11–20 of 227 posts
I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.
This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observ…
If you're a computer guy, you should clearly understand what his fundamental disagreement with Kurzweil is about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
”It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?“ I think the point he is making is that if your goal is to simulate the human brain you also have to simulate and thus understand all the little details of biology because transistors don’t magically have the same properties as proteins.
Yes, I think that's his point too. But if you believe that the little details of biology emerge from the underlying physics, then maybe you only need to code the fundamental rules and can have all the rest automatically.
About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
I really understand where this article is coming from. Spend a decade in a biology laboratory working day and night just to figure out a tiny subset of the role of one simple protein, and you'll find that pseudoscientific handwaving no longer sounds like a pleasant breeze, but like the grating of sharpened fingernails on a chalkboard. (For physicists the equivalent torture is a movie, which goes by the name of "What…
The trailer is Poe's Law in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg
I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)
This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observ…
One answer is "They will, and surprisingly quickly. But they will be a completely different set of complex interactions than are observed in the real world, because of some roundoff error in the binary representation of the Nth digit of some apparently unimportant constant. Unfortunately, because the system is complex, you'll probably spend the rest of your career trying to track down that error, and fail."
Another answer is: They would, if the simulation was comprehensive enough. Unfortunately, phase space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Seriously: Your mind reels when confronted with the number of different molecular interactions going on inside the "simplest" single-celled prokaryote, so you abstract it away, almost as a reflex, to stop yourself from going mad. Then you abstract away the first-order abstraction. Then you keep going. Soon you begin to imagine that you can model an entire collection of a trillion organisms, just as a naive programmer imagines that they can rewrite Windows in three days if only they use a powerful enough language. It's a mere matter of programming!
I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 62-year-old Ray Kurzweil's lifetime, or mine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really understand where this article is coming from. Spend a decade in a biology laboratory working day and night just to figure out a tiny subset of the role of one simple protein, and you'll find that pseudoscientific handwaving no longer sounds like a pleasant breeze, but like the grating of sharpened fingernails on a chalkboard. (For physicists the equivalent torture is a movie, which goes by the name of "What…
Wow - that "What the Bleep..." does look remarkably bad. The trailer is Poe's Law in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)
Now, I need to go calm myself by fixing some bugs before I start to throw things. ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our colle…
> and population growth doesn't slow. Population growth is slowing. Dramatically. There's tons of evidence that as women are educated, they will have fewer children. And women are starting to get better educations all around the world. There's absolutely no doubt that population growth will slow (slash, is already slowing down) a bunch in the coming decades. Second, I'm confused about the 700 number. Where does that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
”It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?“ I think the point he is making is that if your goal is to simulate the human brain you also have to simulate and thus understand all the little details of biology because transistors don’t magically have the same properties as proteins.
Yes, I think that's his point too. But if you believe that the little details of biology emerge from the underlying physics, then maybe you only need to code the fundamental rules and can have all the rest automatically.
Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.