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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.
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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."
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?
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. :-)
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
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.
It's an unsolvable problem. In the distant future, poor people will own star systems, middle class will own their own star clusters, the rich will own galaxies and the .0001% will own galaxy clusters
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.
Not to be a negative nellie, but I think it is fair to say that there is a limit to how happy people can become and that there is a turning point in civilization, beyond which life for the average citizen doesn't get much better and can always get much worse. More people check out every year. Welfare participation has been increasing per capita since the 70's. I don't really see poverty decreasing in the near future with Trump taking away all funding except to the military.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
Are you sure about that?
Average life expectancy, excluding child mortality, has only increased moderately since the stone age.
They only had to work a few hours per day to provide food, clothing, etc., so they likely had a lot more free time than anyone with a "real job" does today.
Their work directly contributed to the survival and well-being of themselves and their families, no pointless soul-killing jobs for a paycheck.
They already had alcohol and other drugs, and many board games.
Nobody was dramatically richer than anyone else, and political corruption was limited to what the leaders could personally convince their tribe was a good idea.
They had never seen daytime television or Hollywood movies.
Honestly, in a lot of ways I think "civilization" has been an elaborate ponzi scheme, with only a select few truly benefiting.
--- 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.
The originals did not come about via knowledge of such things so why should version 2.0?
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/
Interesting. There are still parts of the world where you could go and live at that technology level, and live that lifestyle.
And yet, you aren't jumping at the chance.
Why is that, exactly?
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.
Please name one AI that "imitates intelligent human behavior". Chess/go/checkers playing computers is the wrong answer.
Who says I'm not?
It's not necessary to forgo technology to opt out of the rat race of modern society, you just have to be willing and able to recognize and reject the majority of it's cultural precepts.
Technology itself is not the problem - the problem is in the cultures that have co-developed with it. To the point that modern society does not actually offer a clearly superior quality of life.
Allow me to turn your question back on itself - if modern society is so vastly superior to the alternative, why are there still so many parts of the world where people haven't leapt at the opportunity to join us?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
At least you have, or many have, the choice to drop out and live a quasi stone age or Amish existence.
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.
Arguably all apperance of intelligence, natural or artificial, is nothing more than immitation of other intelligent behaviour.
AI can most definitely be real intelligence, but it is intelligence that just happens to be artificial, rather than (implicitly) natural. Natural is fairly well defined... it refers to things that are produced entirely by natural phenomenon, such as evolution, which has led to human beings having what we call intelligence. Artificial is anything that that isn't natural, so we're good to go on that term. Now if you could just find a way for everyone to agree on what "intelligence" is, then we'd actually have a way of measuring objectively how close we are to achieving AI (or if or when we already have). Until we have done so, however, it is impossible to know how far along we actually are.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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!
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."
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
You're out of your mind. The amount of work that had to be done just to feed yourself varied wildly based on location. At absolute best, yes, you only had to work a couple of hours a day. At worst, and much more common, you were perpetually on the edge of starvation and constantly looking for food. You are whatever you could find or kill. Today your local grocery store has a larger variety of foods that any king could have ever wished for a couple of hundred years ago.
You also leave out the complete lack of effective medical treatment. Any scrape you got could get infected and kill you. Everyone was perpetually infested with lice and other kinds of insects feeding off of you, not to mention all of the species of fungus that would live in your crevices. If you were lucky, your toilet was a river.
Sure everyone was almost equal, equally shitty.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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.
>You have changed the subject. We were talking about technology.
No, we're not. From the comment I replied to:
> Compare modern life to the stone age, and it is awesome
The technology has improved a lot, there's precious little evidence that the quality of life has done so as well, and some evidence that the opposite is true.
As for your digression on Trump's wall - that's irrelevant. I was talking about stone-age cultures not jumping ship to join the modern world. Mexico, etc. are already fully culturally invested in modern consumerist culture, they're just near the bottom of the heap so of course they want to climb - climbing into reach of bigger and better things is an incredibly pervasive theme in modern consumerist cultures. There's just very little evidence that it contributes anything to quality of life.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I had no idea our ancestors were so incompetent that they were often on the edge of starvation and had to eat anything they found, when clearly that is not the normal situation for any other wild animal.
As for the wide variety of foods at the grocery store - I'll admit I believe I enjoy it, but it has nothing directly to do with quality of life. In fact, numerous studies have shown that having more than a very few choices actually *lowers* happiness - the belief that having more options make us happier is actually self delusion.
As for being killed by a scratch, you are correct - and that continued to be the case until we began using penicillin in 1942 (and there's a very real chance that it will again be the case in the relatively near future as antibiotic resistance spreads). Nevertheless antibiotic poultices were almost certainly used for wounds even in the stone age - even wild animals make use of various forms of herbal medicine.
And the fact remains that even with all those people who died from scratches, life expectancy was still almost as high as it was today - so obviously it was actually a fairly minor concern (or something else has started killing us almost as fast)
Cant say I miss the parasites, I'll give you that one. The fungi and such that live in my crevices though? They're still there, in your crevices too, and you'd be smart to appreciate them, they keep you healthy. Dirty, microbe-rich skin is typically healthier than the clean ideal we've recently become infatuated with. We're multicellular interlopers in a world completely dominated by microbes, maintaining a healthy population of symbiotes helps keep the malignant ones at bay.
> If you were lucky, your toilet was a river.
No, that would be if you were stupid. Even most wild animals avoid soiling their water source.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.