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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.'"
Ray Kurzweil is the biggest hack on the planet.
Number one: Ray and Terry's Longevity Products.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
No. This is a common myth. We do infact use pretty much all of our brains.
The concept of 'a small percentage' is a misrepresentation—it's like saying we only use a small amount of a CPU's die in each instruction. The whole brain gets used, just not constantly.
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.
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/
Humans have been doing it for thousands of years with writing already. External storage of information.
Teh Internets is just bigger and faster. Next revolutionary step is offloaded thinking.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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
That's the power of obscenely deep neural networks, for you.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?
The Student worked at his computer day and night. He was so frustrated because there was so much to know. The Master asked "Why do you sit all day, in a dark room with only words?" The student said "I'm trying to transcend biological limitations!"
At once he was enlightened.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
.
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.
Isn't it more like a bad Beowulf cluster, in that if one machine goes down another might pick up the slack - or it might not.
So you get these people who've had a stroke and afterwards they can't recognize people's faces, but they can still tell cats and dogs apart.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The "small percentage used" myth comes from early experiments on the brain, where they were looking for physical reactions to applied electrical impulses.
Only a small section of the brain (the motor cortex) gives such reactions, and this info was twisted into the current myth via a game of telephone.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
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.