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Ray Kurzweil Joins Google As Director of Engineering
dgharmon points out news at CNET and on Ray Kurzweil's own site that Kurzweil will join Google as Director of Engineering. Specifically, "he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."
SkyNet will come to dominate all first posts soon.
Pretty much exactly what I think. Director of Engineering is no internship, and while Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, his inventions don't seem nearly as important as his writings on the singularity. He can only be going to google to "directly engineer" a technological singularity as far as I am concerned.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Specifically, "he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."
"he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing," sounds like reasonably plain English.
"quickening the singularity" sounds like pretentious gibberish.
Yay! Kurzweil got a job. Now can he stop selling those cheap supplements, and speaking for longevity research at the same time?
Herbert did have a point you know
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Catholic_Bible
Lt Cmdr Data said he was happy to have RK aboard. (He had his emotion chip in).
Google has jumped the shark.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
> which sounds to me like another way to say "quickening the singularity."
Good! I'll have my own pocket universe and a harem of 30 computer-controlled hotties of my choosing from the fashion and entertanment industry.
And this is good, transcendent-level computer control. I don't want any way to tell they're actually robots besides that they're interested in me.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Resistance is futile.
Easy enough when you're just a simulation anyway.
Logically there are a few things that need to come out of the industry before a singularity should even be attempted. Until then please put my money on this joining the graphical ides from google archives.
Thank you for showing us just how little you understand about what the man has actually said.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Whoever makes the first AI capable of improving itself had damned well better stick to that principle. You know it really isn't funny. It's not the AI you should worry about so much as the people in possession of it. And Google (i.e. USA) are not the only outfit involved in this arms race. Bad, bad, bad. This one could make the Manhattan project look like the work of amateurs.
Thank you for providing absolutely no substantive corrections.
If you actually read what the man has written, you'd see that he's pretty explicit in that raw computing power is necessary for matching and exceeding the computational ability of the human brain for superhuman intelligence, but that it is not by itself sufficient. Raw computing power doesn't do anything without the proper algorithms running on it, which is the entire point of his latest book. I didn't think it needed spelling out when Kurzweil himself has already done so many, many times.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Thank you for challenging me to provide more detail as I should have done from the outset.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I didn't think it needed spelling out when Kurzweil himself has already done so many, many times.
In other words, he sells a lot of books, that all pretty much sell the same idea. Over and over.
Tedious for most of us, though for enthusiasts of the notion, very self-validating.
"He's still a clown with no credibility." Speaking of credibility. I wonder whose judgement of Kurzweil is the more credible, this anonymous guy on slashdot who sounds a bit TOO annoyed or multibillion dollar tech company Google?
He's still a clown with no credibility.
by Anonymous Coward
Pot, meet kettle.
That is a fiction though up by cretins looking for a religion-type experience or vision in technology. If anything, what computers can do slows down proportionally to size, i.e. increasing computing power is subject to diminishing returns, in most cases strongly so. Engineers and scientists know this well. These idiots do not even understand the basics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Dude I'm with you the whole way, but some people just don't want to think it all out. They want to know in concrete terms what it means. It seems ridiculous to them that the tools we use today will form the basis of the tools of tomorrow, right down to our DNA and particles of being.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
There are probably dozens of smarter grad students they could have hired over this crackpot.
Clearly, you're not one of them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Assuming there's a difference between will and intelligence, that motive and knowledge aren't just different aspects of the same thing, any self-improving superhuman AI need only be given one command for the whole world to end in chaos. "Do No Evil" will probably end in mere paralysis, the AI shutting itself down. I shudder to think of the consequences of commanding the AI to "Do GOOD".
Kurzweill is the last guy I'd hire as a Director of Engineering. Give him an office for special projects, on a tight leash, sure. But not Director of Engineering which requires accountablity and products to market.
I have reached the point where my reaction on Ray Kurzweil name is "why do we have to hear about him again?" Not all science fiction authors enjoy such devotion in news reports.
Did anyone else get the inkling from his recent documentary "Transcendent Man" that he was looking to digitally resurrect his father from the dead? The man is a megalomaniac looking to create a state of intellectual immortality through software engineering. The idea that he would be allowed to continue his work with the resources of a tech giant like Google give me the heebie geebies for sure. We will certainly have the technology to emulate the human mind in a machine in the not too distant future, but I pray to Turing that it's not the mind of Kurzweil that is the first to be uploaded to that hard drive.
As Kurzweil himself points out, there's two main approaches to simulating a brain. The one you mention is by simulating every neuron with sufficient detail, which requires a massive amount of hardware. Exactly how much depends on the detail required, which we're still not sure of - we could be at that level today, or we could be decades off. At that point, we hope that intelligence emerges - a reasonable hope, given what we know, but still somewhat uncertain.
The other approach is by building sufficiently detailed and accurate functional models of the human brain. At the time of writing of The Singularity Is Near, he estimated possibly 5% of the brain's function had been well-modelled (one example he gives is auditory function, which is fairly well understood). This is obviously the harder path in terms of effort and invention, but also more useful, as functional models can be adapted, and generally require significantly less underlying hardware (e.g. we don't have to fully model a bird's entire biology to make something that can fly).
The recent articles on models like Spaun suggest that, while we're obviously still a long way off human-level intelligence, we're making good progress. You'll also note that Spaun's model runs on a single workstation, not a super-computer (albeit well below real-time).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
My guess is that strong A.I. will be smarter than humans long before it passes a Turing test, since that requires the computer to accurately pretend to be a human. Humans get lots of practice interacting with other humans, and so we are fairly good at noticing when something is not quite right. Now, maybe if the person was told that there was a computer, a human, a space alien, or a dolphin on the other end (CHAD test), and as long as the computer convinced the person it wasn't a computer it wins, the Turing test would be more fair. By the time computers can reliably convince a human that they are a human in an extended dialog, they will be vastly more capable than humans.
In the book Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, Boyer states that humans have large ontological categories that we group stu into. These categories deal with the very nature of being. Ontological categories include Animal, Person, Tool (or artifact), Natural object, and Plant.[Religion Explained, pg 78] Humans have default attributes that we assume that an item in a given category has. So for example, if we are told that something is an animal, we know that it started out small, will grow bigger, and will eventually die. Religious beliefs tend to involve information that is counterintuitive to the category involved.[Religion Explained, pg 65] For example ghosts are in the category of people, but have the counterintuitive physical property of being able to pass through walls. Boyer lists the following possibilities for tools: “Tools and other artifacts can be represented as having biological properties (some statues bleed) or psychological ones (they hear what you say).”[Religion Explained, pg 78] wrote Boyer.
Artifacts don’t think, and artifacts do what they are made to do. A Carburetor is an artifact, and carburetors don’t think, and they will keep mixing gasoline with air unless they break. I believe that in the most likely course of events, there will soon be computers that are smarter than humans and they will not obey us. Thinking artifacts that don’t obey humans t Pascal Boyer’s denition of a religious-like concept. I believe that it is unusually hard to think critically about thinking artifacts because of how tied-in with religion the concepts are.
For the rest of the a sermon I gave: http://jjc.freeshell.org/sermons/there_is_no_map.html
I dispute that auditory function in the brain is fairly well understood. *Some* of the fundamentals are fairly well understood.
As an example, there is the Olivocochlear system that feeds back from Superior Olives to the cochlea. We think it may contribute to active amplification of sounds in the cochlea. See wikipedia for a list of PROPOSED functions.
What we do know is that cutting the olivocochlear connection impairs sensitivity in the cochlea. We do know what neurons connect to what other neurons, and have some idea of the types of connections.
What we don't know is "how the thing works".
This system is key to human hearing; it's not just a lump of cells with no known function. So, we are a long ways off from any human- (or even cat-) level auditory models.
He was an absolute wingnut, but that doesn't mean he didn't make invaluable contributions to astrophysics, chemistry, mathematics and just science in general.
Baseless self confidence kills more people each year than bathtubs.