Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
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Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#2About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#3I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#4This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?
Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observation that the genome consists in only 50MB of data (after compression) somehow gives us an upper bound to the complexity of the system. I'd however suspect it rather gives us a lower bound: factor in all the epigenetics, external interactions, the not necessarily simple rule set provided by physical chemistry (this is not in the genome, obviously), etc etc, and the problem may be quite a bit larger.
Take for example the way we currently believe gene transcription promoter networks to work. The combinatorial nature of those interactions means that even though the underlying data is "only" a few megabytes, the system you end up simulating gets very big very quickly.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#5I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.
I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our collective insecurity that we've come so far and yet seem to have improved on the world so little.
But it's grating to see that he's getting so much media attention for such blatant disregard of the human condition. No consideration what a post-sentient-AI world would accomplish. No regard for what happens when people live to be 700 years old and population growth doesn't slow. His ideas are like genetically engineering society with no regard to the collateral damage it'd cause to the societal environment. I don't dislike Kurzweil for being an optimist, I dislike him for being arrogant.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#6About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
I really understand where this article is coming from. Spend a decade in a biology laboratory working day and night just to figure out a tiny subset of the role of one simple protein, and you'll find that pseudoscientific handwaving no longer sounds like a pleasant breeze, but like the grating of sharpened fingernails on a chalkboard.
(For physicists the equivalent torture is a movie, which goes by the name of "What the Bleep...", that came out a few years ago. OMFG if you want to drive me into a towering rage just show me ten minutes of that film. It's like watching someone make spitballs out of the manuscript of the Eroica symphony.)
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#7This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observ…
”It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?“
I think the point he is making is that if your goal is to simulate the human brain you also have to simulate and thus understand all the little details of biology because transistors don’t magically have the same properties as proteins.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#8"he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius"
Looks like he understands the brain just fine, to me...
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#9I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.
I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our colle…
> and population growth doesn't slow.
Population growth is slowing. Dramatically. There's tons of evidence that as women are educated, they will have fewer children. And women are starting to get better educations all around the world. There's absolutely no doubt that population growth will slow (slash, is already slowing down) a bunch in the coming decades.
Second, I'm confused about the 700 number. Where does that come from? Does he think that in the next 30 years, we will be able to extend life so much that he can keep on living? Why does that stop at 700?! Doesn't he think that some time in the next 700 years we'd be able to find a way to live longer than 700?
Frankly, I doubt there's much difference between finding a way to live to 700 and finding a way to live until the end of time.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#10This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observ…
”It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?“ I think the point he is making is that if your goal is to simulate the human brain you also have to simulate and thus understand all the little details of biology because transistors don’t magically have the same properties as proteins.
Yes, I think that's his point too. But if you believe that the little details of biology emerge from the underlying physics, then maybe you only need to code the fundamental rules and can have all the rest automatically.