Futurists/Ray Kurzweil

[CrayZee]

So I bumped into an online lecture by Ray Kurzweil. Seemed interesting enough.

Tell me what you think of this guy. Is his stuff worth reading or is he kooky?

While the robot chickens probably won't dominate the earth by 2203, I still have a hard time believing the short time frame he believes people will be able to achieve much longer life spans. Perhaps this is a misunderstanding/underappreciation of the exponential gains in technology on my part.

[Rduke55]

He's pretty kooky.
He's making HUGE uninformed assumptions about a lot of things because of his knowledge of technology. He's pretty weak on how the brain actually works.
Actually it seems his knowledge of biology as a whole is shaky.

I think there's a bunch of criticism on the net on a bunch of his ideas from some experts in various fields.

[CrayZee]

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He's making HUGE uninformed assumptions about a lot of things because of his knowledge of technology. He's pretty weak on how the brain actually works.
Actually it seems his knowledge of biology as a whole is shaky.

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I'm supremely weak when it comes to chemistry, biology, etc., so I could be a sucker for unwittingly agreeing with this stuff. I mean his lecture seemed logical, but yeah, bad assumptions lead to garbage in, garbage out problems.

Speaking of which, I wonder if a lot of technology guys have this black box-type of thinking bias that extends to areas they know less about. It is tempting to infer things when you don't look inside the box...

[Rduke55]

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Speaking of which, I wonder if a lot of technology guys have this black box-type of thinking bias that extends to areas they know less about. It is tempting to infer things when you don't look inside the box...

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I think this is a very good statement.

[madnak]

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He's pretty kooky.

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And "technological progress" can't be quantified, nor does it fit the curve his proponents suggest.

[Metric]

Some of his specific prediction are a bit "out there", but I think he has an excellent point about the exponential growth of technology -- it is virtually guaranteed to have profound effects on humanity. I agree though -- some of the specific timetables he outlines may be a bit, shall we say, "optimistic."

[Phil153]

Only the speed and storage of technology has been growing exponentially, and at some point in the not too distant future it will reach fundamental phsyical barriers.

Computers technology today is identical to the first big vacuum tube model from the 1950s, just faster and smaller. There has been virtually no progress in a computer's ability to think or learn, just to solve certain very narrow computational problems more rapidly.

Ray Kurzweil (and all the singularists, who crack me up) are way off track.

[vhawk01]

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Only the speed and storage of technology has been growing exponentially, and at some point in the not too distant future it will reach fundamental phsyical barriers.

Computers technology today is identical to the first big vacuum tube model from the 1950s, just faster and smaller. There has been virtually no progress in a computer's ability to think or learn, just to solve certain very narrow computational problems more rapidly.

Ray Kurzweil (and all the singularists, who crack me up) are way off track.

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He does make a good point in his book along these lines, although I don't know for sure if its what you are saying exactly. What type of thing would a computer have to be able to do for you to consider it some fundamental leap? And if some computer was able to do this, how likely do you think it would be that people would say what you just said about THAT accomplishment and move the bar further?

I dont really know enough about the way the mind works to have any useful opinion on this. But it seems like raw computing power increases may, at least theoretically, be enough.

[Phil153]

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What type of thing would a computer have to be able to do for you to consider it some fundamental leap? And if some computer was able to do this, how likely do you think it would be that people would say what you just said about THAT accomplishment and move the bar further?

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A computer would have to be made of a material that can form a self organizing system, building up layers of meaningful abstraction from some input. At the moment computers are a bunch of switches that people can flick on and off. Nothing more. There is no inate capacity for intelligence or learning and there never can be with this structure. A capacity for learning needs to be tied to the material itself to become possible.

Building this material will likely prove to be as difficult as designing a bird's brain from carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. We are centuries away from the level of complex understanding required to build such a structure, let alone the engineering skills.

As soon a computer can satisfy the above, a singularity becomes theoretically possible. Though it may well be limited by other constraints.

[Metric]

I'm still not quite clear on why you believe this:

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At the moment computers are a bunch of switches that people can flick on and off. Nothing more. There is no inate capacity for intelligence or learning and there never can be with this structure. A capacity for learning needs to be tied to the material itself to become possible.

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If a "bunch of switches" computer can simulate and reproduce all the relevant functions of a single neuron, why shouldn't a sufficiently large computer be able to simulate all the emergent and hard to understand functions of a human brain? Is it your position that a single neuron does something inherently non-computable?