Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen • Hacker News Board

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#41

Post by api » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:28 PM UTC

lupatus wrote: post #34

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 a…

I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc.

The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested.

Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil, we are out of oil as an energy source. This could occur after only ~5% of the Earth's hydrocarbons have been extracted.

EROEI for oil has been steadily declining. The first oil drilled was, of course, the easiest to get. Drop a well and it spurts out. Almost all of that is gone outside a few supergiant fields, and those are or will soon be entering decline. Heavy oil, shale oil, and tar sands require a lot of energy to extract and process... far more than "light sweet crude."

All fossil fuels follow the same pattern. Coal and gas have not peaked yet, but they will... almost certainly in the next 50 years. Oil probably peaked in 2005, though it won't be possible to say for sure except ~25 years in retrospect.

I'm also aware of the thorium cycle, etc., but I am skeptical of the ability of such things to scale fast enough. Keep in mind that to maintain growth new energy technologies will have to scale faster than the fossil fuel EROEI decline curve.

I personally do not believe in the "doomer" scenario. However, I do think this: I think the first half of the 21st century will be dominated economically and technologically by the energy transition. The story of this era will be a mad rush to do everything we can to increase efficiency and build out new resources simply to tread water against the fossil fuel decline.

And of course our political class will make it worse by doing the absolute dumbest possible things: subsidizing oil prices to prevent price signals from working, going to war over dwindling oil reserves, interfering in the market for new alternatives, restricting new alternatives, NIMBYism against renewable and nuclear energy, etc.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#42

Post by wanorris » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:30 PM UTC

rsl7 wrote: post #38

fl3tch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would it need to be in isolation? Machine vision, voice recognition, speech synthesis, robotics -- there's no obvious reason why if we could build such a brain we couldn't find a way for it to interact with people.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#43

Post by endtime » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:33 PM UTC

bh42222 wrote: post #23

Allen writes that "the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). . . is not a physical law." I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but result from the emergent properties of a large number of events at a finer level. A classical example is the laws of thermodynamics (LOT). If you look at the mathematics underlying the LOT, they model each particle as following a random walk. Oh that's a terribl…

>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.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not a huge Kurzweil fan, but as far as I can tell he's saying something reasonable here - that when he talks about LOAR, he's describing a phenomenon rather than a physical process, and that this is an accepted usage of the word "law". I don't think he's playing semantic tricks so much as responding to a semantic complaint.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#44

Post by api » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:34 PM UTC

lupatus wrote: post #40

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 com…

But how much do they want all this, and does this require major improvements in computing power?

It looks to me that almost everything you listed could be done on the computers of five years ago. It's all nothing but software improvements. Existing hardware is good enough.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#45

Post by cpeterso » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

Moore's Law gives us more for your money, where "more" can be more speed or more (cheaper) devices for the same cost.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#46

Post by lupatus » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:39 PM UTC

api wrote: post #41

lupatus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc. The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested. Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of…

I totally get EROEI. In fact, I used to be the canned beans buying type.

But, after years of thought, I realized that the EROEI has a fatal flaw. It completely discounts humanity's ability to discover creative efficiency improvements. The EROEI calculations are done with today's technology, and do not include future improvements.

For example, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where the oil industry started back in the 1800s. Capped oil wells abounded in the woods, because at some point in the past, it stopped being efficient to drill them with 1800s drilling technology. Today, old high school friends are making bank reopening those wells and even drilling new ones with modern techniques.

The political problem is an interesting one, and I have opinions on it. But I hesitate to air them here because they are unconventional. The haters would probably drop my karma back down to -20.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#47

Post by shin_lao » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #15

shin_lao wrote: post #4

Science progress is not just a question of intelligence. Therefore, even if computers become more intelligent than humans, it is doubtful a "singularity" will occur.

If not, then what? Even while I agree with Alan Kay when he says that IQ Imagine we manage to build a machine that produce more insights than Newton. That particular form of intelligence would be quite likely to trigger a singularity, don't you think?

No I don't, because you still need time and a certain amount of randomnesses to make discoveries.

Another way to put it is that even if you are twice as intelligent as Newton, you won't discover twice as many things or discover things twice faster.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#48

Post by api » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:44 PM UTC

lupatus wrote: post #46

api wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc. The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested. Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of…

I totally get EROEI. In fact, I used to be the canned beans buying type. But, after years of thought, I realized that the EROEI has a fatal flaw. It completely discounts humanity's ability to discover creative efficiency improvements. The EROEI calculations are done with today's technology, and do not include future improvements. For example, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where the oil industry started back in t…

I am in neither the doomer nor the pollyanna camp on this, as I said.

Keep in mind that EROEI includes not only the energy cost of operating technology but also the energy cost of developing it. Every engineer who worked on that fracking technology? Every car trip they made to/from the office, etc., all has to be included in the energy investment required to get that shale gas out of the ground.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#49

Post by rsl7 » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:45 PM UTC

wanorris wrote: post #42

rsl7 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would it need to be in isolation? Machine vision, voice recognition, speech synthesis, robotics -- there's no obvious reason why if we could build such a brain we couldn't find a way for it to interact with people.

I agree, but the devil is in those details. Look at the variations among actual humans.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#50

Post by lupatus » Thu, Oct 20, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

api wrote: post #44

lupatus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

But how much do they want all this, and does this require major improvements in computing power? It looks to me that almost everything you listed could be done on the computers of five years ago. It's all nothing but software improvements. Existing hardware is good enough.

Two years ago, I was developing some HVAC equipment modeling software as part of a sales automation package whose worst case scenario needed to calculate the max cooling capacity, and a few other thermodynamic stats, for roughly 18 million different configurations. No matter how much I optimized it, the CPU didn't have enough juice to "instantaneously" plow through all of that math. The best I could get it down to was about 20 seconds. More CPU power would definitely be nice.