Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

Oh that's a terrible point! Thermodynamics laws are nothing like predictions about the future. I would have thought linguistic slight of hand like this is beneath Kurzweil.

Allen's statement that every structure and neural circuit is unique is simply impossible. That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome.

The design of the human brain is not entirely contained in the genome!

As soon as we mapped the human genome we were faced with a paradox. How come the complexity difference between us and mice for example, is NOT proportional to the difference in our genomes?

Here's an article form 2002 "Just 2.5% of DNA turns mice into men": http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2352-just-25-of-dna-tu...

In other words, if you look at just how the genomes are different then humans and mice ought be a lot more similar than we are.

We have since come to find out just what a huge role the feedback-interactions of DNA and its products, like proteins and all kinds of RNA, play in the development of life.

This staggeringly complex feedback mechanism is why despite the mapping of the human genome, medical progress still remains excruciatingly slow. Much, much faster the before! But not nearly as fast as we had hopped when the human genome was first mapped.

Note that epigenetic information (such as the peptides controlling gene expression) do not appreciably add to the amount of information in the genome.

This is true in that they don't add much to the genome. But it is profoundly wrong in that they do add hugely to the actual resulting phenotype.

Kurzweil continues in this same vane for a while. I don't know if he has just never bothered to look into the latest research or if his understandably strong desire to not die has resulted in a huge confirmation bias.

When Kurzweil talks about the general trend of scientific progress I tend to agree with him. But neither Paul Allen nor anyone else disagrees with the notion that we will reach the singularity at some point in the future.

The argument is about the timing. And timing the future, is like timing the stock market, something I don't care to try to do.

But when Kurzweil attempts to convince the reader that the singularity is near, by using specific examples, that's when I start do disagree with him. Because once he starts being specific, it becomes easy for me to see where he is wrong, factually, objectively wrong.

This fact was a result of the mapping of the human genome, and has since been proven wrong.

But like many such facts it has a certain "stickiness" to the human brain. I expect to be hearing it for many years.

I tried finding the paper which found that the complexity of mRNA or tRNA (or some other kind, I forget) produced in the brain matches the complexity difference between mice and humans almost exactly, unlike the difference between the two genomes.

It also turns out that type of RNA is very fragile and very easily mutated compared to DNA. And evolution does like to follow the path of least resistance. By my google-fu fails me.

tl;dr: It's not 50 megabytes, shit's complicated.

Kurzweil provides both high level general evidence (like improvements in computation) and low level, domain-specific evidence (like the discussion about the pancreas) to support his claims, but none of that justifies the use of the word "law" in "law of accelerating returns". He attempts an analogy with thermodynamic laws and how they are derived from underlying statistical principles, but there are no underlying fundamental principles of human innovation and progress that are in any way comparable to the certainty and universality of physical laws. This, I think, is why a lot of people (myself included) have a hard time taking him seriously. He tries to apply the same kind of formal analysis that works well in science to human beings and the complex, highly non-scientific processes that underly innovation today. The bottom line is that, until the singularity occurs, human beings will still be needed to build ever more complex and powerful systems, but human beings do not progress at anything close to an exponential rate.

It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s.

I'm on the fence on this issue, but there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable people who are predicting a kind of anti-singularity: in the 21st century, fossil fuel depletion will send us way back, perhaps even de-industrialize most societies.

Is our civilization simply a machine that is transferring the order (low entropy state) in fossil fuels into order within itself (technology and economic complexity), and when those fossil fuels run out will this ordering process cease?

The lack of major breakthroughs in energy in the past 50 years is pretty dramatic. Nuclear looked like an energy panacea once, but it's turned out to be clunky and hard to scale. Solar panels and wind turbines are interesting, but the problem with those is that we basically can't store energy. Energy storage is either super-expensive per kilowatt-hour and not scalable (e.g. Li-Ion batteries) or very inefficient (e.g. water electrolysis to hydrogen).

Without a breakthrough on the order of cheap ultra-capacitors or fusion, I'm afraid we'll be seeing peak everything pretty soon, including technological complexity.

The thing is: all the technologies of the "singularity" are energy consumers. Where are the producers? What is going to power the singularity?

Then there's another area that makes me horribly pessimistic: politics. Most of our societies are degenerating to banana republic levels of corruption. Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing in this area: ride the fossil fuel crash into the ground in an orgy of war and despotism.