intelligent business person interested in accelerating technology by promoting artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights. Thus, he pushes for a singularity filled with competition and artificial scarcity, rather than one filled with cooperation and abundance for all. What's the danger in that? While we may not know enough yet to make a friendly AI with humane values, we certainly know enough to make some nasty dumb replicators and military robotics programmed to kill widely, plus we already have nuclear and bio weapons. As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me?"
Kurzweil also doesn't understand ecology and evolution very well, in terms of making assumptions about the value of intelligence without seeing how it plays an adaptive role in only certain ecological niches.
More comments on those themes as emails I've sent to Ray Kurzweil, archived by someone else here:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
What does this chart suggest about a law of diminishing returns for being more intelligent? :-)
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm
Look at the ratios, and see the Fin whale ratio of brain to bodymass. It's tiny.
Bigger may be better up to a point, but it looks like a law of diminishing returns sets in.
One might posit some sort of inverse square law for the usefulness of increasing amounts of computational capacity to an organism, given perhaps exponentially increasing difficulty in creating more detailed or longer-term predictions of the world. This is an issue weather forecasters may wrestle with, in terms of facing chaotic behavior impacting predictability in weather systems. It's called "the Butterfly effect" where a small mistake or mismeasure may have increasingly big implications over time. So there is a need for constant remeasuring and recalibration of the models, which reduces the value of predictions and related computations. This is kind of like a game of chess where pieces were moved randomly by outside forces every once in a while, reducing the value in looking ahead too much.
Obviously, architecture can play a part in changes in intelligence too. But even Jupiter Brains might get dementia or turn uncommunicative.
Anyway, so this ratio of brain sizes and body mass may suggest the same thing. It's not that bigger is not better in some sense, it is just that it it only justifiable energetically up to a point.
Consider that a Right whale's testes may weigh over a two thousand pounds compared to that whale's fifteen pound or so brain, or about 100X bigger, whereas for humans the ratio is approximately reversed, the brain 100X larger. (Fin whales' testes are closer to 100 pounds, or 7X brain size, but still much larger than their brains.) So, you can see what nature is betting on when body size goes up. :-)
It's not like whale's could not easily have brains that were 10X bigger. Whales are social, and even communicate around the p
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sure. Then they implant those brains on people. Then those people end up thinking so fast that, when they need to go to the bathroom, by the time they finish standing up they've forgotten why they were getting up, start thinking about something else (well, actually, a million something elses), and piss themselves.
That was a joke, sure, but it's a joke based on a larger, important point: the concept of a "sped-up human brain" doesn't quite make sense. Why? Because to the extent the brain can be meaningfully said to have a "speed" like computers do, it's more likely than not that its "speed" is set by the environment. So a supposed "high-speed simulated brain" would, in fact, be a brain running at the wrong "speed."
A simplistic model of neuronal functioning can also show us one crucial way in which this "sped-up brain" idea is wrong. Suppose we have three neurons, A, B and C, such that neuron A fires on external stimulus x, neuron B fires on external stimulus y, and C fires on the simultaneous internal stimulus of A and B. Suppose that once a neuron fires, it remains active for 500ms in a real brain, 5ms in a fake, "high-speed" brain.
Now consider the situation where external stimuli x and y arrive in sequence, 100ms apart. In the real brain, this will cause C to fire. In the fake, "sped-up" brain, C will not fire, because A's activation will decay much before the second external stimulus arrives.
Yes, this is a simplistic, almost cartoonish model, but it drives the point even further: there is no guarantee that a "sped-up brain" will even work at all in the first place, or have an interesting pattern of activity.
Are you adequate?
Today I can converse directly with someone on the other side of the globe, I can fly thousands of miles in a few hours, I can see what's happening in other countries, I can move at 100mph, etc. To a person 1000 years ago these are magical abilities.
But no human needs to manage 1000 years of change or even 100 years of change. We only need to manage about 60-70 years of change at the absolute most, and I would argue it's more like 30. That's because about every 30 years a new generation grows up among technology that their parents did not have as kids.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" scenario assumes that culture will not keep up with technology, but it always does. Not long after machines are created that think like people, a generation of children will grow up in a world where machines think like people. And like always, their parents and grandparents will not understand how they will manage life, but they will. Because it's the only world they'll know.
Long perspective creates singularities in both directions--like standing on a long straight stretch of road, which appears to narrow to a point in both directions, beyond which we cannot see. They are apparent, but not real, singularities.
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.
yes, the aim is to make all content available (probably not on day one, but it's very much in the plan)
One thing interesting about Kurzweil's logarithmic plot, is that there are uniform advances.
If one believes his chart, then advances seem to occur regardless of the religious, political, or economic ideologies of the time.
Test
I think I just got chicken rolled - can't believe I watched all 4 mins of that AND downloaded the ppt. I'm a little disappointed that they didn't do anything with the binary on slides 17-20.
01100011 01101000 01101001 01100011 01101011 01100101 01101110
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Regarding your stats class, I'm sorry it was so uninteresting and hand-wavy. The subject is rarely taught well, and if it were I truly believe that many students who go into CS, would do statistics instead. On the other hand, it's vexingly hard to teach for a number of reasons and, to make things worse, the field itself is having a kind of existential crisis at the moment.
I was speaking once to a much more mature and sophisticated person than myself, and the whole Kurzweil thing came up. I asked him, if it was reasonable and if not, whether it was sound to pin hopes on it.
He said to me, that it was basically a ploy to get young above-average-IQ (but not quite world-class brilliant) idealists into computers and hot fields of science (notice, biotech and neuroscience are Singularitarian topics; geology, not so much) as opposed to making money (business school); playing sports; entering a traditional trade (lawyer or doctor); &c. The real geniuses are going to do math and science automatically; the singularity is kind of an emotional selling point for others to live a technical life.
How he said it, it was so blindingly obvious, and it felt like an enormous weight lifted from me only to be replaced by another one. I grew up an atheist, so I never had a religion to lose. Still, at that moment I understood a bit of what it would feel like to lose faith.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky