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Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

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Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#81

Post by hugh3 »

khafra wrote: post #61
hugh3 wrote: post #51

I grow tired of Kurzweil's vague arguments against people who disagree with his vague predictions. What I think Kurzweil doesn't understand is that in any argument about what's going to happen in the future, the onus of proof inevitably lies with the guy saying "This is what's going to happen", not the guy saying "Ehh, maybe not". I don't know what's going to happen in the future, and I don't pretend to know what's g…

I agree with your conclusions, but > the onus of proof inevitably lies with the guy saying "This is what's going to happen", not the guy saying "Ehh, maybe not". I'd say that the onus lies on the one making conjunctions instead of disjunctions. Often, negative predictions are disjunctions, but this isn't always the case: Compare "in 2100, North America will be inhabited by humans" with "Ehh, maybe not."

Something like that. It's actually hard to know where to divide up the onus of proof when we're talking about predictions.

One thing's for sure, though. Kurzweil's "I'm right until proven otherwise" attitude ain't the way to do it.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#82

Post by 3am »

temphn wrote: post #74
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…

Overall good line of thought, but a few other things are worth considering. It is vastly underappreciated just how much the EPA has retarded energy development in the US. The retroactive revocation of permits for the mountaintop coal project, the Keystone XL imbroglio, and the hasty ban on offshore drilling are just a few examples. (Not many know that Deepwater Horizon was out that far because of regulations forbiddi…

How much oil is in off the East Coast passive margin? 20 bboe (which is twice the best estimates of MMS)? That would make it on par with the North Slope in Alaska, an elephant field. That's 3 years or less of US consumption, or about 7 months of global consumption. BFD.

And that comment about the Deepwater Horizon not being able to drill closer to the shore... that's eyepopping. The shallow-water GoM in the Mississippi Delta has been drilled for decades.

I don't want to use an inappropriate tone for HN, but you should really take stock of how you've been misinformed so badly and seek to educate yourself.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#83

Post by 0x12 »

modeless wrote: post #16
0x12 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Yes, absolutely! I actually think the most appropriate benchmark is memory bandwidth, which hasn't been improving as fast as FLOPS or storage capacity. It's not a matter of running a strong AI at 1/100 speed on today's fastest supercomputer. It would be more like 1 billionth or trillionth speed. The reason for our disappointingly slow progress in AI over the years…

> It would be more like 1 billionth or trillionth speed.

That's a possibility.

Now what algorithm do you propose to use?

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#84

Post by WeWin »

lupatus wrote: post #80
WeWin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency actually increases energy use, as per Jevon's paradox, which goes hand in hand with the technological cornucopia argument that the energy issue will be solved by better technology. Unfortunately the EROEI numbers reflect quite the contrary - where once oil bubbled up from the ground under its own pressure netting 200x EROEI, we're now griming are way through oil sands which net 5-6x EROEI, or sinking 2 mil…

Read my comment a few levels up. The data says that Jevon's paradox is wrong. See the energy usage chart here: http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran... Since about 1982, the annual world oil consumption has held at roughly 32 billion barrels despite efficiency improvements in petrol energy usage. Our technological efficiency improvements are doing more with the same amount of energy and not mor…

In fact the hard cap as to amount of energy we can extract has been reached - we would in fact use more if we could, but we can't extract it - we are running in place. This is often confused with efficiency when in fact it is a peak energy issue. Three billion people in the world living on under $3 a day and we there's no demand for more energy?

The example is not compelling; 100 years ago there were no cars - are we using more or less energy now with the advent of 'car technology'? The obvious answer is: way more. We are not just taking the net energy of 1910 and 'redistributing' it. Because this is what technologies do, provide an advantage that nature does not. But technology is not free - to develop it, make it, use it, dispose of it, all requires a lot of energy. An insatiable thirst to develop and use thingamajigs is what is causing the problem, not solving it.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#85

Post by eavc »

api wrote: post #32
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 s…

>Why build it when screwing and popping out babies is far cheaper and already works?

Why build a word processor when pencil, paper, and a scribe is far cheaper and already works?

It's about scale.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#86

Post by politician »

0x12 wrote: post #10
politician wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memristors are the silicon equivalent of neurons -- a time-dependent function with state. In mammals, the connectivity of millions of neurons enable the emergence of intelligence. I don't see any reason why a silicon-based neuron network of sufficient size isn't capable of the same. Now, that's entirely different from purposeful design of an AI such that it speaks English and knows what I like for breakfast. I don't…

A memristor can be simulated by a couple of formulas and a few variables. (just like neural networks can be simulated). In spite of our ability to simulate this sort of process for decades we have not succeeded in building a strong AI, the difference in having a hardware version is one of performance (just like Neural Network chips are typically a lot faster than their software simulated counterparts). There is no re…

I think there's a very real minimum speed limit necessary to keep a highly connected system like your brain, an AI, or the Internet operational. Does anyone seriously expect 'TCP over Carrier Pigeon (RFC1149)' to work in practice at scale? Or that your own wetware would've developed properly if it plodded along forever below 13 Hz?

Given that biological examples of a minimum speed limit for cognition exist, and that the behavior of computational networks at various speeds seem to follow the same behavior (slower=worse), then it seems reasonable to assume that a similar lower limit for cognition exists for silicon-based networks.

Therefore, faster devices such as memristors might be just the thing necessary to get our machines thinking, and moreover, that we may never see intelligent behaviors in slower simulated environments.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#87

Post by bh42222 »

wnewman wrote: post #70
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…

It seems to me that Kurzweil is on rather strong grounds when he argues in effect that 25Mbytes is a safe conservative upper bound on the information needed to specify a human infant brain. The relevant information content of the epigenetic stuff is unlikely to be tens of megabytes, and extremely unlikely to be hundreds of megabytes. Otherwise, it's hard to see how we could've overlooked such a high proportion of non…

It seems to me that Kurzweil is on rather strong grounds when he argues in effect that 25Mbytes is a safe conservative upper bound on the information needed to specify a human infant brain.

This is the best I could do: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111115721.ht...

I can't find the actual scientific papers. Anyway, form the article above:

The lack of correlation between genome size and an organism’s complexity raised a question – how do complexity and diversity arise in higher life forms?

Or to rephrase that, why is there no correlation between source code size and application complexity? Why are mice with 24.99Mb of DNA so much less than humans with 25Mb of DNA? Why is there not a linear relationship between the complexity of the animal and the complexity of it's DNA? Well...:

RNA editing involves the process by which cells use their genetic code to manufacture proteins. More specifically, says Maas, RNA editing “describes the posttranscriptional alteration of gene sequences by mechanisms including the deletion, insertion and modification of nucleotides.”

RNA editing, says Maas, can “increase exponentially the number of gene products generated from a single gene.”

Increase the number of gene products from a single gene exponentially, that says.

The paper I can't find describes how this process, as it takes place in the brain, is an almost exact match for the complexity difference between mice and humans.

And yes, posttranscriptional alteration is much more fragile than good old double helix DNA. And no, evolution doesn't care.

...hard to see how we'd've overlooked all the machinery that would accomplish that.

We didn't overlook it for long, shortly after the human genome project raised the question, we spotted it. See above.

the relevant uncompressable complexity of what computer scientists need to design for general AI is likely no more than 1M bytes.

What do you base this statement on?

How many uncompressable bits of design information you are talking about?

Scientists have already discovered that posttranscriptional alteration (a part of epigenetic information) adds huge complexity. How much more? I am absolutely not comfortable guessing at numbers of Mbytes because I know how little I know.

And what about the actual cell machinery. As the egg is being formed inside the mother how much complexity does the way its machinery work add the what will happen after the egg is fertilized? Again, I dare not guess.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#88

Post by hexagonc »

bh42222 wrote: post #57
endtime wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 us…

Our understanding of thermodynamics is very thorough. Our understanding allows us to make a plethora of predictions, all of which are falsifiable, and have been throughly tested over the years. This is what makes our theories about thermodynamics real scientific theories. Predictions about the future, no matter how simple or based on long running past trends, are only falsifiable in exactly one way: wait until the pr…

No, Kurzweil was not equating the "Law of Accelerating Returns" to a physical law of the universe. Instead, he was comparing it, albeit clumsily, to laws that govern aggregate behavior, like the second law of thermodynamics. There are lot of things that we colloquially call "laws" that clearly don't have the same footing as laws in physics, "Moore's Law" being one of them.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#89

Post by bermanoid »

wnewman wrote: post #70
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…

It seems to me that Kurzweil is on rather strong grounds when he argues in effect that 25Mbytes is a safe conservative upper bound on the information needed to specify a human infant brain. The relevant information content of the epigenetic stuff is unlikely to be tens of megabytes, and extremely unlikely to be hundreds of megabytes. Otherwise, it's hard to see how we could've overlooked such a high proportion of non…

I fully agree with your estimates, and would just like to point out more precisely where people (especially biologists) tend to misinterpret this argument.

The strawman argument that people tend to hate is this: the brain is encoded in 25M of DNA, so it would only take 25M to build a physical brain. To be clear: we're not arguing that.

Then they go on about how complex the process of creating a physical brain from a string of DNA is, how there's so much information that we'd need about the chemical reactions, that because the building-up is so complicated we couldn't do it with computers 100 years from now even if Moore's law held up, etc. And I agree with all of that, but it's not what that 25M figure refers to.

What we're saying when we give that number is that an algorithm that does more or less what the brain can do can be coded in less than 25M. It won't implement its physical structure exactly, but some algorithm that comes in under the 25M limit in almost any suitably strong programming language is all but guaranteed to qualify as "intelligence". Whether we can find it or not is another matter; all we're saying is that it's there (and I'd go further, and say that many such algorithms exist in the That the particular genotype->phenotype->algorithm encoding that creates the brain's algorithm is hideously complex doesn't change the information theoretic content, it loosely corresponds to inserting a massively complex general-purpose compiler in front of a Turing-complete language, which doesn't change the compressibility of the code one bit. Unless the compiler is specifically built to compress a certain type of algorithm very well, the compressed information density will not change significantly for any program of sufficient complexity (this is provable mathematically if you properly define the various conditions). In fact, there's a very good chance that the genotype->phenotype->algorithm mapping that results in human intelligence uses a less efficient coding of the algorithm than we could achieve via a modern expressive programming language, because the brain's physical implementation severely limits the expressivity of algorithms that can be baked into it.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#90

Post by hexagonc »

lukifer wrote: post #75
hugh3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, predicting the future with 100% certainty is impossible. But that doesn't mean that making predictions is a mug's game. Predicting the future, with appropriate levels of uncertainty, is a very sensible thing to do with your time. I, for instance, predict that if I wander down to Cheeseboard in twenty minutes I'll find that they're selling delicious pizza. And I predict that if I eat that pizza, then it won…

Arguably, attempting to predict the future is the very essence of intelligence. (See: Jeff Hawkins.)

I would say that the ability to predict the future is indeed a large part of what we call intelligence. Note that 'intelligent' is a relative term, however. You are considered 'intelligent' if you are able to predict the behavior of a system at a success-rate significantly higher than the average observer, given similar or equivalent prior knowledge about the system.
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