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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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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 Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is.
I'm curious if there are different types of consciousness. For instance aside from size, the difference between dolphin, elephant and, human brains and the way they work. Does that make for a different type of consciousness? Or is consciousness the same and awareness is what is different?
You look into the eyes of an animal and you can see a conscious awareness. Apart from wanting food, sex and sleep what else is going on in those consciousnesses? A fast constantly aware consciousness of a dolphin whose brain is always half asleep and half awake to a slow type of conscious awareness of an elephant that isn't threatened by much of anything. It also seems that emotions are constants and that an animals experience of emotions is similar to ours (or ours to theirs), after all we seem to forget that we too are animals. But that stuff seems to be the chemical experience of life.
In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
What if the universe is consciousness? Not conscious, as in aware but actual consciousness. Simulations of reality would have to end somewhere and what if the explanation of the creation of the universe is only missing how consciousness relates to it. Our individual experience of reality is consciousness, but what if the manifestation of the universe itself came when consciousness became aware, and then aware of itself?
What if consciousness is not a function of complex systems in the universe and reality is the other way around. What if the universe and complex systems are a function of consciousness manifesting into reality? What if the 'big bang' was the universe saying 'I am' and every living creatures experience of reality is the universe observing itself?
Just a thought.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"...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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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