Futurist Sees Machines, Humans Merging in 2045 (Ray Kurzweil alert)

LA Times ^ | 4/16/2006 | James Harkin

[Dark Skies]

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist, has stumbled on a discovery of earth-shattering importance. It is the arrival of "singularity," and according to him it will happen in 2045.

"Gradually," he writes at the beginning of "The Singularity Is Near," "I've become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the 21st century … the impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality."

Singularity, Kurzweil says, is a development "representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" and a "radical upgrading of our bodies' physical and mental systems."

[B-Chan]

Some scientists tend to paint their conception of reality with the colors that are popular at a given time. When Isaac Newton was the reigning savant, the peak of technology was the mechanical clock; therefore, the human mind was deemed to be a clockwork mechanism, deterministic and mechanical. Computers are the technology du jour; therefore, RayKay thinks consciousness is something like a computer program -- a program capable of running on any appropriate platform.

I beg to disagree.

As for Moore's Law: expecting a computer to become conscious simply because it has more processing power is like expecting a car to fly because it has more horsepower. "In accordance with Ford's Law, autombiles are becoming faster, more powerful, and cheaper at an ever-increasing rate. For example, ten years ago, in 1913, most automobiles had four cylinder engines producing fifty horsepower or so at a cost of five hundred dollars. Today, eight cylinders, one hundred horsepower and $750 is the norm, and plans for cars with sixteen-cylinder engines developing more than two hundred horsepower are on the drawing boards. These fantastic machines will cost only eight hundred dollars in today's money. By 1963, we can expect to see cars being sold at a cost of $843.75. These cars will be equipped with 128-cylinder engines cranking out an amazing sixteen hundred horsepower, enabling them to fly, drive across water, and travel through time. At that point, mankind's ability to comprehend auto travel will come to an end -- a sort of "autopia" will come into being, beyond which nothing about driving can be known."

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

[ThePythonicCow]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Good quote.

[ThinkDifferent]

When Isaac Newton was the reigning savant, the peak of technology was the mechanical clock; therefore, the human mind was deemed to be a clockwork mechanism, deterministic and mechanical. Computers are the technology du jour; therefore, RayKay thinks consciousness is something like a computer program -- a program capable of running on any appropriate platform.

The two concepts are equivalent. (Any "clockwork mechanism" can be simulated by a Turing machine, and vice versa). The fundamental question is whether consciousness is a physical and non-supernatural phenomenon. If so, then a computer with the appropriate software would be conscious according to any standard by which humans are. Of course, creating that software is a bit of a challenge.

[ThePythonicCow]

There are a couple of elements of these futurist singularity scenarios that seem highly implausible to me.

Computers are idiot savants: they have whatever highly specialized skills are programmed into them, but without the intentions, emotions, dreams, beliefs, drives or ambitions that humans have, making us the dominant species on this planet.

Computers don't have the millenia of history, culture, civilization, government, literature, technology, economics and religion, highly attuned to their circumstances, abilities and limitations, that have been required to turn humans from small bands of roving tribes into the huge nation states and thriving world economy we have now.

There is a profound confusion in all this between the physical capacities of the brain and the power of the mind. Many layers of 'programs', both individual and social, are required to get from one to the other. The idiot savant is a good example of someone with a brain, but without these other layers well developed.

When we take a few tons of steel and make a Cat 9 bulldozer, we make something that is far stronger than a human and more capable of moving earth. And at the same time we make something that cannot fly, sinks like a rock, cannot bring thousands of commuters from Long Island to Manhattan on Monday morning, and cannot do any of the thousands of other tasks that that same steel could have been put to.

When we load up a computer simulation of Black Holes on a supercomputer such as Columbia (see further Simulation Breakthrough: When Black Holes Collide) we have a computer that can compute that one program very fast, but that is not doing anything else, not even as trivial as browsing FreeRepublic.com. If we want to do something else with that computer, such as analyze the impact of foam insulation falling off a Space Shuttle booster, then we have to reprogram it, which, albeit easier, is rather like melting down the Cat 9 bulldozer and making something else from the steel.

These computers are the idiot savants of our time.

Making them another thousand or million times more powerful, as we are working on doing, just increases the savant part, doesn't remove the idiot part.

There is still a vast distance between machine and man, that will not be breached in the lifetime of any of us alive today, if ever.

Some religious people might say that yes, of course, humans have a God given spirit that machines lack. While I would not use those words (I'm a god-damned atheist), those words are much closer to the truth than anything in the writings of Kurzweil.

I am not building low IQ human substitutes, of rapidly increasing IQ. I am building computational bulldozers.

[NicknamedBob]

"Computers don't have the millenia of history, culture, civilization, government, literature, technology, economics and religion, highly attuned to their circumstances, abilities and limitations, that have been required to turn humans from small bands of roving tribes into the huge nation states and thriving world economy we have now."

Humans don't have that either, at first. They require an extensive period of absorption and integration before it becomes a part of their sensory gestalt. For a computer mind, the absorbing might come a little more easily, and the integration with a great deal more difficulty.

Boiling this down, you are essentially saying the same thing that Kurzweil is saying.

Humans are self-programming multifunction organisms.

Machines are externally programmed single-purpose devices.

So combining the two, with a transparent, intuitive interface, we create a self-programming entity with undefined capabilities.

Now, if the design function of the computer is to find information and make correlations, then the human would appear to be unusually bright and resourceful.

That may be exactly what Kurzweil is anticipating.

[ThePythonicCow]

Kurzweil is saying more than that. He is not saying that technology will augment humans making as you say the human to "appear to be unusually bright and resourceful.".

He is saying that intelligence will vastly overrun humans, on a scale and capacity trillions and trillions larger and more powerful than human civilization.

Humans will be to this post singularity intelligence as chemical molecules are to humans.

I found some useful quotes from Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology on the web page http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=13&t=7814&s= :

---

Epoch Five:

The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence. Looking ahead several decades, the Singularity will begin with the fifth epoch. It will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. The fifth epoch will enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations of a mere hundred trillion extremely slow connections.

The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution. But the Singularity will also amplify the ability to act on our destructive inclinations, so its full story has not yet been written.

Epoch Six:

The Universe Wakes Up. I will discuss this topic in chapter 6, under the heading ".. on the Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos." In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation (based on limits we will discuss in chapter 3) to spread out from its origin on Earth.

Like most trends, they start out seeming to be linear, then seem to become exponential, then cap off. It's the famous 'S' curve:

Overly timid prognosticators early in the trend project the linear growth, and undershoot. Overly optimistic prognosticators in the increasingly steep part of the trend project continuing exponential growh, and overshoot.

Kurzweil is a classic case of the overshooter.

[NicknamedBob]

"He is saying that intelligence will vastly overrun humans, on a scale and capacity trillions and trillions larger and more powerful than human civilization."

Some of us find the force, direction, and intentions of our societies beyond our ability to predict or comprehend. I am sure it will be like that, but I don't quite see a qualitative difference.

Some may complain that the machine intellect will be soulless, and lack a controlling spiritual force other than driving ambition of some sort.

Others may be concerned that it won't.

[ThePythonicCow]

See my signature ...

Kurzweil is presenting the leading edge of the secular movement, in the guise of current day technology. He is saying we can create enough intelligent technology to flood the Universe with its new light.

Somehow the morality, the truth seeking, the spiritual wonder, that guides humans is lost. It's heaven on earth, thanks to transistors, nanotech robots and the like.

Deeply dangerous crap.

[NicknamedBob]

"Kurzweil is presenting the leading edge of the secular movement, ..."

He may even think that it is a good thing, but I don't think he is doing anything other than that to promote it and to bring it about.

He is simply predicting it. If we should be truly concerned that an unguided intellect would lead us to a dystopian future, perhaps now would be the time to consider what could be done to give that mechanistic intellect a conscience.

How shall we do that?

[Sarajevo]

But you're certainly right that any potentially world-changing technology should be extremely well tested before widespread release.

Like Windows 95/98/ME?

[Sarajevo]

What the hell is the list of job requirements for the "Futurist" position?

Being a human-machine hybrid/inventing a perpetual motion machine/ and using it to power the time machine to find Atlantis. Sounds like a StarGate episode or two...:-)

Don't any of these folks have real jobs?

No, they're just actors. Or should we credit the screenwriters?

[ThePythonicCow]

He is simply predicting it.

No - he is not simply predicting. He is deeply optimistic about the technology rich future he predicts, and seemingly oblivious to the deeper issues of spirit that will have a far greater impact on our future.

If we should be truly concerned that an unguided intellect would lead us to a dystopian future, perhaps now would be the time to consider what could be done to give that mechanistic intellect a conscience.

No - that is emphatically not my primary concern. My concern is not whether some future robot has a soul, but whether our current secular culture destroys our own souls, and leaves our children to live in tyranny.

We are engaged in a life and death struggle with tyranny, in many disguises, including communism, socialism, Islam, some in the Republican party and many in the Democrat party, the drive by media, Universities and teachers unions, the federal bureaucracies, Hollywood, the United Nations, much of 'old' Europe, and others.

The essential delusion behind all these leftist fools is the belief that we can build Heaven on Earth, that we have gone past the old fogey backwards religious delusions of our ancestors and can now do far better.

Kurzweil is serving a vital role in this mass delusion, painting a compelling picture of this "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley).

[djf]

Lately, it seems as though the wilder the claims, the greater the coverage and accolades.

Pop science, I guess.

[NicknamedBob]

"He is deeply optimistic about the technology rich future he predicts ..."

So am I.

"My concern is not whether some future robot has a soul, but whether our current secular culture destroys our own souls, and leaves our children to live in tyranny."

I suspect you will not like what I have to say next. "... whether our current secular culture destroys our own souls ..." does not depend upon our secular culture, nor can it be blamed for that.

We have the obligation to find enlightenment, no matter the circumstance. Perhaps it is more difficult for the rich to enter Heaven, and it may be that our increasing knowledge will lighten the burden of labor for many, and enrich us all.

But I do not believe we would be better off poor.

[I got the rope]

BTTT

[ThePythonicCow]

But I do not believe we would be better off poor.

Neither do I. I have no clue what made you suspect otherwise.

You changed the subject on me. You said he was simply predicting. I said no, he was more than predicting; he was very positive about the future he predicted.

Then you reversed direction, as if I were some anti-technologist, and waxed optimistic yourself on such a future.

I give up. Have a good day.

[ThePythonicCow]

Lately, it seems as though the wilder the claims, the greater the coverage and accolades.

Yup - nice point.

[djf]

I can't figure what is more exciting... some of the stuff that passes for 'science' these days, or watching NBC's "Dead Celebrity Cookoff".

[Thunder90]

We are the borg... You will be assimilated... Resistance is Futile...

[Dark Skies]

Sorry dude, we have evolved. You have assimilated our sewage...

But (as they say) better late than never.

Please flush those floating lumps...