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Kurzweil: The Cloud Will Expand Human Brain Capacity
Nerval's Lobster writes "Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will eventually do more than store our emails or feed us streaming movies on demand: it's going to help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits. In a question-and-answer session following a speech to the DEMO technology conference in Santa Clara, California last week, Kurzweil described the human brain as impressive but limited in its capacity to hold information. 'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.' (Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk.) The solution to overcoming the brain's limitations, he added, involves 'basically expanding our brains into the cloud.'"
And no, that's not what I am talking about.
Ray Kurzweil is the biggest hack on the planet.
Don't we only use a small percentage? Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out how to put the remaining, unused portion to good use?
Number one: Ray and Terry's Longevity Products.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
A PC or portable device wouldn't possibly work, it must be the cloud. Not because cloud is a buzzword.
you all know why, right?
While Kurzweil seems to be in urgent need of such an extension, so he may gain at least a bit of effective intelligence, that is baseless wishful thinking at its best. The cloud so far does not even perform on the level of local, dedicated hardware and it is uncertain whether it will eventually get there. Mental capacity enhancements? In your dreams.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It already does though. I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need. This allows me to work with a much smaller set of data and fetch that which I need from the cloud as needed.
We don't need it built in though.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Someone's got their head in the clouds.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The word "Cloud" has become such an in word that all kinds of predictions, even those which makes no sense altogether, are dime a dozen these days.
Does the human brain need "cloud" to expand its capabilities?
Didn't we have pencil / paper all the past centuries?
How about books and diaries and post-it notes?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I believe Kurzweil is confused on the definitions of data vs. information. Information is data I've had time to digest and react to. If all you want to do is accumulate TBytes of raw data, yeah, the Cloud is fine for that. Whether you'll ever find the time to do anything with it all is another question.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
http://xkcd.com/903/
Aliens have been doing it for years.
It was already 100% clear he's an idiot, when he came up with that "singularity" bullshit, completely ignoring that in nature, such things saturate themselves, and that because of that, a "singularity" could never happen. (If people start to get problems with keeping up with technology, they will by definition not be able to create technology that's even harder to keep up with. It's self-limiting.)
And now he uses PHB buzzwords like "cloud", and the idiots jump again?
Like with Bieber or "Friday", it's the idiots constantly dragging him through town, thereby creating his "popularity" in the first place, that should be slapped silly.
What do you think the Internet is for exactly?! If not an extension overcoming our brains limitations, not solely for storage, but for communication too. Technology is simply the next phase of evolution, an extension of the biological to overcome biological limitations.
As the saying goes, the longer it takes you to get it, the longer you roll on the floor when you do.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Game over. Computers won.
The future is Human augmented computing!
Here, I'll drop some meandering diatribe and see if anyone gives a damn.
The work I do in AI primarily teaches me about myself and other large brained organisms. Much of what I've learned is that humans aren't special. Intelligence emerges naturally from any sufficiently complex interaction. The more complexity, the more intelligence is possible.
Most of the transhumanists I've met or read seem rather presumptuous and chauvinistic. I don't believe humans are all that special. For instance: We can grow rat brain cells on a computer chip -- It exhibits some life-like properties, but no more so than were human brain cells or a digital neural network used instead. This experiment is just a short cut: A neural network for cheap. However, it's far from optimal since the organic brain on a chip dies, and all the training is lost -- an AI doesn't have these problems... The take away is that a neural network is a neural network -- The complexity of the neural network defines its level of awareness. It's the "human" part of "transhumanism" I take offense to, seems rather racist to me. :P
To speak in terms of transforming the human condition is to place too much emphasis on our own race's importance. How can we evolve to be greater than humans if humans are most important? To me: Humans are simply the organisms with minds having the most complexity at this time on this planet. The evolution of the mind is not something unique to humans; It's a process that all life has been contributing to -- Even indirectly through competition.
A sufficiently large mass -- or network -- of rat brain cells could surpass the complexity of a Human mind quite easily. Would we then be speaking of transverminists? I prefer Transorganic, Posthuman, or my official title that covers all systems with input feedback loops: Cyberneticist. Protip: AI, businesses, and brains are all cybernetic systems by definition.
What we're all taking part in is really the Rise of Inorganic Life.
Augmenting organic entities with non living parts is a step in the process, but at some point the organic components aren't required at all, and we've given life to the non living. The foundation of life is genetic code: RNA / DNA. Life as we know it occurred after the living genetic code took up residence in the non-living lipids to form the first cells. So, there you have it: Life has always been augmenting itself by incorporating non-living technology. The transhumanist seems just a little late to the game, if you ask me.
Life used to just produce chemicals to digest nutrients externally, but complex life does this internally via eating. My point is that the food is a part of the organism -- can't live without it, eh? The line between one organism and the next is the abstraction layer of eating, but in the end it's all one eco-system that is alive. Each organism is simply a complex chemical reaction, chemical reactions are interactions of electrons between atoms. Another form of life could exist that still operates by way of complex electron interactions; It could even draw nutrients directly from the Sun instead of having to "eat" other lifeforms. Even plants eat dead things with their roots & leaves, but an inorganic life-form could be self sustaining -- a complete ecosystem in of itself. Such an entity could drift through space and extract all the energy and raw materials needed to sustain itself from nebulae.
Cybernetic implants are merely another next step in evolution. Nature is simply doing what it always does, produce a smarter, more durable, more pervasive life form. Just as life originated in the sea and became more durable to live on land, then the air; Life is now evolving to live in space... Note: All stars consume their habitable zone (the zone where chemical complexity is possible) when they go red-dwarf or nova. Therefore, the path from sea to space is natural, not radical. An important goal post in evolution on
Every time I learn something new it pushes something out of my brain
God spoke to me
As technology expands and reduces the need for us to use our brains the more our brains will shrink capacity. Example: Since you got a cell phone, how many new phone numbers can you remember? Most can't remember even remember 5.
Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?
yet another publicity whore living the dream...
This is a core element of the early parts of Charles Stross' book Accelerando. (available online and in various ebook formats at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html under a Creative Commons license of some sort).
The protagonist for the early part of the book is Manfred Macx, a "Venture Altruist" - he's not just an Open Source guy, he's an Open Ideas guy. There's some question about how much of Macx's personality (particularly the public-facing parts) is in the meat and how much is in the array of personal software agents that he interfaces with through his smart glasses.
fencepost
just a little off
Remember when it was described that this is how Kelly's brain works?
This idea is over 15 years old - Andy Clark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark), for one, argued that the use of computers can be viewed as an 'extension of the mind' vis. a 'tightly coupled dynamical system'.
It's an interesting argument, but if you don't draw the line at the human body, I think it's sort of arbitrary to draw the line at the 'usage of a tool' boundary. why not include the servers a computer communicates with? the telephone poles that support the wires transmitting the data? etc etc.
There's the question of 'what is the human body' which is certainly interesting, but I just think it's a more appropriate scope to deal with. You can measure hormonal influence on neural activity, but once you get outside of the body I'd contend it's anyone's game.
The one point Andy Clark does make that I think is really good is : language vis. a symbol can exist simultaneously internally and externally from the body - IE, as a representation and external symbolic language. I really think that's the interesting point, rather than some bullshit about computers/the cloud/ whatever extending the human mind. it's really language that extends the human mind, and I'm sure kant/clark/heidegger/chomsky/dennet would back me up on this.
and what goes up.....must come down....haha
"'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.'" What exactly does that mean? I'm well past 20 and constantly learn new things. If I'm "repurposing my neocortex" every time I do it, it seems to be working as intended I guess?
Seriously. Some of these people only have room in their heads for hatred, bigotry, and other forms of outright criminal idiocy. If the cloud expands this, do we really expect these mental defectives to do anything other than create a corollary to "Work expands to fill the space given to it"?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...will you take the blue pill or the red pill?
He and Michio Kaku should have a baby. That will almost certainly achieve the singularity of crazy.
...to trusting your brain to corporate interests:
every time you learn something new, discard some of the old shit.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If you watch the video it'll be explained. But it is /. so obviously you can't ;)
So, I store my memories/infomation on the "cloud" but still have a 250gb download limit a month, how does that help?
Be seeing you...
Since I don't need to memorize information because I can just look it up via Google Search, I'm learning less and less and becoming more reliant on the internet. Which means my brain is shrinking, not expanding.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The page gets into an infinite loop with HttpsAnwhere as it redirects back to an http site!
I don't want to upload my memories to the cloud, just to have a cease and desist notice because I remember a rectangular table with rounded corners.
His claims need a [Citation needed]
.
Yes at night-time, certain rhythms are predominant, and yes some people say that rhythmic entrainment is part of the binding of phenomena and stimuli in the brain, but too much synchrony is a bad bad thing in the brain.
I think that it can be said that there are upper and lower bounds on signal propagation times through the geometry of the brain and upper and lower bounds on the firing rates of different populations of neurons, and that large pools of certain populations firing simultaneously present as particular types of EEG signals in certain regions, but I don't think you can say that the brain has a clock rate like a digital synchronous circuit requires. The brain's more asynchronous.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. A library expands human brain capacity far beyond its natural limit.
However a library has three basic limitations:
1. It is not always available.
2. The time to access any specific piece of information can be slow.
3. The library is read-only
The cloud has already overcome all three of these limitations to a large extent -- it is ubiquitous (available on cell phones and other portable devices), the search is far more efficient and the storage is possible (relatively easy).
However the gap between the ease of storage/access/interface to human memory and the cloud is still quite large.
The new technology will make this gap narrower and at some point in the future it may even disappear completely. Perhaps one would be able to bring up information just by thinking about the key concepts, words or images.
This whole notion of a 'geek rapture' is not only incredibly, insultingly dumb, it doesn't stand up to any scientific scrutiny at all, as does any childish 12yo playground fantasy.
Bless you, Ray. At least you're trying to be 'original' and 'innovative', by throwing in a few new hip buzzwords so that the Forbes-reading crowd will think you're hip and cool.
Isn't ownership the main difference between "The Cloud" and other storage solutions? Then the phrase would become: "Giving away all your data will exapnd your brain capacity."
Really?
Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk
Sweet, it's time for the futurist buzzword drinking game!
(dead from alcohol poisoning 10 minutes in)
The guy has delivered on technology again and again in this life.
I see lots of "crackpot", but I don't see lots of argument that he is wrong about his fundamental thesis on exponential progress in information technology, and how that's bleeding into biological technology.
Will give new meaning when you call someone an "air head"...
Yeah, thought so.
For a direct cloud upload to "expand my brain capacity" people are more likely to use near-brain local storage than the "cloud". And yes, like Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. eventually even brain local storage will be complemented with "remote" storage. And if the MMI stuff works out, same goes for computing power.
When or how long it takes to get there is a wild guess. And a bit obvious as a "vision" or prediction in this day and age.
The cloud makes you don't need to rely that much in memory, and other things i dont remember.
since I've cared about what he has to say.
BlameBillCosby.com
Everyone I know already does this. We keep thoughts and opinions and whatever is currently cached in our minds and use the internet to look up everything else. But we have been doing this for much longer than that. I have read a lot of the books in my library, though I do not have a good memory of where specific words are located on each page. This isn't really much of a problem because my memory stores things that are more pertinent to me such as what the book was about and whether or not I liked it. So this isn't really anything new. It's been there as long as we have possessed rudimentary writing skills or the ability to string beads on a thread. We're just doing it more effectively with our new technologies.
Yes it is, but only if you are male!
I had to forget from Kindergarten to Second grade to learn enough to pass Calculus. I can do integrals, but my basic arithmetic has gone straight to hell.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If the Borg want to assimilate me, all they have to do is send Seven of Nine. Half the planet's population would probably volunteer.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Or does anyone truly believe that human-level AI or neuro-interfaces will never happen?
The cloud is the ONLY way? How about flashh memory implants, genetic manipulation toincrease brain capacity, electronic plug-in interfaces where you could plug in new knowledge like a flash drive? All previously written about in sci-fi.
Kurzweil nonsense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So, what is your definition of "The Cloud"? I have seen several kinds of things refered to as the cloud. Things like other people's storage like Dropbox or flickr. Things like other people's cycles like Google Docs. Things like that vertical market application you run in a web browser (like the ticket tracking software where I work).
Transhumanism: Neckbeards who want to transcend their revolting bodies to have virtual sex with anime characters - the pinnacle of evolution. Large overlap with libertarians, who wouldn't last a week in their own fantasy.
On what basis is he making that claim?
I remember reading in a scientific journal somewhere that a conservative estimate of human brain capacity would be on the order of multiple exabytes. But how could you ever hope to fill that up by the time you were twenty? (insert oblig porn joke here). Seriously, though, even if you used up a gigabyte of that much storage EVERY SINGLE SECOND that you lived, you would still have enough to remember well over a thousand years of experiences.
Can I see us expanding our brains using computers someday? Sure.... but not in capacity.... more like ability, and speed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You can't really be a bit bilingual, any more than you can be quite pregnant, or fairly dead. Bilingual means you speak/write/read a language as well as your native one.
That's a rather harsh definition. Even assuming you have exactly the same skill in both languages, as soon as you learn a new word in either language, you cease to be bilingual.
You probably forget the things you don't need, and forget that you actually knew them. It's not a first-in-first-out, but governed by use counts. Use it a lot, keep it. Don't use it much, forget it - room for the next thing.
Pretty sure that's how the brain works regardless of whether you're 20, or whether you've "filled up". That's just how it works. You don't use something ever, you forget it, why wouldn't you?
Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall.
I haven't read much Nostradamus; I never found it that interesting.
I read some Kurzweil; his predictions didn't all seem "fuzzy".
Your assertion "Its all comfortably 30 years hence" is not totally accurate; many were for a shorter time frame. Kurzweil's book, "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (Jan, 1999) has predictions for 2009 (+10 years), 2019 (+20), 2029 (+30), 2049 (+50), 2072 (+73) and 2099 (+100). Saying "only 30 years and beyond" is unfair. btw: the wikipedia article has a nice summary of the predictions; they're thought provoking if nothing else.
Anyway, I don't care so much about "the singularity" and "Nerd Jesus" aspect of it. I'm more interested in the "information processing trends" aspect of it. (I'm generally interested in trends; who else is putting on their "futurist glasses" and doing interesting work in this area? I'd welcome suggested reading.) Kurzweil's Accelerating Returns idea is interesting, even if we don't upload our collective consciousness into the cloud next week.
Kurzweil wrote a ten-year followup talking the specific predictions 1999 vs. 2009 predictions from "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (written in the mid to late 90's, published in 1999).
(As an aside, I have to ask: did Nostradamus ever published a "how am i doing" followup?)
So.... a longer but more detailed read, check out the 2010 "How My Predictions Are Faring" pdf) to see how "fuzzy" and how accurate his predictions are.
Kurzwil quote #1 (excerpt from above link):
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 8]
The status of these predictions changes very quickly. In November 2009, the idea of large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition using a cell phone appeared to some observers as still far off in the future.
Just one month later, this became the most popular free app for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation from Nuance, which used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first major company) as well as the popular Google Mobile App on iPhone, Blackberry, and Nokia S60 mobile phones, and on Google Nexus One and other Android phones.
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 9]
Just a few days after its official launch, the Dragon app made it to the top rankings in Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps “Best of 2009” and the Chorus Community top iPhone apps in December 2009, as reported by CNET News.
Another prediction that has been cited as wrong is “Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices.” This prediction is certainly true in Afghanistan and recently in America’s undeclared war in Pakistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air war has escalated under McChrystal’s watch.” UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were also commonly used in the second Iraq war, and countries like Israel are using them regularly for their own military operations, among many other nations.
One critic cites my prediction that “by 2009, a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)” and dismisses my contention that this is “off by a few years,” saying it is “not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong.”
IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer, to be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011, runs nearly 8 times faster than the world’s current fastest supercomputer, the Chinese Tianhe-1A system. Yet, IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer is already under construction and IBM has announced that it will begin operation in 2012. The Sequoia supercomputer is the latest of the Blue Gene series by IBM, dedicated
How is the cloud any different from the Internet we have been using for 20 years? The "cloud" is a marketing buzzword, like Web 2.0, that embodies the easier ability for consumers to upload and retrieve information online, nothing more.
The internet has been caching and archiving information for over 20 years, if anything society has become collectively ignorant as a result. Misinformation is now spread at an alarming pace and people are readily willing to believe anything they read online or at least apply no additional logic or common sense to what they are reading and just pass it off as "fact".
I could only agree that the "Cloud" would expand my brain capacity if the content it contains is factual, valid, and true. However since the "cloud" is currently used to archive people's massive collection of cat breading and planking photos, i'll suggest we are far far off from the cloud offering any real expansion of intelligence.
The cloud is nothing more than a meme archiver.
This is a guy who snacks from a large bowl of vitamin and nutritional supplements all day long, every day, I limit my impression of his opinions in that context.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I have a titanium plate and a cadaver bone in my neck. This makes me at least partially a zombie and a cyborg, or as I like to call it, a zomborg!
So rise of the machines or zombie apocalypse, I'm all set!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes, those were amazing predictions, except of course anyone with a modest understanding of technology found them so unremarkable as to be hardly worth the name 'predictions'. There are of course many idiots out there who will say this or that was wrong, but I don't see how its remarkable at all to say that "gosh this relatively straightforward engineering problem will be solved (to degree N) in 10 years". Go back and read Ralf 124C41+ or watch Metropolis, etc and consider real prognostication.
Where Kurzweil and pretty much all of these people go wrong is in thinking they have any handle on where we go with things or what their effects will be. [i]Spiritual Machines[/i] isn't about when we'll have speech recognition in a cell phone, that was just Moore's Law sliderule stuff. It is about thinking machines, and what we will make, why, and what we will do with it. Mr Kurzweil has no more insight into that than I do, or probably half the readers here do. His ideas on social and biomedical issues seem completely off to me, and they are definitely just far enough out there and vague enough that we can't really measure their impendingness or lack thereof. I don't think this is especially deliberate mind you. I just think it is the pitfall and necessity of any prognosticator of this type. They're essentially selling dreams and ideas, not any sort of insight into the future.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The fool who said we'd have sentient computers by 2020, and made that prediction back when if you left a blank floppy in a PC it would blue screen. How much snake oil does that guy have left?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"'By the time we're even 20, we've filled it up,' he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to 'repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.'
That really shows how incredibly ignorant Kurtzweil is about the brain. Before age 20 (in most people*) it isn't even fully formed, and neurons reconnect all the time.
If this were even remotely true, then how would he explain people with Eidetic memory?
Free Martian Whores!
The question will be -- how well do brains that have been connected for a prolonged period, deal with lack of connection?
I.e. if a large amount or most of my brain capacity is in the cloud -- how well do I function when cut off?
Is that "real" brain capacity, or is that a brain specialized for using a tool?
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html ...
===
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
===
My biggest issue with Kurzweil is that the singularity is like a mirror, and what he sees there is a mirror of his success in business creating artificial scarcity through copyrights and patents and engaging in commercial competition rather than global free cooperation. Still, he gets a lot of ideas right.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I believe the kids these days refer to them as "search engines". I hear yahoo and altavista are quite popular.
The process already effectively carbon-CPU limited. That's to say, you can look shit up faster than you can think about it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."