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Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-want-futurist-business-cards dept.

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..."

11 of 830 comments (clear)

  1. ahh, the "singularity"... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The singularity is to nerds what the rapture is to fundamentalist protestant wackjobs....

    1. Re:ahh, the "singularity"... by benjfowler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There surely has to be a Rule 34 for pseudoscientific crap.

      "If it exists, there is woo of it".

      There's physics and quantum woo (Deepak Chopra), food and nutrition woo, health woo, laundry woo, automotive woo, fortune-telling and divination woo, religious woo.... wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?

    2. Re:ahh, the "singularity"... by Raindance · · Score: 5, Insightful

      PZ Myers wasn't there; he based his whole critique on gizmodo's writeup.

      Speaking as someone who was there and heard Kurzweil's full speech, I can confidently say that PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.

      First off, a significant factual mistake: Kurzweil -clearly- never said we'd reverse engineer the brain by 2020. He argued against exactly that (his prediction was late 2020s, shading into 2030-- perhaps also unbelievable, but if you're going to critique someone, why not get the facts right?). Sure, gizmodo's writeup was entitled "Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020". It'd be an understandable attribution mistake for say, an undergraduate.

      Second, Myers is critiquing Kurzweil's ontological position based on a throwaway writeup dashed off by gizmodo. (Really, Myers? And you wonder why you're a magnet for shitstorms...)

      Third, Myers' criticism is essentially that the brain is an emergent system, and we'll have to understand all the protein-protein interactions, functional attributes of proteins, etc. in order to actually model the brain.

      This third assumption is arguable, but Kurzweil wasn't actually arguing against this. All Kurzweil meant with his comment about bytes and the genome was there's an interesting information-theoretic view of how much initial data gives rise to the wonderful complexity of the brain.

      I had a lot more respect for Myers before I read this rant.

  2. It would be nice.. by djlemma · · Score: 5, Informative

    Would be nice if the summary even hinted at what the ridiculous claim actually WAS...

    Namely, that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain in the next 10 years.

    1. Re:It would be nice.. by rotide · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're looking for a level of effort above pure copy'n'paste and as such are asking for way too much. Slashdot submissions and editing have gotten so bad that the summaries are generally misleading if not entirely wrong. The summaries tend to be nothing more than the submitter taking the most polarizing sentence/paragraph from TFA and pasting it into the summary field. RTFA is no longer to glean more details for the sake of learning more or backing up your opinions in comments... RTFA is now necessary to understand just what the fuck the submitter wants us to learn. The term "summary" appears to be _entirely_ lost now, at least in the Slashdot story submission crowd.

  3. Re:Uh by nomadic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ray Kurzweil is yet another computer programmer blathering on about things that he has no understanding on.

    Get Kurzweil a slashdot account, stat!

  4. 50 Megabytes is WAY too much ! by mbone · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.

    Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says.Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

    Dude, the equations of quantum mechanics can be written on one page. General Relativity can be written on a second page. What more do you need ? Clearly, a few hundred lines of code (and a few do loops) should be enough to simulate the entire universe, brains and all.

    Glad we cleared that up. All you physicists and astronomers can go home now and work on your resumes.

  5. Re:Uh by RaymondKurzweil · · Score: 5, Funny

    Which account is it?

    PS: Go fuck yourself.

  6. Kurzweil documentary on The Singularity by peter303 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Because the Article Breaks Down the Claim Fully by Khazunga · · Score: 5, Informative

    Moore's law, the base of his argument that technology is evolving exponentially is pretty much on schedule. We are now on the Petaflop (10^15) range, with the transistor count following the predicted exponential.

    Cost of DNA sequencing, another of his examples, is today at 0.000008(USD) per base pair. Fits the curve.

    RAM cost is now at 28000kB/USD, also fitting the curve

    GDP per capita also is within schedule (note that the scale is logarithmic), even with the wealth transfer east (which is bound to be limited in time to ten more years give or take)

    And, lastly, the core of all atacks on Kurzweil, so is life expectancy on track.

    You may still believe these exponentials will hit some kind of ceiling somehow. That might be true. The numbers, however, support Kurzweil's theory. And predicting from the number of times Moore's law depletion was announced in the last twenty years, I'd wager my bets on Kurzweil.

    --
    If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
  8. Re:So, you believe in a planned economy, then? by Subura · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obviously, by your logic, a free market economy is impossible, Our economy is too complex to have evolved on its own. In fact, it is far more complex, with far more different parts, than a human being. It must have had a creator. If most any part of the economy, like the steel industry, say, were removed, the economy would not function. How did the economy function before there was a steel industry? Obviously, it couldn't, and therefore we have demonstrated irreducible specificated complexification or something.

    All this free market talk is obvious bullshit, and we actually DO have a centrally planned economy because it is impossible for something so complex to have evolved without a central planner.

    The Illuminati control the free market. Point Intelligent Design.