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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.
People still take Kurzweil seriously?
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.
The second indicator is putting a date on the dawn of strong AI. We likely need a hardware breakthrough (I'm hopeful it'll be memristors, they look promising and we've already made them), but we also need a massive increase in our understanding of how a mind works, how it emerges from the physical properties of a brain, how to create a physical structure that can replicate that, and how to program instincts into it. Maybe that'll be in a dozen years, maybe it'll be in hundreds of years, and maybe we'll never figure it out because even a simplified model is too much for a human mind to work with.
I'm OK with smart machines (if we can instill them with a form of Asimov's Laws of Robotics), but I'm not holding my breath waiting for them. For now it looks like we're going to get mindless but very complex systems that can do most things better than humans, but still don't come anywhere near crossing the boundary to actual intelligence or self-awareness.
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
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.
Physical processes (as that is what the brain does) lead to a result you don't understand so it isn't actually a result of the physical processes? You listening to yourself here?
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.
Uh-huh. There is no evidence whatsoever for non-physical explanations of anything, the brain contains hundreds of billions of cells which work together in ways we're just gaining the barest understanding of, and you think the people who believe that could be the source of intelligence are the whack-jobs?
Dude, delusional doesn't even begin to explain what you are. And before you get off on your inevitable mindless rant, do keep in mind that "somebody said so" and "I don't understand it" do not constitute evidence.
It's not highly unscientific to claim that everything we observe in the universe has a physical cause (that is, a cause we can detect and observe) because science by its very nature deals only with observable reality. The idea that somehow because something is not fully understood we should assume a non-physical cause is illogical and goes against the principles of science.
Before you can argue for 'non-physical causes' you need to demonstrate that such exist, the burden of proof is on you to show that such processes are not only possible but actually real, and then further demonstrate how a non-physical process can be detected and how it can interact with the world. And if you did manage to somehow demonstrate such a cause and how it can be detected, guess what? At that point it's no longer a 'non-physical cause' but part of the natural world and the physical realm. This is precisely why substance dualism has not been taken seriously by anyone with half a brain for a couple of centuries: 'non-physical process' AKA 'soul' AKA magic is just a placeholder for 'things we do not yet understand."
You don't get to assert causes which have not been proven to exist and then claim that those causes are somehow responsible for things we have a thus far incomplete understanding of. That's a textbook case of argument from ignorance and the age-old theological argument rehashed:
-Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006)
-Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).
When the core of your argument lies on premises that could be understood to be false by men living over 300 years ago, you know you're in need of education.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead