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Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

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Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#91

Post by civilian »

suivix wrote: post #14

It's startling to me that everything I do comes from 50 megabytes of source code.

"The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them." --Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"

Despite what the exact number is, the brain's connections are much more numerous than the data in my DNA. All information flows from DNA. Chemistry between RNA & proteins & everything does change the end product, but even the chemistry that those do is largely controlled by DNA. (The DNA only produces proteins which does chemistry that it wants to do. Or there is chemistry already happening in the environment, which the development strategy accounts for, but which doesn't add much, if any, complexity to the brain.)

And my quote, by the way, is from a fictional person.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#92

Post by suivix »

bh42222 wrote: post #78
suivix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right? Isn't mRNA and tRNA is produced from DNA? It's been a long time since high school. So I don't see why it isn't 50MB.

Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right? No. That single cell is a working machine of which the DNA is just one component. The proteins which transcribe the DNA, they are in there too, but they are not the DNA. The whole point is that everything else that's in a cell, and there's a lot of "stuff" besides the DNA, has a major effect on w…

As a final question, if you hypothetically took human DNA only and put it into a frog embryo, there is no way you could pass on the parts that make up our highly advanced minds? That is what I meant by everything we do is in those 50MB.

What I am getting at is that very similar standard libraries are in stem cells in animals. There's countless examples of people taking DNA from one animal and putting it into another that is completely different, and copying the same traits.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#93

Post by spot »

super_mario wrote: post #77

String AI is not a hardware problem. It's not a matter of lack of computational power. It is a software and modeling problem. If you had an AI algorithm and a model, you could still run it on any Turning machine. It would just take a lot longer (perhaps years or decades or more) to compute a single thought on current hardware instead of real time or faster than real time on some super fast future hardware. There are…

Nobody takes him seriously. He is just a Christian apologist who wraps it up with quantum who haa.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#94

Post by GrantS »

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…

>but whatever happens either (a) I'll find out eventually or (b) it'll happen after I'm dead anyway

It's not your main point, but I think you're leaving out an important option: (c) you can choose to be intimately involved in making the future turn out a certain way.

The best reason to think and write about the future is so that we can decide what future we want to create for ourselves. Then, as someone with the ability to write code, you can go out and create those very things.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#95

Post by hexagonc »

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…

I would say that strong AI could appear sooner than otherwise with faster hardware. This is because, the earliest algorithms for strong AI are likely to be flawed and imperfect. These imperfections can be compensated for by faster processing. Think of the earlier chess playing algorithms. Although Deep Blue was able to defeat Gary Kasparov, the algorithms themselves were relatively primitive compared to modern chess playing algorithms; although they achieved their goals, they did it with more computation than was necessary due to the algorithms being more brute-force orientated. As the algorithms got more sophisticated, the computational hardware needs decreased.

Faster hardware also allows you to get by without fully understanding how the strong AI algorithms work by using evolutionary methods. You use brute force evolution to evolve algorithms that are even more efficient than their parents. Some people might frown upon using evolution to create AI but that's what was used to create human intelligence so why not use evolution guided by humans to create machine intelligence?

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#96

Post by weaponofchoice »

shin_lao wrote: post #47
loup-vaillant wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sifting through the day's top-list on the AI appstore... WTH's this? "Newton AI. The power of a 1000 research assistants at the click of a button, and they'll run all day tirelessly.". "99c launch deal, just for today -- get it now!" Hmm. Click.

You're now waiting for it to download to your little AiPod that'll beam 'brain bits' to your home-bots, that're now busy sketching out the next monalisa onto a couple of shiny new dreamPads.

Why wouldn't those startup dudes down the street try and build a beefier/faster "runs at 50x universe speed" AiPod for the AI platform you just bought your Newton AI app for?

-------

Why wouldn't AI be able to simulate 'regular universe time/ human time' faster? Why couldn't AI have stronger, more varied randomness?

The bottleneck would be interactions that require a peek into regular universe time: live human input (phone calls, emails), weather, biological data etc.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#97

Post by piguy314 »

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…

What a lot of peakist don't understand is that the most important attribute of hydrocarbons is energy density not energy efficiency. If we expend more energy extracting hydrocarbons for jet fuel for instance than we get from burning it that's fine as long as 1) the extra energy we expends comes from an abundant and cheap source like future PV solar and 2) those hydrocarbons are used in an economically useful fashion like air travel. Peakists seem to fall prey to the belief that the earth is a closed system, instead of an open system powered by the sun.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#98

Post by 6ren »

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…

Hydroelectric power stations run backwards to store energy (electrical->potential).

Energy usage of computers is also decreasing, as in mobile devices. There's also anticipated uptake of ARM processors in server farms, because energy usage is a major cost. The advances include advances in energy usage.

We have many options for sources of power; our current choices are mostly preferences. You're right that energy tech has not advanced at Moore-like rates (nothing but silicon does), but it has matched the accelerating demand for it. When it fails to, we'll see serious research into other power sources. (Cheap energy is a curse.)

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#99

Post by bermanoid »

bh42222 wrote: post #87
wnewman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're saying a lot there, so rather than create a wall of text in response I'd like to boil it down a bit - assume N=25Mb, give or take an order of magnitude:

Are you making the claim that the N bits of DNA involved in coding the brain can encode more than 2^N neural algorithms?

Or do you think that the particular set of 2^N (assuming no redundancy, which is generous...) neural algorithms that N bits of DNA can encode are more likely to result in intelligence than a random sampling of algorithms of equivalent Kolmogorov complexity?

Or are you claiming that epigenetic factors are able to reliably transmit significantly more than N bits of mission-critical data across the generations, and that epigenetic evolution is likely to thank for devising the human intelligence algorithm rather than evolution of DNA?

Edit: looking over your post, I suspect that part of the misunderstanding is over the word "complexity". You seem to be focusing on the complexity of the products; these estimates focus on the complexity of the spec. In humans the difference is muddled because the spec goes through such ridiculously complicated machinery to become the product, but when it comes to designing algorithms, that complicated machinery might as well be a random shuffle for all it matters to the algorithm's proper functioning, so the Kolmogorov complexity that it adds is effectively zero.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#100

Post by modeless »

0x12 wrote: post #83
modeless wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My money's on Andrew Ng's deep learning research. Deep learning has already had huge success, both in reproducing the measured behavior of neurons in the brain, and in outperforming the state of the art on various machine learning classification tasks.

Here's an overview which references some very impressive results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY4ajbu_G3k

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