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Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers
On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."
Clearly, this dispute should be resolved by a poll.
This whole discussion reminds me way too much of the million partisan pundit sissy fights that rage endlessly on the internet. If I wanted to see two guys argue about what the other did or didnt say, I would gladly head over to DailyKos or BigJournalism and drown myself in their pedantry. This is slashdot; please save the inanity for the comments and at least give us stories that have meaning!
Myers may have been focused on the "reverse engineer from the genome" argument but really the main issue is whether Kurzweil is within a few orders of magnitude of guessing the right level of complexity necessary to simulate a brain. The gist of the Myers argument isn't so much about genomics and ontogeny as it is about the emergent complexity of inter-related systems and I think the real nugget there might be something like: "We could model a brain but that wouldn't mean we modeled a mind. To model a mind you need to model a great deal of the environment the mind lives in... and that is many many orders of magnitude more complex."
For the record: I hope Kurzweil is right but I rather doubt he is. I don't think he's wrong about how powerful machines will be in 2050 I think he may be wrong about whether those machines can simulate a mind well enough because I really wonder if the complexity of a mind is actually a superpolynomial problem due to the hyper connected-ness of a mind and its environment.
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Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome.
So put your speech up on your site, all I can find are videos from previous summits. TED seemingly posted videos as they happened and therefore we could openly debate them. Summits are great but not everyone has the time or resources to attend them. I would suggest you move towards a more open format of disseminating your ideas and the very specific and lengthy details about them. I'm not going to buy a book on futurism and wade through it for the details you provide about neurobiology and I don't think PZ Meyers would do that either.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.
Well, frankly, I don't understand it either. You're applying information theory to lines of code ... and that just doesn't make any sense to me. I haven't heard of it. I haven't heard of anyone say "theoretically could be reduced to x lines of code." I don't know why we're talking about information theory when we're talking about simulating the brain or even understanding the brain.
The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
So first it was information theory on the genome and now you're on about compression of the genome. Great, you've applied theoretical limits to lines of code in order to describe a complex biological system and then argued that due to redundancy we can reduce it to 50 million bytes. And what did that buy us exactly? Look at how many lines of code we've devoted to simulating a single neuron or synapse ... and it's not even a complete and accurate simulation. Your theoretical limits are amusing but pointless ... to further apply your 'exponential growth' of the lines of code we can program is further amusing.
Kurzweil is a futurist with just enough knowledge to sell people. His exponential growth to a singularity and proof of it doesn't do him much good when he doesn't understand the complexity of the brain and then applies theoretical limits to that from other disciplines. He's free to keep preaching, I just question at what point people will give up on him. If he dies soon and pulls a L. Ron Hubbard what sort of cult then will we have on our hands?
My work here is dung.
I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.
We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what Consciousness is.
Free Martian Whores!
The major flaw I can see in his response (which I think was addressed by Myers) is
but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
He even underlined it. The problem is that the brain doesn't just spring into existence fully formed and THEN get exposed to the environment. The brain starts out as a few cells and is constantly exposed to the environment as it develops. I think this was a major point in Myers response and RK just blew right past it.
When are we human? Abortion hinges on this, WHEN is the foetus a human being with a human brain. Is there some magic moment the brain switches on OR are we a bacteria that evolves rapidly into a complex life form?
Can it be that the brain "knows" the human body and how to operate it because it "grew up" with it? We imagine a robot being build typically on a long assembly line and only at the last moment the head is connected and the robot switches on. Could a brain instead function as a very small simple "cpu" that has more and more peripherals (but small ones) learns about it when they are still simple and then grows familiar with them as they and itself grow? Are WE created from a single egg, not the just he body but the WE, the spirit, the bit that makes us, makes any animal able to think? It would explain low level functions far more. A full grown heart is hard to control, but when you can get to grips with it when it is still just a few cells, that makes a lot more sense. Even fits what we know of brain cells being able to learn how to fly. Start simple, then add more complexity rather just plump some brain cells into a 747 and asking it to fly to Hong Kong and boink the stewardess.
But building something like this? Fat chance. We use rat brain cells for a reason. Even building an AI that could teach itself to fly is beyond us. We can build AI that can fly but NOT AI that can teach itself to fly. Not even in very simple environments. That says something.
I think the old "And the egg starts to divide" bit is a bit more complex then we think.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
is right. Myers criticism may be off the mark but Kurzweil's speculation about brain design, like some much of his other speculation, is bullshit. His basic argument in the blog post is that the amount of information in the human genome constrains the amount of information (and the complexity) required to design the brain. This thesis is wrong on a bunch of levels but let's take the most obvious. The amount of information in the genome is the amount of information that the "body" (to simplify) requires to replicate or create parts of itself. The amount of information required is relative to the machinery which is going to interpret it. There is no reason to believe we are dealing with a Turing machine here where the amount of bits required for a program to perform a function is going to be more or less consistent across languages and platforms (assuming similar complexity of the code). The machine interpreting the bits matters. So while the body may only need "50 million bytes" to create itself we may need many, many more millions of bits to specify how to build it. Just consider the complexity of protein folding.
More dubious statements follow:
"The goal of reverse-engineering the brain is the same as for any other biological or nonbiological system – to understand its principles of operation. We can then implement these methods using other substrates other than a biochemical system that sends messages at speeds that are a million times slower than contemporary electronics. The goal of engineering is to leverage and focus the powers of principles of operation that are understood, just as we have leveraged the power of Bernoulli’s principle to create the entire world of aviation."
This completely begs the question of whether it can be replicated in another substrate. He just assumes that it can be done and by doing so he already assumes a model of the brain that could be (and is most likely) wrong. The brain is clearly not a Turing machine. That's not say it is not another kind of "computer" (for some expanded definition of computer) or follow mechanistic principles however. Assuming the brain is like a Turing machine (which Kurzweil implicitly does) is one of the biggest obstacles to developing real AI.
Speculation of Kurzweil kind does not belong in the "Science" category, maybe "Idle".
Kurzweil ridiculously optimistic, Myers ridiculously cynical?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
An "algorithm" could also model the behavior of a few neurons working in circuit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the complexity of the brain and body are completely unrelated to the task of thinking. Much of that genome codes for molecular machine parts needed to maintain and grow the hardware. There's all kind of defense and circulatory and support systems that we won't have to worry about when designing artificial minds.
And finally, when you consider the changes made to the brain from the enviroment : that doesn't make the problem harder. Once you have a self organizing neural system that works like the human brain but a million times faster, you expose that system to our environment and train it up just like we do with humans. Sure, it might take a few years for such a system to reach super-intelligence, but if your fundamental design was right then this would eventually happen.
Myers primary complaint was that Kurzweil used the number of genes in the genome and how many bits would be required to store that data as a predictor of how long it will take to completely understand the complexity of the human mind. Myers' post lays out a glimpse of the additional complexity involved and rightly points out the fallacy of making such a grand prediction based on such a small amount of information and understanding. Of course Kurzweil's entire career and fame are now dependent on people continuing to fall for his dramatic generalizations and overreaching predictions that "Something Big" is right around the corner. I have watched Kurzweil talk and sometimes it seems as if he has a messianic complex.
Sceptics are adept at making really quite fetching mincemeat sculptures of religion, alternative medicine and the new age, but we need some serious attention paid to the transhumanist/singularist/cryonicist belief cluster. Because these are smart people, they are likely our friends, they share a lot of our notions and they are proving that the main use apes with delusions of grandeur like ourselves put intelligence to is being stupid with far greater efficiency.
Obligatory RationalWiki plug: Cryonics. I was actually neutral-to-positive on the subject until a friend started looking seriously into spending $120k on freezing his head and I started looking seriously into what he was getting into. And goddamn, it's woo all the way down. Woo by people who are ridiculously smarter than you or me and use it to be dumb. How do you fight that sort of woo? Piece by piece, of course. So I have to learn the bollocks on its own terms to take it down (at which point you see goalpost-moving, reversal of burden of proof, etc., all the things apes with delusions of grandeur do so well). And it's just AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
tl;dr: Singularitarians talk as much utter bollocks as creationists, climate change deniers, New Age hippies and the tobacco industry. There needs to be more analysis and dissection of said bollocks.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
As someone who actually does neuroscience research, the tools and techniques available today were almost undreamed of a couple of decades ago. Nothing is slowing down. But more money is always greatly appreciated, of course.