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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.
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.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
You just got troll'd!
Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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.
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?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.