2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
time.com
time.com
That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth is no longer exponential.
Unfortunately it's impossible to tell where we are on the growth graph (Although some claim that probability suggests that we are closer to the end. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument). Kurzweil makes the assumption we are at the beginning of the growth curve. We could be at the end where the negative feedback is about to overtake and growth will slow.
There will be limits. The speed of light could be a hard limit on computing speed. Or ultimately heat-death could be the hard limit, but there is a limit somewhere. The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it.
See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_...
You've posed the question and then immediately explained why it's fruitless to ask.
Even if you are right that there must be limits; if you have no idea when his models are likely to break down then your skepticism is no more solid than his prediction.
I'm not saying he is wrong about the next 100 years, the singularity or AI, I'm saying may be wrong about the short term and he certainly can't be right indefinitely.
Sure he can, since you're the one who added the claim that it will continue indefinitely. What he says instead is that progress will continue until well beyond our point to predict what the resulting society will look like, due to the claimed fact that it will for instance include things like true AIs and brain uploading. I do not recall him talking about where the progress will stop; probably because it would be meaningless to us anyhow. If an AI from 2200 came to us now and tried to explain the latest cutting edge trends in the research into the ultimate limits of cognition we wouldn't get past the first paragraph.
Don't worry, you're hardly the only one to dismiss his claims without actually stopping for a moment and figuring out what he's actually claiming. I'm not exactly a strong Singulatarian myself but a lot of people really need to stop reading other people summaries of what he says (very very few are accurate enough to come to evaluate what he is saying) and read past his first couple of paragraphs before flipping the bozo bit. He may not be right, he's definitely not an idiot.
If that is the case I don't really see how there is any logic in his claims. I understand that he has extrapolated an exponential curve, and I can see the potential of future tech if that exponential growth was to continue, but I don't really see what basis he has to claim that the exponential curve will not end tomorrow. I'm not saying that it will end tomorrow, I'm just saying that you can't base a prediction on the idea that exponential growth will continue because you have absolutely zero data about when it's likely end is.
Why don't you stop waiting for me to tell you and spend some honest time with the ideas? Of course you don't see how there is any logic to his claims, you haven't seen his claims at all.
Or, alternatively, realize you don't know what they are and decide not to worry about it. This is fine too. No joke. There are all kinds of times when I take this option. It's not bad to not know somebody's opinions, or criticize them when you know them; the problem is in the criticism when you don't actually know them.
But the onus is on the predictor
This whole issue of limitations is a separate prediction in and of itself, and it's not his.
Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer capable of executing the quantum algorithms.
That aside, all I'm saying is that exponential growth has a limit. That growth could be measured in MIPS or in algorithm performance, it doesn't really matter, but I don't think that growth will continue exponentially.
They're in their infancy, but we've already had a quantum computer factor 15. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/chip-does-pa...
My phone can listen to what I say, translate it into French, and speak it back to me, albeit leveraging external compute power to do most of the heavy lifting. But it wouldn't be possible to provide that external compute power at scale 20 years ago.
I'm also sure that countless small innovations in bioinformatics add up collectively to significant changes over time, and those individual innovations are powered by the more broadly available increases in computing power.
We've also gotten the ability to do much better fluid dynamics modeling, astrophysics simulations (whether you believe them or not), climate models (likewise). I've made use of the processing power we have now to do a bunch of "experimentation" in representation theory, though that's not obvious from the resulting writeup, which is more or less algebraic proof.
In general, for a lot of research areas where we think we have a decent model of some of the things that are going on more computing power means more ability to use a computer to look for things to actually try in the lab (and thus refine the model) as well as more ability to collect and handle data.
And then there's the mundane bits, like being able to find existing work more easily, being able to typeset and disseminate your papers more easily and so forth.
But you are right that we could be more far away from that than what we think. And also that it may be that the limit of intelligence of some machine might actually not be so much be ahead of human intelligence. (Whereby, personally, I think that it should be theoretically and practically possible to build much more intelligent machines at some point.)
He doesn't bracket his law with exponentially to a 'certain point' or 'is currently happening'. He claims it is a law that all technological progress currently happens and will always happen exponentially.
Perhaps I am misreading him, but I interpret predictions as claims that exponential growth will always continue.
Anyway. That aside, You can't use an exponential curve to make predictions about the future if you accept that the curve will end at some point. If you accept the curve will change and you can't know the point of change then you can't use it to make a prediction.
(Or I suppose... That the rate of introduction of technologies with initially exponential growth rates is linear. You could ignore those without exponential growth rate provide that a constant number did.)
It's not so much that technology always goes exponential. It's that in retrospect, we notice the ones that did.
But we don't even have intelligent humans yet!
But seriously, I am not sure it can be said to be near or far. Think of it analogously to physical capability. Have we developed 'strong' Artificial Physical Ability? Do we define and measure our physical machines in comparison to human physical abilities? Was the aim of inventing machines just to make artificial humans? No, we develop every kind of physical machine, and in fact we really aim to make all the kinds of things that are not like what humans do.
So why shouldn't informational machines be the same? Is what humans do with information the only thing possible to do, and the only thing we might want to do? No. We won't be making AI to be like humans much, but for a great range of other, non-human-like, applications. Using human intelligence as a single simple measure just will not work or mean anything much.
We think of 'strong AI' as being an ultimate image of the future, but really it diverts us from imagining the much greater range of possibilities the future really holds.
Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.
Lightning may look perfectly suitable for scientific investigation now, but it was as much a "hard problem" in other times.
That's just computation, but computation drives much of our other technology, and will even more once computers get smarter than people. Kurzweil estimates the timeframe for that based on a range of estimates for the computational capacity of the brain.
y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist
t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered
1. a rolling series of more mundane predictions providing justification and context
2. some of which were made in the past concerning the present, and were mostly right.
…
But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.
It seems to me that for consciousness to be not permanent, additional systems or mechanisms are required. There would need to be some sort of external thing (external meaning something that is not scanned) which keeps track of our consciousness. How else would non-continuous consciousness work?
http://amzn.to/iiaO5j - aff link
Selfless, but unintentional.
It'd be another thing entirely if you could join the 'threads' back together, though. Imagine forking yourself into 12 different entities, each living a separate life for 100 years, then reintegrating.
Perhaps a good alternate angle is to consider the “copy” (rather than “replacement”) proposition someone else mentioned: let's say a perfect copy of you could be made (i.e. the entirety of a consciousness is somehow material). Are the two consciousnesses linked somehow? Or are they completely separate despite thinking exactly alike, having the same memories &c.? If they are separate, what happens if the original is killed? Then, the next logical step is to ask how that is different from a consciousness transplant.
It's wild stuff. Or seems like it to a thus-far (presumed) single consciousness.
We could make a complete physical copy of a brain with all state information (neural connections, blood & solute concentrations, etc.) - along with the exactly body of the person with that brain.
Result: The copy wouldn't "feel" what's happening to the original. For example, if I fly the copy around the word and burn their hand - we wouldn't expect the other to feel it.
Likewise, we may be able to copy the brain in a computer simulation but your initial self wouldn't "feel" what happens to your computer self. I think you're right in saying the copy-consciousness wouldn't know it wasn't "real".
Something like hooking your brain to the computer (like The Matrix) seems like it'd probably be the only way to make you experience consciousness - but that's of course linked to our death. Unless perhaps we could slowly replace neurons with computer-based copies over time so that the effect would be slow enough that you could adapt. Then you could perhaps over-clock the brain when all of the cells are the computer ones? Just a thought...
Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness and replace it by a new "identical" one. It simply does not make physical sense.
Now, uploading may be a bit different, (you wouldn't run on biological neurons any more), but it still looks like it should work. First, if the upload is of sufficient quality to permit a later download (I expect it to be), then when you're back to your physical body, QM says that your conciousness didn't end, but merely lived something while in a computer. I therefore expect my conciousness not to end, even if I'm never downloaded back. Further, I strongly suspect that conciousness is nothing more than a not yet understood mathematical property of running software.
For further reading, I strongly recommend the sequence on quantum physics by Eliezer Yudkowsky, on lesswrong. The introduction about philosophical zombies is also quite interesting. It's long, but you can absorb it in chunks.
In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. They may even turn out to be impossible to prove correct. The hard problem of consciousness has not been solved and you should not pretend that it does not exist.
No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different (not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very different results.
> In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable.
It does hinges on reductionistic assumptions (there's only one territory out there, only maps are multi-level, and ontologically basic mental things don't exist). I doubt those are easily debatable, however. Up until now those assumptions worked, and I see no reason why they should break down some day. I am fully aware that the problem of conciousness has not been solved, but since we discovered that the mind is made of neurons, I think it is reasonable to believe it is solvable (though intractable at the moment).
No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy.
And your claim that this notion can 'of course' be extended to larger things is begging the question.
1) small deviations that are amplified when you increase the scale of the problem and
2) small deviations that simply occur only 1 in a billion times, for whatever reason (the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, time-invariance, and so forth are dangerous assumptions).
No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. You certainly cannot conclude it obeys the same mathematical relations used to predict the observations.
We can't solve a trivial 3-body problem and the deviations in numerical approximations are problematic for some purposes. As we get more ambitious, those deviations will become smaller, but may remain too large for the goal. We don't know whether the law of gravity contains an exact exponent of 2. The Voyager spacecraft seem to suggest there may be more involved and nobody has offered a decent suggestion in the past decades. We can't predict the flow of sand rolling of a dune and we may never be able to do that, because the complexity of the problem may turn out to exceed the theoretically possible computational power of the universe.
As for the second sentence: it's not observed reality that lies: it is our overinterpretation of the observations that are lies. We extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. There are too many trivial puzzles unsolved or even proven unsolvable. How can you possibly trust or accept a description with those defects to be the say-all, end-all description of our universe? I have every reason to believe that my universe defies complete description, modelling, simulation. How about yours?
No, but they sure should have a damn powerful influence over your estimated probabilities for your previous hypothesises. Many of those observations are tests, after all.
Now, though I don't yield QM with my own strength, I can tell that the basics have little to do with chaotic systems, and that most of our intuitions are better thrown out the widow. Really, go read that sequence, at least until you can parse "complex amplitude distribution over a configuration space". It's accessible, it's established science, and I trust Eliezer reported it accurately.
Really, go read that sequence
For instance, the whole sequence about MWI doesn't succeed in making a point with me. I understand it perfectly well: it's an interpretation that speaks to the imagination and I fully agree it's the interpretation that makes the most sense, but there actually is no experimental evidence whatsoever that distinguishes MWI as a better interpretation than many others out there. MWI is just another narrative that attempts to make a mathematical framework yield to our understanding. What makes sense is the actual criterion being used here and, as you said earlier, we should leave our intuitions behind.
Anyway, MWI is irrelevant with respect to cut & paste transportation. Just remember that perfect equality in QM is different in kind from almost perfect equality. Meaning that even with imperfect instruments, the result you obtain with perfect equality are wildly different from the results you obtain otherwise. Way past the margin for error of the instruments we have.
Yes, the theory says that there is a way for testing something perfectly, with imperfect instruments. By some miracle, the theory is the Kolmogorov-simplest one we currently know that match the experimental results. By another miracle, the theory is (as far as I know) uncontroversial up to MWI vs OWI.
Another thing the theory says is that the notion of identity should be thrown out the window. That applies to small factors in configuration space (particles) as well as large ones (paintings, human bodies). It doesn't say we should treat small factors differently than large ones. So basically, if you manage to make a copy accurate up to thermal noise, you got yourself a second original. And if the "original" original were destroyed, well, what's left is the "copy" original, which actually is the original, period (because identity doesn't count).
I'd be surprised to learn that this argument is controversial among physicists.
I'd be surprised to learn that this argument is controversial among physicists.
We happen to live in a world where the question of cut & paste transportation has been answered by physics. Philosophy is therefore out.
You can reach me by e-mail if you wish (I'm easy to find).
Which is not to say Penrose is right, but clearly, the matter can't be as clear cut as you make it sound. Personally I'd say it's not a good sign if you find yourself invoking Quantum Mechanics to support your opinions on subjects like the nature of consciousness, the existence of God, etc.
I don't know of the views of Penrose. Do you recommend a link?
I don't think the properties of identical particles in Quantum Mechanics bring much if anything to the discussion at hand. Even if we lived in a classical universe, in which every atom would be unique and numbered, we could come up with thought experiments, in which, say, (a) a mad scientist makes an exact copy of your body including brain, (b) then kills you and feeds your ground body to your unsuspecting copy as hamburgers, and (c) all the atoms from your digested body make it to the same spots in your copy's body that they used to occupy in your own. (That last part might seem like a stretch, but really, is it more of a stretch than postulating that you and your copy would be identical in a sense you invoke in QM?) The end result from the world's point of view is exactly the same as if nothing happened to you.
And all that has not even that much to do with the question of what happens when you upload your brain to the computer, let it run for a while, and then recreate a physical brain with the updated state from the computer, since then the final state is emphatically not identical.
§2: Your argument actually doesn't feel like such a stretch. QM is just the final nail in the coffin, that made me actually comfortable with cut & paste transportation.
§3: We could actually get the same effect as the mad scientist, actually. Freeze my body, upload, lock me in a virtual cell for a few subjective hours, download by rearranging my neurons (or even my whole body) according to my virtual trip, reboot. There, you get the same final state: same atoms, and same memories compared to what they would be if you locked me in a physical cell instead.
If you read the Mars trilogy, the subject of excessive long life spans is discussed (at least from a sci-fi fictional perspective). The characters do indeed live out lives that exceed 200 years.
One of the questions that then arises is: can the human brain (or as being hypothesized here, a synthetic brain) be able to handle 200 years worth of memories ?
I can remember a couple of things from when I was 3. I am now over 50. As the years pass, some of those older memories become slightly fuzzy. I do wonder about the capacity to deal with 200 years worth.
I am a theist because I believe that human beings - flawed, fallible, finite, and mortal - derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than themselves. Now, some will say that this is a delusion and that it is vital to maintaining an intelligent outlook on life that one stay with what is observable, verifiable, and controllable as a way both of explaining and living life. All of which is fine, as my point here is not to enter into non-hacker-related topics. But, that said, when I read statements like those quoted above from this article, I can't help but think that statements such as these reflect what is merely the scientific equivalent of needing to believe in something that is bigger than ourselves as part of retaining hope in this life - this taking the form, in Singularity thinking, of something akin to attaining human perfectability via an exponentially expanding knowledge base that presumably will be applied by humanity toward good and not toward evil. Obviously, this view is grounded in the science of what computers have done and potentially can do in the future but the final step in the analysis - that immortality will be achieved and that (it would seem) all major human problems will be solved through this superior intelligence - strikes me as being more about faith than about science.
Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good? It sounds like you want to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd like to test that, so please forgive the following troll.
God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is that strong).
Now, is your belief so strong that you feel the urge to respond something like "no you're wrong, God does exist"? I don't ask for evidence (the internet has plenty), just a yes or a no, followed by your estimated probability that God exists if you wish.
In fact, this type of justification is at the root of many of the terrible things that have happened in the world - from slavery to genocide.
Are you a terrible person? Maybe not, but only because it doesn't feel right.
I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).
Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045 (I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of decades away and has been for the last 60 years).
[Edit: Note that I do believe that artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it won't happen any time soon.]
Which one?
Or do you mean my brain? That's not artificial intelligence (at least not obviously artificial!).
Edit: Maybe you meant a computer... but that would be quite a long shot. In short, spell it out, guys!
My theory of the singularity is that the concept is so popular these days precisely because (a) we've passed a critical knowledge threshold: A significant number of the best-educated people in the world have become aware that not only is a giant collection of self-replicating simple machines possible, it is old news -- billions-of-years-old news. But, (b), the majority of humanity still does not understand that. It is the very definition of irony, but most people -- even the educated ones -- have great difficulty conceiving of a vast, mobile, sentient colony of trillions of single-celled organisms working together with plan and purpose. Frankly, it's easier to believe in elves. Elves, we can grasp.
That gap between hard science and magical thinking is fertile ground for fantasy.
Singularity fiction bears the same relationship to modern molecular biology that Frankenstein bore to the work of Alessandro Volta.
That's true only to the extent that the evolution of machine intelligence proceeds via the same processes that led to human intelligence. Which is pretty much impossible, so if we ever get to AGI, we're going to be dealing with another type of evolution or design, and it's very possible that it will happen on a timescale much faster than that of biological evolution.
IMO the reason the Singularity concept is popular these days is that we're the first generation that is, barring a massive disaster that both throws Moore's Law off and prevents us from increasing parallel processing power, going to be in possession of reasonably priced machines that have more compute power than the human brain. Which means that it's only a matter of discovering the right algorithms to run.
Whether we're making progress on that is debatable, but don't mistake the slow progress at cracking "the" AI algorithm with the speed at which the intelligence explosion will take off after that - it took many long, slow years to figure out how to build a nuclear weapon, but once we figured out the trick and started a nuclear reaction, the thing blew up in a fraction of a second. AI is likely to be very similar, it may take us a long time to get there, but once we're there, watch out....
Please, never use this metaphor again. This level of magical thinking is just embarrassing for all of us. It's like saying that building a house must be a really fast process, because burning the house down goes really quickly.
Nuclear weapons blow up easily because, for (e.g.) plutonium, "blowing up" is thermodynamically favorable. A brick of plutonium has much less entropy than a giant fireball and an expanding cloud of radioactive fallout. In a thermodynamic sense, the plutonium nuclei want to be fissioned. All you have to do is find a way to coax them out of their metastable state.
A human brain is massively thermodynamically unfavorable. If you put a bunch of proteins in a box the odds that they will self-assemble into Einstein's brain are, literally, astronomically small.
That's why the brain is a miracle and a nuclear reaction is, frankly, pretty commonplace. There are a lot of stars. Stars are easy to explain. Brains are hard.
It depends what is meant by 'general'. Would we say that humans have 'general' physical capability? Well, we can do quite a few things, yes, but there are plenty of things various animals and machines can do that we cannot, and there are certainly plenty of further things conceivably possible. Why would not informational machines -- intelligence -- be like that?
Have we developed a general physical machine yet? What would that mean?
Human 'intelligence' is just one small example. It is not really special, and not a general measure of anything. So although AI will certainly improve, saying there is a particular threshold that will be passed is sort-of problematic (which does seem to fit the history of AI).
An 'intelligent' computer may be no more comprehensible to us than an intelligent amoeba, intelligent tree or intelligent stellar gas cluster.
Sure we could learn to communicate with it by math, or clicks or something. But can we ever communicate at a meaningful level without ANY common ground? Will it 'want' what we want? Will it even know the meaning of that?
TV shows may have it right - a machine intelligence may be (probably will be) staggeringly unconcerned with human desires.
Sure you can point to machines designed to simulate human activity (create music/speak/do logic). These are like puppets that look like a machine intelligence, or clever videos of what a machine intelligence might act like.
An intelligent machine won't be a simulation, it will be some massive construct of neural nodes complex enough to spark into thought. And it will think what it will think.
For instance it might think "what a massively boring place, sitting here in the dark with no inputs and nobody to talk to. I think I'll stop".
Anyway, you get the idea.
However, one outside chance of a limit may be that the brain is doing something that is fundamentally different to the kinds of operations carried out by a normal computer - which is essentially the argument in The Emperor's New Mind. When I read that book at the height of my own AI enthusiasm I thought it was pretty silly. However, after reading Anathem (of all things) it made me wonder if perhaps Penrose may have had a point.
So; are you trying to create software that "emulates" human intelligence (i.e. AI)? In which case, yes, software is the major limitation.
Or are you trying to create an artificial (and independently functioning) model of the human brain? In which case you have two limits; hardware speed. But also a huge lack of knowledge about the "secrets" of our brains :)
I suspect #1 will be first solved.
I just don't see much progress on #1 - and people have been trying this approach for 50 years.
Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...
This, of course, has massive ethical and practical implications. It wouldn't be fair to do this without simulating external stimulus (e.g. photo's hitting the back of the eye) or human to human interaction. You wouldn't be able to ask the individual beforehand so it probably would be considered completely unethical... that doesn't mean someone won't do it eventually though.
Even assuming current processing capability growth rates continue, it's unlikely I'll live to see a complete modeling of the human brain (an emulation approach to AI). There's always the possibility someone will discover a secret sauce that permits self-aware artificial intelligence.
That would be an interesting time to live in.
Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.
What's meaningful is comparing energy and time required for creating a human or a computer capable of doing this, as well as maintenance costs.
And assuming Moore's law continues unabated, a Watson-scale machine will be competitive with a human within five to ten years. Given that it's already functional, I would bet money that it will be cost-effective compared to Ken Jennings by 2045, whether through advances in computing or energy. I wouldn't bet it will be sentient, but just that we can build one and set it up to answer questions cheaper than we can raise someone with as good a head for trivia as Ken.
I would certainly hope that we can do better than nature in this regard.
Oh, and while we can't synthesize ribosomes yet, we can in fact custom-design DNA and inject it into an existing cell: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium
My guess is that something wholly unexpected will result. A different consciousness will probably interact with the universe in a unrecognizable manner, probably more defined by its unique needs and limitations than by anything we can relate to.
I'd wager that new AI will quickly begin to ignore us, to the extent that they are able.
This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body.
Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculous, really.
I'm curious as to how you support this statement?
A more fundamental issue for me is that computer aren't able to think in place of people. If you want to work on hard problems, you have to learn all the relevant information beforehand. Thus setting a hard limit on how much progress can be made, provided we do not find ways to learn faster or to make computers think for us.
Add to this that for me many domains of knowledge nowadays are presented in unnecessary complex ways. We are building (and this is especially true in computer science) a bunch of complexity based on a bunch of complexity. I believe that one day the piled complexity will lead us to a standstill and that we will have to seriously simplify some systems.
We used to call this type of behavior superstition: a belief not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, an irrational fear of future events.