6 ms·

Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so

35 points by wikiburner 13y ago

higherpurpose 13y ago
> But isn't he simply refusing to accept, on an emotional level, that everyone gets older, everybody dies? Why? Why should we accept on an "emotional level" that we are about to die? Just because it's currently "inevitable"? Seems like a cop-out to me. I think humans are meant to be better than just "accepting their fate", and that we should always try to improve our lives and conditions.
- Maro 13y ago
  Read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael: http://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-An-Adventure-Mind-Spirit/dp/0553375407 http://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-An-Adventure-Mind-Spirit/dp/05...
- spindritf 13y ago
  The ideas of singularity are based on extrapolating from the past (progress of technology). If you extrapolate from the past human lives, eventuality of death seems pretty inevitable for many generations to come. Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does about the world.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does about the world Exactly, i.e. you can't just go and extrapolate stuff at will, lest you end up talking like that guy: http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/. Some extrapolations are more valid than others. There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time. There are no reasons to believe that death will always be inevitable (sans the thermal death of the universe stuff, but I'm sure we'll figure something out by then).
    - spindritf 13y ago
      > There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time. What are those reasons? What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel? What if AI is just like that? We'll keep improving, and then it'll stall. It may later recover. Or not. That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
      - TeMPOraL 13y ago
        > What are those reasons? The economic incentives for progress are still there, we're using current tools to design better tools in a self-amplifying feedback loop, and limits for this process seem still far away from us. We have tons of space for progress. [0] > What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Then I would be wrong, for economical, not technological reasons. We can fly at Mach 25 today, but for various (economic) reasons people generally don't want to even go supersonic. > Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel? Well, we didn't get space travel, but we got the Internet. To be honest, the progress we made in the last 50 years is more amazing than people dreamed back then, but in a different way. > That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not. I agree. In general, the more detailed you try to get in your future predictions, the more likely it is for you to be wrong. [0] - for instance, even re-reading and cross-correlating (in an automated way) all the medical papers that were published in the last 100 years would bring us tremendous new discoveries; we already have more science than humans can handle, but we also build tools that could handle it for us.
      - marcosdumay 13y ago
        Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it? Now, I guess he'll have to redo his AI extrapolations. Chip manufacturing is now mature, and while we'll probably be only slightly latter at the computers that put 70% of the population out of a job, the current smaller rate of improvement will make a lot of difference for his 2029 prevision.
  - im3w1l 13y ago
    I think Pascals Wager is applicable. By just making a few "small" sacrifices, he can get a shot an extremely long lifespan of bliss.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Exactly. Probably the fact that we are told to accept it as a "natural order of things" is one of the reasons we haven't solved death yet.
  - worldsayshi 13y ago
    But is there really a clear moral achievement in solving death? As long as we can procreate faster than we can increase the yield of resources for allowing quality of life there will always be a potentiality of more people than we can support. Then we have the problem of figuring out how to distribute those resources in the most morally efficient way. Living longer means taking more of those resources for yourself.
- blumkvist 13y ago
  I think that humans are meant to accept that they cannot and should not be able to obtain massive amounts of control over world-scale events for prolonged amount of time. We are social species. I believe every individual should carve out his piece of history and then let others do the same. Whether they chose to continue in your tracks or not. If we are to achieve any greatness at all, we should all participate even people who are yet to be born. What you are suggesting seems like breaking nature's cycle to me.
  - rwallace 13y ago
    > I think that humans are meant to accept that they cannot and should not be able to obtain massive amounts of control over world-scale events for prolonged amount of time. Yes, that's why we require political leaders to step down from office eventually. But the civilized way of requiring leaders to step down from office does not involve killing them. > What you are suggesting seems like breaking nature's cycle to me. Damn right. So was the eradication of smallpox. Nature contains many cycles that are utterly abhorrent.
    - blumkvist 13y ago
      >Yes, that's why we require political leaders to step down from office eventually. But the civilized way of requiring leaders to step down from office does not involve killing them. I'm talking more in line of philosophical movements. Political leaders are not that important (although it sure seems that way to us). In my opinion, we as a species, need to have that failsafe of time perspective on ideologies. We risk lurching in a wrong direction with no possibility of coming back on track otherwise. No single generation should decide to faith of humanity as a whole.
  - worldsayshi 13y ago
    You make an appeal to nature fallacy here but you also point towards a valid point. The moral dilemma of taking up resources that could satisfy needs of others, born or not yet born. Sharing resources is not a new issue though, this just makes the issue harder.
dekhn 13y ago
One point the article misses: Ray is a director of engineering, not the director of engineering. There are more than one engineering directors at Google.
- 1337biz 13y ago
  Sometimes I think Ray runs into the risk of becoming some sort of a PR mascot for the company...
  - flycaliguy 13y ago
    I think he serves as an optimistic distraction as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      > as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex. This is a very bold claim. Care to provide any reference/support for it?
      - blumkvist 13y ago
        This article mentions an acquision of a company which produces robots for the military, no?
      - flycaliguy 13y ago
        The Boston Dynamic acquisition. Also the marriage of American intelligence services and the tech sector as the military increasingly takes to cyber space.
        jknightco 13y ago
        "Following the Boston Dynamics acquisition, Google says that it plans to honor its existing contracts, including the military contract with DARPA, but it doesn’t plan on pursuing any further military contracts after that." Stop spreading FUD. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires-boston-dynamics-and-seven-other-robotics-companies-next-stop-judgment-day http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires-bo...
Killah911 13y ago
I'd suggest "The most human human". It's unfortunate that those calling themselves "futurists" somehow seem to think that being alive forever... is kind'o shallow. Death may be inevitable, but hopefully those who preach from the pulpit, have a little more depth to them and have hopefully examined their lives more carefully than to simply say, I'll just live forever. In that sense, I think Jobs had the right idea. If life were "infinite" or even significantly prolonged (i.e. 10 times the current life expectancy), I think we'd have a lot of thinking to do to come to terms with such a new reality.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > If life were "infinite" or even significantly prolonged (i.e. 10 times the current life expectancy), I think we'd have a lot of thinking to do to come to terms with such a new reality. I'd be happy to spend next few centuries thinking about this problem.
  - codeulike 13y ago
    One thing about 10 x life expectancy would be that your attitude towards risk would become much more conservative. You have so many more potential years to lose if you fall off your mountain bike or your parachute doesn't deploy or your fast car skids off a road or your speedboat flips over. People with a 700 year lifespan would probably spend a lot of time sitting around indoors, I reckon.
    - d0 13y ago
      There will still be idiots. They won't respawn.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Would they? I don't find myself thinking "I have only at most 80 more years to live, so I'll jaywalk here, risk be damned". Do people really do those kind of mental calculations? It might be me still being relatively young, but having 60-80 years in front of me feels more like +∞, and I have to keep constantly reminding myself that my time is limited. I'd wager that the only relevant scale for people to think is weeks/month; there wouldn't be much difference felt between 60 years, 600 years and +∞.
himangshuj 13y ago
seems more like a article the virtues of Rays past predictions and is rather one sided. Ray Kurzweil, the man with the crystal ball
jmount 13y ago
Thats his schtick- publicly speculating on this is a big part of his fame.
Geee 13y ago
I'm predicting a future where most people will live on in a virtual world with 'unlimited' lives. Just the brain will be kept alive in a box somewhere. Well, that sounds like Matrix, but I think it's pretty inevitable.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Or you know, where only a handful of people will live this way. In isolated, heavily guarded, areas. With tons of energy, food, toys, technology, medicine and the like. And the majority will slave away and be harvested for work, organs, sex slaves and such. You know, sometimes you need to provide a more realistic picture of the future (this is not totally unlike how people actually live in places like Rio or Russia for example, and even L.A. http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/dp/0679738061 http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...).
flycaliguy 13y ago
I always like to remind people that the road towards immortality is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with immortal rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of. Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us. These new 1% immortals may also require a special country in which they are not at risk of being tragically harmed by one of us billion mortals. Watch you don't get bit by their 2 tonne Boston Dynamics guard dog...
- Geee 13y ago
  No harm done, I bet immortality will eventually come in the form of 'brain backups' in Google Drive and your physical body is merely a vessel which you can use to interact with the physical world.
- exratione 13y ago
  [Rewind to 1940s] "I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of." [Back to the present] Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.
  - flycaliguy 13y ago
    What about the effects of over population? Predictions of food, water and clean air shortages don't seem to lend themselves to an even distribution of nano bio-technology.
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.
coldtea 13y ago
Or you know, it's just another premature product from Google, to get news coverage as an "innovative" company by rehashing older stuff in not-marketable forms. Like self-driving cars, computer-glasses, cloud-only-laptops and the like, all met with minimal success.
- worldsayshi 13y ago
  What's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 times out of 10. That's what innovation entails! If you haven't failed while innovating you either was extremely lucky or you got yourself some divine superpower. The iPhone wasn't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was a new execution. These are all new executions.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >What's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 times out of 10. Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed. Plus, I don't think is an absolute that it's necessary to fail multiple times to get something innovative. Take for example Xerox Park for research. Or, in the market area, Apple. >The iPhone wasn't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was a new execution. These are all new executions. Well, there are new executions that are ready to succeed, and new executions that are barely held together with chewing gum and wire. I don't think it's any service to the public to tout the latter to high heavens.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      > Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed. Oftentimes it's the PR that is the difference between success and failure.
      - worldsayshi 13y ago
        Indeed, the question for many of these innovations is not wether they will work from a technical perspective but if they will work with the public.
edoloughlin 13y ago
But he's the sort of genius, it turns out, who's not very good at boiling a kettle. He offers me a cup of coffee and when I accept he heads into the kitchen to make it, filling a kettle with water, putting a teaspoon of instant coffee into a cup, and then moments later, pouring the unboiled water on top of it. He stirs the undissolving lumps and I wonder whether to say anything but instead let him add almond milk – not eating diary is just one of his multiple dietary rules – and politely say thank you as he hands it to me. It is, by quite some way, the worst cup of coffee I have ever tasted. Slightly off topic, but this sort of guff makes me abandon a lot of articles in the first few paragraphs. In fact, I just did exactly that to come here and complain. It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego. I'd much rather they get to the point, which is what their interviewee has to say.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  I found it added a little humour to the article.
- lisper 13y ago
  > It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego. No, it's adding what is called "human interest" to the story, which (the theory goes) makes it more interesting to non-technical people.
IsaacL 13y ago
I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil - he's one of a large group of people who believe that accelerating change will almost certainly be good. I think the singularity could be good, but it could also be really bad, and it's important to spend some resources on making sure it goes well. MIRI (formally the Singularity Institute) has a mixed reputation around these parts, but after reading fairly widely over the last year I think they have the deepest thinking on the topic of AI. Here's a concise summary of their worldview: http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-and-a-couple-of-strategic-implications/ http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-an... As I see it, their argument goes: 1. It's tempting to think of AIs becoming either our willing servants or integrating nicely with human society. In actuality, AIs will likely be able to bootstrap themselves to superintelligence extremely rapidly; we'll soon be dealing with alien minds that we fundamentally can't understand, and there will be little stopping the AI/AIs from doing whatever they want. 2. It's tempting to think, from analogy to the smartest human beings, that superintelligent AIs would be wise and benevolent. In actuality, a superintelligent AI could easily have strange or bizarre goals. I find this makes more sense if you think of AIs as "hyperefficient optimisers", as the word "intelligence" has some misleading connotations. 3. OK, well surely we can leave the AIs with weird goals to do their thing, and build other AIs to do useful things, like cure cancer or research nuclear fusion? The trouble is that even an innocuous goal, when given to an alien superintelligence, will very likely end badly. An AI programmed to compute PI would realise that it could compute PI more efficiently by hacking all available computer systems on the planet and installing copies of itself. Or developing nanotechnology and converting all matter in the solar system into extra computational capacity. You have to explicitly the program the AI to not do this, and defining the set of things the AI should not do is a hard problem. (Remember that 'common sense' and 'empathy' are human abilities, and there's no reason that an AI would have anything like them). 4./5. OK, well, we'll build an AI with the goal of maximising the happiness of humanity. But then the AI ends up building a Brave-New-World style dystopia, or kidnaps everyone and hooks them up to heroin drips to ensure they are in constant opiated bliss. It's really hard to come up with a good set of values to program into an AI that doesn't omit some important human value (like consciousness, or diversity, or novelty, or creativity, or whatever). I'm glad that Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) is concerned about the issue of friendly AI. I'm curious to hear what other HN readers think of these ideas. Anticipating some common objections I hear from friends: How could a superintelligent AI have a stupid goal like computing Pi?/Wouldn't it be smart enough to break any controls we put on it? I think this objection assumes an AI would be wired together like a typical intelligent human mind. If you think of an AI as a pure optimisation process, it's clear that it would have no reason to reprogram the ultimate goals it begins with. If they're smarter than us, we should just let the AI take over/AIs are like our children, ultimately we should leave them free to do whatever they want Again, this assumes the AIs are like super-powered human minds and that they will do interesting things once they take over, like contemplate the deep mysteries of the universe. But it's clearly possible for the AIs to devote themselves to really trivial tasks, like calculating digits of Pi for all eternity.

35 points by wikiburner 13y ago

> But isn't he simply refusing to accept, on an emotional level, that everyone gets older, everybody dies? Why? Why should we accept on an "emotional level" that we are about to die? Just because it's currently "inevitable"? Seems like a cop-out to me. I think humans are meant to be better than just "accepting their fate", and that we should always try to improve our lives and conditions.

Maro 13y ago
Read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael: http://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-An-Adventure-Mind-Spirit/dp/0553375407 http://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-An-Adventure-Mind-Spirit/dp/05...
spindritf 13y ago
The ideas of singularity are based on extrapolating from the past (progress of technology). If you extrapolate from the past human lives, eventuality of death seems pretty inevitable for many generations to come. Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does about the world.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > Which extrapolation you choose probably says more about you than it does about the world Exactly, i.e. you can't just go and extrapolate stuff at will, lest you end up talking like that guy: http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/. Some extrapolations are more valid than others. There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time. There are no reasons to believe that death will always be inevitable (sans the thermal death of the universe stuff, but I'm sure we'll figure something out by then).
  - spindritf 13y ago
    > There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time. What are those reasons? What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel? What if AI is just like that? We'll keep improving, and then it'll stall. It may later recover. Or not. That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      > What are those reasons? The economic incentives for progress are still there, we're using current tools to design better tools in a self-amplifying feedback loop, and limits for this process seem still far away from us. We have tons of space for progress. [0] > What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Then I would be wrong, for economical, not technological reasons. We can fly at Mach 25 today, but for various (economic) reasons people generally don't want to even go supersonic. > Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel? Well, we didn't get space travel, but we got the Internet. To be honest, the progress we made in the last 50 years is more amazing than people dreamed back then, but in a different way. > That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not. I agree. In general, the more detailed you try to get in your future predictions, the more likely it is for you to be wrong. [0] - for instance, even re-reading and cross-correlating (in an automated way) all the medical papers that were published in the last 100 years would bring us tremendous new discoveries; we already have more science than humans can handle, but we also build tools that could handle it for us.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it? Now, I guess he'll have to redo his AI extrapolations. Chip manufacturing is now mature, and while we'll probably be only slightly latter at the computers that put 70% of the population out of a job, the current smaller rate of improvement will make a lot of difference for his 2029 prevision.
- im3w1l 13y ago
  I think Pascals Wager is applicable. By just making a few "small" sacrifices, he can get a shot an extremely long lifespan of bliss.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Exactly. Probably the fact that we are told to accept it as a "natural order of things" is one of the reasons we haven't solved death yet.
- worldsayshi 13y ago
  But is there really a clear moral achievement in solving death? As long as we can procreate faster than we can increase the yield of resources for allowing quality of life there will always be a potentiality of more people than we can support. Then we have the problem of figuring out how to distribute those resources in the most morally efficient way. Living longer means taking more of those resources for yourself.
blumkvist 13y ago
I think that humans are meant to accept that they cannot and should not be able to obtain massive amounts of control over world-scale events for prolonged amount of time. We are social species. I believe every individual should carve out his piece of history and then let others do the same. Whether they chose to continue in your tracks or not. If we are to achieve any greatness at all, we should all participate even people who are yet to be born. What you are suggesting seems like breaking nature's cycle to me.
- rwallace 13y ago
  > I think that humans are meant to accept that they cannot and should not be able to obtain massive amounts of control over world-scale events for prolonged amount of time. Yes, that's why we require political leaders to step down from office eventually. But the civilized way of requiring leaders to step down from office does not involve killing them. > What you are suggesting seems like breaking nature's cycle to me. Damn right. So was the eradication of smallpox. Nature contains many cycles that are utterly abhorrent.
  - blumkvist 13y ago
    >Yes, that's why we require political leaders to step down from office eventually. But the civilized way of requiring leaders to step down from office does not involve killing them. I'm talking more in line of philosophical movements. Political leaders are not that important (although it sure seems that way to us). In my opinion, we as a species, need to have that failsafe of time perspective on ideologies. We risk lurching in a wrong direction with no possibility of coming back on track otherwise. No single generation should decide to faith of humanity as a whole.
- worldsayshi 13y ago
  You make an appeal to nature fallacy here but you also point towards a valid point. The moral dilemma of taking up resources that could satisfy needs of others, born or not yet born. Sharing resources is not a new issue though, this just makes the issue harder.

dekhn 13y ago

One point the article misses: Ray is a director of engineering, not the director of engineering. There are more than one engineering directors at Google.

1337biz 13y ago
Sometimes I think Ray runs into the risk of becoming some sort of a PR mascot for the company...
- flycaliguy 13y ago
  I think he serves as an optimistic distraction as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > as Google integrates itself into the military industrial complex. This is a very bold claim. Care to provide any reference/support for it?
    - blumkvist 13y ago
      This article mentions an acquision of a company which produces robots for the military, no?
    - flycaliguy 13y ago
      The Boston Dynamic acquisition. Also the marriage of American intelligence services and the tech sector as the military increasingly takes to cyber space.
      - jknightco 13y ago
        "Following the Boston Dynamics acquisition, Google says that it plans to honor its existing contracts, including the military contract with DARPA, but it doesn’t plan on pursuing any further military contracts after that." Stop spreading FUD. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires-boston-dynamics-and-seven-other-robotics-companies-next-stop-judgment-day http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/172859-google-acquires-bo...

Killah911 13y ago

I'd suggest "The most human human". It's unfortunate that those calling themselves "futurists" somehow seem to think that being alive forever... is kind'o shallow. Death may be inevitable, but hopefully those who preach from the pulpit, have a little more depth to them and have hopefully examined their lives more carefully than to simply say, I'll just live forever. In that sense, I think Jobs had the right idea. If life were "infinite" or even significantly prolonged (i.e. 10 times the current life expectancy), I think we'd have a lot of thinking to do to come to terms with such a new reality.

TeMPOraL 13y ago
> If life were "infinite" or even significantly prolonged (i.e. 10 times the current life expectancy), I think we'd have a lot of thinking to do to come to terms with such a new reality. I'd be happy to spend next few centuries thinking about this problem.
- codeulike 13y ago
  One thing about 10 x life expectancy would be that your attitude towards risk would become much more conservative. You have so many more potential years to lose if you fall off your mountain bike or your parachute doesn't deploy or your fast car skids off a road or your speedboat flips over. People with a 700 year lifespan would probably spend a lot of time sitting around indoors, I reckon.
  - d0 13y ago
    There will still be idiots. They won't respawn.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Would they? I don't find myself thinking "I have only at most 80 more years to live, so I'll jaywalk here, risk be damned". Do people really do those kind of mental calculations? It might be me still being relatively young, but having 60-80 years in front of me feels more like +∞, and I have to keep constantly reminding myself that my time is limited. I'd wager that the only relevant scale for people to think is weeks/month; there wouldn't be much difference felt between 60 years, 600 years and +∞.

himangshuj 13y ago

seems more like a article the virtues of Rays past predictions and is rather one sided. Ray Kurzweil, the man with the crystal ball

jmount 13y ago

Thats his schtick- publicly speculating on this is a big part of his fame.

Geee 13y ago

I'm predicting a future where most people will live on in a virtual world with 'unlimited' lives. Just the brain will be kept alive in a box somewhere. Well, that sounds like Matrix, but I think it's pretty inevitable.

coldtea 13y ago
Or you know, where only a handful of people will live this way. In isolated, heavily guarded, areas. With tons of energy, food, toys, technology, medicine and the like. And the majority will slave away and be harvested for work, organs, sex slaves and such. You know, sometimes you need to provide a more realistic picture of the future (this is not totally unlike how people actually live in places like Rio or Russia for example, and even L.A. http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/dp/0679738061 http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...).

flycaliguy 13y ago

I always like to remind people that the road towards immortality is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with immortal rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of. Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us. These new 1% immortals may also require a special country in which they are not at risk of being tragically harmed by one of us billion mortals. Watch you don't get bit by their 2 tonne Boston Dynamics guard dog...

Geee 13y ago
No harm done, I bet immortality will eventually come in the form of 'brain backups' in Google Drive and your physical body is merely a vessel which you can use to interact with the physical world.
exratione 13y ago
[Rewind to 1940s] "I always like to remind people that effectively treating heart disease is going to involve a significant period in which us normals have to deal with long-lived rich people. Sounds awful, like, just about the worst societal dynamic I can think of." [Back to the present] Our age is characterized by the fact that access to types of medical technology is basically flat. Rich people get to hire better doctors, but there are no super-secret, ultra-restricted forms of medicine that are inaccessible to everyone else. Your chances of getting into clinical trials of the new new things are about as good as theirs, provided you are prepared to pick up a phone and put in the time.
- flycaliguy 13y ago
  What about the effects of over population? Predictions of food, water and clean air shortages don't seem to lend themselves to an even distribution of nano bio-technology.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.

coldtea 13y ago

Or you know, it's just another premature product from Google, to get news coverage as an "innovative" company by rehashing older stuff in not-marketable forms. Like self-driving cars, computer-glasses, cloud-only-laptops and the like, all met with minimal success.

worldsayshi 13y ago
What's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 times out of 10. That's what innovation entails! If you haven't failed while innovating you either was extremely lucky or you got yourself some divine superpower. The iPhone wasn't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was a new execution. These are all new executions.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >What's with this attitude? How can you be innovative without failing 9 times out of 10. Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed. Plus, I don't think is an absolute that it's necessary to fail multiple times to get something innovative. Take for example Xerox Park for research. Or, in the market area, Apple. >The iPhone wasn't new either - as in not a rehash of old ideas. But it was a new execution. These are all new executions. Well, there are new executions that are ready to succeed, and new executions that are barely held together with chewing gum and wire. I don't think it's any service to the public to tout the latter to high heavens.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > Easily, by not making PR announcements before you succeed. Oftentimes it's the PR that is the difference between success and failure.
    - worldsayshi 13y ago
      Indeed, the question for many of these innovations is not wether they will work from a technical perspective but if they will work with the public.

edoloughlin 13y ago

But he's the sort of genius, it turns out, who's not very good at boiling a kettle. He offers me a cup of coffee and when I accept he heads into the kitchen to make it, filling a kettle with water, putting a teaspoon of instant coffee into a cup, and then moments later, pouring the unboiled water on top of it. He stirs the undissolving lumps and I wonder whether to say anything but instead let him add almond milk – not eating diary is just one of his multiple dietary rules – and politely say thank you as he hands it to me. It is, by quite some way, the worst cup of coffee I have ever tasted. Slightly off topic, but this sort of guff makes me abandon a lot of articles in the first few paragraphs. In fact, I just did exactly that to come here and complain. It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego. I'd much rather they get to the point, which is what their interviewee has to say.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
I found it added a little humour to the article.
lisper 13y ago
> It's little more than the writer exercising his/her own ego. No, it's adding what is called "human interest" to the story, which (the theory goes) makes it more interesting to non-technical people.

IsaacL 13y ago

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil - he's one of a large group of people who believe that accelerating change will almost certainly be good. I think the singularity could be good, but it could also be really bad, and it's important to spend some resources on making sure it goes well. MIRI (formally the Singularity Institute) has a mixed reputation around these parts, but after reading fairly widely over the last year I think they have the deepest thinking on the topic of AI. Here's a concise summary of their worldview: http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-and-a-couple-of-strategic-implications/ http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-an... As I see it, their argument goes: 1. It's tempting to think of AIs becoming either our willing servants or integrating nicely with human society. In actuality, AIs will likely be able to bootstrap themselves to superintelligence extremely rapidly; we'll soon be dealing with alien minds that we fundamentally can't understand, and there will be little stopping the AI/AIs from doing whatever they want. 2. It's tempting to think, from analogy to the smartest human beings, that superintelligent AIs would be wise and benevolent. In actuality, a superintelligent AI could easily have strange or bizarre goals. I find this makes more sense if you think of AIs as "hyperefficient optimisers", as the word "intelligence" has some misleading connotations. 3. OK, well surely we can leave the AIs with weird goals to do their thing, and build other AIs to do useful things, like cure cancer or research nuclear fusion? The trouble is that even an innocuous goal, when given to an alien superintelligence, will very likely end badly. An AI programmed to compute PI would realise that it could compute PI more efficiently by hacking all available computer systems on the planet and installing copies of itself. Or developing nanotechnology and converting all matter in the solar system into extra computational capacity. You have to explicitly the program the AI to not do this, and defining the set of things the AI should not do is a hard problem. (Remember that 'common sense' and 'empathy' are human abilities, and there's no reason that an AI would have anything like them). 4./5. OK, well, we'll build an AI with the goal of maximising the happiness of humanity. But then the AI ends up building a Brave-New-World style dystopia, or kidnaps everyone and hooks them up to heroin drips to ensure they are in constant opiated bliss. It's really hard to come up with a good set of values to program into an AI that doesn't omit some important human value (like consciousness, or diversity, or novelty, or creativity, or whatever). I'm glad that Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) is concerned about the issue of friendly AI. I'm curious to hear what other HN readers think of these ideas. Anticipating some common objections I hear from friends: How could a superintelligent AI have a stupid goal like computing Pi?/Wouldn't it be smart enough to break any controls we put on it? I think this objection assumes an AI would be wired together like a typical intelligent human mind. If you think of an AI as a pure optimisation process, it's clear that it would have no reason to reprogram the ultimate goals it begins with. If they're smarter than us, we should just let the AI take over/AIs are like our children, ultimately we should leave them free to do whatever they want Again, this assumes the AIs are like super-powered human minds and that they will do interesting things once they take over, like contemplate the deep mysteries of the universe. But it's clearly possible for the AIs to devote themselves to really trivial tasks, like calculating digits of Pi for all eternity.