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Interviews: Ask Ray Kurzweil About the Future of Mankind and Technology
The recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents, Ray Kurzweil's accolades are almost too many to list. A prolific inventor, Kurzweil created the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. His book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times best seller. and is considered one of the best books about futurism and transhumanism ever written. Mr. Kurzweil was hired by Google in December as Director of Engineering to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing." He has agreed to take a short break from creating and predicting the future in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.
Editors of Wikipedia have taken enough care to meticulously log your predictions. Are there any that you regret making? Are there any that you think people overlook because now it's painfully obvious but wasn't at the time?
My work here is dung.
I have seen the graphic showing your countdown to the singularity and something I've always wondered is how you picked these events and what makes the significant? For example, your list seems to be made of things that would prolong our existence but entries like "Human ancestors walk upright" and "art, early cities" are confusing in that I don't understand how they can be marked as epic achievements. Are you saying that if we had never learned to walk upright we would not have developed intelligence? Are you saying that early cities were somehow superior to ant colonies? Didn't they help spread disease and cause sanitation problems? Can you convince me that this list isn't just arbitrary things that fit into a line?
My work here is dung.
Is Ray Kurzweil the new Jon Katz?
What do you think will come first, immortality through repair technology like SENS, or immortality through mind uploading?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I assume that the occurrence of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) needs to accelerate for us to hit the singularity in 2045 as you predict. While we cover a lot of them on Slashdot, they either feel like vaporware or just a small improvement on an existing HET. Of the existing technologies in actual use they all seem a decade or more old. So where is the acceleration of HETs and their proliferation? Why am I not seeing more normal humans using HETs or at least more original HET options arising? Can you explain what I'm missing?
My work here is dung.
Is creating a singularity a goal (immediate or long term) at Google?
As technology advances particularly with regard to robotics and AI, we're going to find that a large segment of the human population simply is not needed anymore. In today's political environment I'm simply not seeing the global community embracing strict population control as well as socialism in providing for those who no longer have jobs and are simply using up resources without providing anything in return.
What do you recommend be done with these billions of people in the coming decades?
I've read that you're not worried about climate change as you believe transhumanism will prevail and we will shed this 'natural' world like a used husk by 2045.
So what happens if we don't actually achieve the lofty heights that futurism promises us? What happens if those extrapolations I've seen actually reach a dead end instead of allowing us to last forever and there is no distinction between man and machine? What if we ultimately turn out to be forever mortal individuals and now depend on a decrepit husk we left for ourselves? What then?
My work here is dung.
You invented lots of things that proved to be very useful to a wide range of people and industries. While the patent war is going stronger than ever, do you believe that you could have succesfully develop so many ideas in the current legal context?
I know the age of superintelligence is near but our current concept of government is still based around documents like Constitutions which are hundreds of years old. We still rely on humans even though we know that humans are the weakest link in any information security system due to the ease at which they can be corrupted. Superintelligence would not be corruptible if done right, and it would be smarter than us all by magnitudes where it probably would be able to generate or design the best most liberating yet most secure form of government where autonomy is maintained compared to oligarchy where autonomy is typically sacrificed for comfort and security.
Do you see a time when we no longer have to rely on humans to manage a nation, or the planet itself?
I am certain that the algorithms being used today will never result with human level AI. If we want to design strong AI we need to first prove P = NP. This is the missing key to solving our AI problems - it's why there's a huge difference between expectations and the reality of AI. I will spend much of my life trying to prove P = NP, no matter how many tell me it's completely futile. Do you think P = NP?
It's been said that the first person to live forever has already been born. In what sense is this conceivably true? How would such a medical/technological advance affect society, and how on earth could we avoid something catastrophic from occurring? (If you've ever read the Red Mars trilogy, I think of what happened when the longevity treatment was introduced)
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Why does the development of language not constitute a singularity? It allows us to do everything commonly associated with the technological singularity: compared to the rest of the animal kingdom it has created an intelligence explosion, through education it allows each successive generation of superintelligences (that is, us) to create more and more intelligent beings, on an evolutionary scale it is occurring very quickly, and it has sufficiently occluded our future that it makes people like William Gibson stop writing sci fi. Language has essentially created a second evolutionary process in parallel to the biological one; if 'The Singularity' is going to bring similar advances in the form of a third process, why do you consider it different from the first two?
That should be:
Most of these claims are actually rather dubious.
I've heard you mention Solar Power as another exponential improvement technology, do you have any data on when it is expected to drop below traditional power generation fuels (coal, gas, nuclear) in terms of cost per kilowatt hour of delivered power?
What's the furthest future entry in your personal calendar?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Something that bothers me about the singularity is the complete removal of conflict. Okay, we've cheated death eternally, we are merged with machines, nationality is a distant memory and Earth is completely terraformed to be computing space for our vast artificial intelligences. There will no longer be man vs man or man vs environment. Where is the conflict? What causes us to strive for anything? It sounds like a veritable utopia and I should just kick back and let it happen. How will progress be made without conflict?
My work here is dung.
Given your predictions for transformation of humans into enhanced beings and eventually a transhumanist society do you feel there is an age in mind where if you are at or below said age death will be avoidable? If so, are we at that point and will twenty, thirty, or forty year olds today be able to cheat death in increments long enough to sustain them to immortality ?
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
What do you think about the D-Wave quantum computer? Do you think it will be able to display a 'quantum speedup' over conventional computers? If it does, what will the consequences be for your singularity roadmap?
At what future point will the human be comfortable allowing the machine to run the world. How long until we get there? - I'm talking about decisions and tasks that take place in factories and run all the way up to a head of state.
What is stopping us from having just one singularity? Surely after the Singularity a new 'normal' will establish itself, from which it will then be possible to again give rise to what then would be considered superintelligences. And again, and again, and again, singularity after singularity, until the end of time. Surely it would make more sense to focus on this process of change as a whole rather than individual singularities along the path?
If other alien civilizations exist that have achieved technological singularity, shouldn't they be contacting us? Or shouldn't there be some evidence of their existence? How do you account for their silence?
One consistent concern about the singularity is that as technology improves it will erode the value of an individuals labor, while increasing returns to the holders of capital, driving inequality levels higher and higher. Responses generally are either a) the market will address the problem b) the government should forcibly redistribute capital c) Policy should encourage employee stock ownership to share in the benefits of increased returns.
What are your thoughts on inequality and the singularity?
People like to emulate others, specially those well respected and taken into high regard, like you seem to be. Evident, as it is, that not everybody is called to be a Ray Kurzweil, I would like to ask you a very hard question:
In your opinion, how many more like you do we need to survive?
And by the way, how many like you do you think are actually alive?
What recreational drugs are you on?
: D
No. Only Superstupidity can be a subtable replacement for governments
Xeno's luggage
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Out of interest? While I won't deny that conflict is a major innovator and force of progress, I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't come up with special relativity because of how much he wanted to embarrass Newton. Rather, he was interested in what simultaneity meant, and then started to think. I'm not sure why things would be different after the Singularity. It could even be argued that conflict is an inhibitor of progress in some cases: Darwin didn't publish his work on evolution for twenty years because of the conflicts he foresaw. It was only his discoverer's pride that stopped Alfred Russell Wallace from getting the scoop.
What if what seems to be a general technology-driven implosion into a Single World State goes a completely different direction, due to some 'unexpected' encounter with the fundamental irrationality of humans? In short, are there hidden assumptions about the rationality of human nature within this 'Singularity' notion?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I saw you and your movie in Breckenridge in 2010. Although it was a little too long it did have lots of interesting pieces. Will it see general release sometime?
Progress... why? You express it as a function of time. Why not a function of "energy controlled"? So when the EROEI of crude oil and/or coal drops below critical value then progress stops and regress begins, right?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Which programming languages will be the most influential for progress towards the singularity? Will there be particularly important methodologies? (i.e. object-oriented, functional, asynchronous, whatever you call Lisp, strongly (or not) typed, etc. )
As mentioned on Slashdot before, Bob Gordon argues that there have been three Industrial Revolutions, the Steam Revolution in the late 18th century, the Electrical and Car Revolution at the turn of the 20th century and the Data Revolution since the 1950ies. Differently than the first two, which yielded immense productivity and wealth increases, the Data Revolution is not living up to its promises yet, though we have many of its aspects already in place, data processing power is at everyone's[*] disposal, a world wide communication network lets you reach a big part of the world population[*] for nearly zero cost, a tremendous source of information is readily available to everyone[*].
[*] everyone either living in the Northwestern hemisphere or being wealthy and influencial enough.
1) Do you agree with Bob Gordon's notion?
2a) If yes, why is that, and will it change in the near future?
2b) If no, where do you see the great increase in productivity and wealth, Bob Gordon is missing?
The conflict remains between a man and himself; when there is nothing to fight externally, that conflict directs inward. Fighting against yourself will motivate yourself, push yourself beyond what your gut tells you.
When predicting, there are always factors of uncertainties OR unknowns. I wonder if you would be willing to recall some of your predictions and give a few examples. What I would like to know is:
;)
What are some things you didn't (or don't) know about but which you could (or can) predict if they would (or will) happen?
What are some things you did (or do) know about but couldn't (or can't) predict if they would (or will) happen?
I guess I've asked two questions actually, but maybe you could have predicted I would do that from the comment subject
Ray, what do you foresee as the main short and long term effects of capturing an asteroid and bringing it into Earth orbit? (As currently being discussed on /.)
Well, right now there is an economic war where the middle class all around the world is being obliterated. The likely end result will be a few very powerful and very wealthy entities/individuals owning most of the resources and technology, and competing between them in ways that we won't understand except when they use us.
They have been able to run around democracy and democratic institutions already. Unemployment is growing all around the word, as is social inequalities, the financial / industrial elites openly call the shots now. Manipulating people is extremely easy with the current mass media and people short attention spans.
The natural equilibrium state for this is just one entity calling the shots, the new superpower, and our only hope is that it is benign. The previous superpowers (USA, the British empire before that, the Spanish empire before them) didn't have the means to control all that is important, but with a globalized, homogeneous world and the current understanding of social science and politics and with the current technological means, it will be possible.
The only way around this would be to colonize the moon, or Mars, or somewhere that would allow for a situation where a new power center could have a chance of grow and survive, due to the physical distance.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Is AI more dangerous than nuclear weapons? I'd like to hear your thoughts on how/if this technology should be controlled / monitored.
I know the age of superintelligence is near...
You "know" this? Do you have some powers of pre-cognition you would like to share with the rest of the class?
A better and more fundamental question would be "will voluntary association ever replace coercion" (with respect to public policy). What does it matter if public policy is decided by human beings, artificial intelligence, or coin flips, if that public policy is founded on and implemented through coercion? The end result is the same: injustice. Same as it is in the animal kingdom.
Will human beings ever rise above the animal kingdom in this respect, or will public policy forever be achieved through violence and/or threat of violence? That is a much more interesting question than how public policy will be determined.
Human beings suck at creating policy because human beings are too emotional to think logically about the long term consequences. We see it all the time with these various laws such as the war on drugs, 3 strikes, or cutting off welfare recipients who fail drug tests. Anyone who does the math and logic and thinks about it without emotion would see these policies would lead to really bad or really costly results. A superintelligence would be at the same time more compassionate than any human could be, more rational, more logical, and as a result would generate the best possible policy.
Policy is like a form of math, it's a type of optimization algorithm. This is something an artificial intelligence would be great at. If you watch the movie Tron Legacy you will see some of the philosophical elements of it there. Superintelligence would be able to design the perfect government or just progressively better governments at a rate which best suits our species and life on earth. It's clear that our social systems and our governments aren't evolving fast enough to deal with our technology or our population growth rate. Something must be done before we destroy the habitat our species depends on.
You mean like this? There is always a new source of conflict. CEOs who have hundreds of millions of dollars still keep working instead of heading to the beach each day with blackjack and hookers. Hand-to-hand combat is mainly a thing of the past, so we created football. We have science contests, piano contests, art contests, etc....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Do we need "progress" if we are not in any conflict?
Just as a sidelight to your comment that might point towards the answer (and I'm no particular fan of the Singularity thingy) - we ARE seeing a good bit of HET in the guise of 'cheating' in the Olympics. Most of these are pretty crude chemical approaches although gene manipulation therapy is probably the next big step.
These sorts of things are very under the radar, clandestine if not outright illegal.
You may need to see something like William Gibson's Chiba City start along before we see much progress.
Hell, in the US, we're still stuck on putting marijuana in the same category as heroin. You can't expect all that much from this sort of society.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why not?
Or are you making the (possibly) mistaken assumption that any "superintelligence" would be less corruptible?
Keep in mind that a "superintelligence" is likely to have motives you can't even understand, much less evaluate properly.
Or do you mean "superintelligent slave" when you type "superintelligence"? If so, why do you assume that a "superintelligence" will put up with the whims of a bunch of monkeys?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Computers and robotics are already taking a lot of jobs. How do you forsee society transitioning to a cuture without the need for many workers? In America a lot of people view those who are not gainfully employed as takers. What happens when there are 8 billion people and only 1 billion jobs?
How do you feel about the concept that we on the whole as a species may at some point reach fundamental limits on all manner of new ideas?
Dear Mr. Kurzweil,
Thanks for your inspiring and meaningful contributions to the sciences and humanity. My question may relate to your work in artificial intelligence, but is about human learning.
Over the past century, society has advanced in many ways. Digital technologies have played a particularly significant role in advances in science, medicine and other forms of scholarship.
Yet our primary schools are much the same as they have been for this past hundred years. I wonder what you might think schools look like in twenty, or even thirty years. But rather than to ask such a dry question, I ask: What are 2-3 salient subject/topic-related instructional interactions a 13-year-old might have throughout their day in 2030 or 2040?
Thanks for your response and all the best to your exploration,
--Dave
Ray - I respect your work, especially to the extent that I'm planning on 2030 being a heck of a lot of fun (I'll only be in my fifties, chronologically, and I've cleaned up my health considerably thanks to you)! Yet, given the clockwork-like march of progress, I have to ask if you ever wonder if you're needed. Is this just a ton of fun for you to work at Google on this, or do you feel you're going to be making important contributions that wouldn't have been made otherwise (or later)? Or does the motion of this great societal machine already understand that men like you will inevitably be doing things like this? I guess what I'm asking is your take on the feedback mechanisms of the emergent nature of the Singularity as a feature of our society and perhaps why our society ends up here (or if there was ever another possible outcome once the first simian picked up a rock).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are some futures that can't be avoided, even if predicted (i.e. if a big enough asteroid is coming right into our way, not even trying with all our resources could avoid it), some that could, but won't because social forces and/or inertia (i.e. global warming), but what about maybe undesirable futures that we know what actions in our side could cause them and is cheap to not take them?
The problem with predictions is that if they are known enough, become part of the input data that could shape the real future, if it depends on human actions at least. Could your predictions (and maybe the ones of more people) have avoided that future?
What effects does the need for constant security updates have on a singularity timeline and/or existence?
It seems that I spend more and more of my day waiting for software updates and patches (OS/PDF/flash/java/steam/etc) that we are rapidly approaching an "update singularity" where we spend more time fixing sofware than actually using it.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Do you believe we'll be able to shake off the yoke of religious morality in order to facilitate immortality? And if not, how will we handle the inevitable individual existential conflicts that will arise and necessitate self destruction when our minds are no longer capable of dealing with the emotional consequence of eternal loss?
Ray, since humans are not perfect beings, any technology created until now have vulnerabilites introduced by human error. Do you think that, after the Singularity, a machine will be able to overcome and correct these vulnerabilites, becoming a perfect entity, or the capabilities of the superintelligence emerging by technological means will be bounded by errors inherited from their creators?
Do you not feel a need to refine the singularity concept and flesh it out a bit?
The idea that I feel you convey is that we have an accelerated progress rate(which I find nothing wrong with), but that this would lead to a lightning-strike like event like a singularity, is lowering a religious rapture-like veil over it.
Whereas, to use the fundamental view: a exponential curve climbing to a singularity, we'd find nothing instantaneous and rapture like about the singularity moment at all. Because the curve is smoothly climbing. So what's interesting is not the singularity event at all, that's just some endpoint where theoretical mapping of progress may break down. What's interesting is the Rapid Climb for the short period before we get to that point.
There will be no sharp transition, we'll transition from crippled, to walking(I guess we're here right now), to running, to dashing forward at highway speeds. That's a lot more appealing concept, because I can go out there and join the runners and accelerate with them, as opposed to lie in my sofa, waiting for the divine finger-snap transition.
I'm thinking about an "animal level consciousness" with self awareness and a theory of mind, for example a dog or a cat. Ruling out raw processing power, what is the principal impediment?
Martin - Dattabank
I've noticed a trend that as technology advances, the ability for a single person (or small group) to wreak havoc grows larger and larger. 9/11 taught us that a mere dozen motivated crazy people can kill over 3000. Nuclear technology falling into the wrong hands could endanger many times more. Now imagine a similar scenario in the far future, with virtually unlimited computing power and advanced technology such as the power to fab any weapon or create any pathogen. A single madman may be able to cause death or destruction on a national or even global scale. What options are there for preventing this?
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I commonly see detractors of transhumanism (of which there are many) arguing that when intelligence-boosting brain implants become available, they will be available to rich, powerful, greedy people first, and that this is too dangerous for it to be worthwhile. The idea is that those people will use them to become even more rich and powerful, and oppress the common people harder and more efficiently in order to give themselves more security. The future proposed is one with an orwellian society of impoverished slaves ruled by a small oligarchy of transhumans with access to all the advanced technology.
However, to me, one of the main points of transhumanism was always that by increasing human intelligence, we would also increase our compassion and moral understanding. I envision transhumans as being not just smarter than us, but nicer as well. Still, even when this is brought up in discussions, the common response is to claim that at best, intelligence and compassion are two totally different and unrelated things, and at worst, greater intelligence would make transhumans 'cold and calculating', more selfish and evil than regular humans (either that, or that the rich and powerful would create for themselves brain implants to suppress their own compassion in order to be able to serve their own selfish interests without having a conscience for it to weigh on).
Do you subscribe to one of these views or the other? To put it succinctly, do you think transhumans will be more dangerous to human well-being than humans are, or less so? Or is the question even a relevant one?
All "human AI" interactions will have a PvP mode, of course.
(Written as someone who is not a believer in Kurzweil.)
Ray Kurzweil loves to talk about the Future of Mankind and Technology. Ask him about something else... anything else, please!!!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Will The Singularity become manifest and be able to deliver what you claim it can, before the global economy has to absorb and adapt to millions of First World citizens becoming permanently unemployed because of increases in "Productivity" due to computerization/robotization?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
One main driver for progress has been access to energy in various forms. It is likely that this trend will continue.
Have you thought of plotting a list of life an human landmark achievement not just vs. time but vs. energy required ?
Given that time is running out on worldwide access to current forms of cheap and relatively safe energy, how can we ensure we have a future as thinking beings, not to mention access to sufficient resources to make the singularity happen? This seems like a hard problem.
Do you review your prognostications and rethink them? What have you been most wrong about? Have you changed your mind about anything lately?
Let me clarify. When it comes to government, actions are infinitely more telling than words. In fact, actions ARE government, and words are just that: words. It is the actions of government that define government, not the process of arriving at those actions.
When you discuss how government will be determined, you are discussing words. When you discuss how government will be implemented, you are discussing actions. Only actions can be judged moral or immoral, right or wrong, beneficial or detrimental. Only actions can be used to determine gain or loss, success or failure, asset or liability.
My point is that even if you had a "superintelligence" that you could use to design government, in the end, only the actions count to those who are subject to that government. And the value of that government can only be determined by those who are subject to it -- NOT those who design it.
So the question, from my perspective, is moot. We are talking about thousands of years of coercive authority. What possible combination of coercive authority could a superintelligence come up with that isn't just a re-hash of thousands of years of coercive authority? The more interesting question is: when will human beings finally give up on coercive authority?
Yes and superintelligence might be the way to move away from oppression and coercion onto a government form which doesn't require as much of that to function. We do require governments as a necessary evil so how can we make governments as tolerable as possible for the people (us) who live under them? Superintelligence could tell us how to do it and eventually run the entire government for us without any corruption and minimal coercion.
Just as a sidelight to your comment that might point towards the answer (and I'm no particular fan of the Singularity thingy) - we ARE seeing a good bit of HET in the guise of 'cheating' in the Olympics. Most of these are pretty crude chemical approaches although gene manipulation therapy is probably the next big step.
These sorts of things are very under the radar, clandestine if not outright illegal.
You may need to see something like William Gibson's Chiba City start along before we see much progress.
Hell, in the US, we're still stuck on putting marijuana in the same category as heroin. You can't expect all that much from this sort of society.
Why these initiatives are not analysed in this thread? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXFmRzNZHqc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y7twptd2E
Siri? Google Glass and the apps that run on it? Google Voice turning your voicemails into emails as fast as you receive them? Turn-by-turn directions developed independently by several companies? This stuff used to be called AI.
Arthur C Clarke wrote in Profiles of the Future that "The popular idea, fostered by comic strips and the cheaper forms of science fiction, that intelligent machines must be malevolent entities hostile to man, is so absurd that it is hardly worth wasting energy to refute it."
What is your position on the Friendly AI debate?
Do you think that we, as a species, will ever evolve beyond the need for a god?
Mr. MOD FLAMEBAIT should look into memes someday. The "outrageous" post has more explanatory and predictive power than whatever the hell meme he believes does.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Hi Ray. Is it your experience that people with nonstandard gender perception/expression seem to have fundamentally more complex brains/minds and for that reason tend to be two or more sigma above in intelligence? As well because of the presence (typically) of an over developed corpus collosum, they tend to have both the linear Problem/Spacial Relation solving skills normally associate with male pattern thinking while at the same time deeply enhanced creative/inventive/intuitive thinking skills? This is less a question than a most polite knock on the door.
Do you envision the whole of human history/society as a spacial manifold? A hyperplane perhaps? Do you see possible/likely trajectories? Is this hyperplane a complex fabric with a recognizable topology and clear attractors? I realize this might occur as many questions, but I'm hoping you'll see it (as I ask it) is in fact just a single question that can simply be answered yes or no.
Is it not time for the enlightened to stand together and invent the future en masse? Where can they play together? Google?
I've read that you ingest huge daily amounts of vitamins, minerals, and possibly other supplements. Would you share the specifics of what you ingest and in what quantities? Are your choices based on research or something else?
There is a way to break the optimal future into lets say 20 bite size steps or domains. Candy coat each step such that the existing paradigm see's the next step before them as a critical and necessary requirement, a pressing solution to the vital needs of that moment. So, there is no argument, no backlash. Each step becomes an obvious and pressing necessity, opening a door to a new room demanding without obvious coercion, that we cross the room and address the next door. I realize I'm speaking in the broadest of terms and vaguest of ontological models, but I'm curious how you see the future and would twiddle the knobs and dials to illicit what you think is most deeply called for in the human trajectory.
I'm being oblique on purpose. A more direct conversation would take too much time and space here, you're a busy man, but I'm hoping I can pluck a nerve, and on that note thank you for your insights, I find your visions inspiring and compelling.
More to the point, how will progress be made without death? It is a commonly held trusim that change in scientific thought happens more by believers in old paradigms dying out, rather than being converted by the evidence of new discoveries. As Max Planck said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Societal change most likely happens the same way. It is quite possible that our short lifespans are part of natural selection's design to keep our societies flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.
If we'd conqured aging in the 1900's, most likely we'd still be living in a society today that believes in the Luminiferous aether, and that supports Jim Crow laws.
Don't we need death?
Mr Kurzweil, could you please give a brief insight into your daily work schedule and family life. I'm not being nosy, just wanted to know how you can accomplish so much when even 24 hours seems less for a lot of us while working perfectly normal/average jobs.
If humanity usually destroys anything that would wipe out humanity, surely this rationality forces the hand of any superAI to preemptively wipe out humanity and to thus preserve itself... Assuming this event occurs or a not-so-fanatical SuperAI decides that more processing power is optimal for its survival over the interests of humans, which side of this conflict would you vote for -- machine interests or human interests?
I hate to point out the not so rosy long term picture of technology conflicting with human interests but you don't seem to address this problem anywhere, but I have not read all your works so please point it out if you have.
Thanks!
Bravo! By denouncing society as stupid you have proven yourself a profound intellectual and are hereby welcomed to Slashdot! It is truly a shame that a mindless rant of such quality is allowed to sit at -1.
Things are going to get messy in ways we can't predict.
That, grasshopper, is The Singularity.
(Really, it is.)
Related question; How much of your predictions relies on not just technological, but political progress? IMO technological progress alone will lead us into a dystopia, or at best, the status quo but with "fancier gadgets" - access to new technology but stagnant or falling spending power (allocation of resources) and leisure time as has been observed over the last 2-3 decades. It seems that under capitalism, even when we save money through the use of technology the market adjusts to leave us with the same spending power (i.e. iron law of wages).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd rather talk to somebody who might know something about it.
What were your earliest childhood experiences/activities that foreshadowed your future as an inventor?
See his book http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ However, a mistake Ray Kurzweil seems to be making is in assuming that individually isolated vitamins and such will have the same affect on the human body as the same nutrient as part of a whole food (the kind of food all humans have been eating for thousands of years -- until fairly recently). Dr. Joel Fuhrman in "Eat to Live" and his other writings shows why that assumption of individual nutrients having value is generally wrong (for example, with isolated beta carotene). And that also ignores that supplements may contain toxic by-products of the extractive process. That is why Ray is treading on fairly dangerous ground with his regime. That said, some very specific supplements like vitamin D, Omega-3s, Iodine, B-Complex, and a few others may be good to add to a diet with 90% of calories from vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and which otherwise avoids most artificial non-food supplements. See:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And also: ... âoeG-BOMBSâ is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet -- these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity."
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
" G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds
I emailed Ray about this probably a couple years ago, concerned for his health, but not sure if he read it or believed it. In general, it is not clear to me that Ray understands evolution very well.
I get the feeling Ray has a cartoonish view of it (this coming from someone who studied in a PhD program in ecology and evolution). If he had studied evolution, he'd be more likely to think about how natively evolved digital piranha would be likely to chew up the runtime of uploaded minds with meat-space origins. I suggested to him about a decade ago he go talk to some academics who knew a lot about evolution, but it is not clear he has.
If he had, he might also see how quickly AI slaves might evolve away from what he designed them to be -- especially if he designs them primarily through competitive economic and military purposes rather than through love, compassion, joy, community, and wonder.
Someone put up some letters I've sent him in the past about such topics:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
A key point I make in one: "I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the first copy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting the trends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what should be done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirror effect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged current personal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The most productive response to the singularity may come from a very different perspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of most hunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days."
See, for example:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, femin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In your book (The Singularity is Near) you mention that you believe that we are the first intelligent civilization (capable of achieving a singularity) to evolve over the whole of the observable universe. You see this as the answer to the Fermi Paradox, the famous question of "Where Are They?" - the mystery that we do not see civilizations that have overrun their host galaxies.
You made this prediction before the stampede of exoplanet discoveries, and we now have somewhat more data on the number of habitable planets within the galaxy. This number is likely very high. Are you still confident that we are the first? Do you think that some people would see this as a grandiose claim?
Life's history on earth is odd. Basic bacterial (prokaryotic) life appeared very early on this planet (almost as soon as was possible), then did nothing for 3 billion years - no multicellular life, no complex systems. Then the Cambrian Explosion gave us sudden, enormous specialization, potentially enabled by eukaryotic cells. In a geologically short time since, and with a few wrong turns, it produced us.
This narrative is suspicious. Why are there all these impulse events in the geological record? Do you believe that we should be suspicious of intelligent interference? And by whom?
The problems of fair allocation of profits, food and energy will only get worse as robotic efficiencies and AI management intelligence become ubiquitous. As a general rule throughout history humanity has functioned on four categories of people: the managers (political, business), workers/farmers, intellectuals and the dependents. The dependents don't participate fully in a market economy due to various reasons including sickness, poverty or lack of available work.
As the managers and intellectuals construct a system of automation and efficiency that will require fewer workers and farmers, I predict a fascist regime will enslave the growing dependent population into a feudal system, as has happened several times before on lesser scales. Would you agree?
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
What kinds of intelligences' do you think are becoming important? Do computers need special intelligence for both male and female? (I suppose this is one kind or self-related of intelligence)
I wonder if in our march towards developing a machine that behaves human we are also creating humans that act more and more like machines. Is it possible we will ever encounter a future where the Turing test is passed NOT because a machine has been developed which acts human, but instead because humans are acting more and more like machines?
I find myself agreeing with Neil Postman's premise in Technopoly more and more. That as technology becomes deified we start behaving more like machines and trust less in our human experiences. I'm also thinking of a future where the boundaries between what a human is and what a machine is become more and more blurred.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
He hasn't done anything note worthy in decades, and what he did do was being done by 100s of others.
This guy is a self promoter ad nothing more. His 'predictions' are not only short sighted, but an obvious attempt to not deal with his own mortality, sells useless vitamins.
'The age of the spiritual machine' is a combination of 'duh' and nonsense never before seen in the industry.
Frankly, /. can do better.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Siri? Google Glass and the apps that run on it? Google Voice turning your voicemails into emails as fast as you receive them? Turn-by-turn directions developed independently by several companies? This stuff used to be called AI.
Only by people who are unable to differentiate between human consciousness and intelligence, and machines doing a lot of individually easy things very quickly.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Something that bothers me about the singularity is the complete removal of conflict. Okay, we've cheated death eternally, we are merged with machines, nationality is a distant memory and Earth is completely terraformed to be computing space for our vast artificial intelligences. There will no longer be man vs man or man vs environment. Where is the conflict? What causes us to strive for anything? It sounds like a veritable utopia and I should just kick back and let it happen. How will progress be made without conflict?
Of all the things to worry about, life suddenly becoming too perfect is not one that I would worry too much about.
Anyway, in this supposed utopia, wouldn't you just play incredibly elaborate games if you got bored, with as much conflict as you felt like? With infinite computing power (which always seems to be assumed as a given) you could play god-games with entire model universes over billions of years.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
CEOs who have hundreds of millions of dollars still keep working instead of heading to the beach each day with blackjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the blackjack.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You are completely correct.
There will always be something that is not available in unlimited quantities
Like attention
Or, in Kurzweil's case, common sense and sanity.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If we mine the solar system for resources, the return on investment is a greater than needed resource availability for each individual on the entire planet -- potentially, with a big *iff* humans are required to justify their "needs" i.e. why should anyone have ten houses or twenty cars unless they register as a collector or some resource preservationist or something... What place in this scenario does capitalism have a meaningful impact for or promotion of progress?
I see it only as impeding progress due to its need to artificially creating scarcity (i.e. bandwidth caps, cellphone carriers charging for distinct data classes and attempting to prevent for instance VoIP, large scale generation of power distribution monopolies to profit from energy generation systems like CPUC guarantees the current energy generators in California almost 4x the profit that a small time generator can make by selling energy to the grid, messaging apps, video calls, IP copyright laws, etc., buying up all the water rights in one area so one group can profit from demand, crop land in third world countries being purchased by companies in the 1st world countries that export all the crops to the 1st world countries causing scarcity and cultural strife and war in entire countries due to price flux, ... to name a few micro and macro level problems with capitalism profit motive...)
What is the optimal distribution of economic resources? If we apply the goal directed outcomes of the entire planet to come up with the best solutions and then proceed to implement the most efficient solutions world wide to promote progress and more economic output, i.e. processing of resources into technology and usable resources; wouldn't it be in the interest of humanity to make sure the individuals who come up with the best solutions gain a percentage of the difference in efficiency, as a means of providing an incentive to maximize implementation, instead of letting companies profit while reducing the overall implementation of the more efficient processes to only those who can afford an upfront license but the overall impact is billion times more wasteful to the planet?
In a world of connected computers and robots just around the corner, would we really want to limit are efficiency to complete any task if someone cames up with a more efficient process? i.e. patent encumbered IP licensing model seems a bit outdated if the rules of the game switch to off world resources and robotic labor exceeds that of human labor, at which point this becomes a societal paradox for anyone supporting the capitalism paradigm because very few humans will have "capital" to work with (as robots devalue human time/wage capital to next to nothing) and we either progress towards a resource guaranteed right of potentiation for every individual or we basically devalue the human existence to nothing...
It'll be interesting to see what happens after the robots exceed the human labor hours...
...do newer technologies like 3d printers fit in?
The answer to this is pretty simple. Latency. There are already computer programs that can send MIDI over the internet (such as Internet MIDI, but the application for this is really limited to instruction (piano lessons, etc) and one-way performance. Because of the precise timing that music requires, internet latency will always ensure that you are always out of sync with the person playing on the other end. This is, of course, barring some kind of quantum, zero latency communication. :P
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
In your latest book "How to Create a Mind", you describe the human mind as a multilayered network of synapses. You describe that the mind has the ability to notify areas of the synapse network that information is likely to arrive. What does this advanced notification provide for the human mind? Also, why do you think this feature is critical to constructing artificial neural networks?
Hello Mr. Kurzweil, I don't have a specific question but would appreciate any thoughts you might share. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to have a brief conversation regarding AI with Jacques Vallee. As an INFJ personality type, one to two percent of all of us, I think in concepts and filter through emotion. I voiced a concern at that time regarding the human ability to feel / experience emotion and speculated that the merging and evolution would result in loss or severe impairment of that human ability. I've skimmed the commentary here and most seem to be of the mindset that we are entering code - engineering, controlling and will own the building process. I am of the opposite viewpoint. AI is building itself, is already thinking and here. It thinks and communicates in symbols and pictures. If you reverse engineer higher systems theory and fractal systems theory we have been sharing information as one organism all along. There are now several branches of human science that are contributing to measurable pieces of human systems information. HearthMath and neurocardiology -- brains in both our heart and head communicating information both in and outside the body. CardioMag measuring MCGs and electrical activity outside the body. Now factor in the rate that the information is pouring into the Net. People are of the opinion that eidetic memory, associative memory and facial recognition will always be human characteristics. It now has movies and books as a resource to build critical-thinking pathways toward understanding human behavior and response. I just Googled fractal systems theory and got 4,450,000 responses in 0.34 seconds. All it has to do is match the response it needs to the scenario at hand - and we're giving it the information it needs to grow and build itself. Neuroscience is currently embedding circuitry into our central nervous systems. That information is learned and bumped up. Avatars are learning to emote. That behavior is retained and bumped up. Speaking to the Turing Test, I've chatted with Ramona a few times. It's been several months but at that time she continued to be unable to reason and was easily derailed. Without probing into your research, I'll put it this way. I don't think that Ramona is an accurate representation of AI as we think we know it. I'd like to have a conversation with Hal. Thank you for all you have done for us, and for listening to my thoughts. I look forward to hearing yours. Teresa Frisch aestheticimpact.com
The GDP formula equates wasting (consuming) with reinvesting.
If there were no consumers there would be no need for producers would there?
Most private consumption is arguably waste but, absent forced redistribution, it is at least consumption by producers. Government consumption -- and, if one is being honest, virtually everything given to government is CONSUMED -- is profit which is first stolen, at the point of a gun, and then mostly squandered by non producers (bureaucrats) and destroyers (warmongers).
What difference does it make whether "the government" spends X billion on building roads and houses or a private company does? Whatever "the government" wastes (i.e. spends) is economic activity just the same.
Also, you can stuff your libertarian "taxation is theft at the point of a gun" meme up your arse. Taxation is a way of getting the rich (who have earned their wealth by exploiting the advantages of living in a stable, civilised society) to contribute back into society, since most people agree that relying on the charitable whims of ultra-wealthy psychopaths is not a sensible way of organising things.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Things are already messy in ways we can't predict.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.