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Kurzweil Argues Technology Improves The World, Compares DNA to Code (geekwire.com)
Futurist Ray Kurzweil told a Seattle conference specific ways in which technology is already improving our lives. For example, while there's a general perception that the world's getting worse, "What's actually happening is our information about what's wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes two of Kurzweil's other interesting insights:
"We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
Several months back there was a call for questions for Ray Kurzweil. https://features.slashdot.org/...
Whatever happened to the answers?
Please login to access my lawn
Has he even been in the Netherlands ? This place IS crowded. We do not have ANY unused space, there is no such thing as "out in the boondocks" here. Even the bits that appear unused are actually carefully managed pieces of 'nature'. Not a single tree there is allowed to fall over without it being discussed in a meeting somewhere.
I have news for Mr Kurzweil. Crowded is not defined in terms of how much more people you can shoehorn in. Crowded is defined in terms of how easy it is to escape the other assholes in case you do so desire.
Google's Director of Engineering, inventor of optical character recognition, inventor of the digital music keyboard and lots of other stuff - his Wikipedia page is quite lengthy...
10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped. If 1 million people moved into the all that mostly empty land between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where are they going to get water?
In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.
Determining how much land is required support each person has actually been studied. 2-9 acres is one range; there are a lot of variables.
10 million people may live around Los Angeles, but they *off of* a lot more land.
You are a useless human being.
I automatically disregard anything he says. He desperately needs to learn some science before he spouts rubbish about it.
Who are you to ask us that question?
Who are you, and why should we care?
What is the point, why are we here?
Just ignore the biggest problems (oil dependence and climate change), concentrate on everything else, and say it all looks good! ...).
Technology needs an imperial fuckton of energy (mostly from oil, gas and coal) for sometimes dubious results that don't do much, if anything, to improve our quality of life (Pokemon Go, Bitcoins,
Let's not forget that technology isn't science, and that we shouldn't do everything just because we can.
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
""We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
Not in the US, or most of Europe, or a good chunk of Asia. Not used for housing or urban sprawl isn't the same as not used. And no, it's actually changing much - communication isn't the only issue, access to stuff (physical goods) is also important, as is access to experiences. And neither have markedly changed if you live in the actual boondocks. (I find most people who live in big cities have little idea what conditions are like outside of the metro area.)
When will computer geeks grasp that most of the human race actually enjoys the company of others and that there are actual economic reasons why people cluster?
'A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it'.
In 1916? Really? World War I aside, anywhere you'd have heard about it in 1916 I suspect you would today. It wasn't the Middle Ages.
If you really want to compare DNA to software, please at least also make reasonable timeframe comparisons... A 100000 year-old piece of code is not "outdated" if the original software is 4 billion years old. In fact, it is actually brand new. But to Kurzeil's defence, let us all admit how hard it is to represent such durations in our feeble minds, who already have trouble thinking about what will happen in 10 years...
He pops pills thinking it will make him immortal, he promotes ideas like the "singularity" where people will upload their minds into computers and other such nonsense. The hubris is so great he'll probably die by having a heart attack and his autopilot Tesla will plough straight into picture of a sunset.
I find this whole area fascinating.
If human intelligence is just the result of a complex biological computer program in our brains (ie there is no magical soul thing), then there is no fundamental reason why at some point we would not be able to build our own computer powerful enough to create sentience (albeit, we are very far from that at the moment).
However, that sentience will be contained inside a device we build. Whether it interacts with the physical world as we see it or a virtual world we create for it comes down to whether we decide to sandbox it or put a whole bunch of sensors and actuators on it. The machine itself wouldn't be able to tell unless we told it (and it might not even believe us if it was in a sandbox), and bizarrely, we would have some crazy god like powers over it, like being able to arbitrarily violate the laws of physics in its world, moving back and forward in its perception of time etc.
The thing is, the day we achieve this, we will have proven that it is incredibly likely that we are simply a simulation in someone else's universe, the reason being that we have proven that is possible. On the other hand evolution requires us to accept an incredibly unlikely string of low probability events, while also not answering the question of where the universe came from in the first place, other than the abstract concept of nothingness.
However, in terms of human society, this could explain a lot of stuff. I was brought up going to church, and when I sit back and reflect on the god I was told ran the world, it does strike me that he appears very similar to the sort of unstable narcissistic behavior you'd expect from a set of university researchers wanting to probe their experimental rats to see what happens.
You can just imagine some research team suggesting they should send down a 'savior' dude to see how quickly a seeded religious idea would ripple through the population, and then the guy assigned to write the story code did some mushrooms the night before it was due and came up with the idea of the savior guy killing himself and then raising himself from the dead and then that fixes all the bad stuff everyone did. You can imagine in the code acceptance meeting everyone was like WTF? and the guy would be like 'well, if you wanted something more coherent then you should have done it yourself, I'm over this stupid experiment', and that is how we got Christianity. At least that sort of thing would explain why god is always such a bastard.
We get information about the world wide slide of the west into a dystopia, where every single country is passing more laws designed to 'keep us safe' which roughly translates to 'give politicians more power to control us'. You can almost see the politicians high fiving each other in the background as they deceive us with some new outrageous lie.
We get information about how world wide mega corporations suction the wealth of nations into their ever increasing profit books while introducing 6000 page monoliths of trade agreements to governments around the world and refer to the laws of countries designed to protect their people as 'obstructions' to trade as they complete the conversion of citizens rights into capital.
We get information about how spy agencies around the world increasingly capture record store our personal information as they move from covert to overt intelligence operations.
We get information about the world wide destruction of ecosystems, species collapse, combined with global warming and all of the political and social tactics used to stop any progress because if you can deny the carbon externalities then all the rest of them must be bogus as well.
It is what is implied by the better information, that the hidden autocrats controlling the reigns of global power aren't going to let go any time soon. The old powers control the wealth of the world and we all do not and they will not let go. That is the 'implied' information from this better information.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Kurzweil (on the one hand) and all those people thinking the terminator scenario will happen (on the other) feel like theists who try to quash their theism by force, but it just pops up elsewhere in another shape.
Kurzweil's "we're all going to be immortal and the singularity will bring plenty to all" is: technology will let us make God and we will all go to techno-Heaven.
The terminator/golem scenario with the out-of-control superintelligences turning the whole world into computer material is: technology will let us make God and we will all go to techno-Hell. The more you get into the really bizarre end of the theology, the more obvious it is.
People don't just live in the cities because they want to be around other people for work and play, cities are also handy in that all sorts of crucial services are nearby. There's a reason cities developed as trade hubs to begin with: people are lazy and would rather walk a couple hundred meters and take a subway to go fetch their laptop from the shop rather than driving long distances for it. Likewise, being close to emergency services is something that only cities can offer. Here in Finland the average response time of an ambulance in cities is about 8-10 minutes in emergencies, whereas up north in Lapland it can easily be an hour even with a helicopter. Libraries, schools, hospitals, post offices, drug stores, etc, all of these and much more are something you can find in nearly every part of any larger city but you might have to travel a couple hundred miles to out in the countryside.
I'm not saying Ray's wrong overall: it's true that living out of cities has become more viable with technology, but it's a bit shortsighted to assume that the only reason people are concentrated into cities are social reasons and entirely ignore the benefits provided by the kind of service infrastructure that cities offer and sparsely populated areas do not.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Sounds like nonsense; just because there aren't houses on it doesn't mean it's unused. There's a lot of farmland in, for example, central North America, or outside the larger European cities.
Also, forests, for example, might be called "unused" by some, but I'd argue that they are useful just as they are and if we raze them all for farmland and housing we'd be in a bad way.
For example, forests are repositories for all kinds of specialized DNA (refererring now to the 2nd quote in TFS), and to stretch the DNA-is-code analogy, it's rarely a good idea to discard forever any when storage is cheap.
Consider instead the current apparent wave of police misconduct. 25 years ago, it was a fluke that the Rodney King beating was caught on tape. Now, we know that this sort of thing in fact happens routinely, because everyone can take video. Well, thinking people always knew, but now we can prove it. This also explains the general cluelessness of the police as to WHY this is wrong - to them, it's just business as usual.
Or if you want to stay with war, consider instead Vietnam. Vietnam was not much more brutal than any average war, and the rate of casualties was not extreme (again comparing to previous wars, especially WW2). But because the video was routinely aired on TV, it was a MUCH bigger deal. In terms of total casualties (both American and foreign), Korea and Vietnam were actually quite similar - yet hardly anyone today even remembers the Korean war, and it's considered much less significant.
Ray Kurzweil is hardly the only one who has noticed this, though. This idea, that despite what people think - that the world situation, and American situation in particular, is improving - has been a staple of every Warren Buffett speech at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for years. Pundits always talk about the impact of the 24-hour news cycle and how it can make mountains out of molehills.
Interesting times? Maybe, or maybe it's just a slow news century.
Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
He is a stellar example of an idiot with no understanding of science and a big ego. Kind of like a politician, but without the PR training and the power. As such he can be used as a negative example. I do not see any other use knowing about him would have.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Seems much more likely these are not _his_ inventions, and more likely somebody is trying to artificially generate a legend.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago
Wut?
Genes are software programs. It"s not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago, when conditions were different.
Uhmm, how about millions of years old?
And ever heard of proven technology?
Sure, it will be interesting to see what information it delivers and how we could improve it. But don't think genetics are just 'outdated' software. It is software that has constantly been debugged and improved over millions of years.
Hows DNA outdated? Thats like claiming we humans are outdated.. DNA is current and perfectly suited to job at hand. We humans should not try beat nature in engineering of DNA... After all its nature that has unlimited resources and unlimited chances to progress.. We humans tend to make mess.
Kurzweil is an idiot and this article just underscores it.
Now, not believing the future he sees is another thing. I don't believe most of it, but he makes some good points. Do I believe in some unseen singularity that will merge man and machine and boom all will be good? No, just as I do not believe in a mystical sky being who's son's blood is wine.
But, his statement that while things seem worse, they are not is very true. We live in a society that thrives off of BAD news. It sells. And we can get it instantly. Even if there is less of it to report, it seems like there is more.
Do I think that AI and automation will surpass us one day? Yes. I do not think it will be in my lifetime, but it will happen. And, I have no predilection as to whether it will be a Butlerian Jihad moment or the saving of mankind. Why, because I know that it is impossible to see the future. Otherwise I would have my fusion powered flying car by now.
Silence is a state of mime.
It looks like you have written words, but I can find nothing intelligible in what you have said.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
We are on information overload. We have this 24/7 news cycle and everything bad that happens gets rammed down our throat over and over and over again.
And people really react to it. Trump's entire campaign is exploiting it. Turing off the electronic shit and observing around me, things are pretty safe.
And as far as staying informed, after a while, it becomes noise. The quality of information has gone to shit with the advent of technology because the media firms are stuffing the pipeline with crap to keep ad revenue up. It sucks for the Germans last week, but I can't so anything for them and this far away, it has about as mych impact on my life as an action movie.
Just turn the shit off and worry about yourself and care for the people around you. And if everyone did that, the world would be a much better place.
> ry taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with.
Hah, try that in most of Europe: building a house in an area not appointed to housing even if you own the land. The police will be very quickly to tell you that is not allowed and if you don't remove the building yourself the state will do it for you and send you the bill (unless you are very rich and influential). In The Netherlands there is even hassle about people owning vacation houses who live there permanantly (which is not allowed but sometimes ignored by the local authorities).
Many people here have no choice but to live in a city.
It’s one of life’s great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God watching everything, you know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
You know you could just go and look it up.
For instance:
So, it's been around too long for him. What we appear to have with crediting Kurzweil with inventing OCR is a moving of goal posts to accommodate his tech instead of the fundamental idea and implementation.
A search on "OCR inventor" yields the name Emanuel Goldberg as the inventor of Optical Character Recognition (1931).
So Kurzweil moved it into a more modern computer, he didn't invent OCR per se.
In particular the statement "inventor of the digital music keyboard" is provably false. The Kurzweil K250 was definitely a top-flight instrument at its introduction, but there were already a number of other digital synths available at the time. I'm sure Jon Appleton and John Chowning would get a chuckle at the claim.
I'm glad there are still people who think like this, especially in California.
"...there's a general perception that the world's getting worse..."
Well, yeah, amongst people lacking any historical perspective. And maybe amongst politicians, although I'm not always certain they actually believe what they're demagoguing about. I mean, there are people - many people - who think that crime is worse today, when it's actually at record lows. Whether it's you, me, or Kurzweil saying it, these people's minds won't be changed. Let's face it, most people are not all that educated, and get most of their knowledge about the World through the television.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
He loses a lot of credibility with this statement. What I guess he means is the land is not occupied by people. But if you take a look the land is heavily used for grazing, timber, mining. I've flown over and driven over the US quite a few times and it really depresses me. The Mississippi is turned into a big drainage ditch. From the ground I see cattle grazing everywhere and they have huge effects on the original ecosystem. The ranchers that have been protesting out west about grazing on government land have gotten in trouble for burning native shrub so it can be replaced with grasses better for cattle. Even historically there has been much fighting over land in the west, they were called the range wars. Montana was the most famous, but there has been lots of other wars over water, fences and sheep vs cattle.
Well, he does have a B.S. from MIT, the Grace Hopper Award, and the National Medal of Technology. So to say he is an idiot is more like ego stroking for you and not a true statement.
Obama has a Nobel peace prize, if you have a point then make it
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Almost all land in Europe is used, but it's not settled.
It takes about 60 years for a forest to grow, farming is needed for food and interim areas are needed for plants to prosper.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
He's a frequent Slashdot contributor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, Ray Kurzweil is the new incarnation of Captain Obvious? I mean, come on, 30 years ago we had no CNN reporting 24/7 on every single thing that happened, you had an idea about what had happened in your city, some smaller idea about what happened in your province/state, and a vague idea of your Nation, but worldwide news was a 5 minute segment of the 1 hour program! once a day!
With the advent of 24/7 news channels in the early 90's, and the ability to see stuff happening as it unfolded, we became able to see MUCH greater amount of news that previously was simply unreported.
As how many Europeans knew of the Tamil Tigers in 1990 for example. (looking into archived newspapers you will see almost no mention!)
How many Americans heard of the war between Vietnam and China in the late 70's/early 90's? (using the archived newspapers method above).
At the end of the day, CNN and other 24/7 news outlets report so much things that the average European or American would never have heard of 30 years ago that people think the world is falling apart, when pretty much it has been in a steady state.
However, how does that lessen someone else's accomplishments in another field, including an earned degree, not just an awarded prize.
Personally, I think you need to start drinking coffee instead of poo. Your debating skills may be keener.
Silence is a state of mime.
What Germany needs is common-sense gun control, an assault-style weapons ban and for the 2nd amendment to be repealed. Get the guns off the streets. Tell those conservative repukianz Germans that they don't need their metal dicks to feel safe. White men in Germany should be pretty ashamed of their gun culture.
People want to live forever. Once they realise that the afterlife is a lie, they'll put their hopes in even a slim hope like technology that doesn't exist yet but may one day be possible, like uploading or cryonics.
Sure, the chances of waking up again after the dying an freezing is one in a million. But the chance of waking up from the crematorium is zero, so clutch at that straw and hope luck is on your side.
In all the textbooks on neural nets and machine learning that I've seen, Kurzweil's name was not once listed as the inventor of optical character recognition. WTF is this?
the Grace Hopper Award, and the National Medal of Technology. So to say he is an idiot is more like ego stroking
You're right, it does sound like he is more of an ego-stroker than an idiot.
Farming every tiny itsy bitsy pieces of flat ground, herding goats and cows in the slopes strewn with rock, making one wonder what do these goats eat? rocks? There are no untouched pieces of virgin forests left in India. Not in significant quantities.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Look at you, discussing 'likelihoods' with simple matters of fact. If you care, look it up. If you don't, don't opine.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Considering that exactly a century ago those battles were actually happening (Poziers etc) and were reported on the opposite side of the world on the same day it's really bad and insensitive timing for that "grandpa was a flat earther" shit.
Other things - "99% of the land" - the guy may have stuff worth listening to but he's wrapping it up in utterly ridiculous bullshit.
Yes it fucking is you tool. The PopSci-lite dumbed down suggestion that all you need is genes to entirely describe an organism is a metaphor and not reality.
If you belong to those who find out who somebody is through wikipedia or "blogs",
you should read more than what's onscreen
try the paper sometime. or Wired, starting with the ads, maybe even finish with the articles. To get your nerd cred back.
I made it all the way through electrical engineering college without learning about Tesla, with the exception of a Tesla being a unit of magnetic flux density.
He's not idiot, just gaga.
Um, your sentence disproves its own claim. I also don't see how that's relevant. I read these books after college, and they are full of names of people who invented these technologies. Kurzweil is not mentioned at all. But please, have fun getting all your information from youtube comments and Wikipedia entries.
While you're at it, check out the Wikipedia article on OCR. It actually addresses the false perception that Kurzweil somehow invented the technology. Spoiler alert - he didn't! It's much older than that - as other comments have pointed out.
The only thing you've accomplished now is wasting my time, so, congratulations for that.
Not so much.
I'm not sure why a futurist telling us the obvious is worth posting?
-Styopa
Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
On one side you have wishful thinking, and on the other side you have people actually doing research to make things happen. Even if the promises of either side never pan out, one is quite a bit better than the other.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Now that we have cars, changing horses to Obamas does not really have so many consequences anymore. But go back one century ago and change horses to Obamas, and voilÃ, civilisation collapses! Horses have much more horsepower than Obamas... But then, thanks to Kurzweil, maybe we can genetically engineer Obamas to have as much horsepower as horses... then the situation would become interesting, although, I repeat, we do not have that much need for horses in contemporary society. But when we run out of oil, then, better get ready and store a few horses, or Obamas if you can afford them (because we all know that genomic modifications will be patented and IP will cost a fortune...).
Well, it takes about 40 seconds for a supercomputer to perform the same number of computations a human brain does in one - a giant waste of computing power, but it's actually been done.
Interesting datum, but, at the moment we don't even know what the brain is doing with its computing power.
Let's check the calculation. The brain had 100 billion neurons, each with an average of 7,000 synapses, so that's 700 trillion synapses. Each neuron fires at a rate on the order of 1/7 Hz (close enough), so that's 100 trillion synapse firings per second. The fastest supercomputer is a little under 100 petaflops, so the fastest supercomputer does 1000 floating point operations for every neuron firing in a brain over the same time.
If only we had a good idea of how many floating point operations were in one neuron firing, we'd know something here. But the problem is that the brain is massively interconnected, while a computer is very simply interconnected. How many operations does it take to simulate a massively intereconnected system with a simply interconnected system?
When it comes to stuff like farming?
For living we build hi-rises, and our best cities have vertical shopping malls
Why stop with farming? If we can do tiered covered parking why not layered farming on multilevel land tracts?
"We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used..."
This sounds like the perspective of a city dweller. In the US at least, unless you are going out west and talking about desert the land is actually much more populated than even 20 years ago. More and more it's becoming like most state/national parks, a thin screen of trees creating the illusion of being out in the wilds while the next camper is just on the other side with no real private space.
Ray is a God, or at least God-like. But this particular argument is not new. Stephen Hawking delivered the same message at an address at Macworld over 15 years ago. You could have heard a pin drop in the room with over 5,000 people while he was talking about his view of evolution during our lifetime, and the inevitability of a singularity and an evolutionary inflection point. I have looked everywhere for a copy of that speech, sadly to no avail.
My DNA is MY intellectual property.
So to say he is an idiot is more like ego stroking for you and not a true statement.
Stupid is as stupid does. He has a list of inflated claims in his resume and a whole bunch of hot air predictions. So far his record isn't looking very good.
Kurzweil is getting worse. He wants to be taken seriously, but then he says things like "99% of land is not used". That's pretty fucking stupid, Ray.
Couple of years ago he said all you need to make a brain is the few bytes you find in the DNA. Uhhh... No, Ray. Embryology. The brain has to interact with a real environment in order to develop. So it takes waaaaaaaaaay more information than the DNA code itself.
I've no doubt he is/was a smart guy but he keeps talking shit.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It often seems that people have got to worship something. If not God, then perhaps money, trees, AI, one's own self... True atheists are rare, if they do indeed exist.
Nope, no crystal balls. No visions.
Just some blathering about what will come, with a pretty good chance
of being right a few % of the time.
Not even profitable to him, like it was for Gore and the magic carbon credits....
So when are the tachnobabble-babies going to finish growing up?
I looked it up. They're not his inventions. Get f***ed.
Technically, not inventor of the concept but one of those who improved it over the years.
Ezekiel 23:20
But Tauschek's OCR machine was patented in 1929 already.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's probably because neural networks were crap when Kurzweil was working on OCR, so he didn't use them, so why would he be mentioned in a neural net textbook? Likewise, it's more likely than not that he didn't use machine learning either, at least not in a way that we're using it today (he quite possibly did some "traditional" model fitting, but if you include that in machine learning is up to you).
I think the problem here may lie in the fact that Kurzweil was one of those people who brought OCR into the realm of personal computing, thus making it usable for a very wide audience that was previously unaware that such thing had even existed before. It's probably the same as with the fact that computer virtualization is "the new craze" but not all people are aware that it was invented at IBM in mid-1960s or so. It's just new in PCs, not new in computing in general. Similarly, in the US and western countries in general, often local inventors or discoverers are favoured in public consciousness over non-local prior art; the examples are numerous here.
Ezekiel 23:20
It must have been a very poor EE college if it didn't have a Tesla coil for fun! ;) (Or maybe just a very depressed one?)
Ezekiel 23:20
Actually, I'd argue that Marx and Lenin invented that one, not Kurzweil and the ones like him. Checkmate, Americans!
Ezekiel 23:20
Are you seriously comparing merit-based science and technology awards to the f**ing Nobel peace prize?
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh, he didn't make it to more than a B.S.? Figures. The rest are political things, no reflection on skills or insights.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here is a hint: The problem is on your side. And it cannot be fixed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Kurzweil is not only a moron, his "accomplishments" are fake. Hint: Do not look up "Kurzweil", look up the things he claims to have invented. Just another fraudster living big because of stupid fanbois.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So basically failed terror-management. Pathetic. Incidentally, we do know absolutely nothing about whether there is an "afterlife" or a next life waiting for us. We do know that some people use stories about one to defraud us (most religions, but also the Cryo-Freeze people and the "upload into computer" people and the like), but that does say nothing about the validity of the idea itself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is a sucker born every minute...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Technoutopian hotgospelling fraud
..and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software..
You stupid son of a bitch, we are not anywhere near the point, knowledge-wise, and especially wisdom-wise, to 'edit' our own genomic 'software'. Some of you make jokes about a zombie apocalypse? This is the arrogant mindset that will bring about the equivalent of that! GMO foods are bad enough: I don't even say anything about them anymore because the horse has already left the barn: it's out in the wild now, literally in the wind, and nothing can ever change that. Screwing with our own DNA on the level he seems to imply? No. Just, No.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Neural networks ARE machine learning.
OCR IS Neural networks. Some of the earliest examples of the use of neural networks for machine learning were OCR applications.
This technology dates to the 1950's.
See Self Organization and Associative Memory by Teuvo Kohonen, for one reference. There are countless others, including undergraduate level texts on statistical learning methods. Crediting Kurzweil in this way is a gross oversimplification and distorts the facts.
(he quite possibly did some "traditional" model fitting, but if you include that in machine learning is up to you)
Why yes, yes I do.
Neural networks ARE machine learning.
No argument against that from me!
OCR IS Neural networks.
Now that is debatable. Or, you know, it actually isn't - there's no identity between the two. It's not even a case of one being a proper subset of the other, they merely intersect.
Ezekiel 23:20
You forgot the most important question: Where shall we have lunch?
Ezekiel 23:20
YES. I like me.
Good point. I was making a convenient overgeneralization, conflating their intersection (which is significant) with identity.
Most of all, I appreciate that your link shows the technology was invented by an Austrian in the 1930's.
#NotAllAustrians ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
The world population is around 7.4 Billion people most of it in china and India. But in not too many years, say 100 years, the population will be 11 billion, 100 years ago it was about 1.8 billion. The problem is not now, but it will definitely be coming. Imagine having 3 times as many people next to you. twice as many cars and longer lines everywhere as people wait to get what they need. The world is really not enough room, that is why there is a big push to get to Mars, not fast enough I'm afraid.
It doesn't keep me up. Even if we are cosmic accidents (and I happen to believe we are, though I suspect life, mainly unintelligent, is widespread throughout the universe). There's no "why" to the fact we are here, beyond explaining the biochemical origins of life and the peculiarities of hominoid evolution that lead to the rise of genus Homo. We are here, and that's what counts, and to my mind, the fact that we are the end result of a series of many probable and equally improbable events makes human life incredibly precious. Without some big sky god who can do it all again any time it wants to, it means if we wipe ourselves out, we may be wiping out something that is rather rare in the universe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm particularly troubled by these comparisons of DNA to source code. First of all, any programmer that would create code as sloppy and filled with junk sections would probably be canned. While the analogy works in simple terms, the way DNA and RNA encode and then transcribe that back into proteins is far far more complex than how a computer runs code. In some ways, DNA is far superior, because it tends to be a lot more fault tolerant, but in other ways it is much less efficient and tends to be much more error prone (which is a good thing, those transcription errors are one of the major ways in which life evolves).
Ultimately the analogy fails because cells are not computers. They do not function like computers. DNA could almost be more compared to something like a printing press, except that on occasion letters get inserted into the process, sometimes even entire sequences, and on other occasions letters go missing, not to mention the odd occasion where another press's sequence of letters get transferred.
It is a useful analogy for introducing certain concepts surrounding cellular activities and protein production, but it remains an analogy only at that basic level, and fails on the details.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
People move to cities because for *some* definitions they have a better standard of living, and because they all move then more and more amenities grow around them eg art galleries, restaurants, schools.
There will have to be a pretty impressive VR and networking revolution to make most people want to move into the wilderness.
He says things competent people thought of and discarded as idiotic before hitting puberty.
This.
Is God watching or will God (that is the singleton) emerge and be present latter in the progress of the Universe. Perhaps we have it all backwards... Are you for or against the singularity? Your position on the matter may determine where your essence spends eternity.
Either life is rare and we are one of the few if not only intelligent, self-aware entities in the universe or due to the immensity of the universe life is common and rather prevalent though out. Either possibility is mind blowing.
Are you seriously comparing merit-based science and technology awards to the f**ing Nobel peace prize?
I don't take any award seriously absent a reason to do so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think life is probably fairly common. Intelligent life very likely much less so. Even on Earth, intelligence is a solution to the problem of survival used by only a small fraction of organisms, and even among the organisms that use intelligence as a solution, that intelligence doesn't have to be at the level exhibited by a rather small number of tool-using animals.
But it's going to be a long time before we figure out whether intelligence is rare or not. I don't think SETI is the answer, since incidental transmissions (like TV and radio) only propagate out a few light years before they become indistinguishable from ordinary background radio sources. No, I actually think we'll ultimately identify other civilizations through advancements in optical and radio telescopes which will betray tell-tale signatures like pollution in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets. That's still many years away, but eventually we're going to build large scale space-based interferometer array that will be sensitive enough to image continents and oceans on exoplanets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Lake County....
Is similiar to Nevada City, or Grass Valley, or other smaller towns in the Sierras (Only in the coast range instead.)
Most of the inhabitants are poor rural folk who chose to live out there to be away from the Big City. There's a big tourist trade out there because of Clearlake, Beryessa, and others, which makes them prime summer tourist attractions for yuppies with freshwater boats.
But I agree most of California especially has become downright oppressive for new housing builds.... unless you are a developer. That is where the real sickness is. It is harder for an individual to rebuild *THEIR OWN HOME* than it is for a developer to get ahold of farmland or protected land to bulldoze clear, pay any fines for destruction of native species (usually large oaks), and then pile in a few hundred homes costing 300-800k apiece. Meanwhile an individual owner is looking at a minimum of 30k in permitting costs, plus paying for new infrastructure (most of the big developers manage to weasel subsidies or concessions from the state because they are 'job makers' or 'improving demand for the city'.) to meet changes in code standards... Standards which the local government side of the equation hasn't even finished rolling out their end of the required infrastructure for. Lake Country is one of those, even as the creep of Bay Area housing starts driving costs up as people look for alternative commuting communities within range of the big city. (Santa Rosa, Petaluma, and anything closer is already seeing housing costs skyrocket as all the city assholes come in buying up properties and driving up costs for the poorer members of the community. 2x the cost in just the past 5 years.)
Wooosh!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
I wish people will stop saying in "my lifetime", it is very hard to judge, are you in your 20-ies and you imply that it is not possible even in 60-80 years, or are you in your 80-ies and imply it will not happen in the next 5-10 years?
Most scientists agree that AI will overtake today's average person intelligence by 2035. Who knows what we would do to our bodies by then. I would be very surprised if brain-computer interfaces, regenerative medicine, gene-editing, realistic artificial or 3D printed organic body parts, reduced or eliminated aging are not an everyday thing by then.
So basically it's like when we read that Bill Gates "invented" BASIC in the newspaper.
I think true atheists are more likely to go "Eh, god, what's it for?" than "God does exist !!!!" or "God does not exist !!!". Someone who truly doesn't worship doesn't need to fight instinct by consciously suppressing it. It's the same thing as that someone who's not a crook doesn't need to go around loudly proclaiming that.
I do think you're right that they're rare. The idea of a god is a very compelling one -- if it wasn't, theism wouldn't be so common.
Hehehe, nice! I think you are right. And if these two came up with it, we _know_ that it is a religion-surrogate.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm sure to Kurzweil it seems like an ever increasing exponential growth in knowledge, but to younger generations it looks like things are slowing way down, we keep "inventing" different variations of old technology.