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The singularity is not near. Kurzweil continues to pitch his prognostications for strong AI so that he can sell more books and speaking engagements. Despite ex

The singularity is not near. Kurzweil continues to pitch his prognostications for strong AI so that he can sell more books and speaking engagements. Despite experts in the fields of biology [1] and cognitive science telling him that we just don't understand these things very well, he professes that the key discoveries lie just around the corner and that we should just wait. You know, there's probably a business in selling some of his followers rapture insurance... I'm a systems biologist who is at an intersection of some of the various fields where Kurzweil makes his boldest predictions, and I'm willing to place some bets. Before we see this ludicrous explosion in technology and AI that he describes, I think we're much more likely to see all of these: * A cure for AIDS. * Whole-genome sequencing for under $100. * A scale up and widespread use of tissue bioreactors. * Identified causes and cures for neurodegeneration. * Effective treatments and diagnostic tools for many or most forms of cancer. * Artificial hematopoietic cells approved for human use (no more blood donations, etc.) * Designer babies with hundreds if not thousands of selected markers. These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I find it offensive that this guy continues to sell us on it happening within our lifetimes. It almost certainly won't. Kurzweil has almost no appreciation (and I would argue he has little understanding) for biological systems and their complexity. [2] We can barely understand a single cell, and yet we're supposed to understand the brain in only a few years! The best part is, when is is called out on this argument, Kurzweil admits it. But he then proceeds to tell us silly biologists in the errors of our ways--that we are missing his point entirely. Strong AI doesn't need understanding from the field of biology in order to happen. Consciousness can't be that hard. In closing, SMBC's take: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100114.gif http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100114.gif [1] PZ Meyers vs. Kurzweil - http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/singularly_silly_singularity.php http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/singularly_silly_... [2] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/08/18/reverseengineering_the_human_brain_really.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/08/18/reverseengin...

deleted 15y ago
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Astrohacker 15y ago
One of Kurzweil's important points is that humans consistently underestimate the speed of exponential growth. We have a natural bias to assume rates of growth are constant. But with exponential growth, the rate of growth is exponential, and the rate of growth of the rate of growth is exponential, etc. So although it seems like his predictions are pretty wild, they are merely based on extrapolating out the present exponential curves to the future. Keep in mind your own bias about this when criticising his conclusions. To refute him, you'd need to argue that the exponential growth was going to stop, or that his calculations about the rate of growth are wrong.
- possibilistic 15y ago
  I believe that there is a large difference between the magnitude of error in my natural bias for estimating exponential rates of growth and the naive application of a mathematical model to the fields of biotechnology and cognitive science by someone untrained in either. Computing hardware and software may be developing rapidly due to the commercial sector, but my guess is that the developments in academia (algorithms, etc.) are hardly exponential. What about the fields where happenstance discoveries drive improvement? Innovation occurs readily in fields that have money--mobile computing is huge right now, isn't it? The question is whether this distribution of reward correlates with the reverse salients of technological advancement. In my original post I offered several predictions for the growth of biotechnology. I think I'm placing important and valid markers to be able to identify the trend. When I see them happen I'll be happy to conclude that we're on the path to exponential growth in our field. (Note: I follow this area well enough to see where the reverse salients lie and what discoveries may inform us to better techniques.) I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort. It's wrong, and quite frankly damaging. If the people who believe in him so strongly really want to see his vision happen, perhaps they would lend their hands in developing automation tools for us biologists.
  - Astrohacker 15y ago
    > I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort. Sounds like you're arguing we shouldn't hold comforting beliefs because, even if they are true, they might make us less productive. However, I think it is wiser to hold beliefs that are true, always. The reason is that it is, in general, far more valuable to hold correct beliefs than false ones. The fact that there are some special cases where holding false beliefs is better is useless, because there is no way to know when those cases are without first having correct beliefs. Further, Kurzweil has (obviously) never argued that it wouldn't take any effort to bring these technologies about. What he has argued is that we will put forth the effort to make them happen. If anything, it is rather discomforting to think about how much work is going to have to go into this.
vidiviciveni 15y ago
I'm not sure if PZ Meyers is a reliable source to cite when he is regarded a "confrontationalist" and has been proven wrong on many of his criticisms against Kurzweil. There are always going to be examples of heavy critics, and Kurzweil has openly responded to many of these, including PZ Meyers himself in this link: 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... Another critic response here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-issue-of.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-is...
DavidChouinard 15y ago
I sympathize with your position. Kurzweil seems to regularly makes strong remarks that shock me in their assertive naivety. However, our species is incredibly poor at intuitively understanding exponential trends. Kurzweil's essential point is that our gut-feeling predictions of the future will be off substantially. Specifically, our intuitive sense of future progress significantly underestimates actual progress and the gap systematically widens as time progresses. Neither you or I could have intuitively predicted twenty years ago the level of today's technological advancement. And we'd be even more wrong in the predicting the next twenty. It's far too easy to dismiss Kurzweil's work as that of a superficial nutjob who wants to "sell more books and speaking engagements." Kuzweil's crunched the numbers. While he might not be right on everything, his predictions are based on data, but yours are based on human intuition that has historically been wrong. I would be very careful of the knee-jerk reaction you display to Kurzweil's work. Keep in mind we are cognitively disabled at intuitively predicting exponential progress.
- Retric 15y ago
  The problem is not all tasks are of linear difficulty. If building a 1% more intelligent AI takes 1% more computational power then he might have a point. However if building a 1% more intelligent AI takes 2x the computational power then you don't end up with a singularity because you don't get a strong feedback loop. Consider starting at the low end of the scale booting windows 7 on a 2KHz CPU is about twice as fast as a 1KHz CPU and all things being equal faster processors let you get more things done but having a 1GHz vs 2GHz CPU has little effect on boot times. We might be able to build a 10x human level intelligence but if that can only build a 11x human intelligence and that can only build a 11.1x human intelligence you quickly hit a wall. Or for a more natural looking progression (10x, 15x, 18.75x, 21.09x, 22.4x). x sub 1 = 10; x(sub n) = x(n-1) * (2^n+1)/ (2^n)
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    The point of TS is that once you get to 1.0001x smarter than human you get to wall really quickly. If the wall is 2x or 11x, self-improving AI will reach it in no time. And we'll still have tremendous benefits from it, no matter how close the wall is to human intelligence. AI only need be a tiny bit smarter than humans to achieve things such as interstellar travel, eternal life, etc.
xiaoma 15y ago
I've been familiar with Kurzweil and his critics since I was in middle school. He's consistently been derided as wildly over-optimistic, but he's been right far more often than not. People originally thought his predictions of world champ-beating chess AIs by the late 90's were insane, but it actually happened about a year before he predicted. Similarly, his support and predictions for the human genome project were the subject of a great deal of ridicule from both the public and many biologists. He was right in that case, too. I would be very careful about betting against Kurzweil's predictions given his multi-decade track record.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
You bring up some good points but you ruined it from the get go by starting out with poisoning the well[1]. Right or wrong, Kurzweil is not doing it for the speaking engagements, he's not doing it for the money. He believes what he says. And where he might be wrong is because he believes it too much; he wants to live forever and for that to happen his predictions have to right. Kurzweil's arguments about biology are definitely his weakest. He does arbitrarily chart advances as that PZ piece points out. I find that biologists get more enraged about Kurzweil's predictions for this reason, and because biologists tend to have a "my field of study is the most important in the world" attitude in general. It's hilarious that PZ says that Kurzweil's book is terrible because he got the biology wrong, then says he has some points about Moore's Law and AI.... it shows the self-importance PZ places on himself. The only thing that will decide whether we reach a TS is not how fast medical technology advances. The only thing that matters is reaching strong AI. If we reach strong AI it's game-over for everything else. We'll have all of the bets you place virtually overnight, if our new masters decide to keep us around that is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
jonmc12 15y ago
"These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I find it offensive that this guy continues to sell us on it happening within our lifetimes. It almost certainly won't." So, I am assuming you think the EU's Human Brain Project is a waste of $1.6B? From my point of view, our ability to engineer, augment and replicate intelligence has very little to do with our understanding of biology. I really don't see your expertise in the complexity of biology as lending any insight into the ability to predict the evolution of intelligence capacity of our species. Strong AI based on emulating biological design is only one of many, many approaches to engineering intelligence.. Additionally, both your links and the basis of your arguments attempt to make a strawman of Kurzweil by attacking auxiliary points that are not critical to his primary empirical insights - rather you chose to attack choice speculative predictions. I'm no Kurzweil fanboy, but I think his empirical insights have done nothing less than frame the discussion of the technology singularity, and I enjoy his predictions for what they are - speculation. If you are presenting yourself as a scientist looking at this argument critically, I would expect 2 things: 1) an understanding of where your expertise has, and does not have relevance, 2) a critique of Kurzweil's empirical observations, not his speculative predictions.
burgerbrain 15y ago
Consider the following: We built working airplanes over a century ago, but powered ornithopter are still quite the engineering challenge, to put it lightly. A working understanding of biology is not necessarily a prerequisite for "machine intelligence", or more generally, a technological singularity.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Astrohacker 15y ago

One of Kurzweil's important points is that humans consistently underestimate the speed of exponential growth. We have a natural bias to assume rates of growth are constant. But with exponential growth, the rate of growth is exponential, and the rate of growth of the rate of growth is exponential, etc. So although it seems like his predictions are pretty wild, they are merely based on extrapolating out the present exponential curves to the future. Keep in mind your own bias about this when criticising his conclusions. To refute him, you'd need to argue that the exponential growth was going to stop, or that his calculations about the rate of growth are wrong.

possibilistic 15y ago
I believe that there is a large difference between the magnitude of error in my natural bias for estimating exponential rates of growth and the naive application of a mathematical model to the fields of biotechnology and cognitive science by someone untrained in either. Computing hardware and software may be developing rapidly due to the commercial sector, but my guess is that the developments in academia (algorithms, etc.) are hardly exponential. What about the fields where happenstance discoveries drive improvement? Innovation occurs readily in fields that have money--mobile computing is huge right now, isn't it? The question is whether this distribution of reward correlates with the reverse salients of technological advancement. In my original post I offered several predictions for the growth of biotechnology. I think I'm placing important and valid markers to be able to identify the trend. When I see them happen I'll be happy to conclude that we're on the path to exponential growth in our field. (Note: I follow this area well enough to see where the reverse salients lie and what discoveries may inform us to better techniques.) I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort. It's wrong, and quite frankly damaging. If the people who believe in him so strongly really want to see his vision happen, perhaps they would lend their hands in developing automation tools for us biologists.
- Astrohacker 15y ago
  > I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort. Sounds like you're arguing we shouldn't hold comforting beliefs because, even if they are true, they might make us less productive. However, I think it is wiser to hold beliefs that are true, always. The reason is that it is, in general, far more valuable to hold correct beliefs than false ones. The fact that there are some special cases where holding false beliefs is better is useless, because there is no way to know when those cases are without first having correct beliefs. Further, Kurzweil has (obviously) never argued that it wouldn't take any effort to bring these technologies about. What he has argued is that we will put forth the effort to make them happen. If anything, it is rather discomforting to think about how much work is going to have to go into this.

vidiviciveni 15y ago

I'm not sure if PZ Meyers is a reliable source to cite when he is regarded a "confrontationalist" and has been proven wrong on many of his criticisms against Kurzweil. There are always going to be examples of heavy critics, and Kurzweil has openly responded to many of these, including PZ Meyers himself in this link: 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... Another critic response here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-issue-of.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-is...

DavidChouinard 15y ago

I sympathize with your position. Kurzweil seems to regularly makes strong remarks that shock me in their assertive naivety. However, our species is incredibly poor at intuitively understanding exponential trends. Kurzweil's essential point is that our gut-feeling predictions of the future will be off substantially. Specifically, our intuitive sense of future progress significantly underestimates actual progress and the gap systematically widens as time progresses. Neither you or I could have intuitively predicted twenty years ago the level of today's technological advancement. And we'd be even more wrong in the predicting the next twenty. It's far too easy to dismiss Kurzweil's work as that of a superficial nutjob who wants to "sell more books and speaking engagements." Kuzweil's crunched the numbers. While he might not be right on everything, his predictions are based on data, but yours are based on human intuition that has historically been wrong. I would be very careful of the knee-jerk reaction you display to Kurzweil's work. Keep in mind we are cognitively disabled at intuitively predicting exponential progress.

Retric 15y ago
The problem is not all tasks are of linear difficulty. If building a 1% more intelligent AI takes 1% more computational power then he might have a point. However if building a 1% more intelligent AI takes 2x the computational power then you don't end up with a singularity because you don't get a strong feedback loop. Consider starting at the low end of the scale booting windows 7 on a 2KHz CPU is about twice as fast as a 1KHz CPU and all things being equal faster processors let you get more things done but having a 1GHz vs 2GHz CPU has little effect on boot times. We might be able to build a 10x human level intelligence but if that can only build a 11x human intelligence and that can only build a 11.1x human intelligence you quickly hit a wall. Or for a more natural looking progression (10x, 15x, 18.75x, 21.09x, 22.4x). x sub 1 = 10; x(sub n) = x(n-1) * (2^n+1)/ (2^n)
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  The point of TS is that once you get to 1.0001x smarter than human you get to wall really quickly. If the wall is 2x or 11x, self-improving AI will reach it in no time. And we'll still have tremendous benefits from it, no matter how close the wall is to human intelligence. AI only need be a tiny bit smarter than humans to achieve things such as interstellar travel, eternal life, etc.

xiaoma 15y ago

I've been familiar with Kurzweil and his critics since I was in middle school. He's consistently been derided as wildly over-optimistic, but he's been right far more often than not. People originally thought his predictions of world champ-beating chess AIs by the late 90's were insane, but it actually happened about a year before he predicted. Similarly, his support and predictions for the human genome project were the subject of a great deal of ridicule from both the public and many biologists. He was right in that case, too. I would be very careful about betting against Kurzweil's predictions given his multi-decade track record.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

You bring up some good points but you ruined it from the get go by starting out with poisoning the well[1]. Right or wrong, Kurzweil is not doing it for the speaking engagements, he's not doing it for the money. He believes what he says. And where he might be wrong is because he believes it too much; he wants to live forever and for that to happen his predictions have to right. Kurzweil's arguments about biology are definitely his weakest. He does arbitrarily chart advances as that PZ piece points out. I find that biologists get more enraged about Kurzweil's predictions for this reason, and because biologists tend to have a "my field of study is the most important in the world" attitude in general. It's hilarious that PZ says that Kurzweil's book is terrible because he got the biology wrong, then says he has some points about Moore's Law and AI.... it shows the self-importance PZ places on himself. The only thing that will decide whether we reach a TS is not how fast medical technology advances. The only thing that matters is reaching strong AI. If we reach strong AI it's game-over for everything else. We'll have all of the bets you place virtually overnight, if our new masters decide to keep us around that is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

jonmc12 15y ago

"These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I find it offensive that this guy continues to sell us on it happening within our lifetimes. It almost certainly won't." So, I am assuming you think the EU's Human Brain Project is a waste of $1.6B? From my point of view, our ability to engineer, augment and replicate intelligence has very little to do with our understanding of biology. I really don't see your expertise in the complexity of biology as lending any insight into the ability to predict the evolution of intelligence capacity of our species. Strong AI based on emulating biological design is only one of many, many approaches to engineering intelligence.. Additionally, both your links and the basis of your arguments attempt to make a strawman of Kurzweil by attacking auxiliary points that are not critical to his primary empirical insights - rather you chose to attack choice speculative predictions. I'm no Kurzweil fanboy, but I think his empirical insights have done nothing less than frame the discussion of the technology singularity, and I enjoy his predictions for what they are - speculation. If you are presenting yourself as a scientist looking at this argument critically, I would expect 2 things: 1) an understanding of where your expertise has, and does not have relevance, 2) a critique of Kurzweil's empirical observations, not his speculative predictions.

burgerbrain 15y ago

Consider the following: We built working airplanes over a century ago, but powered ornithopter are still quite the engineering challenge, to put it lightly. A working understanding of biology is not necessarily a prerequisite for "machine intelligence", or more generally, a technological singularity.