This kind of fantasizing gathers attention because some people would like it to be true while other people fear it. Controversy results, but it's not about anything. It's a conflict between two forms of wishful thinking.
In Ray Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he makes the argument that progress begins slowly and then the majority of results occur near completion. An example given was the Human Genome Project in which the cost and progress of sequencing began slowly but 90% of the results were obtained in the last 10% of the duration - and at less than 10% of the project cost. He makes a similar argument about strong AI and with conservative figures.
Nice snappy comment but what exactly do you mean? Do you think this sort of thing is impossible? Or that 2029 is way too early? Or are you just saying that speculating about what will happen more than 20 years in the future is folly?
I don't know what's impossible. I'm saying this stuff is made up. Nobody really knows anything about it, and there's no way to prove or disprove it (except by waiting a long time). I think it gets attention not because of anything to do with the future, but because it triggers emotions in the present. Some people find it exciting and want it to be true, others find it frightening and want it to be false, and so on. That leads to controversy, but the controversy isn't really about anything, other than conflicting emotions finding arguments to clothe themselves in.
Well you could to some extent make the same argument over any attempts to predict the future. Global warming is an instance that comes to mind. The point of it all is that your assessment of the likely futures can effect your current actions. This sort of stuff can be particularly useful for tech startups.
But to follow your style of argument - it can also be true that some people would prefer not to think of a future that is radically different from the past and present. So they will often reflexively turn away from that sort of discussion, dismissing it as pointless. This is the sort of attitude a lot of people displayed to the internet during its growth.
I personally think there is maybe a 20% change he is close to right which to me makes it hugely significant and deserving of a lot more attention than it gets.
He is saying that the article says nothing new and it's more or less pseudo-journalism. I tend to agree, having read the book he wrote on this same topic 9 years ago.
I would think more of these predictions if they came attached to some concrete goals. Could we have a list of specific tasks that will be accomplished by the machines in 2029? "Win the world Go championship", perhaps? "Produce a Russian-to-English translation of Crime and Punishment that passes the Turing test?" "Provide better color commentary than the average Fox Sports announcer?" That should be an easy one, but I'm still not betting on the machine.
And I marvel at the tremendous effectiveness of the typical futurist trick: make the banal sound incredible and then predict it:
"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.
I've got those. They're called cells. I sneeze billions of them out every day.
I suppose you might ask whether it's fair to call my white blood cells "intelligent"... but they do have autonomous capabilities, and they do self-organize via a body-wide signaling network. They're pretty talented. I challenge you to produce a device on the same scale that is significantly more intelligent... by 2029.
Well I don't think any of your current cells can network your brain to say a google search by thought alone. To say the capacity for rapid brain-digital interfacing wouldn't have an impact on intelligence would be like saying the internet is unlikely to effect society. Not saying I subscribe to the guy's timetable though.
I agree about the goal part. I'd say GO would be gone way before then anyway. It'll take a new algorithm and some more computer power but not general intelligence. The actual Turing Test is always a good one, but if they passed it computers would be way more intelligent than us to beat us at our own game.
Ray Kurzweil's latest book about all this 'The Singularity is Near', was released in 2005. It has some compelling arguments is definitely worth a read if you are interesting in the longer term implications of computer technology and networking. He hasn't said all that much new in the years since then and this article doesn't really contain any new information.
Doesn't think what? That the Kurzweil book is an interesting read? I think what you are trying to say is that this guy doesn't agree with the notion of the singularity. Fair enough. Though I think his assertion that we aren't in a time of accelerating change is a minority view amongst recognized futurists.
But when comparing the cultures of humans and chimpanzees, that's where the real differences are visible. "That's the promise of what humans are. It's not the individual intelligence but this collective intelligent culture," he said.
I think it may happen, but not on his timetable. If you read his Age of Spiritual Machines, he dismissed many very difficult problems in AI and material science with a bunch of hand-waving. He could just as well be off by 50-150 years.
True. Like I said, I had a problem with his timetable, which he did not justify to my satisfaction. His premise may be valid. I would say it is almost inevitable.
