Google Hired A Man Who Believes He Will Bring His Father Back To Life [Misleading Title Alert!]

Business Insider ^ | 12/27/2012 | Nicholas Carlson

[SeekAndFind]

A lot of what they build in Silicon Valley these days is pretty mundane: sexting apps, social games, and new ways to "share" things over the Internet.

So it's pretty exciting when you hear about someone who has some really crazy ideas for what the future might hold.

One such person is a new Google hire named Ray Kurzweil.

The geeks among you already know who he is.

But I only learned about him from a Bloomberg BusinessWeek story by Ashlee Vance.

In it, Vance writes about Kurzweil's plans to…

…Bring his dead father back to life.

…Help humanity “live long enough to live forever” and "transcend biology."

…Engineer the "singularity," which is in Vance's words, "the moment when superintelligent machines light up with something approximating life and either destroy humanity or carry it to unimaginable heights."

At Google, Kurzweil will have funding to pursue all these ambitions and more.

[farlander]

And how’d that work out? They made themselves Law Zero.

[farlander]

As I said, Asimov’s bots made themselves a Law Zero, allowing them to kill individuals for the good of Humanity (and they get to be the arbiters of that).

Screw that. I’ll pass.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

He speaks of life; yet, says humanity should be destroyed.

He says nothing of the kind. Even this Business Insider article, which is a mistake-filled rehash of a rather foolish Bloomberg article, doesn't claim that.

[Moonman62]

Doncha just love these fascistic, mad scientists who love to ‘play god’?

How do you know God doesn't want them to "play god?"

[presently no screen name]

Help him build the Tower of Babel, then.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Help him build the Tower of Babel, then.

Please try to understand what exactly you're criticizing before you criticize. The Business Insider article misrepresents Kurzweil, his work and his views badly and also misquotes the Bloomberg article it's supposedly based on. It's sensationalistic nonsense written by someone who didn't bother to find out much about his subject.

[presently no screen name]

Thanks. Then why would someone waste bandwidth to start a thread from a known pack of liars, The Business Insider, on some employee Goggle hired? Short of news?

[Hot Tabasco]

…Bring his dead father back to life.

I think it was on the new version of "The Outer Limits" where they had a story of a guy that was cryogenically frozen after he died.

Years later the body was brought back to life but without a soul since the soul had left following his death.

Without a soul the guy was pure evil and started killing people..........

[Boogieman]

You’re the one avoiding his words. Where did he advocate destruction? Advocating an event that could lead to destruction, or in another direction, is not advocating destruction. Otherwise, advocating free elections would be the same as advocating for Obama to be president.

As for “what others did”, I was simply trying to illustrate that this is a commonly understood idea amongst people that think about these issues, because you seem to have misunderstood it. That’s why I’m not “reading his mind”; anyone who talks about the ethical issues of intelligent machines is well familiar with the kind of scenario he is talking about, because it’s a textbook problem.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Then why would someone waste bandwidth to start a thread from a known pack of liars, The Business Insider, on some employee Goggle hired? Short of news?

I said nothing about Business Insider being a known pack of liars. What's undeniable is that this is an article in a business publication written by a reporter who did none of his own work but instead chose to misquote and sensationalize an already shallow article written in another publication. In summary, it was a silly article that left readers with a grossly distorted picture of Kurzweil, the Singularity, and other topics.

There are plenty of well-rounded, intelligent critiques and appraisals of Kurzweil's work and views that will actually give you a pretty good idea of who the man is and what he says, if you want them. This article was not one of them, and it did it's readers a dis-service.

[Dark Knight]

The real future is always stranger than we can imagine. Aging or rather the causes of aging are being identified, and we may be the last few generations to involuntarily die by time itself. Freezing is just a very expensive funeral choice if you disbelieve in coming back to life, but the technology for the frozen to come back is certainly less expensive than those that have been burnt...LOL.

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, but AI singularity is probably unavoidable. When machines develop the capability of self evolution, Moore’s Law will decrease from 18 months to something significantly smaller. My guess would be in the range of the difference between chemical reactions to electrical ones... like milliseconds to nanoseconds, give or take a few orders of magnitude. Moore’s Law dropping from 500 days to half a day for a doubling would not be out of the potential realm. After a month of doubling what would the machine AI be thinking? Good luck!

Aubrey de Grey is on the cutting edge of aging, and he believes it is not impossible for the next generation to live a LONG TIME.

>>De Grey argues that the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine mostly already exists, and that the science is ahead of the funding. He works to identify and promote specific technological approaches to the reversal of various aspects of aging, or, as de Grey puts it, “the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us<<

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, but AI singularity is probably unavoidable.

I agree - what I question is Kurzweil's time-frame, and his attempt to apply Moore's Law to any field in which computers can be involved. The field of artificial intelligence is a good example - I remember the AI classes I took back in college in the early '90s, and the state of the art simply doesn't seem to have advanced very much since then; there's certainly been no exponential growth.

This is even more true for the biomedical and nanotechnology advances that will be needed for humans to achieve the sort of longevity that Kurzweil talks about. Aside from whether Moore's Law is even applicable to these fields, Kurzweil overlooks all of the economic, political and social obstacles. The US, Europe and Japan are risk-averse nanny states in which bio-engineering and medical innovation are smothered by regulations and trial lawyers. The FDA doesn't even acknowledge aging as a medical issue in need of treatment or cures. Companies know this, and make their research funding decisions accordingly.

There's no question in my mind that many or most of Kurzweil's projections will inevitably happen (and I can only admire not only his genius but his courage in stating his views), but they'll happen in fits and starts, with more than a few regressions.

[Dark Knight]

Very true. The future is full of twists and turns that will happen but no one will predict. Will the nature of patents mean that India and China will take a lead on the issue? Do we even have an idea what a self evolving AI is? What can be the timeline be like and what will be the identifiable milestones? That’s for good science fiction writers. Science historians will have another take.

DK