Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change
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Big Sci-Fi has been driving technology - and thus, our modern culture - for decades now. There's not a single advance in our modern lives that wasn't speculated first, by some sci-fi author.
So I don't really think that 'this guy makes amazing predictions' is such a new-worthy article. All this is doing is promoting the Kurzweil brand, and by proxy, the Google brand.
What does get me more interested, is the general reaction to cultists like Kurzweil and Wolfram; because these reactions are a far greater predictor of the future than the original subject. If the industry says "hmm.. Kurzweil is a genius, lets listen to what he has to say" - well then, its a self-fulfilling prophecy.
tl;dr - postulate what will happen, then MAKE IT SO. This is the mantra of any and all technologists - not just those with the wherewithal to spend their idle time pimping themselves, as both Kurzweil and Wolfram do.
1. Convinced himself it's possible
2. Convinced himself it's possible in his lifetime
3. Made arrangements to cryogenically freeze himself in the event he dies before it happens
It's just silly. We're nowhere near the ability to live forever and anyone who thinks we are has delusions of grandeur. And you can't freeze yourself to escape this reality. A planet with 7 billion people that live forever and are still actively procreating is likely to quickly have overpopulation issues. Are they really going to be looking to bring people back from the dead?
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Health_and_aging
The weird part is that it might not make us slam into the inevitable planetary population limit much faster than we otherwise would. Somebody (one of the senescence nuts, maybe - sorry, I don't have a link) did a pretty convincing study indicating the average lifetime might not even double if we get rid of sickness and cellular aging.
You can see the logic: take into account all the things that kill people and aren't related to disease and aging and model around that. Accidents, crime, and war are still going to exist.
The mathematical model isn't perfect. It's interesting to speculate as to whether we as a race would become greater or lesser risk-takers after finding out aging wasn't a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes-Garreau_law
(i.e. the possible bias that people like to predict events will happen in their lifetime)
Vilém Flusser's essay on the Object: 'Design: Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles'
> An 'object' is what gets in the way, a problem thrown in your path like a projectile(coming as it does from the Latin Obiectum, Greek problema). The world is objective, substantial, problematic as long as it obstructs. An 'object of use' is an object which one uses and needs to get other objects out the way. ... > I overturn some of the obstacles (transform them into objects of use, into culture) in order to continue, and the objects thus overturned prove to be obstacles themselves.
– page 58 http://books.google.com/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&printsec=front...
The bigger the techno solution, the bigger the side effect. Technology offers fast benefits, the side effects take a long time to be noticed or materialize.
I am interested in folks looking at social, philosophic and non-objective improvements and solutions to our big problems, particularly those of a more conservative and less progressive nature.
I fear the same will happen when we start using autonomous killer robots [2] (whether drones, or real Terminator-like robots), or when we learn how to make killer mosquito-sized drones that can assassinate anyone in the world anonymously, or when we learn how to use nanotechnology as a weapon. I think NSA doing mass surveillance of the whole planet "just because they can", also fits in this category.
I welcome all such neutral technological progress since I'm not a Luddite, but I also fear our governments hungry for more power or protecting their power and influence will use these technologies nefariously, probably long before we find out about them, in secret. And even if they get public, I fear most people will be too complacent to it, and won't revolt too much against it (US still keeps Guantanamo open, for how many years now? It's not a matter of technology, but the same point applies).
[1] - http://blog.joellehman.com/index.php/2014/01/morality-apocal...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/arms1112ForUp...
It is perfectly possible to not get fat and enjoy delicious healthy food in a sustainable, affordable manner, but this appears to be quite outside the realm of possibility already.
(Mr. Kurzweil aparently lives quite healthy and probably fully understand all of that, but still advocates a technological solution. I remember fondly the old Civilization game, in which you could research mathematics and gunpowder, but also democracy and women's suffrage - cultural improvements equally valued as technological improvements).
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." -Count Zero
...than with how we'll achieve flying cars, curing cancer, or immortality.
Also, beware of all the predictions that don't have good timelines. Predicting a stock market crash is easy; there's bound to be one at some point or other. Predicting when the next crash might be is much much harder.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...
Predicting when is just a stunt. Predicting why is more important. Predicting why can end up giving you when if the event is contingent on a few things falling into place that are being observed falling into place.
Well that's the whole point in 'predictions'. They are supposed to be a large number of them which have to come false. Predictions are a way of extrapolating the future based on current trends. They are bound to be wrong. And they are also bound to be true.
Anything else and we would be asking oracles gazing in crystal balls to narrate us the future.
Today the thesis that Strong AI is a function of processing power is snake oil or a result of a serious lack of knowledge of this area. The latter is OK for a layman, not for this kind of "expert".
"Some of his guesses seem based on other popular books: he thought 'ultra intelligent machines could prolong life to age 1000' - ie things which might measure blood or neoplasms, and even repair them."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mighty-Micro-Microchip-Revolutio...
[The Mighty Micro was definitely one of the things that motivated me to get into computing and AI research]
For example, consider that the CERN Supercollider could have been built 20 years ago but the US canceled the project because it only wanted to fund one big science project and the Hubble won.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Of course, maybe it's better to put more time and money into all research. Picking winners isn't always a good idea either.
>Big Sci-Fi has been driving technology - and thus, our modern culture - for decades now. There's not a single advance in our modern lives that wasn't speculated first, by some sci-fi author.
Oh wow. If I judge by the stuff my generation grew up with, my children and grandchildren are going to see their parents trying to invent some really cool/weird stuff.
I mean, sure, string-theoretic worldgates for interstellar transport will never actually work, but apparently by 2040 we should have futurists predicting them for 2065, and by then God only knows. I mean, giant mecha are already in the works, so things'll be pretty cool then.
http://i.imgur.com/7oDm4Ax.png
Here is apparently the original source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3961130.ece
C'mon, has the art of detecting blogspam been lost?
Scunthorpe bug in the CMS?
`A` is word depicting erection and `The` is missionary pose.
1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'.
2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made.
So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year. So I predict that when we get to 2045 strong AI will be on the slate to be achieved by about 2090.
If he means solar becomes economically competitive for general purpose household and industrial power generation in most places on Earth by 2033, ok, but that's just the starting line for an incredible amount of capex needed to replace fossil fuels.
The first is very lossy: HVDC is the most efficient way to transport bulk electricity, and it loses 3.5% per 1000km. You would need to transport electricity about half the way around the earth of the earth's circumference, or about 20,000km, meaning you would lose about 50% in transit. So this would depend on a drastically more efficient way of transporting power (superconducting power lines?).
The second is not possible with current battery technology.
And that still doesn't answer why this arrangement would be better than a nuclear (base load) + solar (daytime variable load) + natural gas (nighttime/cloudy conditions variable load) mix.
I just did a quick calculation in Wolfram Alpha and found that (assuming perfect efficiency), to store enough energy to power the United States for half a day would take 713km^3 of water raised 1km. That's about half the volume of Lake Ontario pumped up one kilometre during the day, and down again at night.
I guess that's theoretically possible but it would be a hell of a megaproject, and for what?
Imagine some one using an oil lamp in the pre-electricity era saying this. Would it even make any sense at all to replace a perfectly working oil lamp/candle with a light bulb at the expense of century worth mining of copper, putting down massive infrastructure, setting up dams for just glowing this small time bulb?
The widespread use of electricity or trains or airplanes or dams or any major paradigm changing invention in human history requires mega engineering projects for a very simple reason. You have to deliver at scale.
If one can go totally without fossil fuels chasing such projects makes all the sense in the world.
I disagree there. All the examples you stated developed gradually starting small and expanding. The first railways appeared in Europe in the 14th century and didn't really take off until the 18th century with the development of the steam engine.
Even air travel, which went from the first heavier-than-air flight to first commercial flight in a remarkably short period of time of about 27 years, piggybacked off of earlier lighter-than-air travel that had existed for centuries. In the Napoleonic Wars, balloons were used for surveilling the battle field, and airships appeared in the mid 19th century. People already knew that air travel was commercially viable and militarily useful. Heavier-than-air machines were a major improvement on the concept, not something entirely new.
This is a common theme in technology: a primitive form of the technology exists for a long period of time in niches. Then, after a period of time, there's a key invention -- the steam engine for rail travel, the dynamo for electricity, the airplane for air travel, the transistor for computers -- that causes the technology to explode in a short period of time.
That key invention is the last piece in the puzzle, not the first. The earlier developments prove the viability of the concept, build up the infrastructure to support it, and justify large investments in developing the key invention. But if you don't look at the history before the key invention, you'd think that computers and electric generators and railroads and aircraft appeared suddenly and had large amounts of capital suddenly invested in them.
And that brings us back to my original point: all those technologies had clear advantages over their predecessors. What advantage does an all-solar future have over a mix of sources? Simply getting rid of fossil fuels is not good enough.
It may be that aluminum electrorefineries and data centers simply have to be installed next to hydro plants instead of solar plants. And CNC machine tool plants will only operate when the sun is up. So be it.
"Thanks to the Human Genome Project, medicine is now information technology, and we’re learning how to reprogram this outdated software of our bodies exponentially."
What does this even mean?
"We’ll be able to send little devices, nanobots, into the brain and capillaries, and they’ll provide additional sensory signals, as if they were coming from your real senses."
Yes, the magic of -~=nanomachines=~-!
Some of it is not unreasonable, some of it is tame (VR), and some of it is hogwash.
Is this a common/standard way of disagreeing with how something is phrased, is it derogatory, or are you really not able to parse the meaning of that sentence?
Sincere question. I saw this same phrase used a while ago by someone else, and while the sentence it referred to was as poorly worded as the one you refer to, parsing the meaning is easy. Isn't it?
The addition of the "even" intensifier usually signals exasperation or annoyed bewilderment.
I really don't know what the sentence is supposed to mean.
Great, a new source for PTSD.
For context, the industrial revolutions, both the first and second, were by this point old news, so the notion of creating a machine to accomplish a task was familiar. There isn't much in these postcards to delight cynics and pessimists, though, since World War I, when people turned these machines on each other, had not yet happened.
No need to wait until 2040 as per the article, people do this right now at Glacier National Park in Montana. (edited: I understand now, the reason the article listed 2040 and the alps instead of GNP, is the latest estimate for GNP is its last glacier will melt around 2020-2030 timeframe, figure in the next decade, so by 2040 you'll be going to the alps to see a glacier not GNP...)
Some of the comments are amusing, mostly unintentionally. The general public is much less educated and intelligent than HN. If you think we're uncomfortable with self driving cars and digital womens fashion, imagine how those clowns are going to feel.
> Vinegar is set to become the non-alcoholic drink of choice,
brb guise, investing in vinegar.
> artificial intelligence to be able to a##ess what’s going on in their environment.
> Google Gla##
> cla##mate
genius
As with religion, this idea of a perfect future (heaven?) in the Singularity can become a dangerous distraction from the real problem. It's not death that is a hard problem. It's life. Economic scarcity is the real enemy. That is what we should be fighting with all our force. We should fight first to make life better, and second to prolong it.
If we "solve death" and still have to live with scarcity and inequality, then we've just failed in a way that lasts much longer.
(On practical grounds, of course, I'm all for life-saving medical advances and research that reduces or eliminates costly illnesses. In fact, if rejuvenation were an option, I'd probably take it. I'm OK with death, but I hate getting sick. My point is that the real purpose of technology should be to kill scarcity first, and then aim for immortality second.)
Ok, done ranting.
That's very well put.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I completely relate to the perspective change brought by such a loss.
Could, not would.
My point is that if it doesn't, it's not worth having. There are dystopian but plausible future scenarios in which (some or all) people live forever but scarcity still exists. My point is that those are extremely undesirable. Life under scarcity is only tolerable because it ends, and because the embittering, emotional irritation of economic scarcity is minuscule in comparison to the much greater natural scarcity of time imposed by nature (memento mori).
If we had eternal life, or (more relevantly) the billion-year lifespans possible were we to solve aging and accidents, would the sorts of people who hold power and (left unchecked) enslave the world, do so? Or would they, recognizing their (near-)infinitude of time, lighten up and hold back a bit? The big unknown is human nature, and that I could fill pages on that, only to conclude: I don't know.
Inside that VM they can possibly simulate a paradise. Since its happening inside a computer. Resources are hardly a problem. They can retain the best parts about us. They kill all negative traits inside humans(disease, boredom, violence etc etc) and just let the VM run as long as it possibly can.
The point is Ray Kurzweil thinks, we would no longer need a biological body to stay alive.
This would be amusing for all the other nine OS nerds in the world who get the joke.