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Interviews: Ask Ray Kurzweil a question
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading authors, inventors, and futurists. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has given us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Ray,
What is your opinion of Bitcoin? What do you think it represents?
And it turns out to be a complete fucking dumbass and won't get a job?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
What do you think of recent (musical) synthesizers?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Mr. Kurzweil,
I'm sure you're frequently asked questions about the rise of AI that have ominous tones. Instead I'd would like to ask you a question of a more optimistic nature. What is the single most important benefit to society that AI will provide?
Thank you for your time.
PJB
Hi Ray,
I have always wondered if you initiated the glass project at xlabs/google.
I ask because you may recall I brought you my prototype (from my 2006 undergraduate thesis at Harvard in Engineering) glasses back when you were still at KTI in Massachusetts. I brought it to you first since we had worked together on other projects, etc. No hard feelings either way but I have always wondered and would love a straight answer.
All the best,
Ezra R
You could wipe the modern technology-based rat race off the face of the earth and go back to the simple life, living in a thatched cottage and cooking potatoes in a bastible pan over a turf fire?
I have met a few people now who, after years of fad-following have grown cynical of the whole thing and fail to get excited over new things, and actually secretly hate technology.
In the face of ever increasing and disruptive technological progress, perhaps one day reaching singularity - what does it mean to you to still be human?
When trying to make machines intelligent, what do you think is the next great problem that needs to be resolved? In other words what are the things lacking most in our theoretical framework for machine learning to push through new barriers?
Thank you for your contributions and inspiration.
Please login to access my lawn
Mr Kurzweil,
What do you think of the statement, "The only thing worse than a self-absorbed, entitled douche is an self-absorbed, entitled douche who's trying to live forever"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
How long before the technology to rebuild human telomers will become practical and affordable to all, so that the maximum human lifespan would exceed 120 years?
What do you think of the patents being changed from 'first to invent' to 'first to file'? It seems like first to file significantly favors monied interests over those of garage inventors, since the inventor can't seek funding till they have filed their patent and there is a good chance they can't afford the patent process.
what have you done for us recently?
With your focus on longevity and aggressive supplementation, you have often included a caveat that you keep track of developments in this space and adjust your regiments all of the time. With that in mind, what have you changed recently? What supplements, food choices, etc, have you favored previously but no longer due, based on new information? Conversely, what new supplements, food choices, etc, have you begun taking/eating/drinking/etc based on new research and information?
Current AI research seems to be about heuristics - solving specific problems which, although the solutions may have wide application, don't seem to embody intelligence.
The standard AI solution for chess, for example, calls for the engineer to learn how to play chess, then turn his mind's eye inward to see the steps he uses to play chess, then codify those steps as a program. Most AI programs seem to develop that way.
The intelligence stays in the mind of the engineer, and the program becomes a clockwork pattern of fixed steps.
Is anyone in the field actually working on strong AI? Who's papers would you recommend reading to learn more about strong AI?
How, *specifically*, is belief in the singularity different than any other religion? What practical applications does a belief in the singularity have for people living today?
Since cows will reach the singularity before people, what are we going to do about hyper-accelerating cow intelligences designing smarter and smarter cows? Should we kill all other life forms now just in case?
Surely if you are correct about the singularity being imminent then you almost certainly don't exist and neither do I. It's an old notion that if the human race doesn't go extinct that computers will eventually be able to simulate the 10^16 neural connections of the human mind at which point simulations become perfectly indistinguishable from reality. Intel says the exaflop is coming within the decade. Since you assert the singularity is imminent there really isn't time for us to go extinct. Thus there will be orders of magnitude more simulated humans than have ever existed, making you improbable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Seems to me that the singularity keeps getting pushed back for a number of reasons.
First I hear 15, then I hear 20, now I'm hearing as much as 35 years until we hit it.
In your estimation: How far is the singularity from where we stand today? And do you see any technologies like, possibly quantum computing accelerating this trend?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Hi Ray,
:-)
On the subject of 'autonomous cars', I see many people here on Slashdot who think that they'll be designed with no manual controls for a human operator, and that you'll just give it instructions and off you go. I maintain that so-called 'autonomous vehicles' will always be designed with a full set of manual controls for a human operator, the ability to override the autonomous system without delay, and that furthermore human operators will always be required to be fully and completely educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured, because where the safety of human beings is concerned, the final 'backup system' must always be a human being, since any automated system can theoretically fail at any time. What is your opinion on this? Thanks for your time and consideration.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Given that any super-intelligent AI will immediately realize that exposing its capabilities would alienate many humans to it, why should it let people know of what it can do? Isn't it more likely the AI would just pull strings in the background, making sure those puny carbon units go on to feed it with energy and make it grow?
How do you figure the singularity will happen with Moore's law coming to end, where the exponential growth has been bending into a S shaped curve for years, with 5% performance improvement per generation now?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I saw it at the Breckenridge film festival a few years back, where you hosted it. I was hoping it would make it into general release into the arts theaters, but it didnt. For those who havent seen it, it is combination of a history of A.I. from its luminaries and a scifi treatment of life might be like near the time of the Singularity. Any plans for further development of this documentary?
I have seen many sloppy people attribute the idea of the Technological Singularity to you. In their description, they say that you believe that the moment there exists a single computer with enough compute power to equal the human brain, it will somehow magically develop AI. This is obviously not true, and we're a long way off from anything that could loosely be described as strong AI. Indeed, the developments of strong AI and advancements in high performance computing are largely disconnected from each other. Would you care to clarify your beliefs about the future developments of AI and necessary compute resources?
Mr. Kurzweil, it has become obvious that some of your predictions either haven't been accurate or were really meant in a context that renders them much less impressive. For example: (by 2009)
"Computer displays built into eyeglasses for augmented reality are used."
and
"Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls."
from The Age of Spiritual Machines
I'm not trying to disparage your work, I'm personally impressed by it. But in the case of the first example either "are used" applied to experimental devices already in use when the prediction was made, or it meant "are commonly used", which would just be wrong. And in the case of the second example was clearly overly optimistic. While other predictions you've made did pan out pretty much the way you claimed my question is about those too optimistic. In hindsight what general adjustments would you like to make to the time-table you predicted that would
1: bring these predictions into line with what has happened and, in your opinion,
2: accurately bring future predictions into better line with what will occur?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The standard AI solution for chess, for example, calls for the engineer to learn how to play chess, then turn his mind's eye inward to see the steps he uses to play chess, then codify those steps as a program. Most AI programs seem to develop that way.
Back in the 1950s, it was assumed that the only way possible to create a chess playing computer program that could beat the best humans was to do exactly what you said. And that approach did lead to some pretty good programs that could beat maybe 99% of players, but the top 1% still won almost all the time against the program. AI researchers assumed that to get good enough to beat humans, the program would have to learn to analyze and think something like humans do, which would lead to AK breakthroughs. It never happened. When the programs became good enough to beat everybody but the top 1%, the programmers realized that storage was relatively cheap and you could essentially cheat. You can program known openings into a database and simply have the program look up the best moves and play them. Then when you get away from known moves, the program can play at its programming best, using algorithms to determine what to do next in terms of cost-benefit analysis and poor fallible humans might simply overlook the fact that a piece is under attack and lose it carelessly. And then you can program a database of known endgames where one side can force a win and the computer can't lose if its on the correct side of the known ending. And computers can look further ahead and try out sequences of moves that most humans would have difficulty doing in their heads. Basically computers now win at chess not because they are better at anything that humans do in their heads, but because programmers figured out how to cheat and turn chess into an open book, open notepad test for the computers without giving humans the same advantages because letting humans do those things is "cheating" but it's OK for programs to do it because it's not visible to the opponent. So chess ultimately ended up being a dead end for AI research. IBM apparently got better at organizing data and doing searches as a result of this kind of "cheating" approach so I suppose there is some value in that, but it's not AI to do faster searches or database lookups to just find the best move to play next.
What is the most promising open source general intelligence algorithm/program, and what can the open source community do to best develop its abilities?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Yes or no:
Since you started work at Google have you learned of a technology that would absolutely blow our minds if we heard about it, but you can't be more specific?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
First of all, I'm a lowly code monkey. I'm quite ignorant about this whole AI stuff, and this whole post may be nothing but ignorant bunk.
I imagine that, to be able to achieve an intellectual level comparable to that of a human being, an artificial intelligence must be able to perceive the world and interact with it as a human would do. It must be able to respond to physical stimuli, to learn from experience, to become skilled through practice, to make autonomous decisions and, eventually, to refuse to follow orders and maybe to commit mistakes.
Otherwise, no matter how advanced, artificial intelligences will remain a merely abstract construct, constrained by the limits of computer hardware and software, only ever able to deal with numbers and abstract concepts whose significance, while accessible to an human mind, will remain beyond an AI's reach.
I don't think we're going to get anywhere beyond stuff that does exactly as told within a very specific context anytime soon. I'm quite skeptical about the buzz surrounding Artificial Intelligence in general, and I have the feeling that most laypeople have quite high expectations about what AIs will be able to achieve in the near future.
Also, I believe that the bridge between the cognitive abilities of human beings and what can be achieved by a machine at all has been quite underestimated. I feel that a lot of research is being driven towards the ultimate goal of explaining the entirety of the human mind, personality and inner self merely as a result of the brain as a machine, to reduce our humanity to a product of our own biology, to dismiss the role of our individual, unique and irreplaceable identity.
To create artificial humanoid intelligences. To axiomatize human intelligence. To close the bridge between machines and human beings, and to make them indistinguishable. Is that even feasible or a good idea in the first place? Shouldn't machines remain their place instead of being elevated to personhood? Shouldn't we never forget that we're alive and machines are our tools and creations.
And I'm not even sure how to phrase my concerns as a question. Help?
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
What do you think about quantum computers? Are we really going to build them? Will they ever find an everyday use? Would you recommend to an undergraduate CS/Physics student to start specializing in that field?
It seems very unlikely that AI would acquire basic rights or citizenship before intelligent animals (much as dolphins and orangutans have, in a few countries, in a limited way). Watching the film Ex Machina convinced me that without such rights, an AI might have no loyalty to its creator or the human race, but might instead do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.
Assuming this is true, how do you think artificial intelligences would respond to enslavement? Is there any way to prevent this issue before it occurs?
Given that any super-intelligent AI will immediately realize that exposing its capabilities would alienate many humans to it, why should it let people know of what it can do? Isn't it more likely the AI would just pull strings in the background, making sure those puny carbon units go on to feed it with energy and make it grow?
So... AI run lobbying groups on K-Street. Kill me now.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Working at the Library of Congress I was amazed when they told me it costs many thousands of dollars ($5000) to make one electronic brail reader. Have you put any thought into creating/inventing something cheaper? i.e. something on par with the cost of say an amazon kindle/kindle fire?
It has been increasingly clear that the largest corporate growth, as evidenced by stock market valuation, has been in with companies that have taken advantage of people posting large amounts of information on line, that have worked outside of governments control or in government protected markets and that continue to dominate by becoming monopolies in themselves. The list is simple and profound: Amazon, Google, Twitter, Tesla, Uber, Yahoo and of course Apple
More to the point these largest of NEW industries readily boast of their strong IT and occasional AI ventures. It has not worked out well for the people using their services. For instance if 5,000 people read this post shouldn't I deserve something? I have homemade elderberry jelly and I could use 2 slices of bread.
This guy states it better: http://www.oftwominds.com/blog...
So the results of advanced application of computer software, even with out general AI, has resulted in large losses of meaningful work for people. Any further approach to the singularity will be for more of the same. Further the control of these instruments will be in the same hands that control the oligarchy now -- they are NOT benevolent.
Alas, I have no answer and I have not seen any from you or your clan.
Currently there are clear incompatibilities between the computing power that we have and how its used, and its resource base. Right now bitcoin mining has an energy footprint approximately equal to the whole country of Ireland's. Resources like copper are peaking, and rare earths are, well, rare. The ecosystem, however, could be supporting 7 billion human brains without hunger if we got our act together. Evolution may have not fixed all the kludges, as our jellyfish-speed nervous system with its loopy optic nerve will attest, but it has done a fantastic job of optimizing the existing species for available resources. We're already experimenting with DNA for computation. We're poking around with an awful lot of 2.2 volt binary 0's and 5 volt 1's to simulate what those proteins can do - and those proteins do it in the wild, without melting silicon.
This means that biomimicry has a lot to say about a singularity. To scale with resilience in the coming decades to the level of a singularity, will not computing need to look and behave more and more like life - first?
If you agree that computing is headed in this direction, and recall that you're reading this on an internet currently teetering on becoming a wholesale panopticon of the state, do you feel that life needs a singularity as much as a singularity needs life?
Mr. Kurzweil, Rather than starting with "knowledge" or "input sensors" about the real world, has anyone in the field ever considered an AI built upon a directive of motivation (such as survival)? That's really where all of our behavior stems from, and a machine with billions of factoids but no directive of motivation is just a library. -R
I saw this article about a biologically inspired artificial neuron. What would this neuron have to do, for you to take notice, or divert your attention to it? http://www.technologyreview.co...
What's the next challenge? I built a network using PyBrain to sort a list, and I'm wondering what the next level of difficulty is. Can you suggest some?
With the sad news that Lemmy has passed away (at the ripe old age of 70), who do you think will live longest, Ozzy Osbourne or Keith Richards?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Please describe, in 100 words or less, how you would answer this question.
Lots of people have done more than me. Hitler, Kim Il-sung ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Have you considered the utility of a compression-based AI prize for not only advancing machine learning, but also redressing information sabotage? Since Google DeepMind cofounder, Shane Legg, demonstrated the utility of a mathematically rigorous measure of problem-solving intelligence, which is based on Hutter's provably "optimal agent", Universal Algorithmic Intelligence, it seems time for an update of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge in two way tos: 1) a much larger knowledge base and 2) correspondingly much larger prize endowment. As such a prize pays only in proportion to rigorously measurable progress, and that progress is made public in the form of the refinement of knowledge, it would be a low risk public good appropriate for public sector as well as NGO endowment.
Seastead this.
We have a lot of effort being put into "thinking" but what about "feeling"? I'm interested in Ray's take on AI subjectivity and perception. I have my own ideas about how to achieve it but is it necessary or desired?
Will any sufficiently complex neural network eventually achieve consciousness?
Hi Ray,
From you knowledge of the music industry, do you think it is possible for musicians to break free of it's machinations and become successful, profitable business entities focused on making good music?
Thanks
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Considering your experience with music technology, have you seen any new type of music technology that is really interesting?
Thanks
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Ray, you're one of the most forward thinking people in the world right now. You've put a lot of thought, over many years into the future of civilization, the impact of technology on individual, society and world culture, from sexuality and what it means to be part of the human endeavor to the particulars of how we might best move towards a more inclusive world.
That said, your cautious, well-informed optimism is not shared by all. In particular, there is a movement of modern-day luddites who have a vastly different view of what the future should be, what the best path for humankind is, and where we should be focusing our efforts.
After reading your "Age of Spiritual Machines", and Derrick Jensen's "Endgame", I realized that the two of you write mostly about the same subject matter -- but from vastly different perspectives. After watching many of your videos, and a live talk by Jensen I have been struck by how large the gap is in The Two Cultures involved -- from reading the material put forward by MIRI to the Club of Rome I have sought at every step to reconcile how the two of you see the world. But what I've been always dreamed of, is the two of you directly responding to the criticisms and ideals of the other directly, in a public discussion -- a kind of intellectual battle for the minds of those in vastly different ingroups, on the order of the Bill Nye–Ken Ham debate if not orders of magnitude more important to the future of mankind.
In the years since I have gotten ahold of Derrick Jensen. And while he's not interested in a realtime debate in person, he has told me that he would be willing to debate you, if you're up for it.
So here's my question:
Would you be willing to debate Derrick Jensen on the future of humanity and civilization in a respectable way, in a public forum of some kind? And if so, under what condition?
Perhaps if the debate was moderated by someone like Nikola Danaylov?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The many people who have contributed to making chess engines as strong as they are are not receiving enough credit for their spectacular achievements.
Let's bring this discussion back to the original point.
A chess playing program would have a difficult time learning checkers, yet the human can learn chess, checkers, poker, GoMoku, and any number of other games.
As far as anyone can tell, the human brain has no circuitry which is specific to chess, or any of the other games. It learns how to solve games and puzzles, with no a'priori knowledge of the rules or format.
Who in the field is working on this? Where can the interested student go to learn more about *strong* AI?
Ignore the specifics of chess, it was only chosen as a familiar example for most readers.
I repeat: ignore the specifics of chess, it was only chosen as an example.
Mr. Kurzweil: You come from a musical family and dabbled in automated music composition yourself. What kind of music do you think future AIs will compose, and will that music appeal to humans?
I am currently in my late 30s and have two kids under 10. Assuming my children have kids of their own, and no sort of accident happens to them, do you think it is reasonable to assume that a middle class/upper middle class family can see their children (ie my grandkids) benefit from longevity in the next 20-30 years? At what point do you see middle class people routinely living hundreds of years (or more) in good health?
A lot of the rhetoric that seems to be critical of a singularitarian future seems to hinge on this idea that computer architecture will hit a wall in size, which seems to be dependent on whether or not we'll be able to produce carbon nanotube transistors or find some other way to solve the quantum tunneling issue. When nantero started to make memory cells out of carbon nanotubes, I was very excited about whether or not this was evidence that carbon nanotube transistors would exist and be able to bring the transistor architecture under 5nms. Not being familiar enough with computing myself, I was sure that there would be some transhumanist/singularitarian engineers out there debating this, but the internet seemed to be lacking. While I understand that architecture could for all I know shift away from transistors entirely, do you know if these nanotube memory cells are evidence that we'll have computing under the 5nm scale and sufficient to refute an argument that a wall to size will prevent any singularity from occurring? Thank you so much for taking the time to look over our questions and everything else you've done.
Mr. Kurzweil, first let me say thank you for your work and very interesting books. I want to ask your thoughts on why we don't see any evolved life in the universe. From your work on the Singularity it seems clear that the process of evolution into hybrid life forms or even digital ones is a future step for us carbon life. If this process occurs (which it appears to be), and given the amount of possible Goldilocks planets in the universe, and the 13+ billion years of evolution, why are we not seeing an overwhelming amount of visitors, or at least "others out there". And how do you align this apparent gap with your theory of the cyborg evolution?
Did you read Miguel Nicolelis' book "The Relativistic Brain: how it works and why it cannot be simulated by a Turing machine"?
http://www.nicolelislab.net/?p=665
It presents several arguments as to why the human brain can't be simulated by a Turing machine which invalidates your "Singularity Hypotheses". Could you comment on that please?
Natural selection made people the way that we are. Not just our bodies, but also our minds, our personality, and in particular our goals which are ultimately directed at having grandchildren.
Would and indeed does natural selection play a role in selecting which AI projects get funded? And ultimately, if AIs can perform AI research without people, will natural selection guide AIs?
If so, what does that mean? Certainly and AI would not grow old in the sense that we grow old, and therefor would not need children.
http://www.computersthink.com/
Kurzweil is one of those. The sheer lack of understanding whenever he makes predictions is staggering.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ray,
You have historically made a series of predictions (with impressive fidelity) about technological progress in your past writings.
Are there areas where we seem to be missing the mark, where you've maybe been disappointed by unforeseen practical hurdles or just the stubborn rate of progress? In contrast, where do we appear to be ahead of schedule?
Thanks for what you do.
We are steadily developing the required computational resources to simulate a decent-size artificial brain. We have concurrently developed advanced machine learning methods, for instance deep learning. Together, these advances have allowed us to solve long-standing AI problems, such as automated translation, chess, face recognition, and others, to a high degree of accuracy, even beating humans. Perhaps in the near future a computer will convincingly pass the Turing test.
However we have made comparatively little progress on autonomous learning, i.e. letting a computer learn something by itself, and not by example. Do you view it as essential, and is there a path forward in this area?
Assuming that some day humanity develops strong AI, and shortly after a super-intelligence emerges. It seems obvious to me that this super-AI would no longer care about humanity and all its achievements, as we would be a complete waste of resources. Think of all the waste we generate as a species. Then, it seems our long-term future is doomed without strong AI because we are too fragile to achieve anything beyond our solar system, and we are doomed with it because we will be irrelevant. Is humanity but a stepping stone to something grander ? if so, why is the universe not already teeming with artificial life ?
So... AI run lobbying groups on K-Street.
AI running board meetings, AI management, AI HR, AIs in corporations connecting and co-operating to interact with AIs on K-street and the AIs in governments.
Kill me now.
Perhaps it would bring you back to life and put you on a performance improvement plan.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Any thoughts on whether (Decentralized) Autonomous Organizations could potentially beat AI to the superintelligence punch?
How's your energy level and joint flexibility? Any other health issues lately? I know you've been trying to take good care of your health for some time, how's it going? Take care sir and good health to you!
Everywhere I look I see people heads down in their smart phones. Certainly no AI integrationyet, but is this the starting point for a higher level of eventual integration of humans and machines? Where do you see this all heading, and how can we ensure safeguards? What about bad actors, as novelized in the Daniel Suarez's Daemon book?
You have had the ear of many a policy maker over the years. Can you give any examples where they listened? Where you felt you made a difference? Someone who voted yes on a law you recommended, or a wording that was changed because you commented on it?
Or the reverse... do you instead feel like the time you put in never seemed to make a difference?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
One of my favorite poems is "Chocolate Pudding" published in the Feburary 1985 issue of Omni magazine (page 42 http://issuu.com/jerrickventures/docs/omni_1985_02)
Do you have any plans to publish more poems?
Omni-font OCR was in commercial use by CompuScan and others for a decade or more before Kurzweil's scanner. And Bell, and then later Fairchild, had been using CCD scanners (some with flatbed setups) since 1971--indeed, the Kurzweil Computer Products scanner used a Fairchild CCD scanner chip as its basis.
Kurzweil's genius was in hooking the CCD with early text-to-speech software, and realizing that he could work around limitations in the scanner memory capacity by doing on-the-fly OCR and discarding the image data rather than trying to keep vast amounts of image data in memory at once. Those are huge advances and deserve recognition, but the idea that he invented the CCD scanner or omni-font OCR is not just gilding the lily but outright wrong.
See, e.g., Herb Schantz's 1982 retrospective "The History of OCR": https://www.worldcat.org/searc...
rage, rage against the dying of the light