Video of Kurzweil’s Latest Talk at Google | Hacker News Reader

Video of Kurzweil’s Latest Talk at Google

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28 pointskkleiner10 comments

The singularity stuff has always raised my bullshit detector enough that I never paid any attention to it, but after watching the video I'll admit Ray definitely has some really intriguing ideas about the exponential development of technology worth paying attention to.

People seem to forget that he's been around for decades making predictions - and he's been pretty accurate so far.

Well, even more, the pattern he points to is not complex. It is simple exponential growth. And the mechanism is not magic, it is the power of miniaturization.

The main thing I'd question is whether the results will be ... uh, good. There are some serious downside that one might imagine - the intelligent, autonomous, killing machines the US army is working on - I know it's cheesy to say but what could possibly go wrong? Seriously, technological shift makes nearly everyone nearly all-powerful. There might be toes that would wind being stepped on.

Armed robots only make the US military more powerful.

As for everyone else, it is time to upgrade to cyborg technologies, or counteract with killer bots of their own.

I think Kurzweil's books and pronouncements have been a powerful mover of even critics of AI.

Has anyone written an intelligent, thorough critique of his ideas? (Not that I'm necessarily against them but it would be good to hear both sides).

Douglas Hofstadter (more directly) and Peter Norvig (less) have. They were invited speakers (not sure which year(s)) at the Singularity conference. Hofstadter's was almost embarrassing to watch, he ripped on everything (whether you find his argument credible or not), root and branch, IIRC.

Can I see?

Here's the video of his speech there at google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914

How, the interesting thing about the Hofstadter video is that he says more or less what I say in above post ... "I'd like to see serious scientists taking these ideas seriously".

"The Singularity" is an incredibly power, scary and difficult understand scenario. There may be a number of people really gung-ho about the possibility but since it's a possibility that promises to end the human race as we know it, there should be many more people thinking about it. But there aren't. The Singularity may not even be possible but it is past the level of being debunked like a flying saucer - there are very plausible argument for it. Not necessarily unavoidable but plausible. The most important thing to remember is that no every amazing technology has to continue exponential growth for this to happen. The technologies that continue growing can make up for others that don't. Especially if Biology or artificial intelligence as such somehow didn't progress for ten years, nano-technology and information technology will such incredible tools that they would force further biological and AI advances unimaginable today.

So, this is important...

I agree, I think it is very important. Unfortunately, I think it's just too far beyond people's understanding of technology.

The interesting thing about it for me is that this advancement, this creation of humans, is feared. It tells us a lot about ourselves. Why do we fear what we create? Why do we fear advancement? When we watch movies about the future, the Terminators and such, they're all bleak.

And because of this fear, we disregard the future. We deny it or abandon thoughts of it. In doing so, we leave serious contemplation of these technologies to those who are using it ways that should be feared. We're building killing robots and unmanned drones -- exactly the thing of our nightmare scenarios.

Instead, we should be reducing our use of advanced technologies to cause harm to humanity. Without serious discussion of the ramifications, we are leaving decisions to the unconscious, to the short term thinkers who will use the technology in the quest for world domination.

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