Ray Kurzweil On IT And The Future of Technology 450
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this interview with CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil says that one day, software and computers will reside inside us. He adds that by 2020, "we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots -- blood cell-size devices -- inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons." He also says that if we're not enhanced by machines, they will surpass us. But he doesn't think it will happen. According to him, machines and humans will merge. In the mean time, he's pursuing his anti-aging quest and takes about 250 supplements to his diet every day! With this regime, he says his biological age is 40 while he's 56 years old. By 2030, there will be very little difference between 30-year-old and 120-year-old people, says Kurzweil. He's certainly a bright person, but I'm not sure that I agree with someone taking daily such an amount of pills. What do you think? This summary contains some selected -- and biased -- excerpts to help you forge your opinion."
2030? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Kurzweil is a genius (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
What Kurzweil is saying is that, as a species, it's time for us to create our children. The next step in our evolution is to for us to transcend humanity... which is likely to make some people very unhappy because we would, in effect, be emulating god.
Vision of the future (Score:5, Insightful)
My only beef with him is that his timeline is pretty radical. His whole premise is based on his 'Law of Accelerating Returns' which basically states that the pace of technological growth is increasing exponentially and we're at the point where the pace of growth is about to shoot straight up. The reason I think his timeline for all these predictions is too optimistic is because of considerations outside of his realm of thinking. Things like politics, buearocracy and social concerns can really slow down the adoption of new technology. What good is the latest nerve regeneration treatment when stem cells are illegal in the US. What good is the latest disease fighting nano-bots when their FDA approval is pending. What good is the latest wearable computer when all your friends will make fun of you when you wear it. These are the types of issues he never really deals with.
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps the poor will get nanobot version 1.0, and the rich get nanobot version XP.
If we currently don't even cough up enough welfare to help the poor afford basic things like food and heat, what on God's fucking greeen Earth makes you think that we will EVER be giving them ANY version of nanobots?
Kurtzweil is overoptimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
If we get life extension that really works, it will probably work only for genetically modified humans. The genome, and the species, will have to be changed. The new models probably won't interbreed with the old ones. It will take a few generations to get these new species thoroughly debugged. But it will be really great for people a few centuries downstream.
If you thought race and religion were problems, wait until we have multiple species of humans.
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:1, Insightful)
You can call that pointless and let your body rot out from under you if you like. I'll take improvements in medical science any day.
Re:You might also be interested to see his (Score:2, Insightful)
Life extension w/o nanobots (Score:4, Insightful)
It's obvious that what he really wants is life extension. And he may get some.
We already have the means to extend our lives and it doesn't involve nanobots. Here's a recap:
We don't have to wait for any nanobots to start living longer lives. But the above suggestions don't grab as many headlines as nanotechnology, I guess.
Re:what do I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. There's a sensor in your cells that measures the amount of oxidative damage done. Beyond a certain limit it kicks in the senescence program, and BAM! your cells go into G2 meaning a slow coast to death (can't go into much detail on this one)
2. Stem cell maintenance. You need telomerase for that, an enzyme composed of RNA and protein. It keeps the length of the ends of your chromosomes more or less constant. People without functional telomerase (a disease called dyskeratosis congenita) die at a young age of anemia, leukemia and other disorders associated with aging. They also have bowel problems and their skin looks like it's 80 years old when they're 30
3. Genome integrity. A whole bunch of enzymes is busy keeping your chromosomes from breaking, effecting all kinds of different repairs needed for all sorts of damage that a genome (an organism's DNA) can suffer. Various diseases result from a lack of one of these enzymes and they all mimick an aspect of ageing (Werner's, Bloom's, Xeroderma Pigmentosum, Fanconi anemia etc etc).
So, preventing ageing will not be the result of tackling oxidation or whatever on its own (which is what all the supplements are doing). IF we are ever going to be able to offer any kind of athanatic treatment (term borrowed from Dan Simson) it is going to be a complex one.
Ray's timing is out there (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine in 1776 you had a portable gas generator, and a truckload of computer parts from the last 20 years. Could you assemble a computer? sure. But what If you had 18th century knowlege. Your not really going to understand what the generator is for. Your probably going to try and make the peices into some sort of clock arrangement, marveling that you got the PCI card properly inserted into an ISA port.
I'm not ragging on Biological Scientists, but right now were at the stage where we have found the pile of computer parts, and we know how a few of them fit, but It might be a while before we notice that seam on the back of the palm pilot for batteries. Because it doesn't look important.
It might be a while before we really figure out how cellular life works. 10 years seems optomistic for just that. Ageing is a way larger issue. I dont think that immortality is around the bend.
Either way, I hope Ray keeps up the good fight.
Storm
the *real* secret to long life (Score:5, Insightful)
Another Rich Guy Looking For The Fountain of Youth (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is this 'futurist' drivel in 'Science'? (Score:2, Insightful)
The foundation for 90% of the things he says are a bunch of hand-waving. Sure, we're about 20 years from discovering how to build nanobots that can do something useful in our bloodstream (oh, yeah, love those Drexler designs for nano-mechanisms - so pratical). Sure, there's an actual test that really measures aging. Sure, life extension is right around the corner and all you have to do is pop a big bunch of pills. Sure, after about 40 years of failure, strong AI is right around the corner (all we need is another 100 years of Moore's law to turn SHRDLU into HAL, really).
He may admit that he's a neophyte in most of the fields that he allegedly 'tracks'. That's not an excuse to throw all caution to the wind.
At best it's just silly. At worst it's pseudo-science and a pathetic desire on the part of your standard rich white guy to spend loads of money on living forever. I find it kind of disgusting, because we've got finite resources to spend on real problems, and these guys are busy pumping everything they can into the "Science" of "Me Extension".
Meanwhile, evil old Bill Gates is pissing around doing things like spending tens of millions of year trying to eliminate malaria - doesn't he know that the singularity is coming? He should buckle down to serious work - like designing flying nanobots to hunt down all those mosquitoes, instead.
In short, Kurzweil is a kook. He's utterly blinded by his own selfishness and wishful thinking that he couldn't track a real technology trend to save his life.
Re:Life extension w/o nanobots (Score:5, Insightful)
Kurzweil is looking to life extension of centuries and thousands of years, quite a difference. That's way he gets headlines.
Re:"Resistance is futile" 'cause you're gonna bite (Score:3, Insightful)
His arrogance is only exceeded by his ignorance (Score:2, Insightful)
He belittles the human mind and its "limitations", and yet we are nowhere close to even emulating even a fraction of it.
Its nice to have a vision, but this guy is talking out of his ass.
Re:"Bright" in What Sense? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a mere 45 year old.
Anyone who thinks that Martin Gardner went senile at age 60 is obviously brain dead. He's 90 now, and we hope he beats George Burns...
Don't trash older folk. I once used to help my father at the oldest continously running hospital in Europe (The Great Hospital Bishopsgate Norwich) and I can tell you that the worst thing you can do to an older person is dump them in a place for old people...
When I left university (Bristol UK), I spent a couple of years working in a company with a couple
of guys pushing 70 who could do *TRUE* magic with
their machine work (one was from British Aerospace and the other from Rolls Royce Aerospace).
Don't even think of criticizing concorde or anything else with people like that - they would
rip your spine out and feed it to your rear end!
Bottom line, be humble and learn. It's a rough ride out there (nod to the sargent in Hill St Blues).
Those guys are still unsung heroes in my dreams.
I think Kurzweil is a freaking idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
1. great statements require great proof.
2. predictions should follow patterns of substructure
He offers no proof - he simply says : look what's happened so far, by (x) date (which will likely be after I'm dead) the world will be SO different and it will be like (THIS).
His claims of AI are floundering on simple facts like Intel scrapping 4gHz chips [slashdot.org] and any number of other signs that Moore's Law, on which Kurzweil's argument rests, is being scrapped as we speak.
another example: stick a blank floppy in your fancy pants XP machine and start the computer up. Computers are SO far from being "intelligent" in even the most rudimentary way, it's absurd. The basic flaw in Kurzweil's notions are that he believes that intelligence is a disembodied effect, when (if the likes of Ramachandran are correct) intelligence is an embodied effect and specifically dependent on wetware. So, the pattern doesn't hold, and he has no real proof. He's selling snake oil to technodweebs.
Then there's the entire issue of social class, and Kurzweil has no interest in serving the greater masses of humanity. He is interested in pushing a technological vanguard that will be open only to the rich, who, once properly enabled/enhanced with have no need or desire to accomodate a working class. Why bring on board the middle classes, when you can replace them all with machines? And if you think this doesn't mean you, you're an idiot.
But beyond all that his fantasy is just that: a fantasy.Technology is a means, not an end in itself, and the likes of Kurzweil seek to put the managers of technology in a position of power above and beyond democratic principles, and for that he and his ilk must be opposed and revealed for what they are: techno-fascists.
Now, for full disclosure: I do think we need a robust space program, I do think we need faster and better computers, I do think we can and should use technology to solve the world's ills where technology is a legitimate solution. I *even agree* that we can make humans more disease resistant and longer lived, and I also believe that that is a good thing. However:
I do not see technology as Kurzweil does: in some kind of Messianic Eschatology. It's not like that, and I feel that he and his ilk are perpetrating a fraud on the public, but mostly on the people they advocate the most: technologists. I think the Really Hard Nut To Crack is not going to be technological, but sociological and political.
Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting opposition paper [edge.org] that also opposes Kurzweil, but in more polite language than myself. I guess Lanier doesn't consider Kurzweil to be the charlatan I see him as.
RS
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:3, Insightful)
Who always takes direct advantage of new technology first? The military. They will find a way to kill us all with nanotech long before any factories are built to feed the poor. And our leaders will find it impossible to resist using these weapons.
Re:Vision of the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine walking up to the face of a cliff. Doesn't say anything about how high the cliff is.
The problem is that while progress does occur, it's pretty much five steps forward which are visible and four steps backward which nobody notices.
Further, progress is multidimensional with the further complication that higher degrees of progress also involve more dimensions.
I think part of the problem is that he is confusing cost with value. There is a "Law of Accelerating Costs" in which things which used to be expensive are expended in greater and greater amounts in the hope of actually accomplishing something. Newton and Liebnitz discovered/invented/whatever Calculus at the same instant in evolutionary terms. Without discounting their genius, if neither of them had, somebody else would have before long. Cost is easy to measure. You can even do it scientifically. Value is difficult to measure, primarily because value can easily show in places you didn't know you had places. As soon as one attempts to be scientific, there is a shift from measuring value to measuring cost.
Re:I think Kurzweil is a freaking idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Moore's law [wikipedia.org] does not deal with clock speed. It deals with complexity. Intel did say they were working on making the processors more efficient (per cycle). That is typically achieved by adding more hardware; increased complexity.
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this is a possibility, but the reality. The poor of the planet don't even have access to clean drinking water -- if we can't even guarantee that, what are the chances bleeding edge tech like this will *ever* be available to everyone? Until something as basic as this changes, I don't see any way that the corporations that develop this technology will use nanotech in an egalitarian manner. Class will not only be marked by wealth and power, but by the body itself.
Re:the nut (Score:5, Insightful)
Just look at any autistic person who can memorize a whole phone book - there's orders more than 100,000 chunks there.
Another thing - the brain is incredibly efficient at random-access information stuff - think about how many times you read something, and immediately, you go "bullshit". You KNOW it's wrong, within a fraction of a second, without even having the time to sort out the whole thing "logically". You then check, and find out that your "instincts" were right.
No computer can act as fast, sorting through a lifetime of experience in a fraction of a second and coming to a correct conclusion. Hell, no computer can even have an opinion. And that's probably not going to change even with nanotech, because the consciousness seems to "inhabit" the quantum world, way smaller than your nanobots.
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
We won't necessarily be happier, but we will be smarter. And since when do we turn to technology to make us happier, anyway?
250 supplements doesn't mean 250 pills (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask my mother, who had to care for my father during his descent into Alzheimer's, and whose dream of going places and doing things during retirement turned into a nightmare of losing her lifelong companion followed by bleak widowhood. If you survive her response, I'll be sorely tempted to finish the job for her.
Long ago, I read a book written by a doctor, who bloviated on about what he considered the "bright side" of what was then called senile dementia. He spouted BS about a "Puzzled Angel" whose attentions took the aged into a supposedly better world of reliving their youth and childhood. I'm glad I never met the [expletive] who wrote that. To give up is to be less than human. I'm with Dylan Thomas in this issue, thank you very much.
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:3, Insightful)
Now consider asking Joe and Jane Average to take a needle full of little robots for the team. How well do you think that is going to go over? In the USA, where 5 to 10% of the population (millions of people!) listen to Coast to Coast AM [coasttocoastam.com] (used to be Art Bell, now mostly George Noory with a smattering of Art Bell) and gleefully swallow the stories of "alien abduction", "exorcism", "Chem trails", "witches", "holes in the ground" that lead right to hell, "Hollow Earth" creatures and oodles more...
I'm afraid I'm more than a little skeptical that you could get the population to accept infusions of nanobots, and that assumes that you could get the congress and the senate to authorize such a thing, and that we can actually create such things, of which I am also more than a little skeptical.
Maybe you could in a considerably better educated country, like Japan. Then again - maybe not. :)
Re:I have no problem with this, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, my eyeglasses and vaccination-induced immunity to smallpox and stuff sure are pointless. And I've got a feeling that I'm probably happier than some of my prior, less-intelligent ancestors, whose main concern was whether they'd die of disease or being eaten by the ancestors of one of our current species of housepets.
What, you don't consider stuff like those to be improvements (granted, the glasses are more of a fix)? So just where do you draw the line? Why does it make a difference if a modification is technological in the nanotech sense, or biological in the sense of vaccination? You don't oppose vaccines too, do you? Common sense says no, but since you dismiss all possible modifications out of hand, you're using a wide enough brush that I might as well swat you with it a little.
And why do people keep thinking that a human with some kind of modification is either inhuman or subhuman anyway?
-PS
Re:Resistance is futile (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately, the Malthusian perspectives have been somewhat changed by our experiences in the last 50 years. In EVERY formerly poor country where the supply of food, education, supplies for voluntary birth control, industrialization, and opportunities for employment for both sexes has improved past the basic needs stage, birth rates have FALLEN DRAMATICALLY.
Based on the experiences of a bunch of countries (including ones from both Africa and Asia), the best ways to cross into negative population growth is to be sure all adults (this means both sexes) to have access to jobs, voluntary birth control, and a prosperous economy.
(By the way, don't use the US's population growth as your answer, once you subtract immigration, the birth rate has been almost as negative as Europe's for a number of years now.)
Nice to have something optimistic to reflect on now and then................
Re:bs detector (Score:4, Insightful)
So you admit that it works - thank yu.
I wasn't the one who started with the "100,000 chunk" bull-shit - Kurzweil was. We can already store many orders of magnitude of information than that. And we can process it in random order, AND in parallel.
The computer can only process stuff via one or more cpus. The human mind has no such limitation. The best equivalent would be a computer where every byte is associated with a cpu, for MASSIVE parallelism. And those cpus would have to be able to re-wire their conections over time, based on the data in them and their surrounding cpus.
Agreed, but this has nothing to do with Kurzweil's assertion of an extremely low limitation to the amount of info a human can store. We are nowhere near our physical limits yet. The only things preventing people from continuing to learn over their lifetime are laziness and disease.
... and we do amazing stuff that a computer will never be able to do. The "computational stuff" is done with the oldest part of the brain - the "reptilian" part. The interesting stuff - emotions, etc., is newer. We've had adding machines for centuries (abascus, for example). We'll never have a machine that can create "Spaceballs".
... assuming you're giving an example of human stupidity, there are computer programs all the time that screw up too. Some due to hardware flaws (the floating point bug, etc), many due to software flaws (insert the rant of your choice against the OS of yuor choice here).
It in no way invalidates myu contention that Kurzweil is wrong about his "100,000 chunks of data" limit, and needing nanotech to enhance people's performance. In the case you cited, raising gasoline prices to $10/gallon would provide incentive enough to get the driver to develop a more optimal behaviour.
Re:the nut (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be like every thought being generated from a program that is re-compiled with every run, with slightly different code and data. And the "monitor program" or "supervisor program" also being subject to those constraints.
Its akin to a neural net program constantly training itself (the conscious, for example), but on a system where the underlying OS is also constantly modifying itself as well (your personality, say), on a hardware platform that is also constantly modifying/restructuring itself (your brain) and responding to different environments (chemicals, etc, vs. a computer being supplied with, say different voltages and currents).
Besides, computers don't "come up with conclusions". They just crunch bits. Kurzweil has made the mistake of anthropomorphizing them, which then led to his assuming that nanotech will help us extend our brain's "powers".
It seems to me that a biological solution would be more likely than a nanotech one - more compatible, more adaptable.
Re:Uh huh... (Score:3, Insightful)
When my kernel finds bugs on it's own or finds a more efficient way to control memory, and recompiles itself, I'll consider it a smart computer. Until then, it's just another software system created by humans limited to the original human who designed and implemented it.
I take it y'all are athiests? (Score:1, Insightful)
I am floored that no-one here takes a religious viewpoint. Doesn't anyone believe in a higher power anymore? Does everyone believe that Science is the answer to everything? I think it's nuts to believe in science giving us all the answers. I don't mean to spoil all your hopes and dreams, but eventually YA'LL are gonna die. I feel sorry for everyone that feels that great anxiety that when they close their physical eyes their awareness simply ceases to exist. I'd probably feel desperate if I believed that too. However, I don't believe that we just happened to be in the right place at the right time at the right temperature with all the right mixtures of gases and ingredients to give life to our predecessor THE AMOEBA. Doesn't fly with me. Even Einstien seemed to have believed in a superior/higher power of some kind.