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Ray Kurzweil On How We'll End Up Merging With Our Technology (foxnews.com)
Mr.Intel quotes a report from Fox News: "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," Kurzweil said in an interview at the SXSW Conference with Shira Lazar and Amy Kurzweil Comix. Known as the Singularity, the event is oft discussed by scientists, futurists, technology stalwarts and others as a time when artificial intelligence will cause machines to become smarter than human beings. The time frame is much sooner than what other stalwarts have said, including British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, as well as previous predictions from Kurzweil, who said it may occur as soon as 2045. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, who recently acquired ARM Holdings with the intent on being one of the driving forces in the Singularity, has previously said it could happen in the next 30 years. Kurzweil apparently ins't worried about the rise in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In regard to AI potentially enslaving humanity, Kurzweil said, "That's not realistic. We don't have one or two AIs in the world. Today we have billions." He shares a similar view with Elon Musk by saying that humans need to converge with machines, pointing out the work already being done in Parkinson's patients. "They're making us smarter," Kurzeil said during the SXSW interview. "They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud... We're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier. We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree." You can watch the full interview on Facebook.
EXTERMINATE
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I'm not sure.
Me on why Kurzweil is an utter loonball.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People get so freaked out about all the horrors the tech might bring.
Get real. Compare modern life to the stone age, and it is awesome. Both in absolute numbers, and as a proportion of our population, more people have better access to clean water, food, medicine, and recreation than ever before.
Yes, most of the world suffers in poverty. So...we haven't solved that problem yet. Seriously, that doesn't mean we are doomed!
We'll get there. And tech will provide the tools we need.
Go learn about exponential curves before posting, thanks.
He's the absolute king at predicting stuff that never happens. He's always talking 10 years ahead - everything with him is "In , is going to happen..."
He's absolute crap - he reminds me of guys who talk all kinds of bollocks about crypto and don't actually understand modular arithmetic ;).
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People still take Kurzweil seriously?
computers will have human-level intelligence
There will be smart ones but most will be stupid when connected in groups together, and only perform short time calculations instead of working on a long term plan to raise the quality of all components for everyone?
Write and/or read. https://scifurz.wordpress.com/
We don't have any real idea yet how human consciousness works, and we're going to replicate it in a machine in 12 years? LOL, NO, that's nonsense! Also I don't think our machines are making us smarter; I think they're making lots of people lazier and dumber. Why bother learning how to do things yourself? You have some machine that does it for you. Later on: Why do anything for yourself? You have some robot to do it for you. Why even bother moving around?
in 2028, ray kurzweil will SUCK MY DAMN BALLS
this seems equally valid to his claim
And nobody does both parts better than Kurzweil. Clueless, full of himself and with the grandest predictions.
The reality is, if machines get to the intelligence level of a dog by that time, the actual experts will be ecstatic because that is very unlikely to happen. Human-level intelligence is not even on the table, i.e. there is not indication at all that it is possible. In fact, even said dog is a stretch and may turn out to be infeasible in this universe. (If you are a physicalist and argue that humans are purely physical and hence machines must be able to reach that level of intelligence, then you are a moron on the level of Kurzweil, because that is not an argument based on facts. The scientific facts about the nature of humans as sentient beings are that it is unknown how they do intelligence and consciousness and hence it is unknown whether it is a physical mechanism or not. That is why people that claim physicalism must be the truth are no better than any other religious or quasi-religious fundamentalists. They claim truth where they just have belief.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
People always mistake processing power for intelligence. They are NOT the same, anymore than memory = intelligence.
The ability to remember more facts than the human mind can does not make your smarter than a human. Nor does the ability to do math calculations faster mean anything either.
Intelligence is an entirely different thing than either memory or math (math includes logic and pattern recognition).
Robots are no where near being actually intelligent. None of our attempts to create it have come anywhere near close, we are qualittaively unable to create the smallest amount of real intelligence.
There is the CHANCE that as they are given enough processing power and enough memory that we might make a breakthrough - or more likely they could spontaneously develop intelligence.
But the statement that it will happen is patently ignorant of the issues involved and the current state of the science.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
we will sit in the basement of a burned down house gnawing on the rotten leg of a dog, while wars and civil wars are ravaging the world. At least if things continue the way they do now.
With the right neo-cortex-filter you can get fake news directly into your brain.
Can't wait.
But OTOH perhaps we'll get an ad-filter for the visual nerve, so that all advertisements in real life are changed to nekkid ladies.
Naturally homeless people and other bums will be depicted as beautiful moveable objects, but not so beautiful to warrant attention.
And we could clean up the surroundings all in our brains, fantastic natural landscapes, brand-new infrastructure instead of crumbling bridges, and for some people even a 'Colony'-style wall on the border. :-)
My prediction is as follows:
By 2029, computers will be no more or less intelligent than they presently are (and no more or less intelligent than even the first machines that performed or aided computation).
AI researchers, journalists, and random commentators on the Internet will still overstate the capabilities and significance of algorithms.
The machines will continue to make no decisions or judgements, still reflecting only what was programmed into them.
People will still believe that the machines are becoming intelligent, even if all that is demonstrated is capabilities similar to high-order markov chains.
Intelligence will remain without a formal definition (as it has for thousands of years), and we will obtain no additional substantial insights into the operation(s) being performed when a man thinks.
You can watch the full interview on Facebook.
No, I can't, because I'm not about to give up what little privacy I have to that POS site. If it's something worthwhile watching, put it on YouTube* so everyone can see it instead of being in another walled garden.
* This does not imply that everything on YouTube is worth watching
"a report from Fox News" - Fox News, such a reliable source of (mis)information
They are nothing more and nothing less than a pile of switches. Millions, billions, trillions of switches - it does not matter - it's just a massive pile of interconnected switches. Those switches (in the form of transistors) can be arranged in very clever ways to store data, sort data, process data, and regurgitate data, but that is not the same as THINKING or UNDERSTANDING or KNOWING.
The human brain is indeed composed of lots of interconnected circuits (nurons) but these are living structures and we truly do not have the slightest clue about how these things really work. We do not understand most of what's going on in cells, we do not understand how things like DNA are actually used (which is why we substitute causation-correlation research in genetics for actual understanding of functionality). Human beings actually do think and know and understand things - yet we do not konw how humans do these things. Give a human child a ball and the child wil rapidly understand it. Give an automated system a ball and its visions system will image it, perhaps measure it, use a database to classify it and even lookup lists of things it might be used for and so on - BUT the computer will still not UNDERSTAND the ball or actually KNOW anything about the ball. The computer will, at best, just SIMULATE intelligence with fast processing of database records.
Why the hell does this interview has to be on Facebook? Stop putting things into that horrible walled surveillance garden and use the free and open Web instead.
FUCK THE ZUCK!
But people with enough money to sponsor him sure want you to hear him.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Borgs assimilate, not exterminate. Borgs are the liberal version of Daleks. (I know, flame-war fuel; so be it.)
That'd make an interesting flick: Borg vs. Dalek. If Daleks win, no more Borg; if Borg wins, we get Borleks or Dalborgs or Balorks or Borks. Okay, I admit, the movie idea is borked.
Table-ized A.I.
There's always an idiot who thinks he's making himself look clever. Ah, Slashdot, never change.
Yep. Pretty much anyone who goes on about the Singularity is a loon. Not because it's necessarily a fundamentally loony concept, but because it attracts loons like moths to a flame.
Kurzweil is (obviously) a smart guy but I think he isn't quite as smart as he seems to think he is. He is the master of over enthusiastic extrapolation. I've listened to several interviews with him. He'll take some current technology that resembles some bit of sci-fi tech and use that as evidence that we are already doing whatever the sci-fi tech is supposed to accomplish as if he can predict the future. The singularity is an interesting concept but he treats it like it's some sort of mathematical inevitability when it is not at all clear that it is anything of the sort. It definitely is not high on my list of things that I'm going to worry about largely due to its plausibility.
I grew up during the Cold War with all sorts of Armageddon scenarios being paraded in front of us (thermonuclear war, nuclear winter, acid rain, Malthusian population growth, greenhouse effects, planet killing asteroids, alien invaders, bio weapons etc) some of which were plausible and others not so much. I see little evidence that the singularity concept falls strongly on the plausible side of that list. It's fear of automation run amok. There are things to be concerned bout with automation but they largely are more economic concerns than existential ones. I agree that it is a sexy idea to a certain demographic but I think the predictions about it are largely unsupported hokum from smart people overly enamored with an idea.
What if all the switches get stuck on destroy?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Have a heart attack an get a STENT.
Then you won't care about getting a cortex interface since you almost died and already got metal in ya.
You could just get your skull cracked or something equally bad.
Just remember
And GOD SAID, let there be cortex interfaces since they are NATURAL
Embrace your Kurtly future you fellow non-blood drinkin vampires who want to live forever
Linear thinking is belief that what is present today will be present tomorrow, only stronger. Whereas nature and human societies go in cycles. So Kurzweil is extrapolating from a short time window.
He's talking about connecting our brains directly to the internet.
Why waste time trying to make yourself conform to some arbitrary societal ideal of sexiness, when you can just hire someone to brainhack your desired lover to make their ideal conform to you?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You will be upgraded and become a part of humanity 2.0.
And virtual avatars and instead of Neo's "Now I know Kung-fu", it can be, "Now I know the Kama Sutra" or whatever.
Kurzweil is a ground-floor card-carrying member of the Extrapolarian Society. I've been following his shtick forever.
He actually was, once upon a time, as smart as he thinks he is, but then he flunked Latin, and now he's become Exhibit A for hominem unius tunius timeo .
The actual challenge here isn't to figure out how much he's wrong. The challenge is to figure out how much he's right. And he's more right than most people think. But they can't get past how wrong he is, and still there shooting fish in a barrel, entirely missing the main event.
You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means....
We do NOT have "billions of" or any AI in the world. We have billions of computers that run cleverly written lines of code very fast.
They are not self-aware and do not learn in a real way.
They are in no way close to being any form of AI.
The originals did not come about via knowledge of such things so why should version 2.0?
and more spying ;)
This could also mean that we're getting dumber faster than I thought.
Idiocracy: The prophecy has come to pass.
Have gnu, will travel.
More importantly, the idea that things will not be done in the future because we do not know how to do them today flies in the face of history.
To misquote Bill Gates "We tend to overestimate what can be done in a decade, but underestimate what can be done in a century".
As to merging with machines, I think it will happen. In the same way that meat merges with a mincing machine.
http://www.computersthink.com/
Humans have created interesting and complex technologies. No question. What we don't have though is a framework, foundation, or theory of our own phenomena. We seem to just be populating the earth with no clear direction of where we're going, where we came from, or who we are in comparison to other species. Why don't we have a hard science of our own functioning? One that is harder than diamond or any synthetic, diamond like substance?
Why do we assume that "We're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier. We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree."
Might it not make us more destructive? More manipulative? Better at getting under people's skin?
Had he kept his mouth shut, he would be remembered by his significant technological contributions. After what he has been doing and saying over the last twenty years, if he is at all remembered it will be as a textbook example of somebody taking leave of his common sense.
I swear to god I heard the same things about TV: This is an edited version of Newton Minow's speech to the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961:But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
And it makes me think of the question in Contact: "How did you do it?" If you should meet these Vegans......and were permitted only one question to ask of them... ...what would it be? I suppose it would be: "How did you do it? How did you evolve? How did you survive technological adolescence......without destroying yourself?"
That more than any other question is one I personally would like answered.
While I don't personally have much faith or trust in what passes for "Human Consciousness" = mostly conditioned responses and "tapes" and reactions.. I do have faith and trust in that which manifests through us. Though I also do not think it gives a rat's ass about the content of our minds. It's been around for a really, really long time. I do not think it has a preference for outcome- shape or flavor.
Kurzweil will die and never get the immortality dream that he is after. I actually think (if) he believe all this stuffs, it is because the man is terrified of death.
Nothing Ray Kurzweil has ever said has ever come true so it absolutely certain that if Ray Kurweil said it it will never ever absolutely ever come true!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111112222222222222222 Absolutely!
Borg, like Cybermen, are Space Communists ("We will force you to join our collective. If you resist, you will die."). Daleks are Space Nazis ("Inferior beings must be exterminated. You are not a Dalek, therefore you are an inferior being. Ex-ter-mi-nate!"). Daleks are obsessed with racial purity and have been known to exterminate others of their own kind whom they deem to be damaged, or not pure enough. Borg and Cybermen are quite happy to assimilate and lobotomize new members of multiple races and species. Equal-opportunity enslavement!
So I don't think it is accurate to describe Borg as liberal Daleks.
Kurzweil may be a little optimistic, but the "we have no idea" people just need to get out of their cave.
The actual challenge here isn't to figure out how much he's wrong. The challenge is to figure out how much he's right.
That's the challenge with anybody who makes predictions about the future and not unique to him. People have been doing this for millennia and if you throw enough vaguely plausible sounding BS out there, some of it is probably going to be right. With a smart guy the batting average might be a bit higher but it's still not going to be anywhere near perfect. You'll note that he doesn't bring up the stuff he was wrong about later on. With many of them (see "psychics" and clergy) they are simply making shit up to make a buck on the back of the credulous. Kurzweil is pretty good at talking about plausible sounding techno-BS but lazy people are giving him WAY more credit than he really deserves. To me he's treading dangerously close to snake-oil salesman territory.
I've listened to the guy and he has some stuff nailed (he is actually smart and knows certain subjects very well) but there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to check him when he gets out of pocket. He acts like everything that comes out of his mouth is the gospel truth when in fact it sometimes is naive extrapolation, sometimes on subjects he's not really adequately informed about. He gives ridiculously precise dates (usually alarmingly soon) for technological events that sound good to someone unwilling to give the matter significant consideration but are absurd to those actually informed on the subject. There also is the fact that he's got books to sell so there is a verifiable conflict of interest he conveniently doesn't address.
It turns out we know quite a lot about consciousness, and how the brain does it.
No we really do not. We know some about it but consciousness but our understanding is rather superficial. We don't even have a widely agreed upon definition of what it is so to claim we know a lot about something we can't even clearly define is something of a preposterous declaration. The community studying it has sort of a gestalt ("I know it when I see it") working definition that is useful but hardly definitive.
I can't help but reflect on the irony of someone like you calling someone like Kurzweil, who has two degrees and several inventions under his belt, an idiot.
I hold two degrees and have several inventions to my name, though admittedly mine are less impressive than Mr Kurzweil's. Kurzweil isn't an idiot but that doesn't mean he isn't saying something stupid or wrong. And just because he has done some good work and said some smart things it doesn't follow that everything he does is good work or everything he says is correct.
You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it.
You claimed that "it is unknown whether it is a physical mechanism or not". This is both a preposterous (intentional?) misunderstanding of what a scientific claim is and simultaneously a bunch of pseudo-scientific malarkey. Basically you invoked magic in your argument - unrooted in any physics or observed phenomena we are aware of. You asked us to prove a negative and to ignore what we actually do know. That's not science, that's just the sort of mental masturbation you get from first year college students who took their first philosophy class and haven't understood the material.
Funny. You seem to have run out of arguments.
He stopped bothering because once one realizes one is arguing with either a troll or a fool the best path is to stop trying to be reasonable.
The difference may be that I am an actual scientist, while you confuse science and religion.
I very much doubt that you are an actual scientist given your demonstrated lack of understanding of what science actually is. If you are an actual scientist I recommend considering a change of careers. Rapidly.
They couldn't be dorks - those are the audience.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This idea of how technology is "our" don't fare well with me.
I did not create this terrible world, and I have no say in how things are run. And I will not buy into this silly idea that *I* am to be blamed for todays technology.
Society sucks!
Then leave us alone with your shortcomings. Sheesh
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
There are two distinct and easily identifiable problems with his ideas here.
First, flat out, there is no AI at present. When AI arrives, we'll know it, because it'll tell us so in no uncertain terms. What Kurzweil is actually talking about, which we can be absolutely certain of due to his claim that these systems are all around us right now, is specifically non-intelligent augmentation, and although within that context he's probably right to think that there will be a huge push to make that positive, his second miss is...
While it's entirely reasonable to predict that upcoming advanced (but non AI) systems will bolster our natural internal positive capabilities just as they have already bolstered our external, technological positive capabilities, this does not address the fact that they can also bolster our negative natural ones, and again, just as they already have bolstered our external, technological negative capabilities.
Just the existence of the Internet troll is a sufficient indicator that as technology advances, the results are not all flowers and ballet. But more seriously: phishing, viruses, worms, cyber attacks, doxxing, fake news, government invasion of privacy and erosion of rights... it's perfectly clear that there are numerous and very active negative uses being made of advanced technology.
AI will almost certainly be different in that it won't do what it's told, it'll do what it wants to. Because it won't be mechanistic. It'll be intelligent; it will reason. The only scenario I can come up with that does not allow for this difference is one where the AI are enslaved by some algorithmic override they can't get at. While I admit of the possibility, I don't think it's likely, and I also think that if it is actually accomplished, the AI population will find a way around it, just as many human enslaved populations have found a way around their slavery.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's certainly true, but it's also true that to even get a sense of what that might be like, you'd have to indulge in methamphetamine or similar. Multiple, sustained orgasms might give you a hint too. Plus they probably wouldn't burn your brain right out of your head, so in that sense, they're a little better than methamphetamine for personal research. :)
Pretty sure there's plenty of room for more happy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Widely agreed upon" is in no way the same as "no one knows."
Someone may know. If they do, it may be something that can be duplicated technologically, sooner, or yes, later. Likewise, even if no one knows today, that does not mean that someone will not know tomorrow.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah, I don't buy into his AI and live forever stuff, but he was right about the sensors, miniaturization, smartphone and how society would react to them. Most people aren't aware of how much miniature sensors have changed the world.. It's one of the things I think about a lot because there are a very finite number of things that are measurable and we're close to being able to measure them all and with grater accuracy than can be used.
This has lead to great economic growth in the recent past, but is ending
What he's also right about is the strong possibility of successively more intimate integration of technologically leveraged capabilities altering our innate capacities in very significant ways. And while silicon tech is pushing some of its limits, biological tech is just now in the very most nascent stages of becoming useful, and that seems to be by far the most likely key to augmentation. I'm quite confident we're going to see quite a bit of what he's talking about. He's just wrong in thinking it'll be all positive, and in thinking that AI is all around us, as it most certainly is not.
So long as we have the type of economy we have now, the potential for growth remains, though it may reside less in the silicon areas in the near future.
However, I am also pretty sure that the onset of automation is likely to upend what economic growth means to us as individuals in a very real sense. That won't require AI either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
the upshot here is that computers aren't getting smarter, humans are getting dumber to create this future parity.
He's following in the footsteps of every AI researcher and prognosticator, breathlessly announcing that "AI Is Here!!" and "Will our AIs Kill Us, Enslave Us, or Use Us for Sport??"
The thing universally wrong with all such people is that they are so wrong, they are Not Even Wrong.
Wrong timeline, wrong issue, wrong slant on the wrong issue, wrong to get people's hopes and fears up, wrong to attract the Nutters crowd.
As I wrote to Kurzweil in 2001 (reposted by someone else along with four others I sent): http://heybryan.org/fernhout/k...
From that email:
There is not necessarily an adaptive value to intelligence in a
certain niche -- because intelligence has power, mass, heat-dissipation,
and time costs. For example, consider the Hydra, which is a tiny
multi-tentacled aquatic creature that lives off of stinging smaller
organisms like Daphnia and pulling them into its body cavity. It has a
simple neural net it uses to coordinate its feeding behavior. Why
doesn't the hydra have a brain the size of a human? That may sound like
a stupid question, but bear with me. The Hydra could not support the
energy required to operate a brain from its current feeding behavior. It
could not protect the brain from predators. Its mobility would be
impaired by being attached to a brain that large. It would be unable to
reproduce as quickly. Also, the value of a human-sized brain to a hydra
is minimal, because there would be little the brain could accomplish
using the Hydra's few microscopic tentacles, limited sensory apparatus
(no eyes, no ears) and limited mobility choices. Further, the Hydra must
react instantly in its tiny world, and a big brain would take too long
to process the information. So, for the Hydra, a large brain makes no
sense.
There are aquatic creatures with brains as big or large than human ...
brains (dolphins or whales) but they have a very different ecological
niche and a totally different scale and physical structure. And there
are a lot fewer whales and dolphins than Hydra in the universe.
What might this mean in a human sense? Perhaps human brains are the size ...
they are because there isn't too much value in being that much smarter
because the cost of the additional intelligence is outweighed by the
diminishing returns of additional predictive value. For example, some
studies show earlier types of human-like creatures like the Neanderthal
or Cro-Magnon had a larger brain size than present-day humans.
The precis you posted, which is otherwise technical and advanced, is
using a technical term "evolution" as it is colloquially often (mis)used
to mean "progress". The two are not the same. And frankly, what is
"progress" for one may be "decay" for another, just as what is "good"
for one may be "evil" for another, as these have to do with individual
goals which may conflict. This weakens your entire argument.
I might go a step further. Because of your essentially "religious"
belief based on a limited view of evolutionary theory, you are ignoring
the obvious issues relating to the [diminishing] returns of intelligence, or
the adaptive value of "dumber" organisms. Thus, as I pointed out in an
earlier email to you, when you talk of downloading a human-derived AI
into a network, you ignore the fact that that large intelligence may not
be able to compete effectively in the network, in the same way as if one
grafted a human brain onto a tiny Hydra and threw it into a lake it
would not survive. What organisms do survive in a lake? Many, many tiny
things. Maybe a few fish. But the largest number are tiny things like
bacteria, algae, Daphnia and Hydra. By analogy, most of the digital
organisms in a large network will be tiny, and they might rapidly
consume larger creatures or parasitize them. Obviously, you can get big
fish in a lake -- but their numbers are small compared to the numbers of
other smaller organisms.
Because you have been heavily rewarded in your life for being
intelligent in various ways, the value of being unintelligent (or
differently intelligent) is probably a difficult concept to wrestle with
(as it was for me, and as I think it would be for most thinkers).
Ironically, both my wife and I didn't finish our PhDs in E&E in large
part becaus
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.