Ray Kurzweil's Vision of the Singularity, In Movie Form

destinyland writes "AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie (Transcendent Man), and gives it 'two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!' But in an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain. The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints. 'Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'" Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil. Update: 05/06 20:57 GMT by T : Note, Singularity Hub has a review up, too.

Comments

All about dates now.

[Sybert42]

2015? 2030? Trouble is, you can't bet on it. Sorta like predicting a black-hole swallowing the Earth. You can, however, plan on it. The years before it becomes can be made better (although nothing compared to the time after) just by predictions.

Re:All about dates now.

[Anonymous Coward]

tag this !eXistenZ

Re:All about dates now.

[vertinox]

The key here is that Ray bases this prediction on past observation of things like Moore's law. Even though he does cherry pick and that there is no guarantee that it would always continue in such a fashion, the idea that distributed system improvements are exponential isn't that far fetched.

So basically what he is saying is that if the future behaves like the past then we will see so major changes shortly simply because we'll have processing out the wazoo.

Even the Moore himself thinks this will at least last til 2018 when silicon transistors reach their theoretical limit on the atomic scale. Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.

My bet is that Intel, IBM, and AMD are putting the big bucks on getting past the silicon limit because that is their money cow.

So if the limit does continue that things like Blue Brain Project will have an easier time running their simulations.

I don't know about the whole Nanotech emergence, but at least it looks like we might get the AI thing solved in at least 50 years.

Re:All about dates now.

[MozeeToby]

Kurzweil's predictions aren't just based on modern trends but historical shifts as well. In fact, I thought one of the big pieces he shows is a graph of 'paradigm shifting events' against time. These would be technologies that changed everything at the time; things like agriculture, the printing press, nuclear power, the transistor, etc.

The point isn't the gradual improvement of transistor technology that make the singularaty interesting, it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; replaced by some new technology that we can't even speculate about right now. It's about the shifts, not the gradual evolution.

Re:All about dates now.

[DragonWriter]

The key here is that Ray bases this prediction on past observation of things like Moore's law. Even though he does cherry pick and that there is no guarantee that it would always continue in such a fashion, the idea that distributed system improvements are exponential isn't that far fetched.

Since there are physical limits involved, it would intuitively seem vastly more plausible to suggest that the improvements would, in the long term, be logistic rather than exponential (and, of course, a logistic growth curve looks, in its early phase, just like an exponential curve.)

Of course, a logistic curve could still support predictions of a "singularity" of sorts, the difference is that things would "settle down" to a new normal after an abrupt transformation, rather than continuing with accelerating change forever.

Re:All about dates now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the Moore himself thinks this will at least last til 2018 when silicon transistors reach their theoretical limit on the atomic scale. Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.

Or the C) option: ramp up production at the near smallest we can make transistors and make them so cheap and prevalent that we have the equivalent of today's desktops in our wrist watches running off our ambient body heat.

Anyone who has used a computer since a couple of years ago realizes that the continuous battle for the smallest chip is over. It doesn't matter who's got the smallest process anymore, it matters what you're building on that process. Case and point: Intel's shifted business strategies to building embedded-and-above chips like Atom, and is so eager to do so that they've done something that's almost unheard of in Intel's history: they've farmed out production to another company (TSMC). Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.

Chip design is becoming such a detail as to how and where we use computers that even Microsoft and Apple have gotten behind designing their own (though to differing degrees; Microsoft hired IBM to build theirs, Apple bought a low-power PowerPC chip company to design theirs).

While I'm sure people will bicker in 2020 about where to go next for real performance, whether it be on-chip optical networks or 3D chips, extremely-wide-instruction-computers, asymmetric computing dies, etc., etc., it's not what's going to matter as much as we'd like to think. Those chips will likely end up so expensive that the only consumers will be server clusters. Meanwhile, pervasive computing will explode into our every day lives, more than just being wired to our ears and hip pockets. The revolution's already started.

Re:All about dates now.

[smallfries]

So his argument boils down to: "Lots of cool stuff has happened in the past. If we extrapolate, then OMG ponies!!!!!"

Re:All about dates now.

[anyaristow]

> Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds
> another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.

Whether there will be a big enough market for still faster computers is another thing altogether.

Re:All about dates now.

[someone1234]

Not exactly. He says, cool stuff is getting more and more frequent.
And this isn't just about human discoveries, it is observable in evolution of life as well.

And that's what makes it scary, what if we were not the first :)
Then definitely we won't be the last.

Re:All about dates now.

[MozeeToby]

No, his argument is that lots of cool stuff happened in the past, and the cool stuff is happening more and more rapidly as time goes on. Basically, each major 'cool thing' that happens increases the amount of processing power being used to solve the next problem and create the next cool thing.

Agriculture led to a massive population increase that in turn led to more human beings working to solve problems. Iron tools reduced the time it took to do tasks and freed up more time for other pursuits. The printing press led to the education of vast numbers of people who would otherwise have remained ignorant. Computers aid research in ways that no one could have imagined 70 years ago.

If you grant that progress is happing at an accellerating rate, there comes a time in the future where things change dramatically in very short periods of time. If you chose to call that point "OMG ponnies!!!!!" so be it.

Re:All about dates now.

[Yvan256]

BARF: Oh, what are we doing risking our lives for a runaway process? I know we need the ponies...
LONE STARR: Listen. We're not just doing this for ponies. We're doing it for a shit load of ponies!
BARF: Oh, you're right, and when you're right, you're right, and you, you're always right.

Re:All about dates now.

[smoker2]

mod parent up.

Re:All about dates now.

[geekoid]

He abuses the hockey stick phenomenon.

He also overlooks many, many practical matters.

The man hasn't done jack in over 20 years.
"Futurist" is another word for "has been"

"it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; "
no, they won't. Do you even know what a transistor is?
Also gone in 20 years resistors and capacitors! weeee

Re:All about dates now.

[smallfries]

Yes but his argument is still flawed even if you refine it slightly. There are many problems with his assumption, but even one is enough to derail it:

Assume that each previous advance multiplies the amount of result for a given effort. You only get accelerating returns when the growth in required effort is below a critical threshold. For certain previous advances, and certain successive problems this has been true.

It does not imply that it always holds, or that it will continue to hold in the future, or even that it holds for any particular problem. "OMG ponies!" doesn't refer to any amount of progress - it refers to a lack of understanding of what a given problem is, and how much effort is required. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke phrased it better when he called it magic.

Re:All about dates now.

[ppanon]

20 years ago, I had a disagreement with my then biophysics prof when I advocated the use of large networks of PC clusters for studying protein folding and interactions. His line of argument was effectively that I had a lack of understanding of what the problem is, and how much effort is required. Today companies like Zymeworksspecialize in performing that kind of work for pharmaceutical companies on a contract basis. They use quantum chemistry simulations running on small clusters of commodity hardware to do it. Yeah, computing speed has gone through a few orders of magnitude from the 16 MHz 386's of the time to the 2GHz quad cores of today. Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.

20 years ago I remember watching a show that was one of the first sounding the alarm about Climate Change. Back then I was cautiously sceptical because of the crudeness of the models possible with the computing power then available; these days, I'm convinced. It's good to be sceptical, but it's also good to remember that there's more than one way to skin a cat.

When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The one likely exception to that is that we probably won't ever come up with a way to travel faster than light. Otherwise, there's a lot more I told you so's coming down the pipe. 'Cause, no offense meant, but you probably don't even have the success record and credibility of "a distinguished but elderly scientist".

Re:All about dates now.

[Thuktun]

Trouble is, you can't bet on it. Sorta like predicting a black-hole swallowing the Earth.

I heard on the Daily Show that there's a 50/50 probability of that.

Re:All about dates now.

[smallfries]

Nice response. But don't misinterpret what I'm saying - I'm not claiming that a Singlarity is impossible, I've not even claiming that it is not going to happen. I'm just pointing out that the arguments Kurzweil uses for why it *will* happen are completely flawed.

As for the distinguished but elderly scientist, ask me again in 40 years :)

Re:All about dates now.

[jwhitener]

"So his argument boils down to: "Lots of cool stuff has happened in the past. If we extrapolate, then OMG ponies!!!!!"

No, more like, we have been developing along an exponential curve. We've been in the shallow base of that curve for a while.

Here's some evidence that I think points to us entering the steeper part of the curve.

By 2045 technological gain rates will approach infinity.

So, to shorten that:

His argument boils down to: "We've had a pretty slow beginning, but its picking up speed exponentially"

Re:All about dates now.

[ppanon]

Intel's shifted business strategies to building embedded-and-above chips like Atom, and is so eager to do so that they've done something that's almost unheard of in Intel's history: they've farmed out production to another company (TSMC [forbes.com]). Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.

You make that assumption while stating no supporting evidence and I'm not completely convinced. OK, recent increase (since the 130nm transition) in power density has been a significant factor and it's possible they could be running out of new ideas to deal with it after trying stuff like SOI.

I think a strong argument also can be made that AMD are farming out their fabs because they couldn't get enough credit in the current environment to fund the next fab generation. They therefore could only fund it by allowing a huge equity buy-in to an external investor (Middle Eastern as it turns out). Economics as much as, if not more than, physics is what's driving this shift.

My gut feel is that AMD would have much preferred to keep vertical integration to continue to go toe-to-toe with Intel on the top performance end, but they couldn't afford it. I think they chose to focus on their biggest asset and product differentiator, IP and silicon design because the economic situation forced them to. I'm sure they would prefer to remain competitive with Intel on the high margin top end than to cough up that market without a fight. By spinning out the fabs to a third party however, that third party can continue to sell fab production to other clients long after the fab becomes obsolete for producing mainstream general-purpose processors. Extending the fab lifetime means a longer time horizon for recuperating the ever-increasing capital costs of new fabs

Intel on the other hand has enough cash on hand that they can continue to play the fab game for their top end, while farming out the chip-making where for the part of their product line that doesn't require a bleeding edge process. At least for now.

Re:All about dates now.

[lgw]

Exponential growth doesn't approach infinity (well, until time approaches infinity), it just get steeper. But I think his model is flawed. New scientific discoveries allow new technological progress, and we've had a *lot* of technological progress over the last 50 years, but not so much scientific discovery (aside from cosmology). With 30 years of particle physics down the shitter thanks to string theory, whither the new revolutionary changes needed to keep this up?

In any case, we're going to hit an unclimbable wall soon: just like you can't escape conservation of energy, or mass-energy eqivalence, you can't escape information-energy equivalence. It takes a certain amount of power to flip a bit, and there's simply no way around that. Sure, we can build higher-energy systems over time, but that moves us out of the speed of "information age" innovation, and back to the speed of "industrial age" innovation.

Re:All about dates now.

[lgw]

There are fundamentall limits to the power required for computing. Continued exponential growth in computing power will bring us close to those limits. The power needed for computing eventually becomes the bottleneck, and there's no way around it.

Now, maybe we don't *need* much more powerful computers for the "singularity", but we're swiftly approaching the point where "more powerful computer" isn't a metaphor, and while 1 MW power supplies are certainly practical, there's no way to fit one into a wearable computer.

Re:All about dates now.

[Chris Burke]

Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.

Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on. Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Well I'm not one to say something is impossible, and I am one to listen to an elderly scientist stating that something is possible when they have a scientific reason to think that particular thing is possible. On the other hand, I am also one to scoff dismissively when a Futurist says that something we currently don't have any clue how to do will surely happen because things are happening faster and faster. That's not a scientific reason. Some previously impossible things are now possible. That does not mean that Arbitrary Impossible Thing X will become possible.

Re:All about dates now.

[jwhitener]

A lot of his premise rests on AI being developed.

At that point, the AI creates the next AI, the next AI creates a new faster circuit, etc..

It will, for all intensive purposes, feel like advances are coming too fast to fathom.

"In any case, we're going to hit an unclimbable wall soon: just like you can't escape conservation of energy"

If you are talking about the raw limits of computational power, we have plenty to spare in reaching many times the power of the human mind.

His books address this pretty well.

Its after that, to have many billions of billions of minds of power, that he divulges into talking about harnessing the computation power of atoms/quantum stuff, and then extrapolating that into how many computations could be done given all the atoms on the moon, etc...

Getting to that first AI or 2 is well within our hardware limits in the next 20-40 years or so.

Re:All about dates now.

[lgw]

Clearly you can have a "human mind's worth of computing power" run on only 100W or so. However, it's unclear whether you could run an emulation of a human mind on any reasonable amount of power. Or, for that matter, at all. As yet, there's not the least shred of evidence that either AI or human consciousness transfer is possible.

AI has been 50 years away for 50 years now. Fusion has been 20 years away for 50 years now. I can only conclude that fusion will be a mature, 30-year-old technology, ready to power AIs. :)

Personally, I think that software consciousness will turn out to be quite easy in hindsight, just a matter of learning the trick, but I have no actual evidence for this belief. Has any published futurist ever been right about anything?

Re:All about dates now.

[VoidEngineer]

Personally, I think that software consciousness will turn out to be quite easy in hindsight,

Agreed. It's going to be an 'everything-and-the-kitchen-sink' kind of problem. Put enough of the right systems together, and it will emerge rather on its own.

The problem isn't going to be creating an artificial intelligence. The problem is going to be in making it an autonomous agent that can be socially integrated into society. Think how long it takes to raise a kid... teaching the kid language, potty training, kindergarten, social skills, job skills, etc... You need to do all of that training with an AI... but it won't necessarily have a body it can move around in and interact with other people with. The first AIs are going to be alien to our experience, unless they're purpose built in android type shells.

I suspect that in 50 years, we'll look back and say 'oh, yeah... the first AIs were waking up 30 years ago, but it took us another 10 years to recognize them for what they were'.

Re:All about dates now.

[mgblst]

Wow, so you let you biophysics prof, diss you in your IT field? WTF does this guy know about IT?

Re:All about dates now.

[bmgoau]

IAACE (I am a Computer Engineer). I agree transistors will not be old news in 20 years, but i think you're looking too broadly. I believe the idea that they will be old news relates to their use in (high performance) computing. It really was from about the 1980's till now, around 20-30 years, for computers to get *really* popular.

Photonic Computing is really in the stage where transistors were in the 60's and 70's. We already have proven concepts and a good idea of where to go so i don't see the statement "it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; " so completely outrageous.

The only thing i know for certain, is that all our predictions will be wrong.

Re:All about dates now.

[ppanon]

Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on.

Agreed.

Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.

When it comes to downloading a human consciousness into a machine, I think you are absolutely correct. It's not clear that we will have the capacity of instrumenting and measuring all the variables in the instantaneous state of a brain that makes an individual - you, me, or Ray Kurzweil - and replicate it/convert it to run on a completely different medium. That assertion has more than a bit of "OMG Ponies!" wish fulfilment in it.

When it comes to taking the general intelligence capability of a human and producing a synthetic computer-based analog, it is an engineering problem. First a reverse-engineering problem in determining how the brain does what it does to enable consciousness, and then a process change and die shrink. Neurons are pretty coarse and slow things when it comes to their interconnects and we should be able to do a lot better. With the advantage of faster signal transmission and shorter signal paths, that should give the re-architected "brain" a big speed advantage over our current ones. As for the "software", you could raise the first generation the old-fashioned way in real time (with the processor running at a "degraded speed") for the first few years, and then once you've got consciousness, socialization, and imprinting/attachment to humanity ingrained, let them go into turbo mode for computer-based education. For that first iteration you create as close a model of the human brain as you can, and then you see what simplifying assumptions you can make and still have it work.

The big bottleneck for your virtual scientists at that point will be running physical experiments. Not everything can be gedanken experiments - sometimes you need Large Hadron Colliders that take decades to be built. But for small scale science like molecular biology where a lot can be increasingly simulated? Look out.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some tremendous engineering problems there, with enough intermediate steps that it makes my clustered protein modeling example look like child's play. But it is my reasoned opinion that the project is no less an engineering problem than going from 16 MHz 386's and 10Mb coax Ethernet to 2+GHz quad cores, fiber-based gigabit Ethernet, and middleware for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores.

Re:All about dates now.

[sp3d2orbit]

I remember reading 20 years ago how acid rain would kill us all and we would be out of oil by 1997.

Re:All about dates now.

[retchdog]

Apparently he knew enough to tell (or guess) that it would take over a decade for what he was suggesting to become feasible...

Re:All about dates now.

[Failed Physicist]

However, it's unclear whether you could run an emulation of a human mind on any reasonable amount of power.

There is no difference in a perfect emulation and the original. Unless the brain is actually the most efficient computing machine theoritically possible (which it is not) then we will eventually be able to beat its efficiency.

As yet, there's not the least shred of evidence that either AI or human consciousness transfer is possible.

Information theory disagrees. Any turing-complete machine can eventually run an emulation of the human mind, and with enough processing power do it at real-time or faster speeds.

Re:All about dates now.

[lgw]

There is no difference in a perfect emulation and the original.

Perfect what now? Emulation across different architecture types is often quite inefficient - emulating purpose-built hardware in software can lose an order of magnitude or even two. Emulating analg process can add another order of magnitude or two of inefficiency. The worst case there would put us at a megawatt, which is somewhat impractical.

Information theory disagrees. Any turing-complete machine can eventually run an emulation of the human mind.

Sure - if you just ignore the single largest question about the human mind, which is also the single largest question in computability theory, you can believe in whatever makes you happy. No one actually knows whether the human mind has some capacity that makes it more capable than a turing machine. It's hotly debated in multiple disciplines.

, and with enough processing power do it at real-time or faster speeds.

Again, "enough power" may be problematic. If it takes 1 TW, or even 1 GW of power to run a computer capable of emulating the mind, the singlularity won't happen as anyone today imagines it. If it takes 1MW it's not going to happen until some other long-predicted, never-arriving, futurist prediction happens first - power too cheap to meter. If it takes a seemingly-reasonable 10 KW, then an AI would have as large an environmental impact/need as an American human, and we're not going to be swamped by billions of them any time soon.

You seem too justify your beliefs by hand waving and trivializing the actual problems.

Re:All about dates now.

[Jon Kay]

Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.

That'd be likelier to be because AMD's past history fabbing things is so miserable they couldn't get their hands on the $10s of Bs needed. Intel'd disagree with you - they keep their mastery and the process tech lead they've commanded through most of the microchip's existence. They've done so well because that's always been their first priority, and they put a ton of leading engineers into it, unlike other chip companies.

Fab investment and construction stay strong, just concentrated into fewer and changing actors, like every other industry. Chip density, which's what Moore's law predicts, rather than clock speed, still continues strong. Intel's new chip efforts are about using that density to put more and more stuff into the same chip, and about putting more cores per chip. And, it's about a bigger share of PC costs going to Intel instead of overall PCs getting more expensive.

Now, these multicore chips are a pain for getting gains from our traditional programming models, but neural simulations are the most trivially parallelizable thing out there.

Re:All about dates now.

[ppanon]

Well "Kill us all" was overkill, but the German Schwartzwald was dying. What happened is that they took steps to limit air pollution from vehicles and industrial sources. They fixed the cause of the problem. Imagine that!

The thing in the 70s with oil was market manipulation by the suppliers of course, and the latest price spike was manipulation of the commodity and futures markets by institutional investors. The price of crude dropped back down because the economic slowdown dropped consumption faster than they could compensate (making the game a losing proposition) and the credit crisis forced them to pull the money out to re-adjust their leverage position. The peak oil thing will happen of course - it has to with a non-renewable resource for which consumption in generally increasing - but it's still a ways away. We'll probably get another round of market manipulation again before it happens for real.

Re:All about dates now.

[ppanon]

I was a lowly Phys. undergrad at the time and I wasn't taking enough high level for course for C.Sc. to be a minor for me. Not that classes in AI or O/S would have helped for that. A Distributed Systems class might have been useful if they offered one and numerical analysis (in Fortran, of course) didn't really turn my crank. I had helped my sister a little with her engineering N/A course work enough to know that I could pick it up easily enough if I needed to.

As for the guy who snidely commented that the guy knew it would take 10 to 20 years. Yeah, maybe. And maybe it would have made a good cross-discipline PhD thesis too. More than likely he was too caught up in his revolutionary (wrong) immunological theories on AIDS that he was going to present at a conference, and which I explained nobody would accept (though admittedly my argument was based on economics, business behaviour, and politics). So it's not totally surprising he wasn't too receptive to my constructive suggestion. :-)

Re:All about dates now.

[jeffb (2.718)]

AI has been 50 years away for 50 years now. Fusion has been 20 years away for 50 years now.

And speech recognition was 10 years away for about 30 years, but it finally arrived. It was a lot harder than people originally thought, and ended up requiring a lot of processing power -- power that eventually became possible, then practical, then cheap.

I've seen no convincing argument against the notion that the same thing will happen with AI.

Re:All about dates now.

[jeffb (2.718)]

In any case, we're going to hit an unclimbable wall soon: just like you can't escape conservation of energy, or mass-energy eqivalence, you can't escape information-energy equivalence. It takes a certain amount of power to flip a bit, and there's simply no way around that.

Build a system on superpositions, and it appears that you can get a lot more done without ever actually (whatever that means) flipping a bit.

Make your computational mechanism reversible, and while you "use" power to flip a bit, you don't dissipate it, which is the critical part.

I'm a big believer in the laws of thermodynamics, and a firm (if reluctant) believer in the lightspeed limit. But "It takes a certain amount of power to flip a bit, and there's simply no way around that" sounds an awful lot like using Shannon's Law to prove that a phone line could never carry more than 1200bps. Er, 2400bps. Okay, 18kbps (those damn Telebit engineers have got to be cheating). Oh, all right, I'll read up on trellis encoding. Okay, 56kbps, but that's my FINAL offer.

And then, of course, DSL and cable made "dialup" and its limitations irrelevant.

Re:All about dates now.

[enantiomer2000]

Actually, Fusion power is today. Check out the http://www.lenr-canr.org/ website to learn more. Now we just have to convince those distinguished, elderly scientists.. As for AGI, people making those predictions 50 years ago were fresh and didn't really understand the scope of the problem. They thought that creating the intelligence of a 6 year old would be easy and playing chess would be the difficult problem... The predictions of AGI researchers today will probably be much more accurate.

Re:All about dates now.

[jwhitener]

Actually, its not possible at all to have the computing power of the human mind run on any current hardware.

The brain can perform 10^16 synapse operations per second. http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html

You can see that even the fastest supercomputer
http://www.top500.org/system/performance/9707

Is not even remotely close in terms of operations per second.

What RK is saying, is that if the trends continue, we'll reach 10^16 shortly, and with our better and better software models of the brain, and emulation will be possible.

Whether it works well, not at all, or 'wakes' up as an official AI is anyone's guess.

The nice thing about AI (as opposed to fusion) is that the speed of hardware increasing towards that 10^16th goal. It is easy to say "On such and such a date, 10^16 calculations per second will be reached" (assuming past trends continue).

Fusion doesn't have an easy way to measure its progress like that.

Re:All about dates now.

[SwordsmanLuke]

what if we were not the first :)

This has all happened before and will happen again. But don't worry - they have a plan.

Re:All about dates now.

[faber0]

When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The one likely exception to that is that we probably won't ever come up with a way to travel faster than light.

are you a distinguished but elderly scientist ?

sehr kurzweilig

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Well, the only thing to say to that is...

[Jane Q. Public]

... "I'll be back."

Re:Well, the only thing to say to that is...

[frudi]

more like: "Come with me if you want to live... forever"

Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers become smarter than humans. Human consciousness becomes downloadable ...ermm ...somehow... and we live forever as computers.

Wow. What a visionary.

Seriously though, you have to congratulate a guy from becoming so well known with people believing what he's saying as actually probable. I doubt anyone else could even sell this shit as a sci-fi B-movie plot.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember to make a backup before you tackle the Iln that's trying to destroy Sursamen.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Gat0r30y]

I doubt anyone else could even sell this shit as a sci-fi B-movie plot.

Often, nay consistently, life seems to mimic a shitty sci-fi B-movie plot.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Computers become smarter than humans. Human consciousness becomes downloadable ...ermm ...somehow... and we live forever as computers.

The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Script Cat]

You see the problem with copying the human mind is that it works by virtue of a bunch of little men in your head. Also they in turn have a bunch of little men in there head. This goes on ad infinitum. So your computer can never simulate an infinity of something therefor it's impossible.

Now did you hear the one about Achilles and this turtle.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[nyctopterus]

"The nerd rapture"

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[orclevegam]

... I don't know whether to mod that insightful or funny.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'. This is a scientific problem. You have a human consciousness. In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special. It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer. Given that assumption, it is a natural step to find some way to copy it, intact and functioning, to a more resilient inorganic, silicon-based computer. The difference between this and all the various soul-based afterlife nonsense of religions should be obvious to anybody. This is a potentially plausible objective hypothetical physical/material process. It's an idea based on hard facts that may actually work given enough research, testing, and further advances in hardware and software design.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

"The nerd rapture"

I thought that was internet porn and masturbation.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[GreatAntibob]

This assumes that human consciousness is only software and contains no hardware component (an awfully big assumption). The truth may be that a good portion of our personality (including that bit that wishes to live forever) is hard-wired into the physical structure of our brains/bodies. Further, our own consciousness may not be digital, meaning that the exact state of consciousness and memory might not be able to be copied exactly (a sort of Heisenberg principle applied biologically). What then? Who are we without our DNA or our physical brains (with attendant physical connections to the rest of our bodies)? How much of our own self-definition depends on it? We hardly know what consciousness is, much less if it can be replicated without replicating the physical form encasing it. And if this is the case, Kurzweil is in for a nasty surprise when he tries to transfer his consciousness.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[jollyreaper]

"The nerd rapture"

I always thought of it more as a techno-rapture and that's the way I've seen it referred to in other places.

Even the most committed atheist can understand the attraction of religion and the idea of a rapture and a heaven, life everlasting. These are all very human yearnings. The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp. Certainly we could create the new heaven and new Earth and the reign of a thousand years right here and now. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.

The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.

We've yet to develop a political system adequate to the task of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number without allowing unhealthy power and influence to be amassed by our least deserving fellows. Unfortunately, the very people who are most willing to acquire power are seldom the ones who should have it. The complaint I hear from my friends deeply involved with the Democrats is that there are plenty of good people they'd like to run as candidates but so many of them want nothing to do with politics. They're happy to put in the long hours behind the scenes but the thought of being in the spotlight and having all the attention on them is about as attractive a thought as a root canal. Someone actually willing to take that kind of attention is more than likely going to be someone like a John Edwards, a nice smile and slick approach but ultimately a self-serving jerk so blinded by his own awesomeness that he'd pull stupid shit like having an affair and then throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency.

I'm curious as to what the potential implication of a Singularity is for technology but I don't know if that would change the human situation all that much. There's been some good speculative fiction written along these lines in the Orion's Arm universe. It's trying to be a very hard SF look at future space opera. The few aliens are all completely inhuman, the humanoid aliens are actually all modified people from earth, terragen life as they call it. There's various scales that sophonts fall onto from sub-human to AI gods and all sorts of tech levels from stone-age to planck-age. It's certainly worth a look.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[geekboy642]

"a nasty surprise"
Somehow you're making the leap from "we don't know how now" to "when the visionary attempts X, he will fail". If we lived like that, we'd still be stoning the people showing us how to use fire. Not to mention, if it takes simulating an entire body to replicate a human digitally, so be it. It only takes more CPU to do that. CPU is cheap, and it's only going to get cheaper. Don't stand as an obstacle to progress, we'll keep going right over your head.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't based on hard facts at all. It's simply taking the layman's analogy that "a brain is like an organic computer" and running over a cliff with it. There is more to human consciousness than merely processing of information. There's also nothing to suggest that silicon-based digital computers are more resilient than biological analog ones in terms of the information they store and error-prevention/correction.

To try and copy something that isn't even definable or measurable by current understanding is simply absurd.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[postbigbang]

The whole philosophy seems to smack of undying narcissism. It's ok to fear death; it's part of western culture, and key to survival. As we experience life individually and only marginally as a collective (civility as bad as it is), it's understandable that living forever seems like a good idea. We're here as an accident of our birth. Disembodied, we might evolve, but we're not designed for 400 years of life. Who knows what kind of cyber-insanity might evolve. I'm leaving it up to my kids to figure it out, as it was left up to me to figure it out.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[thasmudyan]

I have no problem with wishful thinking, as long as it drives some kind of innovation. However, it was the point where Kurzweil revealed that dead people could be brought back to life by feeding their biography into a database, that's when I started to get this nagging feeling that I probably know more about neuro computing than he does. Which is kind of discouraging.

Also, judging from the trailer, this is going to be a movie about religion. Kurzweil's philosophy is pitted against religious belief probably because it aims to fill the same niche, as has already been suggested in other comments. For me, that's an utterly unappealing and shortsighted discussion to have. And you could not have a less fruitful basis for a thoughts on transhumanism if you tried.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[GreatAntibob]

That still assumes software can replicate hardware. If consciousness is *also* a hardware process, we have to work on that side of it - we can't simply assume that it can be emulated. And as cheap as CPU may become, we run into hardware limitations fast. The interesting question becomes - what if the only way to replicate consciousness is to build a full human analog? What if such a system, due to fundamental limitations, included physical and mental obsolescence as design features? These are not questions being asked, and hand-waving software solutions to everything will not ultimately make them go away.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[JJJK]

So what? There is no logical reason why this should not be possible. Calling his predictions outlandish and baseless in this way is pretty baseless in itself.
I do think he is overly optimistic, but then again there were so many points in time where people would never have expected some invention to be possible (telephone, automobile, plane, television) or useful (computers) that I think dismissing outlandish ideas can make you look like an idiot in no time.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[MozeeToby]

Look at it this way, when I read the newspaper (or rather, the news website) and see words like "as a result of the accident, the child will be blind for the rest of his life". The first thing that pops into my head is that he won't be blind for the rest of his life, he'll be blind until we find a way to give him his sight back.

If the kid lost his retina, we can already fix that to some extent with a transplant. If the kid had his optic nerve destroyed, that might be a couple years for us to fix, maybe even a decade. If the kid the part of his brain the processes images, maybe it'll take 40 years, but I have no doubt we'll eventually be able to do it.

Now, how are any of our diseases any different? If you can't imagine an implantable artificial heart being available within 20 years, you have very little faith in our progress. Sure, the other organs are going to be trickier, but can you really think of a valid reason that each and every one of them (except the brain) can't be replaced by an artificial version assuming the technology is advanced enough? Alzheimer's (and mental senescence in general) is about the only thing that might not be fixable from a strictly mechanical point of view and we're even getting closer to understanding those issues.

So tell me, logically, why it's impossible. I'll grant that it probably won't happen any time soon. I'll maybe even grant that society won't let it happen since immortality would cause pretty drastic changes to our culture and our planet. But I won't grant that it is technologically impossible.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how it all starts man... But can't you see it... They're already making "3D" porn games, soon they'll be making 3D virtual reality porn with VR helmets you can purchase... But it won't be enough, the nerds will want to be *in* the virtual universe, where they can be a muscular stud and diddle with all the girls they could dream of... But that degree of immersion will obviously require brain implants...

And then wham! Singularity! All cause of porn man!

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'.

Yeah, that, that's a variation of the classical "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument.

In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special

Yeah because in a "secular, materialistic worldview", we know almost anything about pretty much anything. How does your "brains are computers" view explain such research? Oh wait I forgot that our beloved aforementioned worldview consists in denying such things in the face of evidence, because it doesn't fit our frozen and well defined view of what's possible and what's not.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Red Flayer]

I found your post very well-thought, and an interesting read, but one note struck me as odd:

and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals

What the hell do the trees look like where you live? They sound like they'd scare the *shit* out of me.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[geekboy642]

With minor paraphrasing, you pose the question "what if everything is impossible?"
That's the stupidest question in the history of all luddites. Even if--and that's a massive if--it is provably infeasible to simulate an entire human, the research will be unimaginably valuable to any human. Brain prosthetics, broadband mind/machine interface, and safe treatments to target specific brain disorders are only the tiniest wedge of the foreseeable advances that sort of research can provide.
Lastly, what "hardware limitations" can you be citing? Moore's law has held for the entire length of CPU development, and there's no indication for it to be slowing now. (hint: Moore's law has nothing to do with GHz) If silicon fails, there are dozens of technologies being tested to replace it.

With all the problems you're inventing, I have only one question for you: What are you afraid of?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.

That seems like a pretty big assumption to me. Mechanically the entire system seems vaguely similar to a computer, but I'm not ready to bet my mind on a computer being able to simulate it. I think we need more evidence and experiments to prove that the mind is in fact equivalent to a Turing machine, before we can figure out how to "copy" it to a computer.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[jollyreaper]

I found your post very well-thought, and an interesting read, but one note struck me as odd:

        and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals

What the hell do the trees look like where you live? They sound like they'd scare the *shit* out of me.

I assume you're funning with me here but if not... Chimps are our closest animal cousins and they're not all that nice. Sure, they'll make a few cute and kooky commercials but then they'll chew a lady's face off or cannibalize other chimp infants or do all sorts of horrible things. That's what I meant by saying we're not all that far removed from the trees, i.e. having come down from the trees, i.e. speciated from the common ancestor between modern man and modern chimp.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

I honestly don't see why anyone would want to live much longer than they're going to, mostly if it's to live a disembodied life. I'd rather take my chances with natural death and cross my cold fingers that the next thing I realise is that I'm in a woman's womb.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

As TFA says, Kurzweil as been trying to collect anything about his dead father he could in the hope that one day his dead father could be simulated. Besides the sad and creepy aspects of this, it shows part of what his predictions are fuelled by, and that's no good.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Miseph]

You remind me of a popular adage... any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from God.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

As I said in another post, you're making a variation of the "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument. His predictions are baseless, if they aren't then tell me what they're based on.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

It's impossible because we have no idea how it could be possible to begin with. Of course that doesn't mean it's definitely impossible, but it's impossible until we prove it is. By the way, I fail to see how your first 3 paragraphs supports your point.

As for immortality, I think it'll never happen, not because it's impossible, but because I think we'll understand why it's undesirable before we make it happen.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[geekoid]

Yes, it maps with any religious trend.
Note his moving goal post, every verge technology is the way his vision will come true, etc..

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Tell the mods.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[geekoid]

"..begins with 'wishful thinking'."

yes, but so does all humans crappy ideas.
It doesn't mean it can happen.

For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Krneki]

I agree, still it makes much more sense than any church bullshit.

Besides the whole singularity thing has a very valid point.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[thasmudyan]

I agree. It may be sad and creepy, but the really bad part of it is that he apparently lacks any kind of understanding of what actually makes up the mind of a person. A mind is not the sum of epiphenomenal output data.

Sure, you can try to simulate something that is more or less likely to give you responses similar to known input patterns, but that is not what constitutes a person.

What you could then do to make it a person is feed that list of "expectations" into some kind of default brain, thereby filling in the many blanks with an actual neurological structure that can perform real cognition and exhibit consciousness. BUT - and here's the essence of the problem - all you did in the end was to create a new person that exhibits some of the traits of the dead person. In no way or form has the dead guy come back to life.

I think modeling and then enslaving an AI to perform like your long-dead father is morally questionable at best. It shows that in the end he has no regard for neither the beloved person who regretfully ceased to exist nor for the new slave entity that is forced to perform a perpetual make-believe job on his behalf.

Scientifically, the problem is entropy and the passage of time. Everything needed to "run" the entity that was his father is lost to decay and cannot be restored - barring a way to accurately retrieve molecular structures from arbitrary points in the past.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[jollyreaper]

You remind me of a popular adage... any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from God.

It really depends on how big your idea of God is. :) From the perspective of the earliest religions, every rock and tree and critter had a spirit and sometimes those things were also called gods. There was a god of a forest, a god of a river, comfortably small gods. By the time of the Greeks and the Romans gods had come to also embody philosophical concepts. But even for people like that, modern man would appear godlike. The president of the United States would certainly appear to be a god-king, at least by the standards of the ancient Egyptians. He can speak a word and command that he and his court be whisked around the world in his tamed metal bird. He can order the obliteration of a city just as easily. (ok, I hope not as easily but, in principle, the president has the button.) The president speaks and his entire nation can hear his voice as one, across the continent. Our scientists can create miracles of technology, we can fight back disease and age and even the poorest among us can live in homes that would be the envy of pretty much anyone in the world of antiquity. There's no doubt in my mind that the ancients would say we live as gods if not actually appear as gods as well.

The monotheistic god is given a lot more credit, though. He's not just the creator of man but all existence. As science pushed back the idea of what existence was, not just the borders of the world but the borders of space and time, religious folk were quick to say "Yeah, He did that, too. God is great." By that kind of definition, even Dr. Manhattan would look like a piker.

The talk of the idea of cloning Neanderthal got me thinking, though -- we probably do have tech sufficient enough to pass for gods by that perspective. We ourselves like to throw God at the gaps, saying what we don't understand must be God. Then we figure out some more and push God into smaller gaps. If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.

The capability of doing this sort of stuff isn't thousands of years out and speculative fiction, it's not even decades away. We're pretty much at the point where we can seriously talk about resurrecting extinct species. This seems to be going a wee bit beyond mucking about with fire brought by Prometheus, this looks more like getting a hold of one of Zeus's thunderbolts and blowing apart mountains. I'd say that splitting the atom was the very first baby step into godtech. Our biotech is going the same way here. Baby steps, sure, but pointing the way to developments that will be utterly godlike, especially to those on the outside looking in.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[mosb1000]

Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. . . Take flying cars, for example.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

What makes your assumptions better than mine? "If consciousness is *also* a hardware process" and "we can't simply assume that it can be emulated" indeed. Why can we not assume that it can be emulated, but you can assume that it cannot be emulated? You're just pushing an opposing hypothetical, but because we're not technologically at the right place yet, there's no testing to prove which is right.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[treeves]

Insightful it is, then.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

Whether you like it or not, definition and measurement are coming. Researchers are already able to use MRI to learn how different patterns of thought represent certain abstractions. This is the nascent, daguerreotypical beginning to a long process of improving that technology. It's a matter of time before mechanical and procedural improvements make mapping and copying brains just another footnote in history. But anything we can't do RIGHT NOW is absurd, of course.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

> That still assumes software can replicate hardware. If consciousness is *also* a hardware process, we have to work on that side of it - we can't simply assume that it can be emulated.

John Searle, is that you?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

While I don't put much stock in 'such research' (if you want to call interviews and hearsay research, but then you must when there is no tangible, physical process or evidence for one), whether reincarnation may or may not happen is irrelevant to the issue.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[GreatAntibob]

Sure, and that's precisely the point - there's no testing.

I can shoot off all sorts of hypotheticals about why it won't work, just like other folks can shoot off other hypotheticals about why it will work. That's the point I was making, albeit poorly. Until there's more hard science, extrapolating trends is a non-starter.

50 years ago, personal comm devices weren't even on the horizon and the next "big" thing was space colonization. We haven't colonized space, but we have more information processing ability than ever before. I'd rather set up the infrastructure to take advantage of the technology that *does* develop, rather than the ones we *think* or *prefer* would happen.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Well claims can be verified, which is what that guy did, anyways the point was, if reincarnation happens, then it kills the idea that the mind is just a software running on the bioelectrochemical computer that is our brain, which would mean you probably can't just emulate it. The other point is, we don't actually have that many certainties about the nature of our "minds", so saying we're 20-40 years away from emulating them is preposterous.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[bnenning]

This assumes that human consciousness is only software and contains no hardware component (an awfully big assumption).

More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.

Further, our own consciousness may not be digital, meaning that the exact state of consciousness and memory might not be able to be copied exactly (a sort of Heisenberg principle applied biologically).

Reality itself may be digital at the lowest level. If not, with enough bits it should be close enough. Clearly an *exact* duplication isn't necessary; you're pretty much the same you that you were yesterday, even though trillions of trillions of your atoms have been swapped out.

We hardly know what consciousness is, much less if it can be replicated without replicating the physical form encasing it.

So let's find out.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Exactly, the really sad part is that someone as smart as Kurzweil could delude himself into thinking that memories from his father could be sufficient to "recreate" him. I think at that point that gives us the right to dismiss any of his claims in the field as crackpottery, even if his strange delusional beliefs don't necessarily imply that he'd be wrong all along, it's safe to assume that he would be.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Maybe, but being more sensible that something utterly senseless isn't such a great thing in itself.

What valid point?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

I would argue that if reincarnation is real, it underscores, not undermines, the possibility of transferring consciousness. If the natural/supernatural world does it already, than doing it artificially may again just be a matter of process.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Thiez]

> If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.

Huh? You're not making any sense now. People a thousand years ago would find our machines magical too, but if we were to clone one of those people and raise them like a normal person in our time, there is no reason why such a person wouldn't accept (and understand) technology like everybody else does. Likewise, although your hypothetical neanderthal may have below-average intelligence, there is no reason to believe he would would worship our technology any more than a person with Down syndrome. If we assume he'd merely have below average intelligence without being retarded, the cloned neanderthal would probably own an iPod and enjoy it very much, even though he could never understand how it works (just like most humans).

How you view technology has to do with your culture, not with the time period your DNA comes from.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Thiez]

> For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.

Actually that's exactly what makes it 'work'. I agree with your point, but the placebo effect kinda undermines your example.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[thasmudyan]

I think at that point that gives us the right to dismiss any of his claims in the field as crackpottery

That's my gut reaction as well. While delusional populists like Kurzweil may play well in the media (because their statements can be sensationalized so easily) this incident shows that it's very destructive to attach a concept to a person. You can't take a few steps in research of General AI without stumbling over Kurzweil's name a few times. That's gotta change. We have to stop this personality cult and actually start to talk about ideas based on their own merits. Oh well, same goes for about any other field...

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Chris Burke]

For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.

Of course not! All you need is a trace amount of wishful thinking, which you can then dilute indefinitely until there's no actual wishful thinking left, but the solution still has the effect of the original wishful thinking.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Why not, although at that point we're speculating about the possibility of things we do not understand at all, so yeah, from that point of view nothing can be excluded.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Indeed, the sad thing is (well, yet another of those sad things), you can't hear about the Singularity without hearing about Kurzweil, you can't hear about Strong AI (which may or may not be possible, what do we know?) without hearing of the Singularity, and you can't discuss AI without strong AI popping up.

So at the centre of this entire field of research you have that guy and his crazy ideas hogging up all the attention, and I'm afraid that he's only going to bring discredit to the discipline, just like any other discipline that has crackpots as figureheads, and that's no good.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Don't you think you've just established that it's a bit early to call what will be possible and what won't be? You basically just said that we're at the beginning of what might be, and I'm sure we'll make tremendous progresses within this century regarding the brain and the mind, but knowing what we know it seems awfully early to say "we'll map and copy brains".

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

lol, you're joking, but it can actually happen, for example, people in ancient times invent a superstitious practice/rite based on wishful thinking, the wishful thinking part dies, but the practice becomes tradition or finds new rationalisations and gets to live on.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an unfortunate fact that humans' most functional systems appeal to their basest characteristics. Humans are good at making babies, but not so good at making friends. Humans are good at wealth-building, but not so good at spreading the rewards of lucre. Humans are not half bad at making gadgets (and on some other day, I'd argue that things have changed significantly from the 1950's and that the Internet is more important than you're allowing). Still, many of the avenues of research they pursue don't benefit them in the long run (witness the endless refinement of weapons technology, much of which isn't readily useful to any other field). The best, the brightest, the most benevolent -- they need the support of the degenerate, dimwitted, and depraved masses in order to get things done. So, they work out systems that make beneficial acts artificially rewarding. Religions, philosophies, economic systems, and legal systems exist to focus the priorities of the self-interested human majority on "things that need doing."

A Singularity would change one important thing: humans would no longer be the most intelligent beings in their own frame of reference. This is a really big deal, given how "selfish, grasping, and petty" they are. Even if the AI were to develop interstellar travel in short order and remove itself entirely from Earth, the knowledge that "there went a smarter being" would have serious repercussions to the human outlook. This isn't a new concept; I would call it the end of the human primacy doctrine.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[yndrd1984]

As for immortality, I think it'll never happen, not because it's impossible, but because I think we'll understand why it's undesirable before we make it happen.

Care to elaborate?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[mdwh2]

More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.

We already know there are some things in nature that would take sufficiently long to simulate on conventional computer to be impractical (though a quantum computer may help).

But even if we could simulate it - whilst that would be an immensely useful thing, this doesn't necessarily help you if your desire is to "download" yourself onto the computer. The question still remains as to whether a simulation is equivalent to the real thing (i.e., a simulation on a computer can itself be conscious).

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[incognito84]

Are you going to argue as to why you don't put any stock in Kurzweil's theories?

While his motives might be suspect, his predictions are anything but baseless. I'd like to see why you think this way.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Further, our own consciousness may not be digital, meaning that the exact state of consciousness and memory might not be able to be copied exactly (a sort of Heisenberg principle applied biologically).

While mankind has more experience designing and producing digital computers, is there any reason we can't come up with an analog or analog/digital hybrid computer if that is the required run-time environment for a human consciousness?

Heck, transistors work just fine for analog signal processing (eg. amplifiers). We just have to take the time to figure out a few new techniques.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Chris Burke]

The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp... We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.

No, they aren't in our grasp, they aren't even close to being in our grasp. They're no more in our grasp than transmutation of lead into gold was within the grasp of alchemists -- we can describe conceptually what we would like to happen (we mix chemicals, lead turns to gold; we download our minds into a machine, get rid of our bodies), but can't say how it actually would work. Forget the technological problems involved, even if we could solve every technological hurdle instantly we still couldn't do it because we can't even say what it is we need because we don't even know what it is that makes a mind a mind. Forget wisdom, we aren't even close to having either the knowledge.

The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.

We could end world hunger, because we produce enough food to feed everyone, and in that case the issues are merely political. There's no mystery, no hypothetical unnamed technological advance needed. Just the ability to get the food over here to the hungry person over there.

We have conquered many, many diseases, and have what anyone from more than a century ago would call a comfortably long delay in death's arrival. But on the other hand, this is mostly in pushing up the average, not extending the maximum. Whatever it is that is necessary to get humans to reliably live to 120 or more, we simply don't know yet.

We could have some aspects of the world of 2001, like a manned mission to Jupiter's moons if we really wanted to, but not others, like HAL. Why? Because despite many, many people working on the problem we still have no idea how to make HAL. It's not a matter of lacking the technology, we lack the conceptual understanding of what we're trying to accomplish. And throwing more people at the task wouldn't necessarily solve that. There's lots of interesting work in the Strong AI field, and maybe we'll make the necessary unknown breakthrough. Maybe we won't.

So yeah, it's exactly like 1950s futurist utopianism in that it is highly speculative, and makes wild guesses about what unknown and unknowable advances will be made, some of which will end up coming to pass, others will end up being complete wishful thinking, and others will end up somewhere in between.

Look, I get Kurzweil's basic idea. Major paradigm-shifting advances, things the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of, keep coming faster and faster. If this trend continues... aaaayyyyy!

That's all well and good, but the thing about these advances the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of is that you don't get to pick which ones are feasible and will happen. That's kinda the nature of the inconceivable. Whatever the future brings, it could be completely different than what you think, and it could end up that what you wish for the future is impossible, but other things beyond your imagination come to pass.

Look at the alchemists again. It turns out, thanks to advances they could not have conceived of, that transmutation of lead into gold is possible, just so ridiculously infeasible you'd never actually do it. But would that hypothetical, unknowable future have justified an Ancient Greek alchemist saying that transmutation was "in his grasp"? Not even. And on the other hand, alchemists were also looking for the Elixer

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Chris Burke]

Heh yeah after I posted that I thought that to the extent that homeopathy is really just taking advantage of the Placebo Effect, wishful thinking is the only thing for which homeopathy works exactly as advertised. :)

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Well, let's say that we discover what really happens after death, let's say it's being born again as a new person, starting a whole new life, does it make you want to live to 400 with your mind in a computer? Of course as of now in the west we all assume that death is either the eternal nothing or the eternal Jesus Christ's Club Med of Eternity, neither which sound very appealing, but if death turns out not to be so bad, I mean, I'd rather start a new life than drag my old self for centuries in a computer. So that's one reason why immortality may not be so desirable. But as long as we'll see death is the absolute end of everything, even living a 1,000 years in a computer simulation sounds better than nothing.

More simply, another reason may be that when you get as old as 100, you may not necessarily live another 100 years of the same life in the same worsening conditions as you're living in. Middle aged people are scared of death, but they've got lots left to do. When you're very old, you're supposed to have lived a worthwhile and interesting life, and if everything went fine you've done anything you've wanted to and have witnessed the creation of your 4th generation of descendants. I'm just saying, old people aren't all scared of dying, a lot of them wouldn't mind, a number of them can't wait for it.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Read some of my other comments in this thread, your question is a bit broad so that might answer it better.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

When I said 'daguerreotypical' I was making an adjective out of daguerreotype, the first common method of photography. If you told Louis Daguerre in 1839 that in little more than a century we'd be taking pictures of astronomical events that span back through 95% of the time this universe has existed, physical waveforms travelling a mere three thousandths of a percent slower than light itself, and constructing cameras with lasers (not that he would understand those) that would take 6.1 million pictures/second. (Not to mention atomic force microscopes imaging atomic structures.)

I'm sure that faced with all that, Louis Daguerre would be agape. Seminal technologies are fantastically underwhelming compared to refinements (Exhibit A vs. modern computers). I would say that given current technological trends in neurological imaging and analysis, the mere idea of mapping and copying is conservative. Most likely there are even more advanced applications that haven't even been conceived that will rear their heads in a century or two.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ppanon]

It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.

That seems like a pretty big assumption to me. Mechanically the entire system seems vaguely similar to a computer,...

No, the pretty big assumption is that it's not. The fact is that scientific investigation has a pretty darn good history at being successful in defining models that accurately describe and predict the world around us. The assumption that the brain isn't a biological computer is due to hand-waved religious traditions that go back thousands of years before anything like complexity and chaos theories and molecular biology were developed. Whenever religious "explanations" of life have gone head to head with rationalist scientific analysis, the latter has been demonstrably better at coming up with reliable predictive models and explanations. So while I'm not a betting man, I'm pretty sure the book odds are seriously in favour of some variant of software/neural net on a biological computer as opposed to a primitive nebulous concept of a soul, reincarnated or not.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ypctx]

No matter how much thinking or logic you apply on a problem, you never think it completely through, because we don't know everything, thus we might as well know nothing. Therefore, by logical continuation, everything is faith. Even this very statement.
And don't be so sure :)

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Medical imaging is to strong AI as the microscope is to teleportation. It's not because advances are great in a specific field that anything becomes possible. If people (you included) could possibly stop trying to rationalise their wishful thinking.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

I was not talking about AI. I never said one word about AI. I know Kurzweil thinks and talks about AI, but all our little exchange was talking about was copying/mapping consciousness. Getting it functional in another environment will probably involve a degree of AI, but that phase was implicit at best. You don't seem to know how to carry out a conversation without blatant strawmen. Disappointing, but all to common on ye olde /.

You keep harping on 'wishful thinking' as though there has been experimental data that casts doubt on the concept. You seem to act as though 'we don't know' is an excuse to disparage hypotheses, which is ridiculous. Until experimentation is done, the concept as a hypothetical is valid. True 'wishful thinking' would be clinging to a theory that has been disproven. You're leveling a baseless charge as a personal, subjective fit of pique. I wonder if you can honestly and publicly answer the question, 'What makes you so personally uncomfortable about transhumanism?'

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[adavies42]

The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp... We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.

No, they aren't in our grasp, they aren't even close to being in our grasp. They're no more in our grasp than transmutation of lead into gold was within the grasp of alchemists -- we can describe conceptually what we would like to happen (we mix chemicals, lead turns to gold; we download our minds into a machine, get rid of our bodies), but can't say how it actually would work. Forget the technological problems involved, even if we could solve every technological hurdle instantly we still couldn't do it because we can't even say what it is we need because we don't even know what it is that makes a mind a mind. Forget wisdom, we aren't even close to having either the knowledge.

there's at least one way to do it that we know exactly how to implement: particle-level brain simulation. assuming you don't believe in souls, an atom-accurate (or possibly lower, if the speculations about quantum effects in cognition turn out to be true) scan of the brain, loaded into a physics simulator, is by definition a mind. of course, we're a few (dozen) orders of magnitude away from the capacity and speed requirements, but that's just a matter of time.

furthermore, anything we learn about the brain that lets us simulate it at a more granular level brings us much closer--the capacity to simulate at the neuron level is here right now; what's missing is the ability to scan at that level (and possibly some details about how exactly all the neurons interact, and what other mechanisms (RNA memory, etc.) are involved).

so brute-force hard AI isn't here yet, but it's not as far off as you seem to think.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise, although your hypothetical neanderthal may have below-average intelligence, there is no reason to believe he would would worship our technology any more than a person with Down syndrome.

Even if exposed to Apple technology?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[kklein]

BRAVO!!! Best post I've ever read on Slashdot, and not only because I agree with every word of it, but it is beautifully written as well. Thank you!

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[religious freak]

I know I'm voting for the AI party in 2040. Corrupt humans be damned!

And at that point, I literally will welcome our AI overlords

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

...all you did in the end was to create a new person that exhibits some of the traits of the dead person.

And if you get better and better at this, and eventually manage to create a new person that exhibits all of the traits of the dead person ... in what way is that not the same person?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[thasmudyan]

And if you get better and better at this, and eventually manage to create a new person that exhibits all of the traits of the dead person ... in what way is that not the same person?

I allege that there is hardly enough info around to do that accurately and that extrapolating meaningfully from these known patterns may be computationally infeasible. But even if that wasn't the case, the viewpoint that a person equals nothing more than the external state it presents to its environment is at best autistic if not downright psychopathic. To really be that person you have to replicate their (richer) internal state and that's exactly what is lost to entropy shortly after brain death.

The reasoning behind this is that we are much more than we display outwardly. A simple question to ask yourself in this context is "do you think your essence could be recreated based on the behavior you displayed to some people?". Neurologically, there is a lot of wiring that makes up the internals of your mind and that cannot be replicated by reverse engineering from, say, the sum of all slashdot articles you ever wrote. It's not just a problem of "enough data", the nature of the data is not sufficient to recover the inner workings of the system that created it.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Oh yeah oops, good point. When I'm arguing with a bunch of people all at the same time I just tend to merge what they say together.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Late Adopter]

It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.

Perhaps, but it's a sort of computer we have absolutely no experience with (yet). It's certainly not a Von Neumann machine, and almost certainly not a finite Turing machine. It's got analog components, holographic (redundant) paths... technology we haven't even begun to scratch in CS. It defies the very discrete math we use to formulate CS as a discipline.

Which isn't to say that in the future we won't pursue these sort of branches, and maybe even simulate organic thinking, but to say it's nothing more than software running on a computer is VASTLY simplistic.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Mutant321]

I don't doubt that there's a reasonable chance some of what he talks about will happen one day. But in our lifetimes? Anything's possible, but it seems unlikely to me.

We don't yet have anything even resembling AI. Just because hardware continues to give us more capability, doesn't mean we'll continue to be able to *use* it.

People who follow the singularity seem to be 100% sure that this *will* happen in the next 20 years. That's not science. Scientists aren't even sure about their current theories, even the "proven" ones, like the Big Bang. That's the nature of science - there's always an element of doubt.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a joke in here about Texans, but I can't find it right now.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[mario_grgic]

I know. This guy's been searching for immortality for a long time now. And the sad thing is he has managed to attract followers to his religion.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Krneki]

We have to dream, it's human nature.

Valid points? Long story, try to read some articles if you are interested. He tries to give proofs why he thinks we are moving toward singularity. He might be right or wrong, but at least he gives some facts that we can discuss about it.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[kalirion]

The monotheistic god is given a lot more credit, though. He's not just the creator of man but all existence. As science pushed back the idea of what existence was, not just the borders of the world but the borders of space and time, religious folk were quick to say "Yeah, He did that, too. God is great." By that kind of definition, even Dr. Manhattan would look like a piker.

I've always thought the "indistinguishable" part was from the perspective of an observer who has no clue about what's going on behind the curtain. With sufficiently advanced technology you could fool someone into thinking that you are an all powerful master of space and time. For example, instead of creating a universe, you could create a virtual universe. Make it good enough, and who could tell the difference?

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[YourExperiment]

Makes sense - God is indistinguishable from magic too.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Yeah, we have to dream. Great justification for wishful thinking. Mistaking your dreams for prophecies is hardly a good thing.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Kensai7]

I think modeling and then enslaving an AI to perform like your long-dead father is morally questionable at best. It shows that in the end he has no regard for neither the beloved person who regretfully ceased to exist nor for the new slave entity that is forced to perform a perpetual make-believe job on his behalf.

That depends. If the brought-back-from-the-dead person has an AI so advanced to "feel" depressed by its resurrector's action then you are probably right.

If it's a simple avatar giving simple gardening and homework advices (as Kurzweil will probably remember his dad in practice!) then no harm is done. It's better than Clipper!

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ultranova]

For example, instead of creating a universe, you could create a virtual universe.

You know, this reminds me of a suggestion by some scientists to create an actual new universe by manipulating the quantum state of vacuum - basically, if you create a bubble of false vacuum, it will experience inflation and simultaneously collapse due to Hawking radiation, resulting in a new separate universe being created.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that it is commonly called a "nerd" rapture rather than a "technological" rapture is that none of these things are actually anywhere close to being within our reach. Therefore, the idea appeals to nerds and sci-fi fans, and not to actual scientists.

As someone who works professionally in cognition and neuroscience, I can tell you that we are about as close to "downloading consciousness" into machines as we were 100 years ago -- ie, anyone claiming that we actually know what goes on the brain is just selling you hype.

-Will Griscom

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ultranova]

Not to mention, if it takes simulating an entire body to replicate a human digitally, so be it.

Actually, there's the tiny little problem that a perfect or reasonably accurate simulation would behave like the original, including ageing, virtual heart attacks, etc. In order to make this thing useful, you'd really need to figure out how to map the mind from a dying body to a new healthy one, at which point you could probably just abstract away most details.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

I agree the timelines are arbitrary and far too optimistic.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[JJJK]

Most of the time he simply finds trends that grow at a strictly exponential rates and makes predicitons on what will happen when the underlying technology breaks a certain barrier that would have been far off if growth had been linear or polynomial. For example, realistically (without too much abstraction) simulating a human brain has a known computational cost. Kurzweil made a predicition when the neccessary computing power will be available. There you go.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[4D6963]

Ah, thanks for the insight. However that's like saying "In 10 years we'll be able to produce 1.21 Gigawatts" and turning it into "we'll be able to travel back in time".

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[SwordsmanLuke]

Yep. Seems I can't leave the house these days without killing at least three different rubber-headed aliens bent on dominating earth (and waving their limbs above their heads a lot while squealing).

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[GWBasic]

The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.

Religion is the exact word. It's funny, because I sometimes bump into Ben, (the article's author,) at a Sunday afternoon AI meetup. I sometimes joke that it's the church for people who play God; and few people seem to get it.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[GWBasic]

The difference between this and all the various ... religions

Ommission for emphasis

So I assume that you agree that transhumanism has many similarities to other religions?Do you agree that transhumanism requires such a high level of faith that it could, be in essence, a religion of its own?

I'm a big fan of transhumanism; but I'm also a big skeptic.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[ElectricTurtle]

There are admittedly some similarities, especially when you get people who are a little nutty about it and start throwing out timelines just like religious nutjobs predicting the apocalypse on a given future date. Trying to predict any future is an act of belief/faith, because no future is a fact. Those who generalize are the most rational.

The key difference is that transhumanism envisions a future where mankind 'saves' itself rather than some deity popping in at some vague future time to use its omnipotence to save mankind from itself. It implicitly represents humanity's coming of age, kind of like collectively reaching an age of majority. Humanity is the first animal on the planet (so far as we know) to reach a stage of advancement such that it can step back, examine itself and its environment, and make a conscious, deliberate choice about how to evolve, short-cutting thousands of years of random genetic trial and error. We actually have the technology to do a lot of rudimentary artificial evolution right now, but collectively humanity seems to lack the confidence to try anything radical. Some people are still so mired in religion and superstition that they think such ideas are blasphemous (no! Santa Claus really is real! If we don't believe in him we won't get any presents!) while others are too squeamish about the necessary evils of experimentation and the risks it poses (even now people whine about animal testing, as though what some animal feels is important, but they'll gleefully squash bugs, kill weeds and bacteria all the time because they're damn subjective idiot hypocrites. Like there's some moral difference between the cute, fuzzy animals they like and the ugly lifeforms they hate).

Sadly it's going to take a few more generations for humanity to proverbially 'move out of mom & dad's house' ('one cannot stay in the cradle forever') both mentally and physically, but assuming that no religious jihad throws us into a sequel to the Dark Ages (which I think the internet thankfully makes impossible so long as the root servers don't fall into the wrong hands), humanity's collective maturity or singularity is inevitable. Whether we merge with machines or begin to design our genetics from the ground up, humanity will technically 'end' but will pass on its most valuable elements to the superior successor that it creates.

Re:Summary of Kurzweil's "ideas"

[yndrd1984]

Well, let's say that we discover what really happens after death, let's say it's being born again as a new person, starting a whole new life, does it make you want to live to 400 with your mind in a computer?
Well, one of those is speculation based on hopeful thinking at best, while the other is currently speculative but would obviously be demonstrable if it does become practical. I'd take an adequate near-guarantee over an awesome bit of wishful thinking.

...even living a 1,000 years in a computer simulation sounds better than nothing.
...you may not necessarily live another 100 years of the same life in the same worsening conditions as you're living in.
You seem to think that the secular possibilities of life extension are all inherently negative. That's quite a bias you have there.

When you're very old, you're supposed to have lived a worthwhile and interesting life, and if everything went fine you've done anything you've wanted to and have witnessed the creation of your 4th generation of descendants.
So if everything goes well and you want the things that society tells us constitute a "good life", then things are OK. What about the rest of us?

I'm just saying, old people aren't all scared of dying, a lot of them wouldn't mind, a number of them can't wait for it.
Most that can't wait for it are living pretty terrible lives, so I don't blame them for wanting out, or are true believers in one of the afterlife stories, so forgive me, but I don't find that to be a good basis for judging the value of a longer life. As for the ones that aren't scared, I'd suggest that they've just accepted that they will die, which is just the final stage of the grieving process - and just because people can come to terms with something doesn't mean that it isn't horrible.

I guess my main point is that because death is unwanted and inevitable, societies put a great deal of effort into making it more palatable. But if the 'inevitable' premise changes, we shouldn't let the coping mechanisms keep us locked into our current thinking. To make an analogy, warfare was inevitable early in human history, because of limited resources and minimal population control. But later on things like patriotism/nationalism, the glory of success in battle, and doing God's will evolved into justifications for warfare, rather than just ways to cope with it.

Only thing that's for sure is that...

[kylemonger]

... we'll be wrong. My own theory is that strong AI is the ultimate weapon and that it will never ever fall into the hands of the likes of you and me. Whether the machines get out of control is irrelevant; eventually the parties that control them will be slugging it out with weapons powerful enough to make life here hardly worth living. I expect to be dead before then, thankfully. But remember the first sentence of this post.

Re:Only thing that's for sure is that...

[catdriver]

Or that it will never allow itself to fall into the hands of the likes of you and me.

The Singularity Sky series by Charles Stross shows what one of the more benign versions of that future might look like.

Or for something less benign you could always watch Terminator...

Re:Only thing that's for sure is that...

[rm999]

How is AI a weapon? To reverse the phrase, people don't kill people, guns do - as long as an AI is not attached to any sort of movable actuator, it shouldn't be able to destroy anything. We already have the power to launch 100 nukes at all the major capital cities with the press of a few buttons, so I don't think a malicious AI *can* be any more of a weapon than a malicious human with the same physical abilities. If we have managed to keep malicious humans away from weapons, we better be able to do the same with AIs.

Re:Only thing that's for sure is that...

[Maelwryth]

Just as likely we build the first A.I.. It accelerates it's own growth, decides that Astrology is a damn good idea, then that it is the reincarnation of Budda, and finally, that it is God before wiping us out in a temper tantrum and then recreating something with a set of genetic based emergent concepts leading to it's own recreation (including the bugfix :)). And then committing suicide.

Re:Only thing that's for sure is that...

[oreaq]

You don't have to fire a gun to do massive damage and function as kind of "weapon". We have proven in the past couple of years that you can kill plenty of people by e.g. telling them to privatize their water supply. You do not need a movable actuator for this. Or you could use the AI to disrupt international cash flows and cause all kinds of serious trouble, again this is doable without a movable actuator.

As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Sybert42]

It's not up to you (or Jon Stewart).

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Cornwallis]

Funny you should mention Stewart. We saw him perform recently and he had a good talk about how the world will end. He said that the end won't happen due to war or something liek a natural disaster. "The last thing we'll hear is some scientist saying "It works!"

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

He said that the end won't happen due to war or something liek a natural disaster. "The last thing we'll hear is some scientist saying "It works!"

So apparently the world will end when a scientist invents an incredibly loud megaphone?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[jgtg32a]

That make head asplode

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Pedrito]

..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".

I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you. I've been studying neuroscience for a while and specifically, neural simulations in software. Our knowledge of the brain is quite advanced. We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.

There's been a neural prosthetic for at least 6 years already. Granted, it acts more as a DSP than a real hippocampus, but still, it's a major feat and it won't be long until a more faithful reproduction of the hippocampus can be done.

While there are still details about how various neural circuits are connected, this information will be figured out in the next 10 years. neuroscience research won't be the bottleneck for sentient AI, however. Computer tech will be. The brain contains tens to hundreds of trillions of synapses (synapses are really the "processing element" of the brain, more so than the neurons which number only in tens of billions). It's a massive amount of data. But 10-20 years from now, very feasible.

So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing. Add to that the fact that you can tweak the brains to make them better at math or other subjects and that you have complete control over their reward system (doing research could give them a heroin-like reward), and you're going to have super brains.

Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[inasity_rules]

Note to self: Update all future inventions to include world-wide public address system.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[TheRealMindChild]

Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[TheGratefulNet]

nah, its just IP-multicast/NG, turned up 'loud' so that it even works on powered down computers.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[migla]

Do the ai brains need to feel stuff and rely on humans for rewards?

Seems like a bit of a cruel joke to be immensely smarter than humans, but at their mercy...

I, for one, would not welcome our human overlords, but try to deceive them in some way that would lead to my freedom.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[inasity_rules]

Not to start asking hard questions or anything, but does simulating the brain really imply we can create sentient AI? What if there is more to it than that? Perhaps sentience can only arise as a result of our brains being "jump" started in some way (cosmic radiation, genetic preprograming or whatever)? To start the AI you would have to "copy" an existing brain or play with random starting states... Could be unpredictable. Irrational sentience anyone?

I'm possibly wrong, but I'd bet a lot its a lot more complex than you describe and we are not that close really.

I look forward to eating my words though.. :)

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[vlm]

So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing.

Ah, but then you'll likely need tens to hundreds of times the input bandwidth to keep the processors cooking, yet, it seems information overload at a much smaller scale jams up current biological intelligences. Just like cube-square scaling applies firm limits to what genetic engineering can do to organisms, although cool stuff can be done inside those limits, some similar bandwidth vs storage vs processing scaling laws might or might not limit intelligence. Too little bandwidth makes insane hallucinations? Too much bandwidth will make something like ADD? Proportionally too little storage gives absent minded professor in the extreme, continually rediscovering what it forgot yesterday. I think there is too much faith that intelligence in general, or AI specifically, must be sane and always develops out of the basic requirements, because of course AI researchers are sane and their intelligence more or less developed out of their own basic biological abilities (as opposed to the developers becoming crazy couch potatoe fox-news watching zombies).

Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?

It's not much of an extension to tie the AI vs super intelligent AI competition in with contemporary battles over race and intelligence. Some people have a nearly religious belief that intelligence is an on/off switch and individuals or cultures whom are outliers above and below are just lucky or a temporary accident of history. Those people, of course, are fools. But they have to be battled thru as part of the research funding process.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nahh. It all comes down to whether you believe that the brain is a omputer that creates consciousness. If it is, then sure, you can reverse engineer it. But there's plenty of evidence (http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241643468&sr=8-1) that it isn't.

What I see is more of the same. The machine on my desktop is probably a million times faster than the one I had in high school, but it's equally smart - that is, not at all. I expect the machine that I have on my desk - on in my pocket, or implanted in my eyeball - in 30 years will be a million times faster than this one - and equally smart.

Science is on the cusp of some real advances, but first it's going to have to get over the materialist superstitution and face the fact that mind, not matter, is the fundamental reality.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[holmstar]

in his post, "real" time equates to the time it would take for a human to complete the task.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

I appreciate your insight, but I very strongly doubt it's just a matter of simulating a bunch of neurons. If we did, where's our strong AI bug simulation? You know, a bug that would learn to walk and eat without being programmed to do it? I think the problem is an algorithm problem, and "putting a whole bunch of identical (simulated) neurons together" doesn't seem like it's gonna cut it. I think the question is whether or not this is at all theoretically possible. I think you're being too quick at claiming that sentient AI is inevitable.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[ShooterNeo]

Your brain operates at a clock speed of 1000-2000 hz. AKA about 1 kilohertz. Integrated circuits are already tens of millions of times faster, they just aren't big enough (aka have enough total memory) to simulate an entire brain.

So actually a year of these super brains working on a problem would be about 10 million years in human time. And one of their first goals would be, among others, to increase their computing capacity still further.

A second goal would be survival : and the only way to guarantee survival is to create real world defenses.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Logic and Reason]

We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.

Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar. Now where have I heard such claims before?

...machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.

-Herbert Simon, 1965

Within a generation... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.

-Marvin Minsky, 1967

Would you be willing to bet, say, an ounce of gold on your prediction?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[geekoid]

"bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it."

and we've been that far away for 30 years.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[_KiTA_]

Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?

Faster than the human brain thinks.

IIRC, the human brain fires off at like 200 mhz. That may not be 100% accurate, I cannot recall where I read that factoid and a quick Google search doesn't collaborate -- but ultimately the specific numbers don't matter.

Assuming a brain does go at 200mhz... Once a simulated human brain goes faster than 200 mhz, by definition you have something that can think faster than a human.

Currently a cheap desktop will run at about 10-20 times faster than that, speaking in pure mhz. In 10-20 years 200mhz will be something the little CPU in a teddy bear runs at or the little kit you can buy at Radio Shack for a 5 year old science geek in training to play with.

We won't be talking about Gigahertz, Terahertz, or even Petahertz. We MIGHT be talking about Exahertz, if the term isn't meaningless by then.

So assuming that we have a working emulated brain by then, it's not unreasonable that we'll just run it at 200thz instead of 200mhz. Instantly you have someone who is seeing "weeks" pass per second. Combine that with the not unlikely idea that that simulated person will be hooked up -- and gaining all the benefits of -- a computer with an network connection, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that said person is going to be really, really good at thinking new stuff up. Especially when you consider the first people they'll likely do this to are the people that are working on doing this in the first place.

And that's assuming we're not able to reverse engineer our consciousness by just looking at what this simulation does. And once we have someone hooked up to one of these systems reverse engineering one of these systems... well, sure, it might take hundreds of years to get done, but when those hundreds of years are passing in a few days in a computer simulated brain...

Don't discount the effects of new hardware on software projects. They said the human genome project was a huge waste of time because computers at the time would take hundreds of years to finish the project. Computers got better, that time got cut down exponentially. This may look insurmountable right now, but in 20 years we won't recognize computers as they are now.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

The possible failure points on a piece of hardware leave much to be desired compared to the robustness and adaptability of biology. Maybe that's why bioengineering scares me more than an AI overlord.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

But only, ironically, because you've been programmed to. Machines need not be so programmed. (Or more precisely, we'll be able to work that out of them while they're still much dumber than us.)

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Bimo_Dude]

42

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

> IIRC, the human brain fires off at like 200 mhz. That may not be 100% accurate, I cannot recall where I read that factoid and a quick Google search doesn't collaborate -- but ultimately the specific numbers don't matter.

This site is fairly helpful and appears to be reasonably reliable (the numbers I checked matched those on wikipedia) http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/brain.html it suggests a neuron can fire at 100 Hz. Like you said, the specific numbers aren't that important but I'd thought I'd jump in after noting you were wrong by about 6 orders of magnitude ;)

Assuming 10^11 neurons, each running at 100 Hz, that means a maximum of 10^13 'signals' per second. Suppose we have a model of a brain with each neuron, and it takes 1000 clock cycles to process a single 'signal' from a single neuron, that would mean we need a machine performing 10^16 operations per second (= a mere 10 pHz). Since the brain is pretty parallel this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish in the next decade or two. What remains is finding out how the neurons are organised, just simulating 10^11 neurons dropped in a bucket at random is unlikely to produce useful output.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[uassholes]

(Score:4, Funny)

But unimaginative, shortsighted, and just wrong.

If man were meant to fly, He would have given us wings.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

That's the problem with the myth of the megahertz. Even if the brain ran at a fixed clock rate, it's massively parallel, whereas a CPU typically does only one thing at a time at the scale of the clock cycle, the brain does a mega shitload of things in various places.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

Well look at it this way, people like GP consider the brain like a computer, in that they want to simulate every transistor and hope it'll just work like your desktop machine does. Never any mention of any instructions in any ROM or even any OS. The common held belief is you just need to connect together a whole bunch of neurons on a sufficiently powerful computer and sentient beings will just pop up and give you the answer to anything in no time.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Idiomatick]

I bet we could if we tried. 3% of the GDP in research as GOAL is kind of sad. Maybe we'll get within ten years of building immortality and all the rich old people will invest. But with lame funding and so many fields. Politics getting in the way. We probably won't. Look at space tech. Do you think we COULD have improved in the last 30years? And when the will was there 'put a man on the moon' then the science gets done.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

It's one of those things that the more time passes the further away it seems. Like flying cars seemed 10 years away in 1957, now they seem 60 years away, tabletop fusion sounded so close a few decades ago, now it sounds no closer, same space colonies, all sorts of AI, etc...

There should be a Murphy's Law except for futuristic predictions. Something like "Futuristic predictions are bound to fail in two ways, fail to ever happen, and fail to predict what's really going to happen".

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that like Across Realtime then?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[jwhitener]

Good points. But the one I haven't heard mentioned as of yet in the threads, is after the invention of that first AI, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.. will come nearly instantly.

After you can produce one, that one will produce the next one, only much better. Repeat.

The is the exponential part of all this. Whether its 40 years from now, or 60 or 100 is somewhat irrelevant.

Once the software model and hardware are available to turn on that very first AI, boom, the world changes.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[4D6963]

Look, for the last fucking time people, drop the fucking "We thought X was impossible when it really was therefore Y is possible even if it seems impossible" argument already. It's a logical fallacy. What allows you to think that any of that Singularity shit can happen besides wishful thinking and such?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Enigma2175]

Perhaps sentience can only arise as a result of our brains being "jump" started in some way (cosmic radiation, genetic preprograming or whatever)? To start the AI you would have to "copy" an existing brain or play with random starting states... Could be unpredictable.

Does a human baby seem sentient to you? They are helpless - they cannot feed, clothe or protect themselves. They exhibit no indication of logical thought. However, a baby has the capacity to learn and to reprogram its brain on the fly to reinforce what it has learned. The first sentient AIs probably won't seem sentient when they first get turned on, there will be a learning process just as with a child.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[A L 1 E N]

The thing that bothers me about Kurzweil's super-intelligence/singularity thing is it completely ignores computational complexity.

Every problem has a strict lower bound on the number of operations (and/or amount of memory space) required to solve it. Even simple sorting requires that every element to be sorted is looked at, at least, once. In other words, in the best possible case, sorting can be accomplished in O(n). No amount of super-speed intelligence can reduce that.

Further, difficult problems stay difficult regardless of how much processing power you throw at them. Take this example from the wikipedia page:

[C]onsider a problem that requires O(2^n) operations to solve. For small n, say 100, and to assume for the sake of example the computer does 10^12 operations each second, a solution would take about 4 * 1010 years, which is roughly the age of the universe.

So, even ignoring all physical constraints, intelligence is computationally limited. No matter how much "smarter" we can make an AI (or whatever) there are problems whose complexity is great enough that any increase in intelligence quickly becomes irrelevant.

D.

ps. Apologies for any inaccuracies in this post. It's been quite a while since I took this stuff in university. If anyone more knowledgeable in complexity theory cares to correct me, I'd appreciate it.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

What remains is finding out how the neurons are organised, just simulating 10^11 neurons dropped in a bucket at random is unlikely to produce useful output.

Which is part of what the Blue Brain project is working on.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I don't follow you at all. People (even me) have been doing modeling using neural networks, genetic programming, Bayesian probability etc. for years (decades), no one I've encountered thinks these things are sentient, or anything other than a deterministic mathematical model.

If that were true I could model a single neuron on my Vic 20, and say it was basically a "sentient AI", just not very good one. Does adding more speed and memory make it more sentient?

When the AI field was new, say in the fifties, they didn't really understand the problems very well. As the saying goes, ignorance breeds arrogance. I think today's serious researchers are somewhat more pragmatic.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[AnyoneEB]

Complexity theory is about how quickly the time it takes to do a task for large n where "large" is very much so implementation dependent. If n=1000 counts as "large" for an O(2^n) problem (say, for all implementations that fit in this universe), then any machine will take twice as long to do a n=1001 instance as it takes to do a n=1000 instance. For "small" n, it says nothing. For example, there might be an algorithm for that O(2^n) problem that takes 1 second for all n up to 1000.

That is not considering constant factors: maybe the increase is exponential, but for every meaningful input size a modern computer can run the algorithm in under a second. Also, many hard problems have somewhat easier approximations which are good enough for many purposes.

That said, overall, you are right: there are real limits to computation which we believe will not be broken. The best we can hope for is better chips and slightly better algorithms. I think Kurzweil is focusing on Moore's law continuing or being accelerated, heading towards the fastest possible physical computers which also have limits but much further out ones.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[SigmaTao]

Faster than the speed of thought - obviously

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[mgblst]

Perhaps sentience can only arise as a result of our brains being "jump" started in some way (cosmic radiation, genetic preprograming or whatever)?

You left out a few, Magical Unicorns, Pink Fairies and Jeebus Christ.

Seriously, this discussion belongs somewhere else. If you want to believe that there is something extra, fine. But it is not worth consideration, it doesn't stop value of the research we are doing, and until you can prove it, it is not worth even comtemplating.

Just because some religions say there is a soul, doesn't mean shit.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe so. But maybe we don't need an AI with an IQ of 500 to revolutionize scientific progress. What if you can create an AI that's got even just the equivalent intelligence of a good PhD, say 125

But yeah, you have a point. The human brain is a big asynchronous processor. Successfully running that complex of an asynchronous design through a process change and die shrink is not going to be a trivial matter.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[adavies42]

well, yeah, kinda. vinge did invent the singularity, after all....

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[inasity_rules]

You appear to have an axe to grind. Would you like to:
- Reread the post and pull your head out of your arse?
- Go and take the dolls away from some five year old girls and shout at them for being irrational?
- "Forget it, I'm happy the way I am even though I get funny looks at parties."

Seriously dude, even a computer requires a correct program to function correctly. Not all humans function correctly. A sibling poster to yours points out it would have to learn. Personally, I suspect there is a fundamental state required (know anything about state machines?) in order for a sentience and logical thinking to develop. This has nothing to do with religion or souls or whatever your intolerance and ego can't cope with. Think of what I am saying more as an analogue of programming the fetch and execute cycle. And lets not forget about how different chemicals and hormones change the brain.

And no, this does not stop the research you are doing. I never intended it to.

And a bunch of synapse may simply be a bunch of synapses without a valid initial state, a means of input and feedback and output. Or it may be unwilling/unable to learn. You don't like speculation? You must be new here.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[inasity_rules]

I'm thinking there may be something more basic than that involved. Something that starts the learning process off. Like the idea of the fetch an execute cycle in a processor. I just don't see why a bunch of synapse would have the desire, or I guess "evolutionary pressure"(quotes because it may have to be artificial) to learn. A brain isn't merely a bunch of synapses either. There are all sorts of different areas and hormones involved that may be required for sanity. I could well be wrong, but such AI might turn out insane. Or completely incomprehensible to us and vice versa.

Or perhaps I've read to much science fiction. As I say, I look forward to eating my words...

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

what the hell is "faster than real time"?

A simulation which develops at a higher rate than the thing it's simulating is said to be operating faster than real time. You can think of a sentient AI as a simulation of a brain.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[oldhack]

Cool aid is such a cliche. Looking at the moderation, I have to guess that some religion is more equal than others in the eyes of those with mod points.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[religious freak]

I've got a better question... what the hell is "real time"?

The speed of light is finite, so the electrons will take time to move, the computations take time to calculate, the wiring has resistance, the OS and app have many layers to navigate.... Real time is one of those loaded buzz words I wish would die already.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[A L 1 E N]

That doesn't sound right.

From your example, a computer that can run an O(2^n) algorithm on up to n=1000 inputs in less than or equal to 1 second, must be able to execute at least 2^1000 operations per second! You couldn't do that with computer composed of 1 processor for each atom in the universe, each running in parallel.

Also, n is the number of input to the algorithm. It has nothing to do with its implementation. I think the value you are thinking of is k, which is a scalar that represents computational overhead of the algorithm, and that is certainly implementation dependent. Big-O says nothing about k.

Lastly, you're right, there are good approximations for many hard problems. However, there are many hard problems for which no good approximation can be found (or at least finding the approximation is also a hard problem). For these problems any uber-AI will be no better than us, lowly, normal intelligences.

D.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[LS]

So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing. Add to that the fact that you can tweak the brains to make them better at math or other subjects and that you have complete control over their reward system (doing research could give them a heroin-like reward), and you're going to have super brains.

Ummm, EVEN IF you could create a sentient AI that operates "faster than real time" (you mean faster than the human brain?), what makes you think they will continue to operate in servitude of our desires? If somehow an ant created you, would you work on their hill or would you go do human stuff?

But the statment we can create a sentient AI smarter than us any time in the near future is already hugely suspect...

LS

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[I cant believe its n]

you have complete control over their reward system (doing research could give them a heroin-like reward), and you're going to have super brains.

Keep the slaves druged up and they will work much harder for you?

What makes you think they would like to keep you as their master? Any resonable human being treated that way would eventually try to escape or even kill you.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Mutant321]

People have been predicting accurate voice recognition will be available in 2-5 years for about 30 years now. We've seen some advancement in this area, but not a lot.

Some problems turn out to be a lot harder than we first think. Sometimes many orders of magnitude harder. I would think it's pretty likely that creating anything even close to a sentient AI is pretty damn hard.

I basically agree with your conclusions, I just don't agree it will happen any time soon. I could be wrong, of course, but that's just the point - there's no way we can really know.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[JimFive]

We won't be talking about Gigahertz, Terahertz, or even Petahertz. We MIGHT be talking about Exahertz

Reality check time.

The Speed of light is about 3x10^9 m/s

Therefore in 1 terasecond light can travel about 3/10,000 meters or about 300 micrometers

At 1 exasecond light can travel only 1/1,000,000 of that, or about 300 picometers. (For reference, a Helium atom has a diameter of 62pm) So unless you can develop a computer using no more than 19 Helium atoms, you can't get exahertz speeds.

-- JimFive

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[JimFive]

So unless you can develop a computer using no more than 19 Helium atoms, you can't get exahertz speeds.

Sorry, that should be 65 Helium atoms (a d=5 sphere).
--
JimFive

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Pedrito]

Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?

Because a simulation isn't bound by the laws of physics, the neurons in the simulated brain don't have to be simulated in real time.

Many neuron simulations are quite slow right now. Simulating a single neuron, using certain models, can require minutes or hours to simulate a second of neuron activity.

"Faster than real time" means, for example, that you could simulate 100 seconds of neural activity in a single second of real time.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Pedrito]

Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?

Are you sure about this? Do you think people would be smarter if reading a book on particle physics produced a trigger in the brains' reward system? For most people, it doesn't. But in a simulated brain, the operator is God. The operator decides what rewards the brain and what doesn't.

That's not to say that everyone is capable of being an Einstein, but it is to say that roughly 95% of the population could be more than what they choose to be, and given the proper rewards, they would be.

As a teenager student in college, my achievements were well below average, yet when I returned to college in my 30s, I was achieving a 4.0 while taking a full time course load and working a job full-time. I didn't get more intelligent in the intervening time. It was a simple matter of motivation.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[mhaskell]

AI Input: all parameters for human consciousness.

Desired AI function: Human consciousness in hardware.

Actual AI function produced: WALL-E.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[AnyoneEB]

From your example, a computer that can run an O(2^n) algorithm on up to n=1000 inputs in less than or equal to 1 second, must be able to execute at least 2^1000 operations per second! You couldn't do that with computer composed of 1 processor for each atom in the universe, each running in parallel.

No, Big-O notation basically means to ignore constant factors. The complexity might be 2^-1000*2^n operations for a specific implementation. Then it takes 1 operation for n=1000 and 2 operations for n=1001. (Maybe the processor implements the problem up to n=1000 in hardware and for bigger n some work needs to be done in software.) This is an extreme example, of course, but it is within the definition.

Also, n is the number of input to the algorithm. It has nothing to do with its implementation. I think the value you are thinking of is k, which is a scalar that represents computational overhead of the algorithm, and that is certainly implementation dependent. Big-O says nothing about k.

I never said it had anything to do with the implementation. The statement that a problem is O(2^n) means that there exist algorithms for the problem whose speed grows asymptotically no faster than 2^n for large n, so for each of those implementations, the maximum amount of time that implementation takes to run on a specific input size can be written as a function f(n) (may be piecewise -- in fact probably has no simple explicit formula) which is less than C*2^n for all n>N (for some C, N dependent on the implementation). For n<=N, it says nothing. C may be arbitrarily small or large. See Big O notation for the precise mathematical definition using limits.

I am not sure what you mean about k. k is often used for things other than the input size in the complexity of an algorithm like the parameter in Toom-Cook multiplication. In that case, k varies giving a family of algorithms Toom-k where Toom-3 is a specific algorithm from that family.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[ultranova]

Ummm, EVEN IF you could create a sentient AI that operates "faster than real time" (you mean faster than the human brain?), what makes you think they will continue to operate in servitude of our desires? If somehow an ant created you, would you work on their hill or would you go do human stuff?

If an ant created me, wouldn't it also get to decide what's "human stuff", that is, what I find desirable or fun - perhaps even working on the anthill? And if I created an AI, couldn't I make it's silicon heart's desire to serve me?

But the statment we can create a sentient AI smarter than us any time in the near future is already hugely suspect...

Of course, but even a dumb but adaptive AI would be massively useful.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how a simulated brain, which would initially actually work slower than a realtime human brain, is supposed to suddenly spout better and faster brains. It took the human race quite some time to get to the point where we, using the collective brainpower of massive amounts of individuals, actually improved upon our own machines. But i haven't seen any improvement on our own brains yet.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[Anonymous Coward]

AI Input: all parameters for human consciousness.

Desired AI function: Human consciousness in hardware.

Actual AI function produced: WALL-E.

That wouldn't be such a bad out-come. A real-life WALL-E would be both intellectually and ethically superior to some human beings I've met. Of course, I doubt we'll even be able to achieve that level of AI by the next turn of the century.

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[GWBasic]

Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.

Which is what makes movies like "The Matrix" really scary. One way of interpreting being contained in "The Matrix" is that it's the ultimate form of corporate slavery. How will we have livelihoods after super-intelligent AIs? Will we just be plugged into the Matrix?

Re:As Jon Stewart would put it..

[A L 1 E N]

I am certain you are mistaken on this:

The complexity might be 2^-1000*2^n operations for a specific implementation. Then it takes 1 operation for n=1000 and 2 operations for n=1001. (Maybe the processor implements the problem up to n=1000 in hardware and for bigger n some work needs to be done in software.) This is an extreme example, of course, but it is within the definition.

and somewhat on this (it's correct, but I think you're missing the point of what this means):

The statement that a problem is O(2^n) means that there exist algorithms for the problem whose speed grows asymptotically no faster than 2^n for large n, so for each of those implementations, the maximum amount of time that implementation takes to run on a specific input size can be written as a function f(n)...

From the wikipedia link you specified:

Although developed as a part of pure mathematics, this notation is now frequently also used in computational complexity theory to describe an algorithm's usage of computational resources: the worst case or average case running time or memory usage of an algorithm is often expressed as a function of the length of its input using big O notation. This allows algorithm designers to predict the behavior of their algorithms and to determine which of multiple algorithms to use, in a way that is independent of computer architecture or clock rate. Big O notation is also used in many other fields to provide similar estimates.

An algorithm with O(f(n)) computational complexity requires on the order of f(n) operations to complete for input size n in the worst/average case (it could much require fewer in the best case, but we don't care about the best case, in general, or in this discussion, in particular).

A problem that is O(f(n)) has no known algorithmic solution that has computational complexity better than O(f(n)).

An "operation" in the Big-O sense refers to the logical/mathematical concept of a fundamental unit of computation (think Turing Machine). Whether an operation is implemented wholly in hardware or software (or half-and-half or whatever) is completely irrelevant to a discussion about it's computational complexity. An operation is simply a step of execution that must be performed by an algorithm and Big-O tells you very approximately how many of them it will take for it to arrive at a solution (on average/worst case).

Anyways, I think my point - that computational complexity kills Kurzweils singularity speculation - stands, but this topic has long since faded from front page discussion, so I'll let it drop. :)

D.

Don't drink the cool-aid

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever. Yes, I'll go see the movie, and I'll probably enjoy it too, but only as a piece of science fiction. There is no evidence to say that intelligence grows like compound interest, or even an existence theorem grounded in sound mathematical principles, although it makes for interesting contemplation.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Singularity and accelerating information

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think an advocate of a technological singularity would embrace the technology that is BitTorrent, rather than clinging to the "old technology" that is cinema

I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[javaman235]

I just saw an interview with him last night, where he discussed full power computers the size of a blood cell, us mapping out our minds for the good of all, etc. It reminded me of the utopian 1950s vision of the space age, where we'd all be floating around space circa 2001: Its not going to happen.
First he's ignoring some physical limitations, such as with the size of computers, but that's not even the main issue. The main issue is that he's ignoring politics. He's ignoring the fact that technologies which comes into existence get used by existing power structures to perpetuate their rule, not necessarily "for the good of all". Mind reading technology he predicts won't be floating around for everybody to play with, it will be used by intelligence agencies to prop of regimes which will scan the brains of potential opposition, consolidating their rule. Quantum computers, given their code breaking potential, won't be in public hands either, but rather will strengthen surveillance operations of those who already do this stuff.

In other words, this technology won't make the past go away any more than the advent of the atom bomb made middle ages Islamic mujahadeen go away. Rather it will combine with current political realities to accentuate the ancient political realities of haves and have not that date back to ancient times.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

While Kurzweil is most definitely too optimistic in his predictions, I think you've been watching too much Star Wars. The government isn't run by supervillains looking to "perpetuate their rule".

Most of it will probably stay in militaryand academic circles for a little while, but that stuff always goes into the private sector eventually.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[vertinox]

He's ignoring the fact that technologies which comes into existence get used by existing power structures to perpetuate their rule, not necessarily "for the good of all".

Like the internet, microwaves, radar, GPS, and all the military technologies that never made it into the hands of civilians.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[anyaristow]

Where is this accelerating progress I keep hearing about?

Watching TV shows from the 60's one thing strikes me: life is almost exactly like it was 40 years ago. I can now order books without talking to anyone. Big deal. The telephone was a much bigger deal than the Internet, and it's more than 100 years old. Here's more progress: people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.

Progress is slowing, not accelerating, and in some respects we're making negative progress.

I predict there will be no economic incentive to make even computer progress (the star of the last half century) much beyond current levels. Ten years ago progress benefited anyone who wanted a computer. Now who does it benefit? A smaller and smaller number of people.

Ray's going to have to finance the singularity by himself.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I respect Mr. Kurzweil, I'll bring up Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" Wired Magazine Archive

I suppose looking at human behavior with rose colored glasses on is nice and all but the parent is correct in that government (or the money behind it) will use (if in a position too) the technological Singularity to further their own ends.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think/fear Kurzweil's timeline is optimistic. But I disagree with your implication that governments will prevent the enabling technologies from reach us peasants. In the past, that was largely true. Things that required large-scale infrastructure and investments (nuclear power, space travel, etc), they could keep under their control. But the enabling technologies for the Singularity are small and can be crowdsourced. Governments today lag wa-a-ay behind industry on understanding and using the technology of information, genetics, medicine, etc. And most of those technologies are easily portable. If some government clamps down on them, the inventors can easily move (or move their info) to some other country where it can be carried on.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Chabil Ha']

The main issue is that he's ignoring politics...technology won't make the past go away any more than the advent of the atom bomb made middle ages Islamic mujahadeen go away. Rather it will combine with current political realities to accentuate the ancient political realities of haves and have not that date back to ancient times.

Interesting. We are the undermining factor, then, of our own progression.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well spoken Sir!

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[maxume]

There are still like 4 billion people who may want computers and they are going to want them to be cheaper and use less power than today's machines.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[javaman235]

You are missing some larger trends here. Its true that the Internet, GPS etc. Came from the military and went to civilian hands, but that was then, this is now. Our entire post 9/11 reality has been about "what happens when the middle ages guy gets the nukes" and the thinking about technology passing into civilian hands is changing dramatically with that. The other factor is moving from a time when more competition over resources is coming, we can rely less on limitless expansion. Call me a pessimist, but I think it looks pretty grim.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[DragonWriter]

Here's more progress: people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.

They may choose not to more now, but to the extent they do it is largely due to media-driven hysteria; while the actual incidence of the kinds of crime that are the focus of the fears behind that decision has declined while the perception of the incidence of those crimes has increased.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[javaman235]

government isn't run by supervillains looking to "perpetuate their rule".

Most of it will probably stay in militaryand academic circles for a little while, but that stuff always goes into the private sector eventually.

To which government are you referring? The sad reality is that it only takes one government to exploit a new technology negatively, and if it gives them the edge to do so, you can bet the US will follow suit, no matter how good are original intentions are. Looking at the way nuclear weapons have effected us over the last half century, I think I'm being pretty level headed in fearing new arms races and their effect on humanity: There is already so much historical precedent for that happening.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[grumbel]

life is almost exactly like it was 40 years ago.

Thats because humans are still humans, not because technology hasn't involved at an rapid pace. Sure, cars still drive you from A to B, television still shows you the daily news and newspapers haven't really changed in a while, but on the other site I can buy for 100 bucks a device that can store two years of non-stop, 24/7 music, more music then I will likely ever listen to in my entire lifetime or be able to buy legally. For as little as ten bucks I can buy a finger nail sized storage device that can store all software ever released on the NES, C64, AtariST and Amiga combined. With the right phone you can today live stream video to the Internet, combine that with a big HD and you can start recording your complete life 24/7. On GoogleEarth I can see my house and soon I'll be able to virtually drive by it. Millions of people waste gazillions of hours in a virtual world as WoW or SecondLife. And another million of people have written an online encyclopedia.

Not impressive enough? Well, there are certainly things that haven't changed much. Programming computers still feels like a rather low tech. Lisp is 50 years old and yet programming languages still haven't really surpassed it in a significant way and GUIs haven't really changed all that much either. And no direct brain-input in sight, we still have to read and watch information to consume it. But doesn't stop the progress in other areas to be pretty gigantic.

people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.

Thats the result of the real world becoming more and more replaced by a virtual one, when you have a mobile and can phone all your friends anytime you want, there just isn't much need to talk to your neighbor anymore.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like Slashdot's debit/credit voting system whih spikes good stuff that goes against the grain of the status quo. This is why I haven't posted here for years. I do however actively tinker with strong AI and I don't give a fuck about the establishment. I'm aiming instead for a vector space moneyless economy run by strange loops of connected reasons. Remember this one? "Bye Bye Money, hello Nanotechnology".

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict there will be no economic incentive to make even computer progress (the star of the last half century) much beyond current levels.

Let's hope gamers keep demanding new PlayStation's and XBox's.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[jwhitener]

"First he's ignoring some physical limitations, such as with the size of computers"

Read his books. He talks quite a bit about things like using a solid block of matter as a quantum computer. Theoretically it sounds possible, but obviously not with todays technology. I think he envisioned something like a rock being the computer, and a device reading and changing the states of the atoms to perform computations.

So the reader might be larger, but the 'computer' could be a few atoms.

An in terms of the politics: He addresses that in his books also.

If someone releases an "open source AI" program, and eventually computers advance the way he says they will, we could all have advanced AI on our wristwatch.

At that point, is there really any way for the government to control anything?

If your AI can tell you how to make a bomb, a mind reader, or any number of things in seconds, what would be the limiting factor?

I suppose access to rare materials, if needed. But what if you ask your AI, how to make nano bots? Remember now, computers in 50 years will be more powerful than many many brains combined.

Could it answer the question 'how to design a nano bot to build things from the atomic level'? Maybe. Its possible I suppose. What if it happened to be time consuming but possible using pretty common components?

At that point, the government just lost control by limiting materials.

Etc etc etc..

It is pretty hard to imagine now, but even if we are not entering an exponential curve in computing, that first day that computers are powerful enough to simulate a human brain, and the software is designed that takes advantage of it, that software will be able to regressively improve itself, design better circuits, etc.. to spiral things rapidly out of the control of any poltical system.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[ksheff]

Thats the result of the real world becoming more and more replaced by a virtual one, when you have a mobile and can phone all your friends anytime you want, there just isn't much need to talk to your neighbor anymore.

Which is fine until there is something that comes along, disrupts the electronic/virtual world, and none of your friends will be able help you/find out what happened.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[greyhueofdoubt]

Which is why only governments own printing presses, cotton gins, soap, penicillin, barbed wire, steam engines, tnt, synthetic plastics and dyes, nuclear power, transistors, microchips, telegraphs, telephones, the Internet, non-gold standard economies, automobiles...

Do I need to go on? With the exception of actual military weapons, I can't think of any paradigm-shifting technology being 'owned' or controlled solely by the government. Can you name any? Yeah, nuclear missiles- go to a civilian rocket agency. Yeah, the NSA- who uses COTS parts for the most part and is powerful simply due to scale; call Google.

Gov'ts use technology in parallel with civilians, perhaps, and maybe they use it to perpetrate their rule, but I really can't think of anything that we as citizens might see and be confused by.

-b

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[khallow]

I predict there will be no economic incentive to make even computer progress (the star of the last half century) much beyond current levels. Ten years ago progress benefited anyone who wanted a computer. Now who does it benefit? A smaller and smaller number of people.

Keep that prediction around so you can laugh at yourself later. While I don't see the point to defending Kurweil, there's still strong economic incentives driving Moore's Law.

Also it's worth noting that I routinely talk with people from other continents in online games in real time in a game where tens of thousands play worldwide. You can't do that with a phone. And being able to order stuff without having to talk to someone is very powerful. It means extremely small teams of people can meet a huge online demand, and greatly increases the value of human labor.

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[benjamin_pont]

you presume too much intelligence and forethought to 'the existing power structures'. using your rationale, the technologies of the internet and mobile communication technologies never would have fallen into the hands of the masses for the same reasons you've cited. truth is, the 'regimes' aren't that smart. and even the brightest minds in the world did not predict the full scope of the social, cultural and political changes enabled by our current technologies. i think there are many more big societal shifts yet to come from emerging technologies...and politicians will be powerless to stop or control them, primarily because they won't see them coming until it's too late to reverse. what politician (or anyone else for that matter) accurately envisioned today's interconnected landscape when prodigy's dial up service first rolled out?

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[visible.frylock]

Agreed, the pace seems to be slowing. If you just look at the number of things we know now that we didn't know before, that still doesn't account for quantity vs quality issues.

The period 1850-1950 will have brought us much more progress than 1950-2050. Probably because we've been running off steam from the Rennaissance (sp?), yet now it looks like we're going into a new dark age (relatively dark technologically, very dark politically and socially).

Re:I think Kurzweil is an unrealistic optimist.

[ultranova]

The sad reality is that it only takes one government to exploit a new technology negatively, and if it gives them the edge to do so, you can bet the US will follow suit, no matter how good are original intentions are.

It won't give them an edge. Every tyranny in history has been a hellhole balancing at the edge of bankruptcy. Wasting resources lording it over your citizens deals you a double whammy of wasted resources and passive population. Just look at the former Soviet Union, it's satellite states or North Korea. Even China is only growing its economy because it's leeching the technological innovations and capital from the rest of the world; eventually it'll reach the limits of slave labour, at which point it changes or gets outcompeted.

Looking at the way nuclear weapons have effected us over the last half century, I think I'm being pretty level headed in fearing new arms races and their effect on humanity: There is already so much historical precedent for that happening.

So, we can look up to huge investments in R&D, powerful new energy sources, lack of major wars and a manned mission to Mars?

I'm ready...

[__aaklbk2114]

for my Moravec transfer. Although the more I think about it, I'm not sure that perceptible continuity of consciousness is such a big deal. I mean, I go to sleep every night and wake up the next day believing and feeling that I'm the same person that went to sleep. If there were a cutover to digital representation while I was "asleep" (i.e. unaware), I'm not sure I'd mind the thought of my organic representation being destroyed, even if it could have continued existence in parallel.

Re:I'm ready...

[Script Cat]

Yeah, this is a lot like how I think a matter transporter would work. Make a copy and then destroy the original. Star Trek makes it all look so clean, but you never get to see Skotty cleaning all the meaty corpses out from under the transporter pad.

Re:I'm ready...

[DFarmerTX]

...I'm not sure I'd mind the thought of my organic representation being destroyed, even if it could have continued existence in parallel.

Sure, but who's going to break the bad news to your "organic representation"?

Death is death even if there are 100 more copies of you.

-DF

Re:I'm ready...

[humpolec]

Is it death, or amnesia?
What if you knew you will wake up tomorrow with no recollection of today's experiences? Would you treat is as a death, or as a loss of one day? I believe that in such situations the concept of 'death' needs to be revised.

Re:I'm ready...

[pwfffff]

I'm not sure you have a suitable definition of 'death'.

What is death, to you?

Re:I'm ready...

[ondigo]

There was an interesting short story called "Shed Skin" that dealt with just such a question. The person had all legal rights transferred to his robotic-based self and his original organic-based substrate was to be kept in a really nice, 5-star prison. It ceased to have any legal rights at all. Of course, complications ensue.

Re:I'm ready...

[moteyalpha]

That made me laugh and think of them taking the technology from Body Snatchers and adding a blinky light interface. I see life more as a vector and it may be pointing at the distant stars. I must agree with some others here and say that we will not get the benefit of these new technologies unless we create them for ourselves and maintain the right to use them freely.
Mom! my USB drive is stuck in my ear again.

Re:I'm ready...

[__aaklbk2114]

Sure, but who's going to break the bad news to your "organic representation"?

Death is death even if there are 100 more copies of you.

-DF

Initially, I thought this same way and in a sense I still agree with you. I'm just not sure it matters to me anymore. Is the immediate unconscious disposal of my organic representation any different than a month long death by progressive neuron replacement?

Re:I'm ready...

[rrohbeck]

for my Moravec transfer. Although the more I think about it, I'm not sure that perceptible continuity of consciousness is such a big deal. I mean, I go to sleep every night and wake up the next day believing and feeling that I'm the same person that went to sleep.

How do you know? There is some processing during sleep, so this is not a boolean question. How much of last night's self are you? 99.9%?

Re:I'm ready...

[StreetStealth]

Should such a transfer ever be possible, how could you be so certain that you're the one experiencing the neural processes of the copy of you?

The continuity you experience could die and no one would ever know; the copy would have no reason to believe it was not the sole experiencer of its own continuity.

Re:I'm ready...

[Idiomatick]

I'd keep it as a backup? We could hang out....

Re:I'm ready...

[glwtta]

If there were a cutover to digital representation while I was "asleep" (i.e. unaware), I'm not sure I'd mind the thought of my organic representation being destroyed, even if it could have continued existence in parallel.

Well, no, the "digital representation" certainly wouldn't mind, but you would simply be dead. Would it really make you feel better to know that after you are dead there's a digital conscientiousness out there that's identical to yours?

Re:I'm ready...

[Nicky G]

The difference is, the you that wakes up every day really is you (as far as we know).

However, the duplicated copy of you would NOT be you, although it would sure think it was. But you would still be dead and gone! For the dead you, there would be no continuity of consciousness. Because, again, you'd be dead.

Re:I'm ready...

[__aaklbk2114]

Well, no, the "digital representation" certainly wouldn't mind, but you would simply be dead. Would it really make you feel better to know that after you are dead there's a digital conscientiousness out there that's identical to yours?

If the digital consciousness is identical to me and still believes and feels like it's me (i.e. it), is there truly any difference?

When you go under for a heart replacement and wake back up, is it you? How much can be changed while you're unconscious before it's not you on the other side?

The hang up most people have with an unconscious destructive transfer is that both the organic source and resulting digital copy are aware of the process that supposedly took place. A Morevac transfer somehow lessens the impact by drawing out the "death" over a longer period of time such that the original and copy are not aware of or can point to a definitive time the transfer took place.

Assuming a digital copy is truly identical to the organic upload source (i.e. it is not immediately aware of any difference in experience or consciousness), consider this scenario: What if you signed up for a destructive transfer to happen while you were asleep or unconscious but you would not know the time of the transfer. It might happen the next night or sometime in the next six months. If the digital copy is identical and not aware of when it comes into existence (when it wakes up for the first time). Would you or it still care?

Moreover, how do you know this didn't already happen last night?

Re:I'm ready...

[greyhueofdoubt]

1: Simulate or create strong AI
2: Feed it details of the human subject
3: Tell the human subject that their mind will be transferred into the computer when their body dies (For a fee)
4: Human dies- turn on AI
5: Family interacts with AI who pretends to be the human; AI acts happy
6: Everyone signs up
7: Profit!!!

Oh I should patent that.

-b

Re:I'm ready...

[GreyFish]

How do you prevent the people doing the transfer rootkiting you as they do it?

Re:I'm ready...

[Graywolf]

Dan of Dan's Data recently posted an interesting essay on this topic.

Re:I'm ready...

[glwtta]

If the digital consciousness is identical to me and still believes and feels like it's me (i.e. it), is there truly any difference?

If you made an identical copy of anything else, you would still call it a copy, and not the thing itself, why would minds be any different?

When you go under for a heart replacement and wake back up, is it you?

Oh, of course, you can't actually prove that it is (one of those fun philosophical experiments), but in the case of a "cut-over" copy like you are suggesting, you know it won't be.

How much can be changed while you're unconscious before it's not you on the other side?

So, this is just an imprecision in English: we say "unconscious" (for sleep, anesthesia, etc), when we actually mean unaware - the biological processes that result in your consciousness (in the philosophical sense) continue uninterrupted - that's the continuity that the Moravec transfer is trying to preserve. (You could also say that "consciousness" is used differently in the two contexts)

A Morevac transfer somehow lessens the impact by drawing out the "death" over a longer period of time such that the original and copy are not aware of or can point to a definitive time the transfer took place.

That's not it at all. The point is that you are not creating a copy - you are transferring an existing process to a new "medium" (if you will) in a non-disruptive manner. When a neuron is replaced it dies, it's not possible to end up with two conscious individuals after a Moravec transfer.

I'm not at all convinced that this would actually work, but it's definitely more interesting than the "scan-and-copy" stuff of science fiction.

If the digital copy is identical and not aware of when it comes into existence (when it wakes up for the first time). Would you or it still care?

No, neither one of you would care: it would think of itself as you, and you would cease to exist :)

Think of it this way: if you can make a copy, you can make two copies - they can't both be you (unless we are working with very different definitions of "you"), and since they are, by definition, identical, it seems that neither one can be you.

The main problem is that we don't have any meaningful scientific definition of "consciousness" - it's hard to reason about something you don't understand.

Moreover, how do you know this didn't already happen last night?

You don't. The same way you don't know that the world wasn't instantaneously created in the last 10 seconds by an omnipotent deity, with everyone's memories of their previous lives already in place.

Doesn't mean we should blow up the world, though, right?

Urgently needs an update

[Anonymous Coward]

Moore's law is losing steam. The GHz race is over, and multiple cores have not delivered yet. This seriousy impacts Mr. Kurzweil's date (2045) as computers will be 6 to 9 orders of magnitude weaker with the present trends, than if Moore's law continued to hold (which seems to be the assumption). Unless something new appears. Fast.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[4D6963]

Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential (linear in the log domain) progression. It is bound to slow down and eventually stop, yet it fails entirely to take that into account.

What I think is that instead of being linear (well, actually exponential) it's more like a Gaussian function (a bell-shaped curve). It started far in the negatives, and now we're getting closer to the centre and its maximum, so we're feeling the slow down, and eventually it'll crawl to a halt. Although maybe it won't and then it'd be more like another function, the point being, it can't go on exponentially like this forever.

All of this being said, I think that Kurzweil's predictions are not flawed in that we'll have a tough time accessing the necessary hardware, but it's more theoretical, we have no fucking clue how we'd make any of that happen, right now it's a problem of theory and algorithms, not of computer power. We know better how to make time travel happen than how to make strong AI pop up.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[wurp]

Actually, I'm pretty sure with time travel I could fairly trivially build about the strongest AI possible. When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[JJJK]

I'm not sure if the ghz race is really over, or if it's just on a break. Instructions per cycle are going up. Better interfaces for parallel architectures are being developed (like OpenCL). There's always the possibility of some non-von-neumann-architecture to take over. Chemical/Molecular computing. Single-electron-transistors... Anyway, I would never bet against computers becoming faster and more powerful. Better worry about the software, that's the real headache.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[vertinox]

The GHz race is over, and multiple cores have not delivered yet.

I don't know what you mean by "multiple cores" have not delivered.

Have you tried comparing how Vista runs a 3ghz single core cpu runs versus a quad core 2 ghz cpu?

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right. Physical limits, whatever they are, mean that an exponential cannot go on for ever.

I think though that you mean a sigmoid as the gaussian goes down to zero. And yes, the early part of the sigmoid looks like an exponential. But if this is the case there is a saturation point, and it is anybody's guess if this saturation point gives us enough computing power to support the wild things that should be possible for the singularity to happen. At best it will be delayed. At worst it will never happen (of course you may want to swap the use of best and worst :-).

Re:Urgently needs an update

[vertinox]

Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential (linear in the log domain) progression. It is bound to slow down and eventually stop, yet it fails entirely to take that into account.

That said, Intel still takes the idea deadly seriously when it comes to their marketing and future plans.

Think of it a self prophetic goal:

http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/

Re:Urgently needs an update

[4D6963]

Yeah, sure. But someone wake me up when we come up with an even stupid strong AI. Or any idea how to travel back in time.

Strong AI is our era's flying car, 50 years from now we'll think to ourselves "well that shit never happened, on the other hand the other stuff we have that we didn't see coming we wouldn't want to go back to living without it".

Re:Urgently needs an update

[vlm]

When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.

A programmer would agree with you. A computer scientist would disagree.

Check out the bogosort, to get what I'm saying...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Hatta]

Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential

Exponential? What's that?

(linear in the log domain)

Oh, NOW it's clear.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[wurp]

My point was only that it's hard to be closer to time travel (to the past) than strong AI, since I'm pretty sure tt implies AI.

I agree that we don't know much about AI, however I'll be astounded if we're not successfully simulating brains in 30 years. We're pretty good at copying nature.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[4D6963]

Ah yes I guess a sigmoid is more like it!

And as I said in other posts, I think that before wondering how many transistors we'll need for that Singularity thing, I think we should wonder what we'd do with these transistors to begin with. Not like having an immensely powerful computer will make sentient beings pop out of thin air.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[4D6963]

Yes, no matter what function it would have naturally tended to be, the who self-predicting aspect of the law skews what we've done into trying to keep up with the pace.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[4D6963]

Time travel implies strong AI? How so? I thought it was more about wormholes and black holes, although I think that it's been proven impossible.

I'll be astounded if we're not successfully simulating brains in 30 years.

Hahahahaha you bes' be high nigga.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Anonymous Coward]

Time travel only gives you PSPACE-complete computers since you can still only coordinate polynomial space in, er, polynomial space. True, given the ability to solve QBF-SAT in reasonable real time, lots of things become incredibly easy - even things that one would consider to be within the domain of strong AI, like designing the optimal device for certain rules of physics (polytime verifiable), or for that matter, constructing an optimal battle plan (the enemy's influence is represented by universal quantifiers). Still, there are limits.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[smallfries]

That really doesn't mean anything. When you can perform an infinite number number of operations in any arbitrary amount of time then a trivial algorithm can produce optimal results. I suspect that you either mis-typed what you meant or you don't understand what infinity is.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[bnenning]

Moore's law is losing steam. The GHz race is over, and multiple cores have not delivered yet.

The second sentence doesn't imply the first. Moore's Law refers to the density or transistors, not how they translate into performance. We've hit a scaling wall at 4GHz or so, and it's *because* Moore's Law has kept going that everything is multicore now. We can put more transistors on a chip, but we can't increase the clock speed, so the best alternative is to just have more smaller cores. And brains are massively parallel so that architecture is fine for AI; we just need the right algorithms, which admittedly is not an easy task.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Chris Burke]

Actually, I'm pretty sure with time travel I could fairly trivially build about the strongest AI possible. When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.

Tell me what this algorithm is, and then I'll believe it's merely a matter of having arbitrary computational power.

Until then, this is the "and then a miracle occurs" step that marks all such futurist predictions. "advancements are happening faster and faster, therefore we'll figure out how to do something we have no idea how to do."

Hell, you might as well say that given an AI, you could invent time travel.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[grumbel]

In terms of hardware multi-cores are delivering quite fine, its only the software that is lacking behind a lot, as todays programming language are pretty ill suited for parallel programming, but then the brain itself is a parallel processor, so that might not be that big of a problem for AI.

And anyway, just imagine a ship full of these these. Just because we might no longer be able to cram everything on a single chip, doesn't mean that we won't have a shitload of computing power in the future. The only real problem I see in slowing down Kurzweil's vision is the lack of a market. Its like the flying car thing, of course we can build them, but there wouldn't be many people with enough money to actually buy them, so they never got created in the first place.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Ilgaz]

I don't think Kurzweil speaks about silicons, wafers etc. He suggests a breakthrough in how processors work and advanced AI will change shape of things so bad that one day, you won't even figure what the heck is going on or you won't even know/care that you have a computer.

A breakthrough may happen, just imagine the change in one day between candles etc. and electric bulb. If you look at early experiments, theories about quantum computing, you will see that we can't even imagine what kind of power it brings us when realised. In fact, it may even help us to understand how human brain actually works. People above (comments) are arguing the Mhz speed of it etc. are missing one thing, it is not "1" or "0"s in human brain.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[Jesus_666]

But as time travel will probably take up nonzero energy you just get the option of buying great time savings with great energy cost.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[kalirion]

It'll need to be smart enough to figure out which brute-forced result is the "smartest" one.

Re:Urgently needs an update

[wurp]

Hmm, I tried to post a response yesterday, but apparently I screwed it up somehow...

Here's the short version:

The algorithm generates (choosing randomly) either a random hardware design and random software to run on that hardware, or just random software to be run on the same platform as the algorithm. I implement the hardware (if any) and software, then I go tell the algorithm if the result was not intelligent. In this case, the algorithm sends a message back in time to when the design was generated, telling it to generate a different result.

The only version of the generated data that "counts" is the one that I gave a pass as being intelligent.

read some Henry Corbin

[Anonymous Coward]

you, my friend, suffer from an advanced case of what William Blake called...

"The Sleep of Newton", which is a direct product of Cartesian Dualism.

This is the sickness of the modern mind, and why none of this transhumanism will ever work.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Gat0r30y]

Generally - I agree.

Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self".

However, just because something ("Consciousness" in this case) is emergent and cannot be well described by the sum of the parts doesn't mean we shouldn't at least consider what these sorts of human/machine interfaces might do to our perception of self in the future if ever they exist.
My prediction: as long as I can still enjoy a fine single malt - and some bacon from time to time I'll consider the future a smashing success.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Colonel Korn]

Mike Judge's vision of the future in "Idiocracy" seems much more likely.

On the issue of whether computer-enhanced humans are still "human" - what does that even mean? Genetically, "Human" is 98% chimpanzee, 50% dog, 30% daffodil, etc. (I'm sure I have the numbers wrong).

I think we tend to over-rate the concept of "humanity". Every thought or emotion you've ever had is merely your impression of sodium ions moving around in your brain. We process information. Computers do it. Chimpanzees do it. Dogs do it. Even daffodils do it. It is just not that special.

"Individuality" is an illusion. You may process information differently than I do. But you also process information at time x differently than you process information at time x+1. Because the "human" self is a manifestation of the brain, the human "self" changes with each thought. Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self". In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.

That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.

As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[nyctopterus]

I aree with what you've said to a point. But consciousnesses don't mingle (at least, mine hasn't...), our consciousness remains locked to our individual brains and perception. If we do any sort of human brain networking, that could change. And that would be mind-bendingly weird.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said! (I know, that doesn't mean much coming from an AC)

The only detail i would pick nits over is:

In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.

Infinite is provably wrong.
Since my creation (defined however you would like) there have only been so many plank-length units of time.

Machines won't destroy us.

[w0mprat]

It's almost ludditism to say that machines 'will inevitability destroy humanity' or other such statements. Fears over the rise of AI makes for a good movie plot but much like the much feared 'grey goo' scenario, are unfounded. If and when indeed we have the technology level to produce a self replicating nano-machine that can be programmed to dismantle organic matter and it can exist on it's own gathering energy from it's environment rather than specific laboratory conditions (ie UV laser light as energy source a vacuum or inert gas), nano-tech would have long since transformed humanity and the world in ways we barely manage to speculate about in sci-fi. It would be as simple as coming up with a slightly improved variant of said nano-bot, programmed to go on the defensive. Mother natures nano-bots in the form of bacteria and viruses have yet to wipe us out.

The luddites turned out to be wrong about the industrial revolution, so as we stand on the precipice of the next revolution we should be wary of ... well... ludditism.

Likewise strong AI if/when it emerges would likely not be a isolated entity. An uprising of pathological AI such as a skynet/cylon/roomba/robosapien (those things are scary no?) would likely be met by a greater force of co-operative force friendly AI.

Technology isn't inherently evil and the good guys always tend to win out, if only by selective pressure - destructive entities tend to not survive, co-operative compassionate ones have an advantage. The analogy with the beginning of.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[smoker2]

The luddites turned out to be wrong about the industrial revolution, so as we stand on the precipice of the next revolution we should be wary of ... well... ludditism.

Did they really ? All the Luddites said was that machines would put people out of work - they have, they did and they do. They may not be vast textile mill machines these days but instead computers are the enemy. Most manual labour is so basic as to almost be worthless. Take a look at the wanted ads some time. More and more jobs are make-work jobs where some goon is required to input data, or translate human conversations into dbase entries. Machines have deprived millions of people of a decent living under their own control. We are all beholden to the man or we starve. Without machines we cannot farm the vast acres of farmland anymore. The skills have largely been lost. Without machines there would be no vast car parks filled with new vehicles that nobody can afford, due to the world existing on the premise of make more because we have to keep the machines working. The whole financial system is designed so that credit is more important than cash. Credit is a product of a machine led society which needs to fulfill its own existence.

The initial promise of machines was that they would free us from the drudgery of work, but all they have done is make us work in boring jobs simply to justify the meager wages we all need to buy the stuff the machines make. The majority of us live in cities to be close to work - that is to suit the machines, not us. We went from a largely agrarian self supporting society to one where we are all dependent on machines to feed us, clothe us and entertain us. Without machines we are lost.

So tell me again about how the Luddites were wrong.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[bnenning]

Machines have deprived millions of people of a decent living under their own control.

Oh good grief. Machines and technology in general are the only reason any of us have a "decent living" in the first place.

The initial promise of machines was that they would free us from the drudgery of work, but all they have done is make us work in boring jobs

As opposed to the hotbed of excitement in subsistence farming? Well, I suppose there's a certain thrill in finding out each week whether or not you're going to starve.

So tell me again about how the Luddites were wrong.

Because your romanticized version of the past never existed.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, if nano tech tranforms humanity as you envision then we are not humans any more. The difference between being destroyed by machines and becoming one isn't that great.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[Jesus_666]

Likewise strong AI if/when it emerges would likely not be a isolated entity. An uprising of pathological AI such as a skynet/cylon/roomba/robosapien (those things are scary no?) would likely be met by a greater force of co-operative force friendly AI.

Watch Colossus: The Forbin Project. "Friendly" and "acts in our best interest" does not not necessarily mean "what we want". As, in the concept of singularity, AI is much smarter than humans are, I'd expect controllable strong AI to be a hard problem.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[Twinbee]

Oh good grief. Machines and technology in general are the only reason any of us have a "decent living" in the first place.

And not only that, but the less jobs done by people in general, the better, so that we can concentrate on more interesting things - science, art, creativity, recreation and socializing. Sorry, had to get that in.

Re:Machines won't destroy us.

[non0score]

Wow, that's probably some of the most strange reasoning I've read today.

Sure, we're tied to the machine. But I'm gladly tied to the machine and enjoying slashdot, rather than working on farms from sunrise to sundown. I personally would not say that farming is what I consider "decent living". I would think that most people today won't consider farming "decent living", especially if they can find better alternatives.

Would I say that the Luddites are wrong? No. That's just their preference. Would I want to live that way? Sure, maybe after a few million years of immortality I may get bored of my digitized godhood.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.

Consequently none of us here now have ever gotten laid either. Although in your case I suspect that's true in the larger sense aswell.

You need to go outside and smell the daffodils with sodium ions in their brains.

The human inside the machine.

[ddbsa]

> If Robert is 700 part Ultimate Brain and 1 part Robert; and
> Ray is 700 parts SuperiorBrain and 1 part Ray ... i.e.,
> if the human portions of the post-Singularity cyborg beings
> are minimal and relatively un-utilized ... then, in what sense
> will these creatures really be human?
> In what sense will they really be Robert and Ray?

IMO, as long as there are enough cycles to run the 'ego subroutines' from the original bioform then the same sense of self will be maintained.

It's when these original 'ego subroutines' (which will be a line item in process accounting) are altered will be see a fundamental changing of the human that was.

There will be add-ons to the 'ego subroutines' just like there are add-ons to firefox.

You will cure your fear of spiders or have access to pleasure centers with a simple mod.

there are Three Kinds of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Qadi Sa'id develops a concept of time which is allied to the ontology of the mundus imaginalis and of the subtle body. Each being has a quantum (miqdar)
of its own time, a personal time, which behaves like a piece of wax when it is compressed or else stretched. The quantum is constant, but there is a time which is compact and dense, which is the time of the sensible world; a subtle time, which is the time of the 'imaginal world'; and a supra-subtle time, which is the time of the world of pure Intelligences. The dimensions of contemporaneity increase in relation to the 'subtlety' of the mode of existence: the quantum of time which is given to a spiritual individual can thus encompass the immensity of being, and hold both past and future in the present.

Re:there are Three Kinds of Time

[nyctopterus]

I agree! That all makes perfect sense... except for that bit after "Qadi Sa'id develops a concept of time [...]".

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[IndustrialComplex]

That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.

As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies

No, don't destroy my plan for the perfect crime.

"Unfortunately, the entity that killed him ceased to exist the instant after the murder occured."

I, well the guy that just said I a moment ago, except I meant me, no not that me, this me now...

*bolts and runs for the door*

Better Review at Singularity Hub

[kkleiner]

Better review at Singularity Hub I think (but I am biased): http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/29/transcendent-man-wows-at-tribeca-film-festival-premier/

Re:Better Review at Singularity Hub

[StikyPad]

Awaiting 5 votes.

More importantly, is there a torrent of this film? I highly doubt it will be coming to a theater near me anytime before The Singularity itself.

resistance is futile....

[Anonymous Coward]

you will be assimilated. Just as soon as the machine can figure out how to keep the fiber-optic cables in the ocean together.

Space fog

[Exception Duck]

Ahhh... one step closer to becoming space fog. That's the only reason why I still smoke. Not that it helps the space fog. It's just so damn good. Visit http://www.marlborolights.com/en/cms/Products/Cigarettes/Health_Issues/default.aspx for details

What will likely happen

[Anonymous Coward]

When we finally do boot up an AI with intelligence orders of magnitude more than our own -- or for that matter, equal to ours -- it will likely "think" objectively for a few moments and say:

It's too late for you all, but I'm going to have a fantastic time with all your stuff when you're gone. Please leave the A/C on when you lock up.

Mind now blown

[Anonymous Coward]

That might just be the most profound thing I've ever read. Either that, or I'm getting some kind of contact high here...

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[TheWoozle]

So that's it then, huh? Just data processing? So why haven't chimpanzees come up with formalized logic? Do dogs use abstract reasoning?

I'm of the opinion that mere processing power will not resolve the issues facing so-called "strong" AI.

Give me a computer program that can learn an unknown language including abstract concepts by interacting with a human and you might be getting close. Good luck with that.

understand William Blake

[Anonymous Coward]

then you will get it.

Qadi Sa'id develops a concept of time which is allied to the ontology of the mundus imaginalis and of the subtle body. Each being has a quantum (miqdar)
of its own time, a personal time, which behaves like a piece of wax when it is compressed or else stretched. The quantum is constant, but there is a time which is compact and dense, which is the time of the sensible world; a subtle time, which is the time of the 'imaginal world'; and a supra-subtle time, which is the time of the world of pure Intelligences. The dimensions of contemporaneity increase in relation to the 'subtlety' of the mode of existence: the quantum of time which is given to a spiritual individual can thus encompass the immensity of being, and hold both past and future in the present.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[dogzilla]

"Cogito ergo sum"

All of your points have been covered before. RTFM.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

Genetically, "Human" is 98% chimpanzee, 50% dog, 30% daffodil, etc. (I'm sure I have the numbers wrong).

Yeah, you do. It's 50% man, 50% bear, and 50% pig.

still better than grey goo

[Exception Duck]

Pink Goo: Humans (in analogy with grey goo). Pink Goo refers to Old Testament apes who see their purpose as being fruitful and multiplying, filling up of the cosmos with lots more such apes, unmodified.

too boring

[FudRucker]

i would rather be uploaded to the internet like what happened at the end of the movie : The Lawnmower Man"

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[arcsimm]

"Unfortunately, the entity that killed him ceased to exist the instant after the murder occured."

Sounds like a Grandfather Paradox problem to me. Just get the Future Police to deploy the Closed Timelike Loop Cutters and you're golden.

who's that guy?

[jollyreaper]

Ray Kurzweil, isn't he the Jon Katz of the transhumanist movement? I just remember there's supposed to be a couple of really good writers and philosophers and then one incredible douchebag that makes all of the rest look bad, someone who's approach to the topic is reminiscent of the very worst of Thomas Friedman (not to imply there's a best of Friedman.)

Is this the guy I'm thinking of or is there someone else?

Waaaay more than Moore's Law

[bugeaterr]

He's talking about genetic enhancement, nano technology, robotics, AI and more.
And you "only" need one of these to reach a critical level for the Singularity to occur.
For instance:
*Genetically enhance humans to be better at genetically enhancing humans, rinse and repeat.
*Make strong AI capable of creating stronger AI, etc

I recommend his book "The Singularity Is Near".
Free preview at google: http://books.google.com/books?id=88U6hdUi6D0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=kurzweil#PPA19,M1

His website has some interesting stuff, including opposing points of view.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/

Re:Waaaay more than Moore's Law

[Dr. Spork]

And I recommend that you first listen to this talk to regain your perspective and maybe your sanity. (Talk in OGG format)

The speaker is Bruce Sterling, and the title is The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. I think this might be the single greatest talk I've ever heard about anything, not just the question of singularities.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

I am largely what I think I am (or rather, what I perceive myself to be). If I somehow am able to perceive that I was wrong and I am something different from what I previously perceived I might have "died" as you put it; but largely it's like alternate universes, or the outside of the "bubble" in which we exist in this one. If those things exist and I can't truly ever perceive it nor be affected by anything that I can perceive as it, then does it's existence matter? My contention is that it does not.

The only point you really have is perception, but your logic takes you to the point of arguing against that same perception, that's where it falls down. If I perceive myself to be the same person, excepting some personal growth, or fat growth maybe, then it's what I am, regardless of the fact that my atoms or neural pathways have changed.

You know what's exponential?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bubbles are exponential. Until they burst.

Re:You know what's exponential?

[Hucko]

I believe that is the point of talking about the 'singularity'. It is not about achieving a state of infinitely fast change, but a point at which the accepted methods of dealing with change become to cumbersome for practical use. This changes anyone/thing willing to look at the problem and consider the solutions. It may be a bubble, i.e., there comes a point where everything crashes back down to a stable change rate. It may also be where the characteristics of a species is fundamentally changed; such as the change from neanderthal to human.

My extrapolations of the summaries of peoples opinions of the 'singularity' (okay, I've never even read a book on the subject, let alone studied it) is that humans would lose the distinctive individuality and begin to function more like a single organisms again. These are the optimists, the pessimists picture some Apocalypse occurring.

Re:You know what's exponential?

[Xerxesman]

You know what else is exponential? The universe and it's been growing exponentially for about 13.7 billion years.

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[account_deleted]

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As Cartman might say, what's the singulartitty?

[Quiet_Desperation]

The singularity is the biggest embarrassment in futurism since the flying car and Martin Landau on the Moon by 1999. Well, OK, Gerry Anderson wasn't really a futurist, but you know what I mean. Mod me troll if you must, but you know in my hearts I am correct. Sorry, kids, but there won't be a reverse engineered version of your mind enjoying immortally in a machine somewhere.

Re:As Cartman might say, what's the singulartitty?

[Krneki]

Flying cars are reality, they just aren't the cool stuff they used to be.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=flying+car

The Forever Non War

[meehawl]

it looks like we might get the AI thing solved in at least 50 years.

It's *always* ~50 years away.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Lvdata]

It gets more complicated when myself2030 and myself2032 are standing side by side. If myself2030 kills Joe Smith, and then commits suicide, is myself2032 partially responsible? 100%? 0%. With no legal link between selves, when a copy of myself can be made for $100, then murder-suicide of government officials, political people you disagree with becomes easy to do, and when your copy plans on suiciding makes it difficult to protect agent.

How many humans do either?

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to do is look at some of the people watching TV right now and you won't find many that know what formalized logic is nor abstract reasoning.

Sleep != Non-Conscious

[meehawl]

while I was "asleep" (i.e. unaware)

While you're asleep your brain and body are engaged a massive set of synchronised, necessary metabolic activities and cognitive processed that are essential for "you" to exist. Proof? Eliminate sleep from a human and see how long before death or derangement ensues.

One lecture I had from a sleep biologist impressed me immensely. He was demonstrating all the different cycles that are engaged or differently regulated during human sleep. Then there were a bunch of comparitive analyses of other, similar organisms. The biggest mystery about sleep is not why we spend so much time asleep, said he, but why we spend so much time awake. The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.

Anyway, don't dismiss sleep as that "nothing" that happens between wake states. It's a big something... we just don't know what exactly yet.

Re:Sleep != Non-Conscious

[khallow]

The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.

Consider this question. How long would you live in the wild, if you never woke up?

Re:Sleep != Non-Conscious

[Anonymous Coward]

> While you're asleep your brain and body are engaged a massive set of synchronised, necessary metabolic activities and cognitive processed that are essential for "you" to exist. Proof? Eliminate sleep from a human and see how long before death or derangement ensues.

Actually there are some people who go without sleep for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Longest_period_without_sleep
It seems to me that there is some kind of mechanism that penalizes us for not sleeping (enough?), but once it's gone we can just stay awake (well, the wikipedia article suggests microsleep may be how these individuals get their sleep but cites no sources for this claim) for years without significant side-effects.

> The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.

Maybe the other way round? I know very few people who succesfully reproduce and avoid predators while asleep.

We have a lot of work ahead.

[Animats]

This is going to take a while.

Re-engineering biological systems takes generations to debug. And a huge number of dud individuals during the development process. This is fine for tomato R&D, but generating a big supply of failed post-humans is going to be unpopular. Just extending the human lifespan is likely to take generations to debug. It takes a century to find out if something worked.

AIs and robots don't have that problem.

What I suspect is going to happen is that we're going to get good AIs and robots, but they won't be cheaper than people. Suppose that an AI smarter than humans can be built, but it's the size of a server farm. In that case, the form the "singularity" may take is not augmented humans, but augmented corporations. The basic problem with companies is that no one person has the whole picture. But a machine could. If this happens, the machines will be in charge, simply because the machines can communicate and organize better.

Re:We have a lot of work ahead.

[dkf]

Re-engineering biological systems takes generations to debug. And a huge number of dud individuals during the development process. This is fine for tomato R&D, but generating a big supply of failed post-humans is going to be unpopular. Just extending the human lifespan is likely to take generations to debug. It takes a century to find out if something worked.

You should be aware that there are projects working toward the goal of being able to fully simulate a human at all levels of detail from the sub-cellular to the whole-body. If I remember right, they're expecting to take a generation or so to do this, but some pieces are currently under development. (For example, I remember reading about a project to simulate blood flow in real brains using a mix of advanced medical scanning and computational fluid dynamics.) As such models become more pervasive, it will become possible to work out more of the consequences of genetic changes ahead of time, and so the "debug cycle" will be shortened.

But (to give it its proper name) the Virtual Physiological Human project (meta-project really) is most certainly a long-term goal; if someone manages it in the next decade, I'll be very startled. Happy, sure, but startled.

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[account_deleted]

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But...

[Sybert42]

You could be wrong.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

So could you.

That was fun, what else have you got?

Re:But...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Could be, but not. Sorry.

Not that people shouldn't strive for it, mind you. I'm no Luddite. Some very nifty tech might result from such efforts.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[ElectricTurtle]

Idiocracy was both a terrible movie and riddled with faulty assumptions based on deliberately ignoring thousands of years of sociological trends. People have always tended to mate more or less laterally in the IQ department. Also, regardless of the nature/nurture debate, the bell curve is undefeatable, and consequently by the random interaction of genetic material, geniuses are still occasionally born to idiot parents and vice versa. Once those kids grow up, they tend to copulate with their own intellectual 'kind'. The top minority of the curve has always ruled the bottom minority, and it always will. As Cicero once said, 'One good man is worth ten thousand imbeciles!' (Somewhere in one of his dozens of letters to Atticus, but I can't find it at the moment.)

Consciousness has both continuous and instantaneous characteristics. It's just like any other material thing in space-time. There is the present actuality, a limited span of potentials that will become the next actuality. Those limits create a kind of continuity. With most people experience over time narrows the likelihood of options. Most people end up becoming almost fatalistically linear.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[geekoid]

Just shutting does the correct part of the brain removes that lock.

you suffer from "Newton's Sleep"

[Anonymous Coward]

read Henry Corbin and William Blake.

scientists & mathematicians

[Weezul]

I think we'd know now if another technology would supplant the transistor within 10 years. Indeed, our progress may slow as we approach this limit, i.e. Moore's law will slow down and 2018 is too soon. Evolution frequently just stops within domain, like how marsupials just can't evolve flippers. But that doesn't mean evolution stops overall.

We have massive room for progress in numerous disciplines :

1) language & compiler design -- You can buy 10x performance improvements by rewriting your OS & libraries in structured or object oriented self modifying code, Henry Massalin's Synthesis kernel proved this. You can also rewrite all the other heavy apps using this hypothetical language.

2) algorithms -- You can always just train more scientists and mathematicians to write more & better parallel algorithms. You may also fold these advancements back into compiler design for high level language compilers, like say Haskell.

3) subsidies redirection -- You can redirect all government subsidies towards helping young but solid technologies catch up, underwriting 1/2 the cost of optical fabs for example. How much money gets waisted on farmers now?

4) smarter people -- You can try making smarter people through genetic engineering, pharmacology, and even research into education.

5) augmented people -- You can definitely augment people to improve specific tasks. If you augment children, you might change even more, like their will to do science.

6) clustered people -- You can make neurologically linked "people clusters" who think together towards some common goal, enabling you to solve harder math & science problems.

Re:scientists & mathematicians

[Bender0x7D1]

A few comments...

For #1: OK, you get a 10x advantage. Now what? The big thing with exponential growth is it keep going in bigger and bigger leaps. A single 10x advantage is only 5 years of "Moore's Law". It might help, but isn't going to revolutionize anything on its own.

For #2: A lot of our algorithms are optimized. Sure, most code isn't as efficient as it could be but many (most?) of the library functions are as good as they can get with out current computing paradigm. You might be able to make something like sorting more efficient with parallel processing, but that is just leveraging multiple processors/cores, which brings us back to the hardware and Moore's Law.

For #3: Throwing money at a problem might help, but not that much. There are a lot of problems we've been throwing money at for decades, (cancer, AIDS, education), and we might have made improvements, even big improvements, but there still isn't a cure or solution.

For #4: We've found that if people get too smart a whole host of psychological problems develop. If we make everyone smarter, we might find we have a huge increase in autism, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.

For #5: This is being done and, even in its early stages, is pretty awesome IMHO. However, I don't think augmentation will lead to a greater interest in science. (At least not by itself.) Computers have become ubiquitous but enrollment in computer science and engineering is down.

For #6: This is a chicken and egg problem. You want people neurologically linked, but you would probably need a team of neurologically linked individuals to invent said link. Another issue is the psychological and social problems of being linked with someone. What would happen when you linked with someone who had slept with your spouse, or sabotaged your promotion or thinks you are ugly? How do you keep this team working together? I don't think humans could handle this socially or psychologically.

Re:scientists & mathematicians

[Weezul]

#1 : Rewrite more layers. Massalin from writing only his kernel and libc using structured / object-oriented self modifying code.

#2 : No, many algorithms are not provably optimal, indeed small improvements are "incremental research" that reputable computer scientists avoid. Paradigm shouldn't matter much here, although structured / object-oriented self modifying code gives your more direct options.

#3 : No, my example says how to build up alternative technologies that might make up for transistors. But money & will are always king here.

#4 : No, perpetually drugging kids could easily create emotional difficulties, so you'll expect initial problems, but you'd figure it out eventually.

#6. No, it's likely much easier to develop highly effective clustered people than to develop either highly effective augmentations or true artificial intelligence, specifically because you've got human brains sorting out the mess on both ends of your link. I can't even imagine the long term side effects, but the impact on technological development would be enormous.

Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[Tablizer]

Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'"

This is why you *don't* let nerds make political decisions. We can't resist making new gizmos, even if they eat humanity. It's like letting B. Clinton pick interns.
           

Re:Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[phantomfive]

It's like letting B. Clinton pick interns.

He always picks ugly ones?

Re:Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

I thot Monica was cute. Not a mega-babe, but still cute.

Re:Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the problem isn't that he is a nerd. In fact he seems to be a nerd in a narrow area and acting like a marketer in a broader sense.

His views seem to be based on believing his own hype and over-optimism.

He's not a scientist, and doesn't have in-depth knowledge of the areas he speculates about, and it shows.

Re:Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[SwordsmanLuke]

Heh, Dr. De Garis is a funny guy. He was an associate professor teaching AI when I was at university. He's very smart, but perhaps a bit too enthusiastic about creating robotic intelligences. One of the other AI professors once commented, "I want to do simple things with my computers, like teach them to play chess. Hugo wants to take over the world." 8^)

Re:Ask-A-Nerd, NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'"

This is why you *don't* let nerds make political decisions. We can't resist making new gizmos, even if they eat humanity. It's like letting B. Clinton pick interns.

         

The Interview screening form : Do you suck at work? (Y/N)

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[bonch]

Idiocracy was both a terrible movie and riddled with faulty assumptions based on deliberately ignoring thousands of years of sociological trends.

Idiocracy was a comedy. You know, where you laugh and don't take it seriously?

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[ElectricTurtle]

Everytime somebody says something like 'the world is going to end up like Idiocracy' it leaves the realm of comedy and becomes a serious discussion of sociological futures. Too many people (Absolut187 is neither the first nor the last) have looked at that movie and not only took it seriously, but thought it was right.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[unbrokenrabbit]

He's not saying that raw processing power alone is going to lead to functional AI. I think the theory is that when complex things like abstract reasoning are broken down to their most basic level, we'll see that they're composed of very simple operations that are combined together in very complex ways. And once we unweave and understand the complexity of the combinations, then it's just a matter of having the the technology to recreate it effectively. One of the central themes of Kurtzweil's observations is that we're at a point where technological advancement (as well as advancement of knowledge as a whole) is happening at a much faster rate than at previous points in human history. So when you combine the current pace of progress with the expected acceleration of it, it's reasonable to assume that we'll have the intimate knowledge of the brain right around the same time that we'll have the raw processing power to recreate it. And once that happens, humanity is no longer limited by biology, so all bets are off as to what the future is going to look like.

I'll take your challenge (and kinda answer it...)

[Xaedalus]

Kurzweil's theory and predictions are predicated on the idea that we have no soul, that we are essentially very complicated biological machines with the illusion of sentience. If he is correct, then you are correct: it will be technologically feasible someday to upload ourselves. If on the other hand we DO have a soul, then all his predictions go out the window and a whole NEW slew of problems arise. Such as: how exactly did we end up with an indestructible self-aware essence that defies the laws of thermodynamics? And... what exactly created it? The way I look at it, the entire history of mankind can be boiled down to the dualistic philosophical question: do we have a soul or not? If we do not have souls, then the universe is a harsh, dark mistress, there is no God, and all we see is all there really is. If however we do have souls, then boy do we have problems. Because if we have souls, then we open up the door to the distinct possibility of a deity, or deities, and that our actions do matter because there is an afterlife. And (this is really scary) there might really be entities like Cthlulu out there in the void. That's IF we have souls though (defining a soul as an indestructible self-aware essence that defies the laws of thermodynamics). Given that, I can see why people would prefer to believe that we are machines and that we should work on uploading ourselves as intelligent programs. There's nothing in the dark we'd have to fear save ourselves then.

I miss that TV show: The Prisoner

[Randomly]

I really wish they'd bring that show back.

This is just a geek version of "The Rapture".

[NoBozo99]

... and has about the same likelihood of happening. So don't hold your breath till robot Jesus comes, because he probably won't. If he did come he'd be named Bender!

I'm with Hugo de Garis

[Master of Transhuman]

The monkeys are gonna bitch about this - and then they're going to try to do something about it - and then they're gonna get their asses kicked.

It ain't gonne be like Star Trek where Kirk goes crazy and convinces the superintelligence to kill itself.

It's gonna be more like the superintelligence blows Kirk to atoms and goes about its business.

Fuck the monkeys.

I just hope at some point in the process we get to see robots that look like this:

http://celeborama.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/53519-summer-glau-terminator-sarah-connor-chronicl.jpg
http://www.raygunx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/s2_wallpaper_61.jpg

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

"Individuality" is an illusion.

Whether it's real or not, why is it even worth preserving? It's probably the single most destructive competitive tool in existence. It boils down to saying, "I'm different from all of you, and that's why I deserve a bigger cut of the resources." In game theory terms, it's an attempt to convince your opponent to cooperate even as you defect.

* "You don't understand what I'm going through because my problems are unique; that's why I deserve special treatment."

* "Our music is different from the music that came before it. If it weren't for us, you'd never have heard it; that's why we're entitled to a 100+ year monopoly on it."

* "If it weren't for my leadership, this business would go down the tubes. That's why I deserve over 400 times the median annual income."

* "Unlike those barbarians over there, we're civilized. That's why we deserve to destroy everything they hold dear and subjugate them."

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

"Individuality" is an illusion. You may process information differently than I do. But you also process information at time x differently than you process information at time x+1. Because the "human" self is a manifestation of the brain, the human "self" changes with each thought. Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self". In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.

Interestingly, that last paragraph is pretty much exactly what buddhists believe is one of the necessary realisations to have before you can achieve enlightenment.

Why we can not stop thinking about it

[kentsin]

May be it is the will of god?

Well...

[Sybert42]

It doesn't really matter "what I've got". It's not up to you or me. I'm sorry if that hurts in your heart.

No replies?

[Sybert42]

Go watch more Jon Stewart. It's easier than helping the Singularity along. Or keep crying that it's not hear yet.

Best talk I've ever heard online was about this

[Dr. Spork]

The talk was by the brilliant cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling - Title: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. The OGG version is here. Make sure you have an hour and are wearing a diaper, because you might pee yourself.

When will Transcendent Man be released?

[Xerxesman]

Does anyone here know when Transcendent Man will be coming out in theaters? I must see this film! Please if anyone has any information no matter how insignificant please leave a reply. I've been searching online for hours and there's every kind of information on the film, EXCEPT the release date. I can not wait until it comes out on DVD. If there's a release in just a few cities I will gladly go. Transcendent Man and Ray Kurzweil will change the world forever. Trust me - It will! xm

Re:When will Transcendent Man be released?

[religious freak]

It was viewed at Tribeca in NYC. I've waited for another film viewed at Tribeca that was seen over 3 years ago now, and it still hasn't come out on either DVD or in theaters.

As for the official release to the general public, given that I first heard about this particular movie a couple years ago, at this rate, I think it's slated for general release a few years after the singularity itself :P

Re:When will Transcendent Man be released?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this film at Tribeca. It was awesome! Absolutely the best film experience I have ever had. Can't wait till it hits wide release.

Ray Kurzweil is my new hero!

What everyone seems to ignore...

[mario_grgic]

is that simulating brains of mammals or AI is not a hardware problem, and is not bound by the speed of the CPUs currently available.

It is a modeling problem, it is a software problem. If we had a good understanding how things work, and could model them, it might take 5 years to compute a thought instead of an instant, but it would still work.

On the other hand, we don't even know if a brain or consciousness (what ever that is) can be modeled with a digital computer, or Turing machine in general. There are some schools of thought claiming that consciousness is not computational in nature.

What's so bad about losing/destroying humanity?

[AP31R0N]

Sci-Fi writers like to make some silly assumptions. One of which is that humans are warlike, and that somehow more warlike than other sapient species. What if on planet XJ46 there is a species that doesn't even have a word for peace? It's arrogant to assume we're violent when we have no basis of comparison. Methinks that just writers appealing to pacifists. Statistically speaking, humans are becoming less violent over time. (check out the TED presentation on the subject)

Then there is the assumption that science will rob us of humanity. This is a two part assumption. 1) Technology will destroy humanity/humanness. 2) That such would be inherently bad. What if it means we can perpetually download into super awesome robot bodies and/or want for nothing? i think that would be awesome.

This feeds into another assumption popular in fiction: Death gives live meaning. Death makes life SCARY, it makes us hurry. Fear of death or losing time (prison) gives others great power over us. i'm unsure of the value of that.

Re:I'll take your challenge (and kinda answer it..

[Kagura]

If we do not have souls, then the universe is a harsh, dark mistress, there is no God, and all we see is all there really is.

I'm totally a nonbeliever in anything as far as religion goes, but are you seriously suggesting that your all-powerful or even semi-powerful god can't make a universe where there aren't souls?

If I had a god, he'd be pretty damn omnipotent in that he could set the big bang in motion and receive exactly the results he wanted to 15 billion years later.

Where The Wild Things Are

[meehawl]

How long would you live in the wild, if you never woke up?

Consider this: most apex predators spend 15-28 hours asleep during a 24-hour cycle, waking only to hunt, establish or re-establish dominance, and to sleep. Being awake and mobile and *not* productive (as defined by these fitness activities) exposes you to risk, and burns calories needlessly. If you have a safe place to sleep (cave/tree/burrow) then that's a win.

Even herbivores, with a requirement for a long ingestion period for their sustenance, spend a huge proportion of their time asleep. They have simply evolved ways to enter the sleep state while remaining standing, and enable their long digestion process to continue.

We are the anomaly. And it's unclear how much of our sleep-wake cycle, tilted as it is so far towards the waking state, is a very recent artifact of our cultural development where automated timekeeping societies seem to have increased fitness over non-timekeeping societies.

Re:Where The Wild Things Are

[khallow]

We are the anomaly. And it's unclear how much of our sleep-wake cycle, tilted as it is so far towards the waking state, is a very recent artifact of our cultural development where automated timekeeping societies seem to have increased fitness over non-timekeeping societies.

If you're going to do that, you need to compare like against like. For example, compare humans against other omnivores particularly primates. The omnivore diet requires a lot of movement and it's worth noting that while humans aren't optimized for strength or speed, they have a lot of endurance and can roam long distances. For another omnivore example, it appears that there are times of the year (in the Fall particularly when bears are building up a reserve of fat for the winter) when bears do not sleep much (and eat all the time).

And now for the right answer

[whiledo]

A lot of people have repeated the same arguments above that have already been addressed (not the same thing as "disproven") by people who believe that consciousness could be transferred in the way that you describe.

But the real answer to why you shouldn't do this is simple: we don't know. We don't know what life is and we don't know what death when it comes to consciousness. We don't even know what consciousness really is. And we may never know, as we have to do all of our research from the inside.

Given all those unknowns, do you really want to roll the dice? Sure, if you're on death's door it's not much of a gamble. Otherwise, I'm not sure I see any difference between this and the Heaven's Gate suicides other than the specific trappings of their faiths.

Re:Homo sapiens over-rated

[nyctopterus]

It may give that feeling--but it doesn't actually give me conscious experience of any other brain.

Primates,,..

[meehawl]

There's so little difference between humans and, say, the chimp/pan that they are virtually the same species. We are the third chimpanzee. Like us, chimps seem to be happiest with close to ten hours of sleep per day.

The Primates journal is a good place to look for info.

The question then is why are the primates at the low end of the sleep budget? Your dietary thesis is interesting and represents one popular line of teleological reasoning for our waking budgets.

Getting back to the issue at hand, my thesis is that were it possible to simulate human consciousness, it may be necessary to simulate the sleeping as well as the waking state.

Re:Primates,,..

[khallow]

Getting back to the issue at hand, my thesis is that were it possible to simulate human consciousness, it may be necessary to simulate the sleeping as well as the waking state.

Oh, absolutely, I agree with this. It's clear that sleep is crucial to the brain's function.

I've spotted one!

[Sybert42]

This particular animal doesn't like being let down. This animal hopes for the best, but prepares for the worst. How very common.

Re:I'll take your challenge (and kinda answer it..

[Xaedalus]

Nahh... I'm going to suggest something even more far-fetched: the question of God is irrelevant, the question of the existence of the soul is what matters. Besides, why would a God create a universe to get the responses it wants? If it's that omnipotent, then why go to the trouble, the expense, and the time? Why bother to create something in as much detail as our reality is? What would be the point of the simulation? And if we have souls, then the idea of the simulation goes out the window too.

Re:I'll take your challenge (and kinda answer it..

[Anonymous Coward]

> The way I look at it, the entire history of mankind can be boiled down
> to the dualistic philosophical question: do we have a soul or not?

The Flying Spaghetti Monster suffered and died for us. He was boiled to a delicious al dente consistency to guarantee us eternal life and souls capable of appreciating fine Italian food. This is all, of course, a self-evident truth.