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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

208 points by nollidge 16y ago

c1sc0 16y ago
About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  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.)
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Wow - that "What the Bleep..." does look remarkably bad. The trailer is Poe's Law in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      It is deadly dangerous for me to watch a clip from that film. It could inspire dozens of hours of rage-filled but closely-argued physics lectures. Given the slightest provocation, I will go all xkcd.com/386 on its ass and my actual career will die of neglect. Now, I need to go calm myself by fixing some bugs before I start to throw things. ;)
      - arethuza 16y ago
        For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with my son (he's 11) about the key differences between scientific and religious beliefs - I think I'll use that film as an example of how it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference - especially when people present what are essentially religious beliefs using terminology derived from science. (NB I remember reading some Erich von Däniken books when I was 9 or 10 and getting awfully excited - I was quite upset when I found that people could just make stuff up and present it as science).
        mechanical_fish 16y ago
        That's the extra-infuriating thing. In theory, I'm completely down with the project of using parables based on science to convey religious ideas. Religion is built out of the raw materials that the world gives you. If we live in a world full of science and technology, we should expect our parables and our myths and our stories to be filled with science and technology. (Cue a chorus line of Doctor Who cosplayers.) So, in theory, I could have been okay with What the Bleep. In practice, however, it is just horribly grating -- way more grating than any SF, even the dumbest SF.
        jimbokun 16y ago
        "Erich von Däniken" The Nova debunking of Chariots of the Gods was epic, and a important lesson to me as a high school student not to take scientific sounding arguments at face value. Also, an important lesson in not underestimating human intelligence and creativity. Most of the debunking was simply figuring out how ancient peoples did things we now think are impossible without modern technology.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - bld 16y ago
        Turn that rage into a popular webcomic, then you could start a new career!
        16y ago
napierzaza 16y ago
I 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.
- tiles 16y ago
  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.
  - cryptoz 16y ago
    > 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.
    - pavlov 16y ago
yungchin 16y ago
This 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.
- ugh 16y ago
  ”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.
  - yungchin 16y ago
    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.
    - bh42 16y ago
      I think his point was that we can't code the fundamentals because those require linear time protein folding. And protein folding is one of those hard CS problems.
StavrosK 16y ago
"he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius" Looks like he understands the brain just fine, to me...
rsheridan6 16y ago
I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab. I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 62-year-old Ray Kurzweil's lifetime, or mine.
- getonit 16y ago
  > We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. You sir, are a genius. To make up for my previous lack of initiative, I will do so immediately. Please arrange for the world to be ready for my announcement of the solution at noon tomorrow.
  - rsheridan6 16y ago
    I'm not a genius, and you probably aren't either, but somebody probably is. As far as I know there is no fundamental reason to assume that this problem won't be solved. It's not the halting problem.
  - aswanson 16y ago
    Don't even solve it. Just put it up for bid on elance, along with the P-NP problem.
- cageface 16y ago
  There is Nobel-prize winning theory that shows that you won't ever truly solve this problem by studying the underlying atomic physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_structures_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_stru...
  - rsheridan6 16y ago
    I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.
sprout 16y ago
Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist. Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid. He's out of his depth is all. Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.
- flatline 16y ago
  "Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid" That's not much of an argument. He plays on the standard things that all religions play on: the promise of some form of immortality, which instinctively plays on the fear of death; claims that the near future will be radically different than the present; etc. His extrapolations of exponential growth are not entirely unfounded but he applies the same logic to everything that suits his fancy without taking into account that science and technology have made large but halting steps forward throughout history, and the fundamentals of scientific insight and discovery haven't changed. He talks and sounds like an evangelical to me. No doubt he is a brilliant scientist but that doesn't warrant the cult of personality that has grown up around him, which I perceive as a dangerous thing contrary to the aims of science.
  - sprout 16y ago
    I agree that cults of personality are bad things. But dismissing someone as an evangelist and overrated isn't much of an argument either. It trivializes his very real and important accomplishments, and conveniently allows you to dismiss all of his ideas without looking at them on their individual merits. In short, ad hominem, and unwarranted. Kurzweil has several functioning products that would have fallen into the mess you dismiss as nonsense two decades ago. Is he wrong on a lot of things? Yes. But so is any other engineer looking for things that haven't been done before. Even if Kurzweil has a spell where he does nothing of any merit for a decade (which has yet to happen) I'll still confidently say you're foolish to rule him out as a crank. He's earned his right to dream aloud.
rsaarelm 16y ago
Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain. Basically, we have no idea where we will get the AI source code we can actually do something with, but we have some reason to believe that the most concise version of the source code won't contain more data than the human genome. The rough intuition might be if we wanted to simulate brain in the caricatured reverse-engineer-the-DNA way, we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space, but the human DNA and basic cellular machinery for hosting it would be the only seriously difficult bits to stick in there, the rest would just be simple chemicals and the impossibly detailed physics simulation. I guess the analogy then is that we make the AI source code (which we don't know how to write yet), which is supposed to end up at most around the length of a human DNA, but which can run sensibly in existing hardware. Then, deterministic processing entirely unlike the immensely difficult-to-compute protein folding from DNA will make this code instantiate a working AI somewhere at the level of a newborn human baby, in the same way as the genome initiates protein-folding based processes that makes a single cell grow into a human baby given little more than nutrients and shelter from the external physical environment. So it doesn't seem like a really strong statement of overoptimism. It's basically just saying that the human brain doesn't seem to require a mystifyingly immense amount of initial information to form, but instead something that can be quantified and very roughly compared with already existing software projects. I'd still guess it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though.
- russell 16y ago
  Form my limited understanding, it's simpler than it appears. It's a wire routing problem. Each neuron "knows" where it is going based on the proximity of its fellows, just as other cells know to become a liver based on who their neighbors are. Given a nascent brain, it is trained into an intelligence by external input. Neurons are pruned and connections strengthened. As I see it, a significant problem is designing a substrate in silicon, or whatever, that has the requisite complexity. I would not be too surprised to find out that the layout program for an AI is not too different in complexity from today's largest software projects.
wihon 16y ago
His last comment, The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (http://bit.ly/uEC5 http://bit.ly/uEC5) 'artificial cell' (http://bit.ly/c27AL5 http://bit.ly/c27AL5), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team really did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.) It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)
- tokenadult 16y ago
  The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research, http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.
  - wihon 16y ago
    @tokenadult that's some good shit. :) This is slightly off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics. I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.
chadmalik 16y ago
Ultimately the criticism of hard AI that sticks is that its enthusiasts are using a faulty "brain as computer" metaphor as the basis for their theories. The brain and digital computers do NOT work the same (the brain is not digital) and assuming they are, and that therefore clever-enough computer models can replicate the brain, seems to put very intelligent / brilliant CS people at risk of banging their head against a wall for decades. More generally its fun to imagine things like this but also good to realize real world limits as we live in a finite world with limitations such as living 700 years not being at all likely (or desirable, IMHO).
efsavage 16y ago
Synopsis: Kurzweil is underestimating the brain. Myers is underestimating technology.
edtechdev 16y ago
Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems. I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we can simulate brain function by 2020. We can already simulate simple organisms and neural networks. You can already accomplish quite a bit of complex emergent behavior with those. Simulating the entire brain would require an enormous amount of processing (though surely feasible some day, if not 10 years, how about 20), but most likely we'd make some trade-offs and sacrifices and still get a close approximation (like we do with virtually every simulation). Of course simulating a brain and simulating a human are not the same thing. You can't really avoid having to simulate the entire body and its interactions with the environment. And of course we wouldn't suddenly "understand" the brain just by simulating it. It would still be the same complex system, it's just we'd be able to inspect it more closely. Such a simulation would at least help us understand a good bit more about the brain's role in our cognition and actions. And yeah, who knows, maybe in 20 years we could have some kick-ass AI in counterstrike.
10ren 16y ago
I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. (EDIT no offence intended, they freak me out too) The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.) But it's weird to claim that 50% of our genome encodes the brain. Really? Perhaps it's just that 50% is required by the brain, much of it being foundational to the whole organism (like standard libraries.)
- phreeza 16y ago
  I see it as an upper bound for the Kolmogorov Complexity of the brains structure. I am very dubious that the first successful attempts at doing this will be as efficient as the genetic code though...
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  This strikes me as very similar to a Mandelbrot fractal. The fractal is overwhelmingly complex and intricate, but wholly mathematically described by a very simple formula. The complexity of the brain is similar: A few simple cells and proteins can interact in extraordinarily complex ways. Some biologists understand this just fine, thank you very much.
  - roadnottaken 16y ago
    In fact, some biologists have even written books on the subject: http://books.google.com/books?id=lZcSpRJz0dgC&lpg=PP1&dq=isbn%3A0195079515&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=lZcSpRJz0dgC&lpg=PP1&#3...
- aswanson 16y ago
  But even looking at it in an information-theoretic way, what is being stated is that the instruction set is far more powerful than the binary analogy Kurzweil is using. The instruction I give: "Cure Cancer" has 11 bytes. But that instruction implies a ridiculously complicated set of sequences that we haven't figured out yet. In this situation, look at the genome as the instruction set for protein construction and folding, an ongoing problem in research we have just begun to investigate. The information contained in the genome is combinatorially descriptive and therefore not as simple as made out to be, if you define information as the amount of "surprise" in the outcome.
masterponomo 16y ago
Kurzweil has written enough by now that anyone hearing his interviews should be able to put his ideas in the context of his predictions about the Singularity. I have always thought Kurzweil hedges his bets quite well, and he makes it quite clear that the capabilities about which he writes depend on future gains in computing power. Kurzweil is only human, of course, and it is well known that he is trying to extend his own life so that he will be here for the Singularity. He very much wants the things he predicts to happen in his lifetime, but I don't hear or read him as asserting that that will absolutely be the case. Myers' unnecessary "refutation" (and insulting) of Kurzweil reminds me of the reactions to the Segway. Kamen predicted that it would revolutionize transportation; naysayers then piled on, ridiculing him and saying that the Segway wouldn't work for commuting long distances on American super highways. Well, no, but that's not what he meant by revolutionizing transportation. I'm sure Myers is probably good at what he does, and he is very much concerned with the now and the practical. We need people like him, and we also need visionaries like Kurzweil and Kamen who look ahead decades or centuries.
scotty79 16y ago
> The design of the brain is in the genome. Given how much computation takes to "decompress" information about what a protein is built of into 3d layout of that protein (vide folding@home), statement that you could "decode" half of the genome into working simulated system is bold to say the least. Trouble with simulating human 1 to 1 is not with how complex human itself is but with how complex, bizzare and computationally powerful is physical hardware on which program "be human" runs.
api 16y ago
I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, software, machines, etc. are very loose analogies meant to illustrate a point. Never take these analogies too seriously. DNA is not a program-- it is a molecule, and one that may very well do things at the quantum level that are biologically important. The brain is not a neural network. It is an interconnected colony of living cells of a variety of types, and it has been shown that all types of cells in the brain are involved in cognition. We are nowhere near anything with the parallelism or information density of the brain. Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us. There's a nascent field called quantum biology that suggests that the brain may very well be a quantum computer, so maybe quantum computers are the vacuum tubes->ICs scale transition I am speaking of. I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain. Cells are not machines. I don't think we have the language to really describe what they are perfectly, but the closest I can come is "stochastic quantum probability field device." A bacterial flagellum is not a "motor," it is a quantum-scale chemo-electro-motive... well... our language breaks down. Like Feynman said, don't tell stories. Just speak literally and then use math. Actually, come to think of it, there's one engineering analogy that might work for biology. Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology. Yeah, that's pretty close. (On a related tangent, I've found that many engineers are sympathetic to intelligent design type arguments against evolution. This is because they try to think about biology like engineers and take these machine analogies literally. It just doesn't work like that.)
- jasongullickson 16y ago
  Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. ...so about 35 years? ;)
deleted 16y ago
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jerf 16y ago
There's a psychological principle that I've forgotten the name of that observes that by setting the stage correctly you can cause people to accept assumptions without even thinking about it by framing the debate correctly. This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no a priori reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system. Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper. The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call human-intelligent even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.
- ars 16y ago
  No, people are talking that way because it's obvious to the participants that no one knows how to do the higher level simulation. And there is no hope of anyone figuring it out any time soon. So people figure why not "run the program" that already exists, and that's what this conversation is about.
- zasz 16y ago
  Possibly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring.
nervechannel 16y ago
The main thing Kurzweil has missed is the even though we something like the 'source code' for a human brain, we don't have the compiler. If you're taking the (pretty weak) 'source code' analogy further, the compiler is... A host human embryonic cell, running on a womb in a mother. So thinking about the problem that way is a non-starter for obvious chicken/egg reasons.
Confusion 16y ago
Myers is wrong, because he overcomplicates. Kurzweil is also wrong, because he oversimplifies (I'm taking Myers's version of argument at face value; I actually suppose the argument was more sophisticated than that). Firstly where Myers is wrong: the human brain ultimately comes forth from a bunch of information roughly equal to 1 million lines of code. If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being (nothing else: what else could they construct?) and letting that human being live in our world, you would have 'created' intelligence. It's as simple as that and attacking that abstraction is completely the wrong approach to pointing out the problem with Kurzweil's argument. So, then the two points where Kurzweil is wrong: 1) it's not just any million lines of code. It has to be exactly the million lines of code in our genome, give or take some bits. Considering the enormously complex interactions between these bits of code, this is worse than reverse engineering the largest codebase of spaghetti code you could possiblt imagine. The simple example that Myers gives is enough to show this. 2) The million lines of code cannot just be executed anywhere. It encodes for the construction of a human from raw material and the subsequent operation of that human. Give it different materials or a different living environment and something entirely different, in most variations nothing remotely capable of 'life', appears. And even if you could make it build something from electronic components: slight differences in the perceptive systems can create huge differences in the brain and the concepts in the brain. A machine with a finite pixelized array of visual light receptors would build a completely different conceptual model of the world. Reverse engineering the genome is not only extremely hard: it is very unlikely to produce the result you want.
- andolanra 16y ago
  Myers isn't trying to argue that the million lines of code aren't there or aren't important. He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best, and that trying to reverse-engineer the hardware is several orders of magnitude more difficult than trying to understand the original programming. The hardware components don't follow the law of superposition, either, so we can't just look at each element in isolation. The entire thing has to be understood. Imagine going back to ancient Roman/Greek/Etruscan/&c times and handing them a ream of paper filled with the hexadecimal representation of an x86 application compiled for a Windows environment, and then showed them what it looked like when running. "Hey, look, now you can play videos and music!" Now imagine it was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that, and you're beginning to get the idea. "If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being..." The exact point he was making was that there's a lot of handwaved complexity in this statement, and that the abstraction "understand human being program, run code" is abstract to the point where it no longer accurately reflects the reality of the situation.
heyadayo 16y ago
My programmer's understanding of the argument is this: Even if you could reduce the brain to some sort of bytecode, an interpreter is still necessary to run that bytecode. For instance, a python program might be a few bytes, but the interpreter is still a few megabytes. Yet both are necessary to run the program. Who knows how large a brain bytecode interpreter is going to be, but probably very large.
- alisey 16y ago
  But you don't need to write the whole interpreter to understand how that small python program works.
  - rayval 16y ago
    Assuming you have the documentation, or assuming that you can extrapolate from a program in a language that you already know. If one knows python and is given a program in APL, then likely an insurmountable barrier has been reached. If you don't have the docs the describe the language, the one can try to infer the language by running experiments on variations of the stored program. However one needs access to the processor in order to run different experiments and get different results to be able understand how the programming language works. We don't have CPU in a form that we can experiment with ("brains in a vat"). We have a 50Mb string in APL*2, a mostly unknown language for a mostly unknown processor. The other part is that this is not a program but a meta-program -- meaning there are multiple levels of indirection. The DNA does not directly specify the brain, but instead specifies rules for components that would eventually arrive at an assembly (guided by a rich context of voluminous other inputs over an extended period of time) that constitutes a brain.
- kragen 16y ago
  The interpreter for DNA is a living cell. There are two problems with this argument: 1. For the interpreter to substantially reduce the size of the DNA needed to encode a program to build an intelligent system, that interpreter needs to be optimized to reduce the complexity of such programs. However, as far as we can tell, ribosomes and protein folding work exactly the same way in nearly all living cells, from snottites to kelp. It isn't plausible to suggest that each Salmonella cell contains hundreds of megabytes of information that's optimized for producing intelligent systems. Even if Salmonella contains hundreds of megabytes of information, it would amount to a proof of creationism if that information were optimized to simplify the expression of brain designs. So the size of the interpreter is irrelevant. 2. DNA is not just interpreted; it's compiled into cells. The DNA of a cell contains a complete program for making every peptide that is necessary to the cell from individual amino acids, and those peptides together construct all the other chemicals from a small number of simple molecules found in the environment. So the source code for the "interpreter", down to the hardware level, is actually already present in the DNA.
paraschopra 16y ago
Actually the information needed for replicating brain is not just limited to the information encoded in DNA. Physics plays a great deal of role in all molecular biology and from physical interactions arise cell-cell interactions which then give rise to complicated organs that you have in the body. (And, of course, all these arose during billions of years of evolution which is encoded not only in DNA but environment also.) So if you were to simulate the brain, modeling DNA will be A tiny part of it. Encoding the deepest of physics world (yes, quantum effects play many roles in DNA) AND then having enough computational power to model interactions of those particles in real time IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.
trominos 16y ago
This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code. It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.
abecedarius 16y ago
Kurzweil is reported as equating 25MB of compressed DNA to 1 million lines of source code, which seems several times too low: if I compress the comment-stripped source to one of my own projects, it compresses down to 8 bytes per line of code as defined by sloccount. If we suppose compressed DNA has similar real info rate to my gzip-compressed source, then 25MB corresponds to 3 million SLOC, not 1. If you include blank lines and comments, then more like 5 million. For another take, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html puts the Linux kernel source at 4 million lines. Can you compile a 25MB kernel? Compressed? (How much of it is 'introns', anyway? This might not be the best example.) (Not going to touch the argument about applicability. It does seem to me that whenever Kurzweil glosses over details, the closer look always appears less utopian. There are other writers about these ideas who I can read without having to check every assertion, like Anders Sandberg.)
CamperBob 16y ago
We eventually learned to fly, too... but not by sticking feathers up our butts, as Kurzweil is advocating.
geuis 16y ago
PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.
- Devilboy 16y ago
  This is what I got from it too. Ray is not an idiot.
jarin 16y ago
If you want to read some hard science fiction about how AI might be developed and how an AI might think, I'd highly recommend the in-progress series Life Artificial: http://lifeartificial.com/ http://lifeartificial.com/
Aegean 16y ago
The article has a point that Ray Kurzweil's claims are nonsense, but lets not focus on his claims on genome-to-protein-to-brain cells mechanism. What's rather more important is how the brain does what it does and how that compares with today's computers. There are 50 to 100 billion neurons in the human brain and the power of the brain comes from the fact that you can create many orders of magnitude more neural circuit combinations with those neurons. Each cell may be part of many circuits, and learning involves the forming of these circuits. Now, lets compare that phenomenal power with the power of the computer. It becomes especially laughable when you say its 50MB worth of information.
Devilboy 16y ago
Everyone is an expert on AI and the human brain today I see.
wglb 16y ago
Hmmm. Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain. A million lines of code is hardly enough to run a car, for goodness sake.
dilipd 16y ago
Just from the description in the Wikipedia this is how I read Ray. He is excellent in marketing, in sales, in networking & as an overall promoter. All qualities we hackers need to cultivate as long as we control ourselves & avoid pitching any vapor-ware. Some examples of him promoting his product or himself. 1. At 17, appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret - showed off software that composed piano music 2. International Science Fair, first prize for the same. 3. Recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search 4. Personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony. ... Incredibly, it goes on and on. Very fascinating, if read with the heart of an entrepreneur. His whole life seems to be a chain of fantastic promotions.
DrJohnty 16y ago
I too have my doubts about reverse engineering the brain. As I see it regardless of whether the Singularity arises or not this century will achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before. To get this in perspective just consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never before seen. Whether we reverse engineer the brain or not the merging of human and machine intelligence is an inevitability because you only need to look at how attached we are to our iPhones and Blackberry’s to realise that we will ultimately be unable to resist moving increased processing capability directly inside the body. The consequence of that is massively increased capability whatever way you look at it.
rsaarelm 16y ago
Incidentally, Larry Page used the exact same argument back in 2007: My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed… so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess. (http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-the-aaas-meeting-entrepreneurship-in-science/ http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-t...)
jongraehl 16y ago
Kurzweil denies the accusation strongly: http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzweil-does-not-understand-the-brain http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzw...

208 points by nollidge 16y ago

c1sc0 16y ago

About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."

mechanical_fish 16y ago
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.)
- arethuza 16y ago
  Wow - that "What the Bleep..." does look remarkably bad. The trailer is Poe's Law in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    It is deadly dangerous for me to watch a clip from that film. It could inspire dozens of hours of rage-filled but closely-argued physics lectures. Given the slightest provocation, I will go all xkcd.com/386 on its ass and my actual career will die of neglect. Now, I need to go calm myself by fixing some bugs before I start to throw things. ;)
    - arethuza 16y ago
      For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with my son (he's 11) about the key differences between scientific and religious beliefs - I think I'll use that film as an example of how it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference - especially when people present what are essentially religious beliefs using terminology derived from science. (NB I remember reading some Erich von Däniken books when I was 9 or 10 and getting awfully excited - I was quite upset when I found that people could just make stuff up and present it as science).
      - mechanical_fish 16y ago
        That's the extra-infuriating thing. In theory, I'm completely down with the project of using parables based on science to convey religious ideas. Religion is built out of the raw materials that the world gives you. If we live in a world full of science and technology, we should expect our parables and our myths and our stories to be filled with science and technology. (Cue a chorus line of Doctor Who cosplayers.) So, in theory, I could have been okay with What the Bleep. In practice, however, it is just horribly grating -- way more grating than any SF, even the dumbest SF.
      - jimbokun 16y ago
        "Erich von Däniken" The Nova debunking of Chariots of the Gods was epic, and a important lesson to me as a high school student not to take scientific sounding arguments at face value. Also, an important lesson in not underestimating human intelligence and creativity. Most of the debunking was simply figuring out how ancient peoples did things we now think are impossible without modern technology.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - bld 16y ago
      Turn that rage into a popular webcomic, then you could start a new career!
      - 16y ago

napierzaza 16y ago

I 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.

tiles 16y ago
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.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  > 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.
  - pavlov 16y ago

yungchin 16y ago

This 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.

ugh 16y ago
”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.
- yungchin 16y ago
  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.
  - bh42 16y ago
    I think his point was that we can't code the fundamentals because those require linear time protein folding. And protein folding is one of those hard CS problems.

StavrosK 16y ago

"he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius" Looks like he understands the brain just fine, to me...

rsheridan6 16y ago

I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab. I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 62-year-old Ray Kurzweil's lifetime, or mine.

getonit 16y ago
> We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. You sir, are a genius. To make up for my previous lack of initiative, I will do so immediately. Please arrange for the world to be ready for my announcement of the solution at noon tomorrow.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  I'm not a genius, and you probably aren't either, but somebody probably is. As far as I know there is no fundamental reason to assume that this problem won't be solved. It's not the halting problem.
- aswanson 16y ago
  Don't even solve it. Just put it up for bid on elance, along with the P-NP problem.
cageface 16y ago
There is Nobel-prize winning theory that shows that you won't ever truly solve this problem by studying the underlying atomic physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_structures_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_stru...
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

sprout 16y ago

Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist. Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid. He's out of his depth is all. Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.

flatline 16y ago
"Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid" That's not much of an argument. He plays on the standard things that all religions play on: the promise of some form of immortality, which instinctively plays on the fear of death; claims that the near future will be radically different than the present; etc. His extrapolations of exponential growth are not entirely unfounded but he applies the same logic to everything that suits his fancy without taking into account that science and technology have made large but halting steps forward throughout history, and the fundamentals of scientific insight and discovery haven't changed. He talks and sounds like an evangelical to me. No doubt he is a brilliant scientist but that doesn't warrant the cult of personality that has grown up around him, which I perceive as a dangerous thing contrary to the aims of science.
- sprout 16y ago
  I agree that cults of personality are bad things. But dismissing someone as an evangelist and overrated isn't much of an argument either. It trivializes his very real and important accomplishments, and conveniently allows you to dismiss all of his ideas without looking at them on their individual merits. In short, ad hominem, and unwarranted. Kurzweil has several functioning products that would have fallen into the mess you dismiss as nonsense two decades ago. Is he wrong on a lot of things? Yes. But so is any other engineer looking for things that haven't been done before. Even if Kurzweil has a spell where he does nothing of any merit for a decade (which has yet to happen) I'll still confidently say you're foolish to rule him out as a crank. He's earned his right to dream aloud.

rsaarelm 16y ago

Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain. Basically, we have no idea where we will get the AI source code we can actually do something with, but we have some reason to believe that the most concise version of the source code won't contain more data than the human genome. The rough intuition might be if we wanted to simulate brain in the caricatured reverse-engineer-the-DNA way, we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space, but the human DNA and basic cellular machinery for hosting it would be the only seriously difficult bits to stick in there, the rest would just be simple chemicals and the impossibly detailed physics simulation. I guess the analogy then is that we make the AI source code (which we don't know how to write yet), which is supposed to end up at most around the length of a human DNA, but which can run sensibly in existing hardware. Then, deterministic processing entirely unlike the immensely difficult-to-compute protein folding from DNA will make this code instantiate a working AI somewhere at the level of a newborn human baby, in the same way as the genome initiates protein-folding based processes that makes a single cell grow into a human baby given little more than nutrients and shelter from the external physical environment. So it doesn't seem like a really strong statement of overoptimism. It's basically just saying that the human brain doesn't seem to require a mystifyingly immense amount of initial information to form, but instead something that can be quantified and very roughly compared with already existing software projects. I'd still guess it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though.

russell 16y ago
Form my limited understanding, it's simpler than it appears. It's a wire routing problem. Each neuron "knows" where it is going based on the proximity of its fellows, just as other cells know to become a liver based on who their neighbors are. Given a nascent brain, it is trained into an intelligence by external input. Neurons are pruned and connections strengthened. As I see it, a significant problem is designing a substrate in silicon, or whatever, that has the requisite complexity. I would not be too surprised to find out that the layout program for an AI is not too different in complexity from today's largest software projects.

wihon 16y ago

His last comment, The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (http://bit.ly/uEC5 http://bit.ly/uEC5) 'artificial cell' (http://bit.ly/c27AL5 http://bit.ly/c27AL5), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team really did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.) It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)

tokenadult 16y ago
The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research, http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.
- wihon 16y ago
  @tokenadult that's some good shit. :) This is slightly off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics. I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.

chadmalik 16y ago

Ultimately the criticism of hard AI that sticks is that its enthusiasts are using a faulty "brain as computer" metaphor as the basis for their theories. The brain and digital computers do NOT work the same (the brain is not digital) and assuming they are, and that therefore clever-enough computer models can replicate the brain, seems to put very intelligent / brilliant CS people at risk of banging their head against a wall for decades. More generally its fun to imagine things like this but also good to realize real world limits as we live in a finite world with limitations such as living 700 years not being at all likely (or desirable, IMHO).

efsavage 16y ago

Synopsis: Kurzweil is underestimating the brain. Myers is underestimating technology.

edtechdev 16y ago

Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems. I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we can simulate brain function by 2020. We can already simulate simple organisms and neural networks. You can already accomplish quite a bit of complex emergent behavior with those. Simulating the entire brain would require an enormous amount of processing (though surely feasible some day, if not 10 years, how about 20), but most likely we'd make some trade-offs and sacrifices and still get a close approximation (like we do with virtually every simulation). Of course simulating a brain and simulating a human are not the same thing. You can't really avoid having to simulate the entire body and its interactions with the environment. And of course we wouldn't suddenly "understand" the brain just by simulating it. It would still be the same complex system, it's just we'd be able to inspect it more closely. Such a simulation would at least help us understand a good bit more about the brain's role in our cognition and actions. And yeah, who knows, maybe in 20 years we could have some kick-ass AI in counterstrike.

10ren 16y ago

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. (EDIT no offence intended, they freak me out too) The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.) But it's weird to claim that 50% of our genome encodes the brain. Really? Perhaps it's just that 50% is required by the brain, much of it being foundational to the whole organism (like standard libraries.)

phreeza 16y ago
I see it as an upper bound for the Kolmogorov Complexity of the brains structure. I am very dubious that the first successful attempts at doing this will be as efficient as the genetic code though...
roadnottaken 16y ago
This strikes me as very similar to a Mandelbrot fractal. The fractal is overwhelmingly complex and intricate, but wholly mathematically described by a very simple formula. The complexity of the brain is similar: A few simple cells and proteins can interact in extraordinarily complex ways. Some biologists understand this just fine, thank you very much.
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  In fact, some biologists have even written books on the subject: http://books.google.com/books?id=lZcSpRJz0dgC&lpg=PP1&dq=isbn%3A0195079515&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=lZcSpRJz0dgC&lpg=PP1&#3...
aswanson 16y ago
But even looking at it in an information-theoretic way, what is being stated is that the instruction set is far more powerful than the binary analogy Kurzweil is using. The instruction I give: "Cure Cancer" has 11 bytes. But that instruction implies a ridiculously complicated set of sequences that we haven't figured out yet. In this situation, look at the genome as the instruction set for protein construction and folding, an ongoing problem in research we have just begun to investigate. The information contained in the genome is combinatorially descriptive and therefore not as simple as made out to be, if you define information as the amount of "surprise" in the outcome.

masterponomo 16y ago

Kurzweil has written enough by now that anyone hearing his interviews should be able to put his ideas in the context of his predictions about the Singularity. I have always thought Kurzweil hedges his bets quite well, and he makes it quite clear that the capabilities about which he writes depend on future gains in computing power. Kurzweil is only human, of course, and it is well known that he is trying to extend his own life so that he will be here for the Singularity. He very much wants the things he predicts to happen in his lifetime, but I don't hear or read him as asserting that that will absolutely be the case. Myers' unnecessary "refutation" (and insulting) of Kurzweil reminds me of the reactions to the Segway. Kamen predicted that it would revolutionize transportation; naysayers then piled on, ridiculing him and saying that the Segway wouldn't work for commuting long distances on American super highways. Well, no, but that's not what he meant by revolutionizing transportation. I'm sure Myers is probably good at what he does, and he is very much concerned with the now and the practical. We need people like him, and we also need visionaries like Kurzweil and Kamen who look ahead decades or centuries.

scotty79 16y ago

> The design of the brain is in the genome. Given how much computation takes to "decompress" information about what a protein is built of into 3d layout of that protein (vide folding@home), statement that you could "decode" half of the genome into working simulated system is bold to say the least. Trouble with simulating human 1 to 1 is not with how complex human itself is but with how complex, bizzare and computationally powerful is physical hardware on which program "be human" runs.

api 16y ago

I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, software, machines, etc. are very loose analogies meant to illustrate a point. Never take these analogies too seriously. DNA is not a program-- it is a molecule, and one that may very well do things at the quantum level that are biologically important. The brain is not a neural network. It is an interconnected colony of living cells of a variety of types, and it has been shown that all types of cells in the brain are involved in cognition. We are nowhere near anything with the parallelism or information density of the brain. Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us. There's a nascent field called quantum biology that suggests that the brain may very well be a quantum computer, so maybe quantum computers are the vacuum tubes->ICs scale transition I am speaking of. I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain. Cells are not machines. I don't think we have the language to really describe what they are perfectly, but the closest I can come is "stochastic quantum probability field device." A bacterial flagellum is not a "motor," it is a quantum-scale chemo-electro-motive... well... our language breaks down. Like Feynman said, don't tell stories. Just speak literally and then use math. Actually, come to think of it, there's one engineering analogy that might work for biology. Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology. Yeah, that's pretty close. (On a related tangent, I've found that many engineers are sympathetic to intelligent design type arguments against evolution. This is because they try to think about biology like engineers and take these machine analogies literally. It just doesn't work like that.)

jasongullickson 16y ago
Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. ...so about 35 years? ;)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jerf 16y ago

There's a psychological principle that I've forgotten the name of that observes that by setting the stage correctly you can cause people to accept assumptions without even thinking about it by framing the debate correctly. This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no a priori reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system. Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper. The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call human-intelligent even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.

ars 16y ago
No, people are talking that way because it's obvious to the participants that no one knows how to do the higher level simulation. And there is no hope of anyone figuring it out any time soon. So people figure why not "run the program" that already exists, and that's what this conversation is about.
zasz 16y ago
Possibly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring.

nervechannel 16y ago

The main thing Kurzweil has missed is the even though we something like the 'source code' for a human brain, we don't have the compiler. If you're taking the (pretty weak) 'source code' analogy further, the compiler is... A host human embryonic cell, running on a womb in a mother. So thinking about the problem that way is a non-starter for obvious chicken/egg reasons.

Confusion 16y ago

Myers is wrong, because he overcomplicates. Kurzweil is also wrong, because he oversimplifies (I'm taking Myers's version of argument at face value; I actually suppose the argument was more sophisticated than that). Firstly where Myers is wrong: the human brain ultimately comes forth from a bunch of information roughly equal to 1 million lines of code. If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being (nothing else: what else could they construct?) and letting that human being live in our world, you would have 'created' intelligence. It's as simple as that and attacking that abstraction is completely the wrong approach to pointing out the problem with Kurzweil's argument. So, then the two points where Kurzweil is wrong: 1) it's not just any million lines of code. It has to be exactly the million lines of code in our genome, give or take some bits. Considering the enormously complex interactions between these bits of code, this is worse than reverse engineering the largest codebase of spaghetti code you could possiblt imagine. The simple example that Myers gives is enough to show this. 2) The million lines of code cannot just be executed anywhere. It encodes for the construction of a human from raw material and the subsequent operation of that human. Give it different materials or a different living environment and something entirely different, in most variations nothing remotely capable of 'life', appears. And even if you could make it build something from electronic components: slight differences in the perceptive systems can create huge differences in the brain and the concepts in the brain. A machine with a finite pixelized array of visual light receptors would build a completely different conceptual model of the world. Reverse engineering the genome is not only extremely hard: it is very unlikely to produce the result you want.

andolanra 16y ago
Myers isn't trying to argue that the million lines of code aren't there or aren't important. He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best, and that trying to reverse-engineer the hardware is several orders of magnitude more difficult than trying to understand the original programming. The hardware components don't follow the law of superposition, either, so we can't just look at each element in isolation. The entire thing has to be understood. Imagine going back to ancient Roman/Greek/Etruscan/&c times and handing them a ream of paper filled with the hexadecimal representation of an x86 application compiled for a Windows environment, and then showed them what it looked like when running. "Hey, look, now you can play videos and music!" Now imagine it was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that, and you're beginning to get the idea. "If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being..." The exact point he was making was that there's a lot of handwaved complexity in this statement, and that the abstraction "understand human being program, run code" is abstract to the point where it no longer accurately reflects the reality of the situation.

heyadayo 16y ago

My programmer's understanding of the argument is this: Even if you could reduce the brain to some sort of bytecode, an interpreter is still necessary to run that bytecode. For instance, a python program might be a few bytes, but the interpreter is still a few megabytes. Yet both are necessary to run the program. Who knows how large a brain bytecode interpreter is going to be, but probably very large.

alisey 16y ago
But you don't need to write the whole interpreter to understand how that small python program works.
- rayval 16y ago
  Assuming you have the documentation, or assuming that you can extrapolate from a program in a language that you already know. If one knows python and is given a program in APL, then likely an insurmountable barrier has been reached. If you don't have the docs the describe the language, the one can try to infer the language by running experiments on variations of the stored program. However one needs access to the processor in order to run different experiments and get different results to be able understand how the programming language works. We don't have CPU in a form that we can experiment with ("brains in a vat"). We have a 50Mb string in APL*2, a mostly unknown language for a mostly unknown processor. The other part is that this is not a program but a meta-program -- meaning there are multiple levels of indirection. The DNA does not directly specify the brain, but instead specifies rules for components that would eventually arrive at an assembly (guided by a rich context of voluminous other inputs over an extended period of time) that constitutes a brain.
kragen 16y ago
The interpreter for DNA is a living cell. There are two problems with this argument: 1. For the interpreter to substantially reduce the size of the DNA needed to encode a program to build an intelligent system, that interpreter needs to be optimized to reduce the complexity of such programs. However, as far as we can tell, ribosomes and protein folding work exactly the same way in nearly all living cells, from snottites to kelp. It isn't plausible to suggest that each Salmonella cell contains hundreds of megabytes of information that's optimized for producing intelligent systems. Even if Salmonella contains hundreds of megabytes of information, it would amount to a proof of creationism if that information were optimized to simplify the expression of brain designs. So the size of the interpreter is irrelevant. 2. DNA is not just interpreted; it's compiled into cells. The DNA of a cell contains a complete program for making every peptide that is necessary to the cell from individual amino acids, and those peptides together construct all the other chemicals from a small number of simple molecules found in the environment. So the source code for the "interpreter", down to the hardware level, is actually already present in the DNA.

paraschopra 16y ago

Actually the information needed for replicating brain is not just limited to the information encoded in DNA. Physics plays a great deal of role in all molecular biology and from physical interactions arise cell-cell interactions which then give rise to complicated organs that you have in the body. (And, of course, all these arose during billions of years of evolution which is encoded not only in DNA but environment also.) So if you were to simulate the brain, modeling DNA will be A tiny part of it. Encoding the deepest of physics world (yes, quantum effects play many roles in DNA) AND then having enough computational power to model interactions of those particles in real time IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.

trominos 16y ago

This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code. It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.

abecedarius 16y ago

Kurzweil is reported as equating 25MB of compressed DNA to 1 million lines of source code, which seems several times too low: if I compress the comment-stripped source to one of my own projects, it compresses down to 8 bytes per line of code as defined by sloccount. If we suppose compressed DNA has similar real info rate to my gzip-compressed source, then 25MB corresponds to 3 million SLOC, not 1. If you include blank lines and comments, then more like 5 million. For another take, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html puts the Linux kernel source at 4 million lines. Can you compile a 25MB kernel? Compressed? (How much of it is 'introns', anyway? This might not be the best example.) (Not going to touch the argument about applicability. It does seem to me that whenever Kurzweil glosses over details, the closer look always appears less utopian. There are other writers about these ideas who I can read without having to check every assertion, like Anders Sandberg.)

CamperBob 16y ago

We eventually learned to fly, too... but not by sticking feathers up our butts, as Kurzweil is advocating.

geuis 16y ago

PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.

Devilboy 16y ago
This is what I got from it too. Ray is not an idiot.

jarin 16y ago

If you want to read some hard science fiction about how AI might be developed and how an AI might think, I'd highly recommend the in-progress series Life Artificial: http://lifeartificial.com/ http://lifeartificial.com/

Aegean 16y ago

The article has a point that Ray Kurzweil's claims are nonsense, but lets not focus on his claims on genome-to-protein-to-brain cells mechanism. What's rather more important is how the brain does what it does and how that compares with today's computers. There are 50 to 100 billion neurons in the human brain and the power of the brain comes from the fact that you can create many orders of magnitude more neural circuit combinations with those neurons. Each cell may be part of many circuits, and learning involves the forming of these circuits. Now, lets compare that phenomenal power with the power of the computer. It becomes especially laughable when you say its 50MB worth of information.

Devilboy 16y ago

Everyone is an expert on AI and the human brain today I see.

wglb 16y ago

Hmmm. Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain. A million lines of code is hardly enough to run a car, for goodness sake.

dilipd 16y ago

Just from the description in the Wikipedia this is how I read Ray. He is excellent in marketing, in sales, in networking & as an overall promoter. All qualities we hackers need to cultivate as long as we control ourselves & avoid pitching any vapor-ware. Some examples of him promoting his product or himself. 1. At 17, appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret - showed off software that composed piano music 2. International Science Fair, first prize for the same. 3. Recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search 4. Personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony. ... Incredibly, it goes on and on. Very fascinating, if read with the heart of an entrepreneur. His whole life seems to be a chain of fantastic promotions.

DrJohnty 16y ago

I too have my doubts about reverse engineering the brain. As I see it regardless of whether the Singularity arises or not this century will achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before. To get this in perspective just consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never before seen. Whether we reverse engineer the brain or not the merging of human and machine intelligence is an inevitability because you only need to look at how attached we are to our iPhones and Blackberry’s to realise that we will ultimately be unable to resist moving increased processing capability directly inside the body. The consequence of that is massively increased capability whatever way you look at it.

rsaarelm 16y ago

Incidentally, Larry Page used the exact same argument back in 2007: My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed… so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess. (http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-the-aaas-meeting-entrepreneurship-in-science/ http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-t...)

jongraehl 16y ago

Kurzweil denies the accusation strongly: http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzweil-does-not-understand-the-brain http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzw...