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2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

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Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#111

Post by lukeschlather »

bgurupra wrote: post #105
bgurupra wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I…

plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million…

Comparing the processing ability of the human brain with that of Watson is not meaningful. A computer also regulates a ton of parameters like CPU temperature, voltage, and so on. And every single unit has its own logic circuits for regulating internal stability.

What's meaningful is comparing energy and time required for creating a human or a computer capable of doing this, as well as maintenance costs.

And assuming Moore's law continues unabated, a Watson-scale machine will be competitive with a human within five to ten years. Given that it's already functional, I would bet money that it will be cost-effective compared to Ken Jennings by 2045, whether through advances in computing or energy. I wouldn't bet it will be sentient, but just that we can build one and set it up to answer questions cheaper than we can raise someone with as good a head for trivia as Ken.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#112

Post by rue »

arethuza wrote: post #35
rue wrote: post #18

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

How do you know that the instance of you that awakes every morning is really the "same" consciousness as went to sleep the night before? :-)

I don't know, but it doesn't matter because this morning it was me who woke up. It could matter to the me who went to sleep last night but he's no longer here…

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#113

Post by rue »

dfranke wrote: post #36
rue wrote: post #18

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

If even the new consciousness isn't able to know, then what does "same" mean and what part of that definition aren't you satisfying? More acutely, why should you care about satisfying it?

This is an interesting question because as-is, I don't think anyone can really understand what it means to be someone else. For this purpose, I can say my consciousness is something that exists currently and has memories from before, but there is no way to verify that the memories were recorded by the same consciousness. There could have been a different person that no longer exists.

Perhaps a good alternate angle is to consider the “copy” (rather than “replacement”) proposition someone else mentioned: let's say a perfect copy of you could be made (i.e. the entirety of a consciousness is somehow material). Are the two consciousnesses linked somehow? Or are they completely separate despite thinking exactly alike, having the same memories &c.? If they are separate, what happens if the original is killed? Then, the next logical step is to ask how that is different from a consciousness transplant.

It's wild stuff. Or seems like it to a thus-far (presumed) single consciousness.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#114

Post by rue »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #77
grellas wrote: post #69

Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back t…

> I am a theist because I believe that [we] derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than [us]. Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good? It sounds like you want to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd like to test that, so please forgive the following troll. God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is t…

It seems just an incorrect reappropriation of “theism”, really.

I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#115

Post by DennisP »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #15

All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth. That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth…

He doesn't assume all that much. In his book The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil looks at the physical limits of computing, to determine how long we can go before Moore's Law comes to an end. He concludes that we've got another fifty years, or possibly seventy if certain technologies prove feasible. As I recall he doesn't count on quantum computing much, but does think we'll manage reversible computing to solve heat dissipation issues.

That's just computation, but computation drives much of our other technology, and will even more once computers get smarter than people. Kurzweil estimates the timeframe for that based on a range of estimates for the computational capacity of the brain.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#116

Post by bermanoid »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #44
dmd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: You're using it right now. Hopefully.

It did take more than a few decades to design, however. I wouldn't really expect a new model to ship inside of forty years. At best, that's like expecting the next version of Windows to ship in the next three hours. My theory of the singularity is that the concept is so popular these days precisely because (a) we've passed a critical knowledge threshold: A significant number of the best-educated people in the world h…

It did take more than a few decades to design, however. I wouldn't really expect a new model to ship inside of forty years. At best, that's like expecting the next version of Windows to ship in the next three hours.

That's true only to the extent that the evolution of machine intelligence proceeds via the same processes that led to human intelligence. Which is pretty much impossible, so if we ever get to AGI, we're going to be dealing with another type of evolution or design, and it's very possible that it will happen on a timescale much faster than that of biological evolution.

IMO the reason the Singularity concept is popular these days is that we're the first generation that is, barring a massive disaster that both throws Moore's Law off and prevents us from increasing parallel processing power, going to be in possession of reasonably priced machines that have more compute power than the human brain. Which means that it's only a matter of discovering the right algorithms to run.

Whether we're making progress on that is debatable, but don't mistake the slow progress at cracking "the" AI algorithm with the speed at which the intelligence explosion will take off after that - it took many long, slow years to figure out how to build a nuclear weapon, but once we figured out the trick and started a nuclear reaction, the thing blew up in a fraction of a second. AI is likely to be very similar, it may take us a long time to get there, but once we're there, watch out....

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#117

Post by Confusion »

gimpf wrote: post #57
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain. Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

Dualist priors have not yet been shown to be useful.

Neither have non-dualist priors. The nature of consciousness is as mysterious as it ever was. We have cracked a wide range of the soft problems, but the hard problem remains.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#118

Post by Confusion »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #70
rue wrote: post #18

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body. Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness…

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small deviations soon start overshadowing the original guiding principles. The unsolvable three body problem, the flow of sandpiles, turbulence in water. Chaos has been far from solved. Your argument will hold when you provide an actual, experimentally verifiable reduction of macroscopic laws to microscopic principles. Until then, it is all handwaving and make-belief.

In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. They may even turn out to be impossible to prove correct. The hard problem of consciousness has not been solved and you should not pretend that it does not exist.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#119

Post by mechanical_fish »

bermanoid wrote: post #116
mechanical_fish wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did take more than a few decades to design, however. I wouldn't really expect a new model to ship inside of forty years. At best, that's like expecting the next version of Windows to ship in the next three hours. My theory of the singularity is that the concept is so popular these days precisely because (a) we've passed a critical knowledge threshold: A significant number of the best-educated people in the world h…

It did take more than a few decades to design, however. I wouldn't really expect a new model to ship inside of forty years. At best, that's like expecting the next version of Windows to ship in the next three hours. That's true only to the extent that the evolution of machine intelligence proceeds via the same processes that led to human intelligence. Which is pretty much impossible, so if we ever get to AGI, we're g…

once we figured out the trick and started a nuclear reaction, the thing blew up in a fraction of a second

Please, never use this metaphor again. This level of magical thinking is just embarrassing for all of us. It's like saying that building a house must be a really fast process, because burning the house down goes really quickly.

Nuclear weapons blow up easily because, for (e.g.) plutonium, "blowing up" is thermodynamically favorable. A brick of plutonium has much less entropy than a giant fireball and an expanding cloud of radioactive fallout. In a thermodynamic sense, the plutonium nuclei want to be fissioned. All you have to do is find a way to coax them out of their metastable state.

A human brain is massively thermodynamically unfavorable. If you put a bunch of proteins in a box the odds that they will self-assemble into Einstein's brain are, literally, astronomically small.

That's why the brain is a miracle and a nuclear reaction is, frankly, pretty commonplace. There are a lot of stars. Stars are easy to explain. Brains are hard.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#120

Post by tastybites »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #15

All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth. That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
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