But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't.
No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though.
They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time.
But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out.
Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true:
> All prophets are false prophets.
So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions.
They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).
I think Ray Kurzweil would agree with you. That's why he uses language like "the intuitive linear view" and "the historical exponential view" [1]
The whole POINT is that the predictions sound crazy. But the reason why he gathers such a following is because, unlike most "futurists", who make bold predictions for decades in the future only to slink away and hide when the time comes to for a test, Kurzweil welcomes rigorous evaluation of his past predictions. [2]
You can read through second link there and decide for yourself. He laboriously goes point for point and evaluates (in 2010) how he did in his earlier predictions from decades before. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive.
So the reason people listen to him is because his future predictions are even MORE crazy, but it's hard to argue with an 87% accuracy rate. Even his failures aren't WAY off the mark.
1 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 2 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions.php
Some of those predictions were a year or two late, in 2010 or 2011, but does a couple of years really matter in the grand scheme of things?
Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then.
Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.
He was on the ground getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.
As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and what they were now capable of.
"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"
"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"
"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"
"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"
I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.
You sure about that? I thought most business plans were thrown out upon any contact with the customer and morphed in feedback to the customer, after a crazy idea was attempted.
Of course I could be wrong - but it feels like a false division between business and science. Most businesses when they do come out don't have a scientific basis as to why they succeed at the time - just like many theories. You can of course use hindsight bias to make it so.
It should be noted that Einstein was mostly ignored until he was verified by the Mercury orbit measurements.
However, it should be known - I'm long TSLA and have been since the IPO - so don't think I don't know anything. I also know Musk's background inside and out (due diligence and all).
But why do you know who Elon Musk is? Because he succeeded. Let's say he didn't. Now do you think what you do now?
What if the GFC had continued into a depression - who'd buy a an unproven, $5K reserve priced Model S (a veblen good) during a recession, with falling gas prices? He'd be out of capital within the year without cap-ex funds from Panasonic, Toyota, Daimler and the public markets to lever up and be set to produce 20K cars next year (~$1 billion in revenue).
What if the 4th Falcon launch failed and Musk ran out of cash (COTS pays only after hitting each milestone)?
What then huh? You must always look at the probabilistic alternatives, because confirmation bias and the survival bias will fuck your thinking up.
By the way - I do have strong opinions. But I hold them weakly.
I am liable to change them at any moment based upon empirical evidence.
He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead to its eBay sale. That's insane risk for someone who essentially had fuck you money.
He then subsequently plowed the $300 or so million from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and pushed it directly into both SpaceX and Tesla - well before NASA or the world really had any need for either one of them - there was no guarantee that NASA would need SpaceX, or that COTS would continue to have government support (SpaceX bootstrapped on these contracts), or that any launch vendor would go with him over proven tech.
And with Tesla, there was no guarantee that laptops/smartphones/tablets would explode from 2005-2010, driving down the cost of Li-on batteries by an order of magnitude as South Asia's factories came online with their economies of scale, hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions in surplus capital that all combined to help make electric cars and an upstart car company price competitive with established luxury car brands.
There can be no doubt about it - Elon Musk takes huge risks, he is very lucky, and these are not the actions of a normal person. Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck).
Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).
Because, if they weren't, well, they'd do what everyone else did, and be just like them.
To be contrarian, is to be damaged.
This does not mean that any of the people are mentally damaged - I merely found the studies on the relative percentages of functional psychopaths in leadership and investing positions highly curious (http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210).
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_... (full article is for subscribers only unfortunately)
As history would have it, one (or many people) shouting at the top of their lungs about the future does not have a huge impact on the future typically. He has a lot of interesting theories, and plenty of uninteresting or outright dubious ones (I suspect he is accelerating his own death with his over-the-top vitamin consumption). The people who make history are the ones who make it, not speculate about the future. Be wary of anyone who charges $25,000 an hour to make speeches - the line between oracle and scam artist is pretty thin these days.
But I keep a wary eye on them and their ideas from the periphery - lest I be on the the wrong side if they ever become right and start walking.
You never want to be on the wrong side of a wave - it really sucks.
I am going to have to start using that citation format in legal briefs when a proposition seems uncontroversial.
The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.
Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain.
The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of.
In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be.
So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.)
Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar.
There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language.
The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens.
Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function?
My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."
Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are not yet thoroughly understood, and even with our significant current understanding we still have trouble programmatically predicting protein folding, to say nothing of the staggering complexity contained in the brain.
Once we dive deep enough into the functioning of the brain, and its heuristics in particular, the very idea of "essences" looks more and more like mental JPEG compression artifacts and less and less like pyramids on Mars.
Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.
He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.
He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.
A useless distraction.
But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people.
The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever.
Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it.
It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
"The maximum (recorded) life span for humans has increased from 103 in 1798 to 110 years in 1898, 115 years in 1990, and 122.45 years since Calment's death in 1997" - Wikipedia
And "as long as there have been people" is going way too far. Your point that there seems to be some intrinsic limit stands, until medical science disproves it.
Living forever is as ridiculous as 100% uptime, but eliminating preventable deaths remains a good goal.
"Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." - Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com)
The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years
True. The difference is that science might actually work.
I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.
It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption.
Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.
Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...
Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this:
>So is this On Intelligence 2?
I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).
- for anyone interested, the Human Brain Project is at the forefront of this: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/inde...
I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.
