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Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism
wjousts writes "Well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the future in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), but how well have his predictions held up now that we live 'in the future'? IEEE Spectrum has a piece questioning the Kurzweil's (self proclaimed) accuracy. Quoting: 'Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.'"
Seems like a lucrative field. I bet I could do it! Let me think, ah, in the future... Nope. I got nothin'.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books"
Sarah Palin.
Yours In Anchorage,
Kilgore Trout.
I don't agree with his predictions.
A) it is assuming that we will always have a technological breakthrough at the right moment to allow the doubling of computing power every 18 months. Maybe this is the case, but it's still a big assumption.
B) He assumes if we put enough cyber neurons together in a neural net you will develop intelligence and conscience. This may be the case, and it will be interesting to see, but I don't think you can take it for granted. He also spent about 2 pages in his book about this from a philosophical perspective, basically a: "Here is what three people thought about consciousness. Anyway, moving on..." Seems like it should be a central point.
C) I think he also assumes that having such massive massive amounts of computing power will solve all our problems. Has he heard of exponential-time problems, or NP-Completeness? Doubling computing power every 18 months equates to adding one city to a traveling salesman problem every 18 months.
The point isn't to be accurate; it's to be engaging. We live in an age in which it is more important to entertain than to inform. Look at all the hack prognosticators in the business and technology press who make a living making predictions – most of them are wildly off the mark but nobody cares enough to go back and call them on their failures.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"Claims made about the future were wrong"
Actually, the accusation is that the claims aren't even wrong.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well, Ray Kurzweil seems to me about as effective at predicting the future of technology as Oracle is effective at managing data bases.
This analogy is pretty good, but it's not exactly what some people might imagine.
I used to disdain all these vague futurists. in many cases, it's sure to happen in the far distant future, and after the fact a few act smart enough to have said it long before. And many times it doesn't happen close to the way that's predicted. I always tended toward the practical side of things, rather than the theoretical.
But one thing after another after another that was obvious and predictable just by applying Moore's law, still surprised almost everyone when they became reality. Things like lots of movies on a tiny chip.
I was a singlularity denier, for one thing. But I have to reverse myself and admit that I'm wrong. Oddly, it was Ray, presenting to an audience in Vienna, which convinced me otherwise. The only thing about being a singularity futurist is that you've predicted what's already happened. Try living without today's technology and internet and see how far you get. It's already unclear to what extent the creators (ourselves) or that which we have created (technology) is the master. We always thought that we could turn off unfriendly robots, but we can't really turn off the internet, which is the largest robot yet (and the one that replaces most human brains for getting the best answers to things).
Ray takes a lot of flak but he deserves respect, even when you think he's wrong.
OK a new size TV
We have discussed this many times. I debated writing out a lengthy post espousing the many problems with Kurzweil's predictions. Of course I (and Slashdot stories) have done this before. But you know after reading this article, I have this sort of urge to read more of Kurzweil's writings in an attempt to develop an equivalent process for identifying something we could call "Technological Stock Spiel." To some of you Sagan nuts and skeptics, you might recognize the phrase "stock spiel" as something used to designate parlor tricks and underhanded wording to get people to believe that you're a psychic. It's also been called cold reading strategy and you've seen shows from Family Guy to South Park parody it.
Basically I suspect that Kurzweil is adept at standing up in front of a group of people and employing this same sort of strategy that preys on people's understanding of technology instead of their emotions. But both of those things have in common the fact that people want to believe great things. If he's talking to computer scientists, he'll extrapolate on biology. If he's talking to biologists he'll extrapolate on computer science and so on and so forth. And he probably knows exactly what to say so that more than enough people gobble that up. Because of the things that I have studied extensively through college, this man is very capable of talking like he knows just enough and using vague analogies to get people going "Yup, yeah, uh huh I see now, I want to believe!"
As Walter Sobchak might say, "Forget it, Donny, you're out of your element!"
That is, of course, unless he's talking to a group of futurists. Then he's just preaching to the overly optimistic choir.
My work here is dung.
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
No they're not, and there was plenty of skepticism about such claims when O'Neill in the 70s was proclaiming that we could be doing them all in a few years, because it was clearly technologically impossible with any reasonably justifiable amount of money. There's far less skepticism today because we can see that they could be viable in a few decades.
Similarly, I haven't seen too much wrong with Kurzweil's claims, other than that he expects things to happen within the next few years, rather than the next few decades (or centuries if you're pessimistic).
I believe Clarke once said something along the lines that near-term predictions were always optimistic and far-future predictions pessimistic, because humans expect linear progress when most things are exponential.
For the 50 millionth time, Bill Gates didn't make any such claim about 637K, 640K or whatever. The memory limit in MS-DOS was dictated by the CPU, the 8086 made by Intel, and chosen by IBM for the IBM PC. Sorry to be off topic but I get sick of people slandering this guy, who would never say a bad word about IBM and Intel for doing exactly what they accuse Bill Gates of, because of their support of Linux and Apple.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. . And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology...
Oh where have I heard that description before.... oh ya, here
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
People in 2110 will be looking at copies of the Scientific American from 2010 that have Ray Kurzweil in them talking about a Singlularity and saying they want it. They'll also be wanting their flying cars, AI, and fusion power which the singularity was supposed to give them.
For the 50 millionth time, Bill Gates didn't make any such claim about 637K, 640K or whatever.
I'm with you. I hate when people exaggerate and mis-attribute claims. Like GWB said, "if I said it once, I said it a hundred zillion times... I hate exaggeration."
Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?
-- Criswell
oh, wait, you said Kurzweil...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm all for criticizing the excesses of Kurzweil, but I don't think the article is up to snuff and reads like a personal attack on Kurzweil rather than a well-reasoned refutation of Kurzweil's predictions.The author seems to take the position that Kurzweil wasn't exactly 100% accurate in all the factes of his predictions, therefore he was wrong and besides, somebody else already thought of it anyway before Kurzweil did. It's kind of a specious hit piece that cherry picks a couple of examples and doesn't really measure up as a serious analysis of Kurzweil's record. Maybe it would be nice of someone actually did that, but this article is nowhere near it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Futurists don't "predict the future". They discuss the past and present, talk about its implications, and get people in the present to think about the implications of what they do. They talk about possible futures. Which of course changes what actually happens in the future. They typically talk about a future beyond the timeframe that's also in the future but in which their audience can actually do something. Effectively they're just leading a brainstorming session about the present.
This practice is much like science fiction (at least, the vast majority, which is set in "the future" when it's written), which doesn't really talk about the future, but rather about the present. You can see from nearly all past science fiction that it was "wrong" about its future, now that we're living in it, though with some notable exceptions. In fact "futurists" are so little different from "science fiction writers" that they are really just two different names for the same practice for two different audiences. Futurism is also not necessarily delivered in writing (eg. lectures), and is usually consumed by business or government audiences. Those audiences pay for a product they don't want to consider "fiction", but it's only the style that makes it "nonfiction".
This practice is valuable beyond entertainment. Because there is very little thinking by government, business, or even just anyone about the consequences of their work and developments beyond the next financial quarter. Just thinking about the future at all, especially in terms that aren't the driest and narrowest statistical projections, or beyond their own specific careers, is extremely rare among people. If we did it a lot more we'd be better at it. But we don't, so "inaccurate" is a lot more valuable than "totally lacking". Without futurism, or its even less accurate and narrower form in science fiction, the future would take us by surprise even more. And then we'd always suffer from "future shock", even more than we do now.
If we don't learn from futurism that it's not reliable, but still valuable, then it's not the fault of futurists. It's our fault for having unreasonable expectations, and failing to see beyond them to actual value.
--
make install -not war
I can predict the future of the Windows Phone and of Steve Balmer. Fail + Fail = New M$ CEO for January! I remember when the Zune was going to kill the iPod, and the Kin was going to do something I can't remember now, and Slate, and Vista... need we remind you further?
You can't predict the future by remembering the past. History is just the shackles of the mind. What we need are some forward thinkers who are willing to make the same mistakes over and over again. I call them 'American Voters'. We think we know what we're doing and we act like we know what we're doing, but every two years we don't seem to get anywhere. Which is OK because the present is where it's at. What did the future ever do for us anyway?
Our joke about Kurzweil was he was someone who didn't take his "series expansion" to enough terms.. What he does is look at emergent phenomena and notice the exponential growth curve .. (which occurs in a variety of phenomena from biology to physics to even economics) .. and from that draw the conclusion that everything (or particular aspects of technology really) will continue to grow exponentially ad infinitum .. to a "singularity" etc.. This is both intuitively not true and factually not true because of resource / energetic issues (however one wants to define it for your particular problem) .. The point is you can actually look at the same phenomenon that Kurzweil claims to and notice in fact actually new phenomena/technology/etc only initially look "exponential" and then for all the obvious reasons flatten out (again really only initially (but further down the time curve than the exponential growth phase)) so your curve in the end looks really like a sigmoidal function.. (given whatever metric you choose) The hard part is to figure out how quickly you'll hit the new pseudo steady state .. but its certainly absurd to assume it never happens.. which is what the absurd conclusions he draws are always based on..
News at 11.
How do you know? It's only 5:30. Is that you, Kurzweil?
This space up for sale.
I went to a SVUG meeting once and Douglas Engelbart was speaking there during the 90's
I got picked to ask him a question about what the next interface computers might be after the keyboard and mouse.
He was taken aback and answered:
I don't know.
On the bright side, I won a copy of OS/2 for stumping the speaker!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I don't think you said that loudly enough.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Like GWB said, "if I said it once, I said it a Brazilian times... I hate exaggeration."
There, that's better.
Extra medication for all!
Of course, Bob Heinlein had his characters using mobile phones in the 50's and 60's. Between Planets opened with the main character receiving a phone call while riding a horse in the back end of nowhere. Space Cadet had the main character receiving a phone call while standing in line for processing into the Patrol, while another character mentioned leaving his phone in his luggage so his mother couldn't worry at him...
Closest to the internet I can recall was Asimov's "The Last Question", which had characters connected (various input/output methods, from voice to direct neural feed) to world- (and later galaxy- and universe-) wide computer systems.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Nope - if you have "commuter lanes" or some other restricted lanes on your local highways, you'll see it's not a stretch to have those be dedicated to self-driving cars before much longer. The technology is nearly here. The infrastructure (always the hard part) is already here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Of course, when pointing out the flaws in someone else's claims about the future, it helps to get your claims about the present correct. For example, stacked chips may not be quite as common as he suggests, but they're still fairly ubiquitous. Nearly every microSD card uses a stacked-chip design, for example, as do many full-sized SD cards. So do the CPUs used in the iPhone, the iPad, and many other phones. We're only just getting started too... there are plausible rumours AMD are considering stacked chips in the relatively near future.
Yes, S-curves are common in nature. Although we are stil facing discontinuities in our economics. By me on that:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0061.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
Roy Amara first said Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
I sent Ray Kurzweil some emails on why he gets evolution wrong and why uploaded minds will be eaten by digital pirahna (someone else put up copies):
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
Another key point is here by me:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/1f6bb622cafc8c29?hl=en
"Is the Singularity like Harry Potter's "Mirror of Erised"? ("Erised" is "Desire" spelled backwards.) What would we see in the mirror if we are a financially successful capitalist (hint, hint)? Does capitalist ideology dominate "mainstream" singularity thinking? What is the danger of seeing capitalism and competing over scarce resources as the way to build the future of abundance? Or could we see cooperation, or at least, balance, as a better way forward to a world that works for everyone, and where the capacity to collectively create, monitor, and respond outweighs the individual or collective ability to destroy and harm? "
There is a low-tech way to prevent cancer, heart disease, and many other illnesses now, and that is to be sure to get enough vitamin D and to eat lots of vegetables and fruits.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Although it is true that it has taken modern science and technology to prove why that works and to communicate that finding. Kurzweil is probably taking too many potions for his health, sadly. He should check out Dr. Fuhrman's January retreat in Princeotn, NJ on health.
With all that said, I still have a lof respect for Ray Kurzweil's accomplishments and predictions and his efforts to help humanity with technology. I just think some of his pedictions show some of the limts of his perspective based on who he has been, which is true for any of us.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
No they're not, and there was plenty of skepticism about such claims when O'Neill in the 70s was proclaiming that we could be doing them all in a few years, because it was clearly technologically impossible with any reasonably justifiable amount of money. There's far less skepticism today because we can see that they could be viable in a few decades.
Possible, sure. We could go back to the moon with a big enough budget. Economically viable, though?
Solar microwave satellites were fun in SimCity 2000, and I'd still like to see them operational, but I've not seen even any proof of concept devices yet.
Further out, the big question about asteroid mining I've never seen plausibly answered is: how do you make mining bulk metal in space cheaper than mining it on Earth?
The usual space-booster response is "we won't be building stuff on earth, we'll be building stuff in space, and space mining is cheaper for that". But that begs the question: why will we be building megastructures in space in the first place? Not just to build space mining camps so we can build more space mining camps, I assume.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Although I agree it is a bit disingenuous to couch his predictions in scientific language, there is a positive side effect to his spiel. Who else can attract the resources to gather so many geniuses in a room? Scrolling through the list of advisors, I recognize such luminaries as Vint Cerf and Will Wright. Think of him as a story-teller, not a weatherman. The weatherman may help you plan for the immediate future. The story-teller or myth-maker primes the imagination to build a better future based on affirming deliberate values rather than history and habit. Inspiring, corralling, and funding the wills and insights of smart people in multiple fields is bound to produce something of value despite our failure to precisely anticipate the result.
In other words, there's some good in the ra ra. After all, inventions originate from "I want to believe."
You are a nut job. You fail to recognize that propulsion technology may render "rockets" obsolete, i.e. you assume that we only have chemical rockets for all eternity, and you overestimate the length our current economic system will last, i.e. you assume indefinitely. Either humanity will eventually colonize other places (at least in our own solar system) or we will go extinct. Its a natural progression. I bet people like you complained when one of their tribesmen built a slightly bigger ship more suitable for travel between islands. You would be the person saying "Nope. The ocean is endless, all that exists is the land behind us." or "There is no reason to go look for new lands over the ocean because its economically unfeasible to bring goods back from whatever lands may exist over the sea." Funny thing about that is, technology eventually developed to make overseas travel a matter of months (wind powered ships), then a matter of hours or days (airplanes). The next progression was space flight which brought us to the moon and sent probes past Jupiter. Basically, you assume no new technology will ever be developed as far as space travel is concerned and so far history has proven your stance wrong. The only way you could ever be right is if we all are brought back to the stone age or human beings become extinct.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Asimov... Generally he foresaw one big computer. There's even an intro he wrote for a short story compilation in which he talks about it, from the perspective of 20 years or so after writing.
He says "Basically I didn't see miniaturisation coming, so I missed out on computers becoming small or ubiquitous". So he thought of computers occupying whole cities, planets or even systems. I *think* that's the situation in the story you mention too. One huge computer.
Of course as networking and distributed computing take hold it may yet turn out that he's right, and we do end up with effectively one huge computer.
To be fair, Kruzweil isn't that dumb. He's not suggesting that mereley doing the same thing, on a much faster computer, suddenly magically turns into a different thing. Infact the opposite is likely to be true: throwing more power at a problem tends to yield diminishing returns.
But one of the things we use our tools for, is to make better tools. One of the tasks where computers currently help out, is with building better computers. And one of the tasks where software-tools help, is in making better software-tools. The argument is that this is an exponential process. And some of that, is accurate.
There are, infact, many problems which are solvable in much less time and/or much better because of better tools. Tossing up a reasonably good BLOG using Django and a modern lamp-stack on modern hardware, does infact yield quicker results than coding the same thing using the best available tools of 1990 (including the hardware of 1990!)
But it's incremental improvement, and I do think Kurzweil overestimates the impact. Brooks in the mythical man month, argues that there has been, and will be, no silver bullet. That is, that improvements to software-development though real, will be incremental and limited, and we will not get new methodologies or tools that radically change the picture overnight.
No, it really isn't. Biological evolution has never had any need for a Turing machine. The Turing machine, however, came into being only hundreds of thousands of years after the human brain invented symbols. Symbols are sometimes a great way to understand things, but most people understand that a symbol isn't identical to its object. To a Turing machine, however, such a difference doesn't exist, as it has only symbols and no object at all.
And neither does it to you, evidently, boldly proclaiming that the object you're trying to model must be identical to the model, unless there be things you don't understand -- which you then boldly dismiss as religious mumbo-jumbo. Which is to say that you don't only confuse the map with the territory, but you test your model against a different and supposedly wrong model (religious mumbo-jumbo) instead of checking it against its object. So yes, indeed, your brain might be a Turing machine. But that's nothing to be proud of.
At present we can't even all agree on which animals (if any) are sentient, let alone create a sentient machine of the most rudimentary sort.
A gnat's brain is tiny, yet we can't even understand, let alone, match that. People have been calling computers "thinking machines" since the day a computer was a room-sized pocket calculator.
How many beads do I have to put on my abacus before it becomes sentient?
Free Martian Whores!