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Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

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Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#71

Post by mrtron »

andreyf wrote: post #61
gruseom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very hard to argue that the singularity won't arrive eventually Really? What if consciousness is not an algorithm?

What if consciousness is not an algorithm? Then it can be simulated using one. If chemical reactions can, it's just a matter of processing power.

There is a huge fallacy to this.

You would think that any formal system could be defined with axioms, but there are undefinable formal systems.

In GEB, Hof explains that he thinks that this could be the missing piece to creating AI/life.

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#72

Post by tobiazz »

I think it is important to remember that the immortality mentioned here is a protection from biological causes of death, but there are plenty of other obstacles to prolonged existence (especially prolonged self-consciousness and memory, which is harder to wrap one's head around).

Take the popular theories of the universe's lifespan (or life cycle).

1) The universe is expanding exponentially: eventually every star will die and there will be nothing to birth new stars. The universe will stop moving and hit a zero Kelvin freeze.

2) The universe cycles between big bangs and big crunches: information cannot survive through a crunch. Well maybe one binary bit? hehe.

3) Some sort of multi-universe collisions or string theory madness: who knows but there could be some event that wipes out what we know as reality.

Basically, I am trying to point out that immortality is probably a fundamentally flawed concept. A simpler approach might be to consider memory. Memory storage cannot grow forever (let alone be accessed efficiently enough) and while we could cap memory and still exist indefinitely, I think we would have to hit a ceiling of knowledge attainment and we would just be spinning a wheels like a more exciting version of a rock (not that humanity is any less of a _process_ right now).

Smarter people than I have already dwelled upon these issues and probably have better answers than mine (esp. since I have no answer). Asimov's "The Last Question" is an interesting short story that covers this area a bit.

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#74

Post by Novash »

ericb wrote: post #58
aswanson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've laid out my objections to his timetables here before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142175 I like what his books do in terms of sparking the imagination, but take his claims with the same level of skepticism as I do an infomercial. Another thing is the repitition; if you've read Age of Intelligent Machines you've read Age of Spiritual Machines as well as Singularity is Near . Some of the predictions o…

Speech rec with Naturally speaking, as of a year ago when my buddy broke his arm and tryed it, was getting there, but still not usable for him. Speech is not as nice as typing for entering data. Typing seems [citation needed] faster and like less work. Also, in an office, the voices absorb mental bandwidth from everyone in earshot. So I think in this case Kurzweil may or may not be wrong about the quality of the tech…

Solved? I think this qualifies within his predictions. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22037/

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#75

Post by dreish »

aswanson wrote: post #35
dbreunig wrote: post #25

Anyone seen one of his talks or ppts? Anyone else get those creepy cult feelings? Anyone?

Yes. I've laid out my objections to his timetables here before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142175 I like what his books do in terms of sparking the imagination, but take his claims with the same level of skepticism as I do an infomercial. Another thing is the repitition; if you've read Age of Intelligent Machines you've read Age of Spiritual Machines as well as Singularity is Near . Some of the predictions o…

I laid out my objections to your objections here:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindx/frame.html?main=show_thread....

I wouldn't be surprised if he's spot-on about the technology of speech recognition getting to that practical level exactly on his predicted schedule -- it's one of those kinds of things he has been obsessed with on a very technical level for many years, and it really has been improving rapidly.

The chief reason I doubt most people would choose it is that it just doesn't work in an environment with other people around. However, since developing tendonitis in my right hand, I've often thought I'd try it just to give my hands time to heal.

It could get good enough within three or four years that people will do it anyway, just because it will be faster and more comfortable than typing for all but a handful of people.

I agree that some of his other predictions are a little nutty, but only by degrees.

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#76

Post by byrneseyeview »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #69
byrneseyeview wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? So if you lived in a post-Singularity world, in which clinical immortality was an unquestioned human right, you would periodically get your face wrinkled, inject yourself with bone-brittling nanobots, induce dementia, and then wither away? If you tried to inflict that fate on anyone else, it would be a terrible crime. If you wanted that for yourself, it would be evidence of mental illness. If you consider it…

So if you lived in a world... in which clinical immortality was an unquestioned human right... ROTFL. I live in a world where my wife and I had to fight our old insurance company for basic preventive health care. (She tried to have a mammogram in the same year that I had a simple 20-minute physical. Turns out that violated the fine print in our policy, and we had to pay out of pocket.) I'm glad to say that our uninsu…

ROTFL is not the right reaction if you follow it up with, basically, "Your hypothetical futuristic scenario is not like my real-life right-now scenario!" I said "If" for a reason.

I don't think immortality is or should be an unquestioned right, but I suspect that within a decade or two of it being a realistic possibility, letting people die will be about as popular as slavery.

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#77

Post by Novash »

jcl wrote: post #6

I can't help noticing that while we are making these exponential advances in technology, we are also using exponential amounts of our limited supplies of cheap resources -- things like oil, coal, copper, gold, and helium. I sure hope Kurzweil gets his singularity before any of these limiting factors kick in, or it could put a nasty kink in his graph.

I thought about the problem of the entropy too. This is the thing that worries me most about the future at all. One thing that I hope for, but I am not sure, is that the number of atoms in the universe is somehow a constant (might be true for smaller, more essential particles) and if those atoms could once be created (I am a creationist, but it holds true for evolution as well), they COULD be recreated, replenishing the supplies. In fact, we could become very very good at recycling and turn all our trash into a source, instead of waste. Maybe with nanotech? I believe it would be very easy for a bunch of nanorobots to grab atoms of gold in an old discarded motherboard and pile them up, creating a fresh gold bar from them. Is it too far fetched?

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#78

Post by aswanson »

Novash wrote: post #74
ericb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech rec with Naturally speaking, as of a year ago when my buddy broke his arm and tryed it, was getting there, but still not usable for him. Speech is not as nice as typing for entering data. Typing seems [citation needed] faster and like less work. Also, in an office, the voices absorb mental bandwidth from everyone in earshot. So I think in this case Kurzweil may or may not be wrong about the quality of the tech…

Solved? I think this qualifies within his predictions. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22037/

I'm guessing that given the difficulty of characterizing voiced speech is still inaccurate, the more difficult task of translating neural impulses to speech will result in even further degradation of performance. Unsolved: At the moment, the device has a limited vocabulary: 150 words and phrases.

A long way to go.

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#79

Post by bumbledraven »

gruseom wrote: post #57
bumbledraven wrote: post #3

It would be very hard to argue that the singularity won't arrive eventually, provided humans survive long enough. It's just the date that's tough to predict. Sure, computing power has been growing exponentially, but as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results", and there are so many other variables aside from raw processing speed.

It would be very hard to argue that the singularity won't arrive eventually Really? What if consciousness is not an algorithm?

What does consciousness have to do with it? Eventually there will be machines that are capable of passing the Turing test or something similar. The singularity is what happens next.

``To the question, "Will there ever be a computer as smart as a human?" I think the correct answer is, "Well, yes... very briefly."'' - Vernor Vinge

Re: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

#80

Post by bumbledraven »

mrtron wrote: post #71
andreyf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if consciousness is not an algorithm? Then it can be simulated using one. If chemical reactions can, it's just a matter of processing power.

There is a huge fallacy to this. You would think that any formal system could be defined with axioms, but there are undefinable formal systems. In GEB, Hof explains that he thinks that this could be the missing piece to creating AI/life.

I have never heard of any such thing, and neither has Google. I suspect you are very confused. Can you give an example of an "undefinable formal system" and say (1) how it satisfies the definition of "formal system" and (2) the sense in which it is "undefinable"?
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