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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.
n/t
... "I'll be back."
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.
... 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.
..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".
You just got troll'd!
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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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.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
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.
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.
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.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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)
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.
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.
... well... ludditism.
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
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.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
> If Robert is 700 part Ultimate Brain and 1 part Robert; and ... i.e., ... then, in what sense
> Ray is 700 parts SuperiorBrain and 1 part Ray
> if the human portions of the post-Singularity cyborg beings
> are minimal and relatively un-utilized
> 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.
I agree! That all makes perfect sense... except for that bit after "Qadi Sa'id develops a concept of time [...]".
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.
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*
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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/
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
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
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.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
"Cogito ergo sum"
All of your points have been covered before. RTFM.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
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.
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.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
i would rather be uploaded to the internet like what happened at the end of the movie : The Lawnmower Man"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"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.
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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/
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.
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.
So his argument boils down to: "Lots of cool stuff has happened in the past. If we extrapolate, then OMG ponies!!!!!"
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Bubbles are exponential. Until they burst.
> 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.
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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.
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.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
it looks like we might get the AI thing solved in at least 50 years.
It's *always* ~50 years away.
Da Blog
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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.
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.
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.
Da Blog
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.
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.
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You could be wrong.
mod parent up.
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
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
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Just shutting does the correct part of the brain removes that lock.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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.
Table-ized A.I.
Idiocracy was a comedy. You know, where you laugh and don't take it seriously?
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:
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".
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
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.
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 :)
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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.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I really wish they'd bring that show back.
"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"
... 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 may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
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
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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.
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.
Go watch more Jon Stewart. It's easier than helping the Singularity along. Or keep crying that it's not hear yet.
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'.
Wow, so you let you biophysics prof, diss you in your IT field? WTF does this guy know about IT?
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.
Agreed.
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.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I remember reading 20 years ago how acid rain would kill us all and we would be out of oil by 1997.
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.
Apparently he knew enough to tell (or guess) that it would take over a decade for what he was suggesting to become feasible...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.
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
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.
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.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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. :-)
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
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.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Da Blog
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.
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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.
It may give that feeling--but it doesn't actually give me conscious experience of any other brain.
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.
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.
Da Blog
This particular animal doesn't like being let down. This animal hopes for the best, but prepares for the worst. How very common.
what if we were not the first :)
This has all happened before and will happen again. But don't worry - they have a plan.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
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.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:
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 ?