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Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain
jamie writes "There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced..."
Kurtzweil is just the latest in a long line. How do you think publications like Fast Company and Wired get written?
And does anybody remember JonKatz?
To simplify it so a computer science ignorant biologist with a tendency to inane rants can possibly get it, you don't need to simulate electrons in a semi-conductive material at specific temperatures in order to build a complete working emulator for an old computer.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Obviously you've never heard of FPGA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array While you can't add new connections in the strictest sense, you could could conceivably create a chip with a whole bunch of generic unused hardware and in the rest of the hardware program an algorithm that allows new connections to be made with that raw material.
Visualize Whirled Peas
Ray's documentary about the Singularity has been touring the national film festivals along with Ray. I saw it June. Its begins as a dull-talking heads piece about the current state of A.I. Many of the Big Name A.I. Scientists are interviewed. Then it transitions into a crime-drama story about the legal rights of A.I.s. That part was more interesting, since it had a story. The film is full of special effects to advance the story. Although I know most of the film to be factual, I suspect it will look like a scifi movie to the average audience member. I think Ray is seeking looking at broader distribution on cable television or arts theaters after the festival run.
Ray was interesting in person during a film-makers Q&A. He reminded me of Woody Allen, but more confident and intelligent. He was graduated from M.I.T. about decade before myself. I personally believe in the Singularity, but more likely in centuries rather than decades.
religious woo
Isn't that a tautology?
(Incidentally, I'm really curious whether this comment will end up at -1, Troll or +5, Interesting now.)
I don't know where you got your definition of 'the Singularity', but I'd bet that the majority of slashdot readers would disagree with you. I expect most of them have the definition of the Singularity as the time when an AI capable of building an AI superior to itself exists, and begins the freefall towards an AI that is operating at the maximum capability that the universe will allow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
And of course the singularity folks typically conveniently ignore the possibility that we are already close to the limit on intelligence density with the human brain, or that the problem could become a steep exponential more difficult, etc.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
From your wikipedia link:
The idea is more vague than your statement about AI writing AI; you indicate only one possible definition/manifestation of the concept.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
There is a major flaw in the article too: The author apparently believes that you need to simulate the proteins and the exact chemical method for interaction in order to simulate the result of the interaction. It is the result that is important, not the method. I won't say that it is an easy matter of determining how the cells in the brain interact with one another, nor will I say that the chemical interactions are entirely precise, but if there is a finite number of possible outcomes to all possible interactions between two cells in the brain, it can be simulated.
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It is not a flaw. He was explaining what one would have to do to derive "the brain" from the genome, which was Kurzweil's contention.
One could indeed simply look at the complete brain and model it, true, but then you are looking at 10^10 neurons, each connected (not at random) to some 10,000 other neurons to produce a net of 10^14 synapses.
To understand the challenge of modelling a system this vast and complex, consider the state of research on the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans (a tiny worm). Its nervous system has been (almost) exactly mapped: it contains 302 neurons, 6393 chemical synapses, 890 gap junctions, and 1410 neuromuscular junctions. Imagine now the difficulty of reaching this level of precision in a system 10^7 times larger.
But the good news is that with this level of neuro-mapping precision we can now completely simulate the neural network ("brain") of a tiny worm, right? Right?
Wrong. Not by a long shot. We are still struggling with characterizing the behavior of this primitive neural net, and making efforts at simulating some aspects of that behavior. The 302 neuron "brain" is far beyond our abilities to simulate at present.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj