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Honestly fully-sentient machines in 16 years seems totally ridiculous on its face to me regardless of what kind of graphs and charts about technological progres

by acabal 14y ago

Honestly fully-sentient machines in 16 years seems totally ridiculous on its face to me regardless of what kind of graphs and charts about technological progress can be shown off. While I'm not really up to speed on AI research, in the consumer space at least we've just barely achieved a semi-automated house-vacuuming robot and fumbling speech-recognition in call centers. Unless I'm totally off-base with what's capable today, emotions and intelligence in a decade and a half would seem to require breakthrough after breakthrough in a vast number of nearly unrelated disciplines; plus there'd have to be the commercial demand needed to fund it. (Space stations and flying cars may be technically possible today, but nobody wants to pay for them.) Kurzweil has invented a few cool things but today the guy is essentially a talented sci-fi writer. While those kinds of people are important, I have no idea why so many people take him so seriously.

eterpstra 14y ago
Breakthrough after breakthrough already happens today, and happens more and more often due to growing economies around the world, along with more people doing more reasearch with faster computers. Also, academic research and writing software is significantly less resource-intensive than building a space station or flying car.
- shaggyfrog 14y ago
  > Breakthrough after breakthrough already happens today, and happens more and more often due to growing economies around the world, along with more people doing more reasearch with faster computers. This statement brought to you by the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, ...
coffeeaddicted 14y ago
People always seem to assume that the typical "human" behavior (speech, reasoning, emotions, making plans) are the hard parts while walking around without bumping into stuff is the trivial thing. But aren't those just the things added by evolution at the last 3 million years or so on top of stuff that evolved for around 500 million years? So "just" being close to robots moving around nicely might already be 90% of the way. To get that far with AI we took around 60 years - so another 16 years is maybe not so little. If you take the evolutionary time-spans as basis we seem to be even closer already.
wisty 14y ago
AI hasn't progressed because it hasn't been commercially viable in a lot of applications. PID, a bit of hardcoded logic, and a bit of common sense has been far more useful than a machine which will try to outsmart the operator, and screw up badly. Now that it's actually becoming useful, things could progress very quickly. Think about how long it too the internet to be something more than a toy for geeks, and how quickly things started moving once it started getting a real a market.
dmauro 14y ago
People take him seriously because he has a good track record at making predictions.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Plenty of people also don't take him seriously because lots of his predictions turn out to be hand-wavey or quite obvious. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...
juan_juarez 14y ago
Basing your idea on where the cutting edge will be in a decade on the current state of consumer products will be misleading. A roomba is a $300 piece of hardware with an embedded computer, IBM's Watson was a $3,000,000 system. Both Apple's Siri & Google's voice recognition blow the average call-center system away. I'm not sure we'll have sentience in 16 years, if ever, but we're a lot further ahead than you give us credit for.
bytefactory 14y ago
I'm curious how many people have actually read his books before attacking his positions. A lot of the criticisms about his predictions seem to be based around the charts and graphs he's used in his Ted talks and articles. In his books, he goes into great detail describing each aspect of the GNR (Genetic, Nano, Robotics) revolutions that will contribute to the singularity. He's actually addressed a lot of the criticisms that seem to crop up in HN, etc. over and over. Forgive me if your position was based on having read his books (especially The Singularity is Near), but it didn't seem like it. Especially considering that cracking general AI is specifically mentioned as not being a requirement to obtain greater than human intelligence (for example, augmentation of biological human intelligence, specialized AI coming together to solve general problems, etc.). Also, his prediction for the Singularity is 2045 (32 years from now), so your figure of 16 years seems to be incorrect. Edit: D'oh, you were talking about the 2029 figure mentioned in the article, not the date of the technological singularity. I'm an idiot.
pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil's whole thing is exponential growth. He is fond of recounting that the Human Genome project was 1% done half-way through the project, seven years in. This in fact was right on schedule, they finished 99% of the project in the final seven years, most in the last year.
Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago
"seems totally ridiculous" is a ridiculous argument. Human brain being very bad at estimating exponential processes. Do you have anything more scientific? Any way there are gonna be big changes in the near feature. Either the current progress in data, energy, etc. will stop/drastically slow down or in a few years will have what it takes to build AIs and move planets around.

by acabal 14y ago

eterpstra 14y ago

Breakthrough after breakthrough already happens today, and happens more and more often due to growing economies around the world, along with more people doing more reasearch with faster computers. Also, academic research and writing software is significantly less resource-intensive than building a space station or flying car.

shaggyfrog 14y ago
> Breakthrough after breakthrough already happens today, and happens more and more often due to growing economies around the world, along with more people doing more reasearch with faster computers. This statement brought to you by the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, ...

coffeeaddicted 14y ago

People always seem to assume that the typical "human" behavior (speech, reasoning, emotions, making plans) are the hard parts while walking around without bumping into stuff is the trivial thing. But aren't those just the things added by evolution at the last 3 million years or so on top of stuff that evolved for around 500 million years? So "just" being close to robots moving around nicely might already be 90% of the way. To get that far with AI we took around 60 years - so another 16 years is maybe not so little. If you take the evolutionary time-spans as basis we seem to be even closer already.

wisty 14y ago

AI hasn't progressed because it hasn't been commercially viable in a lot of applications. PID, a bit of hardcoded logic, and a bit of common sense has been far more useful than a machine which will try to outsmart the operator, and screw up badly. Now that it's actually becoming useful, things could progress very quickly. Think about how long it too the internet to be something more than a toy for geeks, and how quickly things started moving once it started getting a real a market.

dmauro 14y ago

People take him seriously because he has a good track record at making predictions.

nollidge 14y ago
Plenty of people also don't take him seriously because lots of his predictions turn out to be hand-wavey or quite obvious. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...

juan_juarez 14y ago

Basing your idea on where the cutting edge will be in a decade on the current state of consumer products will be misleading. A roomba is a $300 piece of hardware with an embedded computer, IBM's Watson was a $3,000,000 system. Both Apple's Siri & Google's voice recognition blow the average call-center system away. I'm not sure we'll have sentience in 16 years, if ever, but we're a lot further ahead than you give us credit for.

bytefactory 14y ago

I'm curious how many people have actually read his books before attacking his positions. A lot of the criticisms about his predictions seem to be based around the charts and graphs he's used in his Ted talks and articles. In his books, he goes into great detail describing each aspect of the GNR (Genetic, Nano, Robotics) revolutions that will contribute to the singularity. He's actually addressed a lot of the criticisms that seem to crop up in HN, etc. over and over. Forgive me if your position was based on having read his books (especially The Singularity is Near), but it didn't seem like it. Especially considering that cracking general AI is specifically mentioned as not being a requirement to obtain greater than human intelligence (for example, augmentation of biological human intelligence, specialized AI coming together to solve general problems, etc.). Also, his prediction for the Singularity is 2045 (32 years from now), so your figure of 16 years seems to be incorrect. Edit: D'oh, you were talking about the 2029 figure mentioned in the article, not the date of the technological singularity. I'm an idiot.

pbw 14y ago

Kurzweil's whole thing is exponential growth. He is fond of recounting that the Human Genome project was 1% done half-way through the project, seven years in. This in fact was right on schedule, they finished 99% of the project in the final seven years, most in the last year.

Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago

"seems totally ridiculous" is a ridiculous argument. Human brain being very bad at estimating exponential processes. Do you have anything more scientific? Any way there are gonna be big changes in the near feature. Either the current progress in data, energy, etc. will stop/drastically slow down or in a few years will have what it takes to build AIs and move planets around.