What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Ray Kurzweil Up to at Google?

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40 pointsmcone54 comments

I feel like there's a small minority of people who enjoy elevating kurzweil into a quasi-religious genius figure because of his speculations on the singularity, but he's really just an above average software engineer who happened upon some ideas which captured the public imagination. Easy to forget he's human too sometimes.

He writes books that others do not, even if the ideas are out there. So that is interesting and neat. I guess me makes good money doing that as well.

The quasi-religiousness around singularity ideas is just weird though, I guess it is a form of effective marketing - similar to "fanboys."

And there's also a small minority of people like me who think that Kurzweil is mostly a crackpot who gave the technological singularity a bad name because of his baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts.

I know people who have moved Kurzweil's claims far beyond the pseudo-religious. Check out the Mormon Transhumanist Association sometime.

I don't think that that minority is all that small.

We're also some who regard the whole concept of "the Singularity" as being a quasi-religious crackpot theory no matter how you slice it.

Mind you, it's a powerful meme. Religious tradition abounds with references to some future event that will forcibly clean up the mess and propel us back to Eden. Some of the most prominent -isms of the 20th century subscribed to similar ideas. I guess our brains are a willing host to that kind of stuff.

On top of that, the technological version of the end-of-history cult has the added attraction of whispering into our ears that maybe we .. as programmers and masters of the machine .. may just be able place ourselves on the right side of history and become immortal citizens in future tech utopia. A pantheon of gods, for all practical purposes. That's a seducing idea.

Some aspect of the singularity is kind of undeniable. There's some information thing that's happening right now, and it's growing exponentially, and it just looks like it (for all intents and purposes) asymptotes vertical at some point, approximately 20 years from now.

What actually happens at that point, I think that's up for debate. Are we going to become immortal? Probably not. Are we going to have AIs who are better at everything than expert humans? Probably not.

But I think it's strange if someone denies that it's even happening. Just look at the amount of information that's flowing around, by any metric. It's exponential, and you can fit the curve and plot where it goes vertical. If we were talking about physical processes, I'd understand the skepticism. Maybe that exponential levels off. But I don't see why there is any physical limitation on how much information can flow. Or at least: if we hit that wall, things will be VERY different.

Exponential functions do not have singularities. There would have to be some additional property of the curve in order to conclude the presence of a singularity.

I agree that "the Singularity" is not a singularity in the mathematical sense of divergence, but it is a singularity in the sense of a singular (i.e. special or unique) event. (If it happens at all, that is.)

How?

Look twenty years out and it appears vertical. But 10 years from now it will look much flatter, and what's then 20 years out (30 years from today) will look vertical.

The grass is always greener 20 years in the future.

As I understand it, "the Singularity" refers to the point in time where AGI becomes better at improving itself than the humans that created it. Then the existing exponential growth gets replaced by another exponential, but with stronger feedback.

It's the difference between a differential equation like x' = x and x' = 10x . In either case you can say "meh, if you normalize on today's value, the increase in 10 years is just a constant multiple", but the transition from one phase to the other will still be noticable, even though things won't "go vertical".

A minor point- but exponential curves never actually asymptote or go vertical, they just keep getting closer to vertical forever. But with a big enough level of growth it might as well be vertical.

True. Making any exponential curve look like a hockey stick is mostly a matter of picking the scale. I could probably create a chart showing how the population of the earth went vertical during the reign of the Caesars. Of course, a logarithmic plot solves that issue.

It seems much more likely to me that we're somewhere in the middle of an S-curve, before the limiting factors have kicked in. In terms of processing power, it's already happened to performance per thread, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that there's a plateau to total throughput as well.

Even then, we're undoubtedly going to see some really amazing stuff come out of machine learning in the decades to come, just maybe not the beginning of Ragnarok.

An S-curve still goes "vertical" at some point. That's the idea: that some aspect of reality will be qualitatively weirder when information goes vertical-ish.

My main problem with the predictive power of exponential curves is externalities, usually some tradeoff or some limit to resources.

Try as I might, I probably couldn't put it better than it's done in this talk: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

I don't come from a protestant country, "the end is nigh" does not really ring a bell in catholic countries.

The technological singularity, originally, comes from a very practical observation by Vernor Vinge, who was explaining that as a SF author, once humanity reaches the point where it can make intelligent machines that improve themselves, he hits a "horizon event" that he is not intellectually equipped to look beyond.

I have a hard time finding a good counterargument to it: the emergence of self-improving AIs of human or super-human capabilities will be an extremely strong and fast change in human progress. That much is true.

So yes, the hopes one can place in it look similar to the hopes of the religious eschatologists, but using this similarity to reject the argument is just an association fallacy.

Going a bit off topic here but your remarks on religion makes me curious. I'm from a firmly -- albeit lazily -- protestant country and don't describe myself as religious in any meaningful sense, but still an interesting subject.

My reference to religious "singularities" was to the apocalypse, or however you want to name it. The End of Days. The Second Coming. Stuff like that. I thought these ideas played a similar role in all branches of Christianity, although ignored by most people for most of the time. Is Catholicism and Protestantism so different in that regard?

More on topic, I see the evolution of (better) AI as a logical extension to the computer revolution, and I see the computer revolution as equivalent in scope to the industrial revolution. So I'm not saying it's a small deal. I just don't believe a whole lot in self-improving AI as a concept all that different from what has been going on in, say, processor design, for decades, and I certainly don't believe in the idea of a runaway, self-improving AI.

To become rapidly and exponentially more intelligent, it would have to either work smarter or work harder (to use an overused phrase). Working smarter would imply that if you arranged your CPU instructions in increasingly clever ways, you could extract exponentially rising performance from your programs. That's not how I remember the assembler programming that I did as a kid; you could be clever but there were some pretty hard limits. The strategy of working harder, on the other hand, would imply that someone would be willing to supply exponentially rising amounts of energy. Again, even if some Zuckerberg or some shady government agency would be willing to play this game, you'd quickly run into hard limits.

So yeah, AI is not the first game changing phenomenon in the history of humankind but it will change stuff. Like did bronze, railroads, or nukes.

About the religious thing, I think the catholic mindset is that the end of the world can't be predicted and anticipated. That you should worry less about it than the afterlife. Most protestant actually think the same way but protestantism is more diverse. If 9 out of 10 groups do not care about the apocalypse, you will not hear from them. You will hear from the JW-style preacher saying the end of the world comes next week.

Also, the notion of the rapture is pretty much a protestant interpretation. Most catholics see nothing to rejoice about in the apocalypse, even for good believers.

Back on the AI. Take this scenario: we make a software that's can be as smart as a human engineer, runs in 100% realtime speed on the fastest CPU we can produce. We know it is physically possible because our brain does that.

Buy all the CPU you can buy, compared to human researchers it is cheap. Make teams of hundreds of units (or whatever number is ideal). Put some team on the task of improving the parallelization of the AI program, some on the task of designing a faster CPU, some on the single-core optimization of the code, some on the theoretical research to improve the underlying algorithms. You'll quickly gain exponential results. Actually you will get a fast exponential rise of global intelligence.

The number of researchers will not show an exponential function but a steep step: almost overnight the number of minds working in R&D will change its order of magnitude. This is disruptive. All the currently researched and underfunded problems will be solved orders of magnitude faster. The small problems not worth solving nowadays will see teams of hundreds of top engineers devoted to them.

> The strategy of working harder, on the other hand, would imply that someone would be willing to supply exponentially rising amounts of energy. Again, even if some Zuckerberg or some shady government agency would be willing to play this game, you'd quickly run into hard limits.

Science fiction authors searched for that hard limit but do not see a roadblock until all of earth's matter has been converted to computronium and in a matrioshka brain, making us reach type II on the Kardashev scale. And I agree with them.

Yes, more energy will be required. So what? With enough research to improve generation and automation of construction and deployment of power plants, we can have an exponential rise in energy for quite a while. And if we mastered fusion, we could even go beyond type II civilizations.

> So yeah, AI is not the first game changing phenomenon in the history of humankind but it will change stuff. Like did bronze, railroads, or nukes.

I don't think humanity ever had an event of the same potential. Maybe the birth of civilization, when they started gathering in cities, but even these changes were pretty slow, and their effects happened at the time scale of human reproduction, that has not changed since millions of years. The changes we are talking about rely on our speed of CPU power production, which we improve constantly and that this process will accelerate.

I kind of feel the same way. I read "Age of Spiritual Machines" 15 years ago and thought it was interesting. But now I don't believe most of what he says or predicts. Some of the stuff will come true, but we won't be Matrix-like entities. I also don't like how he downplays (or completely neglects) social backpressure to technology adoption.

Edit: His health regimen is also completely ridiculous.

Edit 2: He actually sells his pill buffet: http://www.rayandterry.com/

Can't we just get rid of the whole singularity term altogether and just realize it is standard exponential growth that people are marking points on a logarithmic graph as the "singularity"?

> baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts

I'm not a fan of Kurzweil, but isn't this really one of his claims with the most data behind it? His presentations on exponential trends is always accompanied with endless citations of data points that went into it. He has (or had prior to Google?) a research team whose job was to find this data.

Just go at page 17

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1....

and see the kind of bogus things he puts together to fit his narrative of accelerating shifts. He puts no paradigm shift between the apparition of city states the invention of the printing press but he separates the inventions of computers and the invention of personal computers as two paradigm shifts.

I did not check all the sources he uses in the graph page 19 but I suspect the same bias: we ascribe more importance to events closer to us than to events further in the past.

In the context of information technology that's perhaps somewhat accurate though, right? City states centralized information into religious and political power structures. That pretty much stayed the same until the invention of the printing press. Maybe you could add the invention of double entry accounting and the banking industry it created, which allowed cooperation between disparate city states. But I'm not sure what else might be an epoch in between.

Gee, I don't know... Paper? Books? Libraries? Big empires with a uniform language? Roads networks? Trade routes? Accurate copying of books? Schools? University? Logic?

To be fair, his work in music synthesizers was far more than "above average".

This... looks surprisingly unambitious for somebody like Kurzweil, who thinks a computer will pass the Turing test in 12 years and we'll all be immortal gods in 30. I'd have expected he'd be doing "moonshot" stuff.

My theory is that Kurzweil was behind the acquisition by Google of several robotics company but it turned out disastrous (the guy has a lot of grandiose claims but apparently pretty average skills) and then they were sold back.

If you want to follow singularity candidates, rather put your eyes on Softbank, who has bought Boston Dynamics, Schaft, ARM, and shares of Nvidia.

I don't know he's credited with inventing the flatbed scanner and also what were probably the best music synthesizers of his time (which are still called Kurzweil!). That seems pretty impressive. But this was all a long time ago, it could be he's been too many years in the writing/talks circuit and has become too rusty for practical engineering.

That was all Andy Rubin.

He's never actually been involved in _working_ towards any of those things, and has no specific expertise to do so. He just follows developments closely and talks about them a lot.

Basically he's just a fairly smart guy who's very afraid of dying.

Agreed. Still, I expected he doesn't really need a job and if he takes one is to advance his futurist agenda, not to do gmail features. Maybe he can't do the work himself but what I expected to hear is he is a leader or at least a sort of VC for singularity-like projects to be integrated in Alphabet or something. This seems... very down to earth.

I'm certain he is up to at least two things: 1) getting paid 2) lending the credibility of his name to whatever google is up to

Funny, I always interpreted it as Google lending the credibility of their name to whatever Kurzweil says. I guess it's a win-win for both of them.

Seems like such a profound genius could do something more productive than save me the 8 seconds it takes me to tap out, "Awesome. Thanks."

disclaimer: i work at google, though not in anything remotely related to this

despite all the naysaying in the thread, this seems like a really good use of AI to me, especially if it can grow to learn your preferred/habitual speech patterns. if you type "awesome. thanks." a lot in reply to emails, why should a tool not make that a one-click operation for you? canned email replies does sound like a very unambitious/unexciting arena to develop this technology in, but the basic idea of AI working with you as a sort of surgeon's assistant who puts the right instrument in your hands just when you need it excites me just as much as the sexier "100% autonomous everything" applications.

Because there will be times when you don't want to say "awesome, thanks," and now you have to strip the email clean, and be sure to catch it. And who knows what other quirks the AI might mirror, like poor grammar, misspelling, etc.

but that's the point; it doesn't insert anything into the email for you. it just provides a simple button click to say that, making the common case easier.

But it's always living in the past. It would be more useful if I could adjust or direct it more purposefully.

Any reply which is brief and generic enough for an AI to write it for me can be written in a short enough time that finding the mouse and clicking the appropriate button won't save me any appreciable effort.

Actually take that as a challenge -- I would be interested to be proven wrong.

Try it on a mobile device then - the most popular computing platform type on the planet.

Then try to do it while getting off of a subway after work.

Additionally, try to find an average person and do it again. Most people are really, really bad at typing.

Oh, I thought he was doing more interesting and relevant stuff.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Cloudera founder Hammerbacher once infamously said. “That sucks.”

I think relevant ads is super-important problem for humanity: connecting completely disconnected buyers and sellers of everything on planet scale. I bet Cloudera has paid clicks budget itself.

Ads are about creating buyers, not connecting them to sellers.

At first I was faintly disappointed. Then it got worse:

> He likes the idea of having AI pitch in anytime you’re typing, a bit like an omnipresent, smarter version of Google’s search autocomplete. “You could have similar technology to help you compose documents or emails by giving you suggestions of how to complete your sentence,” Kurzweil says.

So he's actually helping Google get creepier and more omnipresent. :-/

Autocomplete while I'm searching has become quite distracting when I want to search for something with more than 5 words. You have to search with your eyes closed. I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) popping up in my inbox.

> I could never imagine this "intelligence" (it's literally just pattern matching) ...

Arguably (and this is exactly what Kurzweill says in his books) intelligence is entirely "just" pattern matching on a large scale.

I understand the criticism against Ray Kurzweil, I'm not convinced one way or the other, but I don't think a lot of people know that he has written in-depth about anti-aging and by looking at his photos - he definitely doesn't look his age, and in fact seems to have gotten younger in recent years. So, at least it seems like his anti-aging research may be right.

Toupee does help with that.

Although, he looks much older than 15 years ago.

So, a Google Synthesizer in the works? A self-composing one with a singularity LFO button?

Three words: rest and vest.

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