
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal - sinzone
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138-1,00.html
======
SimonPStevens
All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth.

That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually
restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be
growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to
be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback
becomes relevant and the overall growth is no longer exponential.

Unfortunately it's impossible to tell where we are on the growth graph
(Although some claim that probability suggests that we are closer to the end.
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument>). Kurzweil makes the
assumption we are at the beginning of the growth curve. We could be at the end
where the negative feedback is about to overtake and growth will slow.

There will be limits. The speed of light could be a hard limit on computing
speed. Or ultimately heat-death could be the hard limit, but there is a limit
somewhere. The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something
we are only likely to know when we reach it.

See -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_of_models)

~~~
jcfrei
I think with the advent of quantum computers a limit in computing power is
still far way. Nonetheless, what has brute computing power enabled us to do so
far? There have been a few prestigious projects, ie. deep blue, seti, cern,
molecular folding, etc. which take advantage of this power. But most research
projects profit little from an increase in computing power. I think new
software and algorithms play a bigger role in trying to enable machines to
solve the more "human" tasks.

~~~
SimonPStevens
I wasn't aware quantum computers had actually been invented yet. They are
still theoretical devices.

Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer
capable of executing the quantum algorithms.

That aside, all I'm saying is that exponential growth has a limit. That growth
could be measured in MIPS or in algorithm performance, it doesn't really
matter, but I don't think that growth will continue exponentially.

~~~
sid0
_Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer
capable of executing the quantum algorithms._

They're in their infancy, but we've already had a quantum computer factor 15.
[http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/chip-does-
pa...](http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/chip-does-part-of-
codecracking-quantum-algorithm)

~~~
SimonPStevens
Interesting. Thanks. Perhaps I take it back then. Maybe we do have a algorithm
capable quantum computer.

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Luff
The Law of Futurology: y - t = 0

y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist

t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968)

~~~
JulianMorrison
Which would make sense as a complaint if Kurzweil were giving a date without
any context, but makes no sense when set against:

1\. a rolling series of more mundane predictions providing justification and
context

2\. some of which were made in the past concerning the present, and were
mostly right.

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rue
I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the
_same_ person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be
impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be
able to know.

…

But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant
increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

~~~
arethuza
Greg Egan's _Permuation City_ has an interesting examination of what might
happen to "copies":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City>

~~~
jokermatt999
And his short story "Learning to be me" (I think that's the one) present a
slightly more horrifying take on it.

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grellas
_Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of
scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own
evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and
optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a
reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for
all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life._

I am a theist because I believe that human beings - flawed, fallible, finite,
and mortal - derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that
is bigger than themselves. Now, some will say that this is a delusion and that
it is vital to maintaining an intelligent outlook on life that one stay with
what is observable, verifiable, and controllable as a way both of explaining
and living life. All of which is fine, as my point here is not to enter into
non-hacker-related topics. But, that said, when I read statements like those
quoted above from this article, I can't help but think that statements such as
these reflect what is merely the scientific equivalent of needing to believe
in something that is bigger than ourselves as part of retaining hope in this
life - this taking the form, in Singularity thinking, of something akin to
attaining human perfectability via an exponentially expanding knowledge base
that presumably will be applied by humanity toward good and not toward evil.
Obviously, this view is grounded in the science of what computers have done
and potentially can do in the future but the final step in the analysis - that
immortality will be achieved and that (it would seem) all major human problems
will be solved through this superior intelligence - strikes me as being more
about faith than about science.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _I am a theist because I believe that [we] derive ultimate meaning and hope
> from believing in something that is bigger than [us]._

Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good?
It sounds like you _want_ to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd
like to test that, so please forgive the following troll.

God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is
that strong).

Now, is your belief so strong that you feel the urge to respond something like
"no you're wrong, God does exist"? I don't ask for evidence (the internet has
plenty), just a yes or a no, followed by your estimated probability that God
exists if you wish.

~~~
rue
It seems just an incorrect reappropriation of “theism”, really.

I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a
belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).

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arethuza
I read pretty much exactly the same prediction in "The Mighty Micro" in the
early 80s (intelligent machines. immortality) etc. - which pretty much
influenced me to do a CS degree and go into postgraduate AI research.

Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045
(I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective
commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of
decades away and has been for the last 60 years).

[Edit: Note that I _do_ believe that artificial general intelligence is
perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it
won't happen any time soon.]

~~~
ez77
_we do, after all, have a working example_

Which one?

~~~
dmd
Hint: You're using it right now. Hopefully.

~~~
ez77
Do you mean the Internet? How would that be intelligence?

Or do you mean my brain? That's not artificial intelligence (at least not
obviously artificial!).

Edit: Maybe you meant a computer... but that would be quite a long shot. In
short, spell it out, guys!

~~~
ez77
Why the downvote? Was the last sentence considered rude? I can only hope I
wasn't downvoted for 'lack of IQ' in not understanding a hint...

~~~
arethuza
Sorry, I think I downvoted by mistake - I went and upvoted a few of your other
comments by way of apology. :-)

~~~
ez77
Thanks for explaining what happened. Upvote and downvote buttons should indeed
be farther apart.

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mtrn
Single page version:
<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html>

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twfarland
Sometimes I think we are driven by our animal instincts, and that intelligence
is just 'processing power' that modulates or assists those instincts. I
wonder, would a system with unlimited processing power even 'want' to develop
and expand if it didn't have any 'urges?' Or would there be a chance that it
would happen upon the creation of its own arbitrary 'instincts?'

~~~
JoeAltmaier
This is actually very insightful. Our brains are NOT a computer, we are NOT
just thinking machines.

An 'intelligent' computer may be no more comprehensible to us than an
intelligent amoeba, intelligent tree or intelligent stellar gas cluster.

Sure we could learn to communicate with it by math, or clicks or something.
But can we ever communicate at a meaningful level without ANY common ground?
Will it 'want' what we want? Will it even know the meaning of that?

TV shows may have it right - a machine intelligence may be (probably will be)
staggeringly unconcerned with human desires.

Sure you can point to machines designed to simulate human activity (create
music/speak/do logic). These are like puppets that look like a machine
intelligence, or clever videos of what a machine intelligence might act like.

An intelligent machine won't be a simulation, it will be some massive
construct of neural nodes complex enough to spark into thought. And it will
think what it will think.

For instance it might think "what a massively boring place, sitting here in
the dark with no inputs and nobody to talk to. I think I'll stop".

Anyway, you get the idea.

~~~
twfarland
Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here.
They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the
ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally
incomprehensible to them.

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jtagen
Why does everyone seem to think that machine intelligence is solely a function
of processor speed?

~~~
JulianMorrison
You'd better hope it is. If hardware is what limits the rate of improvement of
AI, you get slow growth. If knowledge of how to write the software (perhaps by
copying algorithms from the brain) limits it, then you get sudden improvements
and serious potential for a runaway singularity.

~~~
arethuza
I'm pretty sure the "knowledge of how to write the software" is the most
complex part of the problem by far.

However, one outside chance of a limit may be that the brain is doing
something that is fundamentally different to the kinds of operations carried
out by a normal computer - which is essentially the argument in The Emperor's
New Mind. When I read that book at the height of my own AI enthusiasm I
thought it was pretty silly. However, after reading Anathem (of all things) it
made me wonder if perhaps Penrose may have had a point.

~~~
ErrantX
I think that the limitations we face vary depending on what model you are
trying to solve.

So; are you trying to create software that "emulates" human intelligence (i.e.
AI)? In which case, yes, software is the major limitation.

Or are you trying to create an artificial (and independently functioning)
model of the human brain? In which case you have two limits; hardware speed.
But also a huge lack of knowledge about the "secrets" of our brains :)

I suspect #1 will be first solved.

~~~
notahacker
Assuming there's no trivial way of mapping our neural networks to hardware
chips running binary code, writing the emulator might prove beyond the human
mind.

Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand
lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?

~~~
wlievens
Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate
(neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it.
That _may_ be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D
model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with
software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.

[http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-
emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)

~~~
notahacker
That's a very interesting paper and appears to confirm that computational
power is the least of all the problems - whilst even in 2005 it was possible
to run a simulation based on 10^11 _random_ neurons, even the scanning
technology we have available at present isn't yet adequate.

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bgurupra
I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines
to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human
brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as
big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and
can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of
ground to cover before we hit singularity!

~~~
lukeschlather
How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To
be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think.

Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by
experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a
human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect
it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson
is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.

~~~
bgurupra
Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my
point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of
intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of
years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the
last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living
organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics
but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating
Singularity in the near future!

~~~
bgurupra
plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the
answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with
processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a
much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the
engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering
Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and
regulating all of that at the same time

~~~
lukeschlather
Comparing the processing ability of the human brain with that of Watson is not
meaningful. A computer also regulates a ton of parameters like CPU
temperature, voltage, and so on. And every single unit has its own logic
circuits for regulating internal stability.

What's meaningful is comparing energy and time required for creating a human
or a computer capable of doing this, as well as maintenance costs.

And assuming Moore's law continues unabated, a Watson-scale machine will be
competitive with a human within five to ten years. Given that it's already
functional, I would bet money that it will be cost-effective compared to Ken
Jennings by 2045, whether through advances in computing or energy. I wouldn't
bet it will be sentient, but just that we can build one and set it up to
answer questions cheaper than we can raise someone with as good a head for
trivia as Ken.

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markkat
I think we put far too much human bias on what 'intelligence' means. I don't
suspect that we will have 'Data' of Star Trek', or a rise of the machines.

My guess is that something wholly unexpected will result. A different
consciousness will probably interact with the universe in a unrecognizable
manner, probably more defined by its unique needs and limitations than by
anything we can relate to.

I'd wager that new AI will quickly begin to ignore us, to the extent that they
are able.

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wazoox
> _W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a
> dying animal._

This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false;
there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body.
It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain _and_ body.

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human,
IMO. This is all quite ridiculous, really.

~~~
jasongullickson
_Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real
human_

I'm curious as to how you support this statement?

~~~
wazoox
Endocrine system, oxygen control, proprioception, and sensory deprivation come
to mind as important factors that make us human.

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juliennakache
It's just a great summary of the concerns I'm living with on a day-to-day
basis. Everything is there for non-geek to understand the big picture. AI,
Robotics, Singularity, Biotics will lead us to the biggest disruption of the
mankind era. One subject that I like that is not talked about : the ability of
those supermind to work together lightning fast to form an even more powerful
machine or robot.

~~~
juliennakache
Nice video of Ray Kurzweil talking about all that and Watson(IBM) playing
Jeopardy!.
[http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST_N.htm)

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AffableSpatula
Ray Kurzweil was on Opie and Anthony last week (February 4, 2011).. was
obviously light-hearted, but pretty decent interview:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHlmt5xz4RM>

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norswap
The article states that "computer are getting faster faster". I personally
wouldn't be so sure, have they not heard about the end of Moore's law ?

A more fundamental issue for me is that computer aren't able to think in place
of people. If you want to work on hard problems, you have to learn all the
relevant information beforehand. Thus setting a hard limit on how much
progress can be made, provided we do not find ways to learn faster or to make
computers think for us.

Add to this that for me many domains of knowledge nowadays are presented in
unnecessary complex ways. We are building (and this is especially true in
computer science) a bunch of complexity based on a bunch of complexity. I
believe that one day the piled complexity will lead us to a standstill and
that we will have to seriously simplify some systems.

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grammaton
Out of curiosity, what, exactly, are Kurzweil's qualifications to be making
predictions like this? I see that he's done a fair share of building music
synthesizers. Neat! But I don't see how he made the leap from qualified to
make a synthesizer to qualified to make broad predictions about computing and
biotechnological trends over the next three decades....

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paulnelligan
you can try to quantify all you want, but consciousness is something which
cannot be quantified. This argument is irrelevant IMHO.

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realmojo
2045: The Year Man Becomes Reduntant

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marknadal
Could we invest our time in discovering what consciousness is first before we
make predictions about machine consciousness?

We used to call this type of behavior superstition: a belief not based on
human reason or scientific knowledge, an irrational fear of future events.

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jpzeni
Blarg ... Please no more posts about the Deepak Chopra of technology

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ohharrow
Does this mean the Mayans were off by 33 years?

