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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.
... 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.
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.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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!"
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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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?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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.
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.
You just got troll'd!
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.
"The nerd rapture"
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
..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.
"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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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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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.
> 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.
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.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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.