10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil | Hacker News Reader

10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil

time.com

26 pointsbarredo14 comments

This article is a perfect example of a bad design and why typography matters.

When you first look at it, there is nothing that suggests that this is an interview.

The questions are in no way visually differentiated from the answers. As such, it looks a lot like an essay where the author asks the questions and then discusses them.

If they just made the questions bold, it would make all the difference.

Came here to say the exact same thing. Glad to know I am not the only one.

Embolden the questions! It lets me skim right to the ones that interest me.

I thought it was just some odd stream-of-consciousness piece :)

I have the print copy of this Time issue and they do exactly that and it makes it so much more readable.

> The consensus in the field is that there's somewhere between a thousand and a million technologically advanced civilizations just in our own galaxy.

Wait, what?

Admittedly I am no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure there is absolutely no consensus in the number —or even the mere existence— of other advanced civilizations at all. Is there?

Nope. As Kurzweil so often does, he's making up whatever crap suits him.

I am, however, willing to go out on a limb and say there's somewhere between one and a trillion technologically advanced civilizations in our own galaxy.

There are between 100 billion and 400 billion stars in our galaxy, which puts the odds of life developing at between 1 in 400 million and 1 in 100,000. That doesn't seem wildly out to me - particularly now that we're finding more and more extrasolar planets.

Would you prefer odds of 1 in a trillion? or 1 in 1000?

The point is that there's incredible uncertainty about "What are the odds that life would develop on an earth-like planet?" and (to a lesser extent) "How many earth-like planets are there?"

This problem was "solved" by Drake's equation. http://xkcd.com/384/

I also feel that a "concensus" is unlikely. But IANAAP.

Implicit in that assumption is that life occurs at least once per galaxy. All we can really say is that it has happened once in the universe which makes the odds 1 in 10^21 to 1 in 10^24. Even then, just because life happened doesn't mean the odds are at all related to life/# of stars. The odds of life occurring could be 1 in 10^10^10^10 who knows. It's very difficult to figure out the probability of an event if the only information you have is that it happened.

Which isn't to say I think we're alone in the universe I personally assume higher life is out there, but that doesn't make ridiculous statistical optimism less ridiculous.

You know actually this is bugging me. # of life/# stars is fucking awful math.

It's the equivalent of shuffling a deck of cards dealing them all out and concluding, that because there are 100 billion decks of cards in the world, that the odds of getting that particular ordering is 1 in 10^11. It's not, its 1 in 8x10^67. All it takes is TWO decks of cards before the probability of a given ordering is less than 1/(# of atoms in the universe)... squared even.

Saying the chances of life forming in the galaxy is AT WORST 1 in a trillion just because, hey we exist right? is straight up fucking wrong.

Saying that the chances are 1 in a 100,000 doesn't imply that life happens once per 100,000 stars, just that that's what'll happen on average. You can roll a dice 20 times and not have a six come up.

But yes, it's difficult to figure out the probability of life occuring if we only have a sample size of one. On the other hand, nobody's found anything particularly special about the Earth's placement or chemical makeup, other than it's rocky and has liquid water.

This is why exploring the other planets in our solar system is important. If we explore Titan and find weird, hydrocarbon-based fish which evolved independently to life on earth, or under the ice on Europa, then it tells us that the probability of life evolving is not that small, and we can up the estimate of the probability of other civilisations in the galaxy.

Nah the consensus is that there is at least 1 civilisation in the universe.

Any number higher is complete speculation.

For those interested about the possibility of life on other planets, there's a great essay by Michael Crichton:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~scranmer/SPD/crichton.html

He rails against Drake's equation, and the larger scientific damage it has done. One important point he makes is that writing

number of cats in this house = average number of cats per room X number of rooms

gives the illusion of science, but it gets you no closer to a final answer if you can't estimate the density of cats or the number of rooms.

The first question was the most interesting:

Is it a mistake to use the events of the recent past as a method of predicting the future?

since this seems to be a veiled criticism of Kurzweil's entire methodology -- he sees an exponential trend and extrapolates it way out into the future with no consideration for the fact that all exponential trends in the real world eventually hit a wall somewhere.

Kurzweil, unfortunately, misses the point and uses it as a cue to go on about exponential trends again.

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