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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.
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?
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.
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.
There's nothing quasi about it. OTOH, his predictions of smaller ubiquitous computers - smartphones and people making relationships with them - was spot on. Not exactly his original idea, but popularized by him. And that was during a time when tower computing was all the rage and the concept of a supercomputer in your pocket was something few people were realistically talking about other than when trying to describe moore to people.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.