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Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

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Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#31

Post by kenjackson »

What are the big advances in linear programming that happened since 1988?

As api mentions in the comments here on HN there are areas of work where progress stopped. For example passenger jet speed was once thought to continue at a rapid rate such that LA to Europe flights would be a few hours. Skyscraper height was thought to continue, with advances in various technologies and engineering methods making it desirable. Both hit realities that signficantly slowed down their progress.

I tend to side with Allen on this. While we're bright people, I don't know if I see us able to keep increasing computing power while keeping actual power consumption reasonably low.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#32

Post by api »

kenjackson wrote: post #31

What are the big advances in linear programming that happened since 1988? As api mentions in the comments here on HN there are areas of work where progress stopped. For example passenger jet speed was once thought to continue at a rapid rate such that LA to Europe flights would be a few hours. Skyscraper height was thought to continue, with advances in various technologies and engineering methods making it desirable.…

What passenger jet speed and skyscrapers really hit is economics: demand limits to growth.

Most super-tall skyscrapers are economic disasters. There seems to be a maximum economically rational height to a skyscraper, and it's already been reached. You can build higher, but if you do you're wasting your money.

A human-level or beyond AI would probably be like the Burj Khalifa: an economic disaster. Why build it when screwing and popping out babies is far cheaper and already works? If you want to exceed human intelligence, it would be a lot cheaper to augment human brains with external digital assistants (like what you're using now) or implants than to re-engineer an entirely new embodiment.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#33

Post by seiji »

0x12 wrote: post #6
politician wrote: post #5

The Singularity concept strikes me as a sort of wishful thinking. Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL, yet here I am texting this on my iPhone. New generations understand intuitively what the previous generation understood theoretically. Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI.

> Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI. Why would they? Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed? An AI running at 1/100th of what a future AI may be capable of is still an AI and I can't see how a mere improvement of a couple of orders of magnitude would do what decades of Moore's law have failed to do so far. If strong AI was just a matter of speed then we could theoretically take any…

Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed?

Storage capacity.

The brain is relatively slow. Ignoring microtubules, we're just dumb chemical reactions. But we are a lot of dumb chemical reactions. A human brain is ~ 100 billion neurons with each neuron having 100 to 7000 connections to other neurons.

So, just estimating here, 100 giganeurons * 1000 connections = 100 trillion neuron connections.

To simulate that, we use matrices of floats for each connection. So 100 trillion 4 byte floats = 400 terabytes of memory (with lots of hand-wavy assumptions). The fanciest GPUs we have today top out around 3 GB of memory (but they have 1k great run-in-lockstep cores) and the largest whole non-proprietary system I've seen tops out at 1 TB of local RAM: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/quotes/212240?confirmation=1...

We can simulate parts (vision and hearing have advanced on neural networks in the past 5 years), but higher level cognition/motivation is still an unknown quantity.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#34

Post by lupatus »

api wrote: post #29

What about energy? 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 civili…

Note: I made a similar comment a few days ago.

It seems that you might be slightly misinformed about energy. Since the 1950s, there have been a number of advancements in energy production. Some examples are efficient shale oil extraction, tar sands oil extraction, horizontal drilling, deep water drilling, and high Arctic drilling.

As The Futurist discusses in depth[1], annual world oil consumption has been hovering around 32 billion barrels since about 1982. That means oil consumption, at $100/barrel, is $3.2 trillion, or 5% of nominal world GDP.

My take away from that is technology has made the oil supply a non-issue. And, it will continue not being a problem for the foreseeable future. It is not a hard resource limit.

Also, check out the the research going into liquid fluoride thorium fusion. It seems to have potential as a way to do cheap, safe, "easy" nuclear fusion.

Personally, I think that the problem is human willpower and chicken-little attitudes. To increase my technology optimism, I read nextbigfuture.com. Nearly daily, I see an article posted there that makes me go, "Holy crap! We can do that now??!"

[1] http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#36

Post by DanielStraight »

jerf wrote: post #7
DanielStraight wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling out someone for not doing their homework seems somewhere in the DH1-2 range: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html There are some good points in Kurzweil's response, but the ones about Paul Allen are definitely not them. I think his best point was about extrapolating function from individual cells or structures, without needing to understand every single cell or structure individually.

I disagree. When one "addresses" a long-standing, well-thought out argument with off-the-cuff snap statement or something only slightly more thought-out, it is perfectly permissible to call them out as not being serious. It's like going into a serious religion debate with "Evil exists, therefore God does not. Ah-ha, you are defeated!", or "God must exist because something must have started it all, so there!" as if in…

I guess my point was just that calling him out, while strictly correct, is doing nothing to refute whatever statements he may have made on the singularity, nor is it doing anything to promote the idea of the singularity.

Replying to "evil exists, therefore God does not," with, "that argument has been made before," doesn't say anything about whether God does or doesn't exist, and it doesn't do anything to refute the argument.

The point of PG's How To Disagree is that the point of disagreeing is to address the truth or falsehood of a proposition, not the way the proposition is presented.

The DH# levels (at least DH0-2) can be restated something like this:

DH0: I don't like the author, therefore his argument is false.

DH1: The author has a relevant fault or weakness, therefore his argument is false.

DH2: The author didn't present his argument well, therefore his argument is false.

While it's nothing against him personally, the first three paragraphs of Kurzweil's reply read like "the author didn't present his argument well, therefore it is false." He recovers later, sure. He easily reaches 5-6 on the DH scale, but the rebuttal would be stronger without the first three paragraphs, and they certainly aren't the best, or most praiseworthy, part of it.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#38

Post by rsl7 »

fl3tch wrote: post #22
losvedir wrote: post #19

Ugh, not this again. 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. I believe it was on HN that this discussion came up before, but that's a short sighted way of looking at it. Basically, it doesn't take into account all the interactions of the environment required to turn tha…

Exactly. Distributed computing grids still have trouble folding single peptides with reasonable accuracy. We have the source code, but we don't have the compiler.

Worse, there are about to be seven billion brains on the planet. Not merely one.. and human brains aren't so great in isolation.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#40

Post by lupatus »

api wrote: post #30

Another response: Kurzweil also ignores economics. The advance of technology is driven in part by economic forces. Computing power may stagnate not because we have reached physical limits but because present-day computers are good enough for what 98% of the market wants. I see this trend developing. If anything, the trend in consumer computing is toward less powerful but lower-power and more portable computing device…

What the market wants is every map, book, song, movie, game, and poem ever made to be instantly accessible, searchable, and reviewable. They want their work to be autosyncing, autobackedup, and to follow them from device to device. They want to be able to securely talk with friends and family at any time, to publically talk with friends and family at any time, to discover new friends and family, and to be able to completely disconnect from friends and family at will. They want intelligent tools that keep them from making dumb decisions, tools to help them make even better good decisions, and tools that won't get in the way of them making dumb decisions.

I think that the market for computing power has a looong way to go before it taps-out what the market demands.

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