
Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind - jlhamilton
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurzweils-dubious-new-theory-of-mind.html
======
confluence
Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside
of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer
off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on
intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see
everywhere).

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>).

~~~
NathanKP
I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off
kilter".

~~~
confluence
Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most
rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch.

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>).

~~~
pjscott
> _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)._

I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less
averse to losing large sums of money, and more averse to regretting
opportunities passed by, than you are. You can call him crazy if his actions
are a spectacularly bad way of getting what he wants, but if he just wants
differen things than you do, that's a matter of taste rather than sanity.

> _Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way,
> especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion)._

I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they would
say to this.

~~~
confluence
_> I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less
averse to losing large sums of money_

Truth. Same argument can be applied to terrorists and soldiers - they value
the respect of their group and their families (in some cases this is monetary)
over their own lives.

But then again - I presume most people think most terrorists would be damaged
in some way (brain washed/delusional/lost parents) and soldiers in another way
(PTSD/lose a friend/people die in front of you).

I'm not stating Elon Musk is, or is not, this - however I do find the
parallels highly curious.

 _> I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they
would say to this._

Kind of irrelevant if it's empirically correct.

~~~
brianchu
1\. Terrorists value things differently

2\. Terrorists are mentally damaged.

3\. Elon Musk values things differently

4\. Ergo, Elon Musk is mentally damaged (or more likely to be damaged, or this
is an indication that he might be damaged, as is implied).

Total analogy fail.

EDIT: Since I can't seem to be able to reply to your reply (too nested):
Bringing up the analogy in the argument and finding it curious indicates that
there is _some_ reason as to why it even applies, when in fact it is
completely irrelevant.

~~~
confluence
I said the parallels were curious. If you read it correctly - I didn't state
either way. I can't be logically incorrect because I didn't make a conclusion.

Secondly: <http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210>

EDIT: Not necessarily. The relative percentage of CEOs, traders and investors
who are psychopaths are much higher than the general population. We normally
label such people as mentally damaged. Musk is both a CEO and an investor who
doesn't think like normal people and fits into this group.

This does not mean he is part of the group though. It is merely interesting.

------
acabal
Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he
was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I
read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his
predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember
thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just
writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!"

Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...

------
jere
>As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical
Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur
Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil’s weak efforts at
differentiating his theory from Hawkins’s—“the most important difference is
the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the
size and size variability parameters”—are likely to convince no one.

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).

------
unoti
I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's
disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we
were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right
all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so
angry.

"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.

~~~
rpm4321
Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being
critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career
before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out
there on predicting the future.

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.

------
jansen
In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-
engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in
the universe.”

\- 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...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-
computer/index.html)

------
jaxytee
Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book
"Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of
useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed
our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable
in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else),
or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack
there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre
civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out
of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray
and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone
uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to
predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the
minds that come along and solve them one day.

------
briggers
> Hierarchical Temporary Memory

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.

~~~
jacquesm
> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50.

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.

~~~
briggers
The maximum life expectancy point is good, note that actually it's changed a
bit.

"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.

------
jfaucett
"The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even
the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own."

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.

------
omarchowdhury
Kurzweil is the epitome of [reductionist, emergentist] materialism.

The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.

~~~
skyhook_mockups
Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there
is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your
reason for thinking this?

~~~
RivieraKid
I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that
consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an
interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes
in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't
explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific
state.

~~~
orangecat
_Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles._

Because no such explanation can exist, or because we don't have a sufficient
understanding yet? See "God of the gaps".

~~~
RivieraKid
Because physics doesn't even have the language to describe the feeling of
pain. Similarly, physics doesn't have a language to describe how "green"
looks, it can only describe the frequency of green etc.

Also have a look at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia>, it's basically what
I'm talking about.

------
ashcairo
I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a
system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million
YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and
faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.

~~~
bloaf
Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several
months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16
thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even
approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even
1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing
objects.

