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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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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..."
Who is Ray Kurzweil? Why should I care what he thinks? Why is he important enough for his opinion to matter to me?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prospects are 3hosen/, whatever
Most of that land could be described as "brownfield land" the land has a past history of people living on it. Depending on how far away you are from a town the first thing you do is create your cesspool, if you are reasonably close to a town you bury a container usually a second-hand back of a truck to act as a cesspool. If you're not near a town you dig out a large cesspool in the ground where the body fluids will stay.
Depending on your income and how close you are to a town, you will have to pay somebody to remove your rubbish, or you bury it.
If you are reasonably close to a town you will have to buy your water supply. You will have to pay to have electrical wiring and piping laid.
If you are reasonably close to a roadside you will have to pay the telephone company to run telephone cables onto your land.
Because of the waste products you create you will have vermin and thus you will need dogs to kill the rats to keep the numbers down.
Depending on your rainfall you will probably need to shovel up dog shit if you have a lot of rain it will be washed into the ground and not require shovelling up.
And if you like to eat other animals you will need livestock and you will need food for the livestock.
I lived this life as a kid, and it is lots and lots of muddy fields and shit. And underneath those fields is all your waste products pollution.
In the towns cities it is out of sight out of mind and in the "countryside" or outback you are just constantly trying to discover new ways of getting rid of your pollution waste products.
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not so much.
I'm not sure why a futurist telling us the obvious is worth posting?
-Styopa
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.