

Ray Kurzweil Wants to be a Robot - haidut
http://www.newsweek.com/id/197812

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Periodic
When I first heard about the whole Singularity thing it made sense. I thought
it was cool. I wanted to be there.

But as I've learned more about the limitations of our understanding, our
biology, and computers I've realized that this isn't something that will be
happening any time soon without some amazing breakthroughs. I don't expect the
Singularity to happen my lifetime, and I'm still in my 20s.

We really understand very little about the brain. We don't know exactly how
neurons work and the most information we can get from the brain is on the
order of 1-7 BITS per second when sampling from implanted electrodes. It's
also not a lack of data. We don't even know how to fully decode the data we
already have.

Our understanding of AI really is pretty poor. Knowledge representation and
machine learning has become a hard enough task that many researchers are back
to developing algorithms for specific tasks, which embeds the knowledge of the
researcher in the algorithm, precluding the system from learning anything
truly novel.

They say we can't see past the Singularity because things will change too much
and too fast. Right now we can't even see the Singularity because too many
things would have to change too much and quite fast.

~~~
Estragon
There are thousands of people working furiously on all of those problems,
though. I was working at Janelia Farm until last year. You should see what
those guys are planning for neuroscience. It's going to be huge. It's a
mistake to assume that our capacity to query neural circuitry is going to
remain stuck at such a low rate.

~~~
TrevorJ
And they have been working furiously for a good while now. The romantic in me
hopes that they can make it happen, but I'm not holding my breath. Mainly
because a lot of people confuse speed of processing with intelligence, but
that's not really the spark of life we need. There's nothing out there so far
that can mimic human thought even at hundreds of times slower than human
responses. We still don't have something quite right with the basic principles
yet.

~~~
Devilboy
What Kurzweil is saying is that you can't just linearly extrapolate the
progress of these projects. Even if we only know a fraction of a percentage of
what's going on in the brain after 20 years doesn't mean we'll know only twice
as much in another 20 years. Rather we're likely to see the pace accelerate.
Going from 50% to 100% might take less time than going from 1% to 2%
knowledge.

Keep in mind that he's been making predictions like these for decades and he's
got a pretty good track record.

~~~
TrevorJ
I guess that I am saying is that I'm not convinced that the direction we have
been heading is the direction that will ultimately produce the end result we
want. The model T and the present day automobile share the same basic
concepts. I'm wondering if human-level AI will bear any real resemblance to
today's solutions on the concept level. I'm not convinced it will.

~~~
Devilboy
I think the argument is that we can already simulate a single neuron fairly
accurately today, and so some decades from now we'll likely be able to
simulate them all, plus their interconnects, and thus by pure brute force
we'll get a human-level AI.

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danbmil99
hey 20-somethings, stop complaining it might not happen in your lifetime and
just pitch in. You could live another 70 years. Think about 1906 vs 1976. I'm
almost 50 and I'm doing what I can. I almost definitely won't make it, but you
guys have a 30 year extra chance. And if you don't, well fuck, your kids or
grandkids will.

If you've had someone you love get old and sick and die, you know what I'm
talking about. Get to work. It's not just about you.

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Tichy
"advance in a linear fashion but rather at an exponential rate. It's the
difference between 1-2-3-4-5 and 1-2-4-8-16."

Don't know, should I laugh or should I cry?

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jamesk2
Kurzweil is a genius but maybe he should try not to put such specific dates on
his predictions. It makes it easy to say he was wrong by detractors.

~~~
sp332
Kurzweil usually makes predictions about things that have strong trends over
time. His favorites are the trends that increase exponentially, because most
people extrapolate the early, slow growth linearly and come to a completely
wrong conclusion. If you watch his TED talk, he explains his technique.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ray_kurzweil_on_how_techno...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html)

~~~
bitwize
Uh, yeah, except the funny thing about exponential curves is that at small
scales they look a hell of a lot like sigmoid curves.

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joechung
The last kind of person I would help become a robot is someone that wants to
become one.

