I, Robot

Dear Newsweek

For your next 'ideas' piece, please assign someone with an interest in ideas and an imagination.

Thanks

some of you might be interested in an online magazine called "h+ Magazine" which interviewed Ray Kurzweil, Veron Vinge (who coined the term Singularity) and others about emerging technology.

Singularity Hub just posted an opinion on the Lyons vs Kurzweil debate that you might enjoy:

<a href=http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/16/kurzweil-in-the-lyons-den/>http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/16/kurzweil-in-the-lyons-den/</a>

I agree that the article is mean spirited against Kurzweil - at least parts of it.

Moreover, you fail to show that Kurzweil's data is wrong. Other commenters have already pointed out that the predictions you criticize are actually not that bad. Accelerating progress as he describes is definitely happening without any sign of slow down for at least a decade (or few). Will the raw processing power of 1000 human brains make it possible for advanced AGI and unimaginable changes to society? I don't know, but you should seriously consider it rather than attack the man who says it is coming.

http://techencoder.com/index.php/2009/05/accelerating-future-part-2/

What a mean and dumbed down article. I've read one of Kurzweil's books (The Age of Spiritual Machines) and you don't seem to have a very clear grasp on Kurzweil's theories, or perhaps you were intentionally misrepresenting them. I'm tired of hearing pointless ad hominem attacks on Kurzweil himself without any actual evidence that contradict his predictions. If you've got it, present it to us--we're smart enough to handle it, I think. I at least didn't need to have the shape of an exponential function described to me, thanks. Who didn't think the internet would take off? Most people in the 1980s. Certainly very few people could have predicted the speed and depth with which it has penetrated our society and daily lives. Finally, from IBM:
"Under terms of the contract, Sequoia will be based on future IBM BlueGene technology, exceed 20 petaflops (quadrillion floating operations per second) and will be delivered in 2011 with operational deployment in 2012."

3 years off ain't bad.

I think this is a great article in dealing with the fact that Kurzweil claims a great many things as eventualities when they are really just possibilities. He and his ilk seem to believe that technology will be our savior and we can more or less ignore the problems of today. This was the attitude of many people in the early decades of the last century and though science and technology gave us many great advancements, there were also a great number of trails. Furthermore, Singulitarians seem to believe that the brain is exactly like a computer in every way. A computer is a good metaphor for the brain, but to assume they are exactly alike in every way is a Fundamentalist standpoint and can lead to tricky philosophical positions. Some of these ideas can be found in more elaborate forms here:

http://antisingularity.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/i-am-a-machine-metaphori-am-a-metaphor-machine/

Check out Lyons' Wiki concerning SCO vs IBM & Linux. "...the open source movement
are convinced of their own righteousness...and are sure the whole world will agree...
they should wake up". In 2007 Lyons had to apologize for being so completely
wrong in not picking the winner of the case. He will write something similar
someday...or his simulacrum will.

"No matter what hurdle you throw at him, Kurzweil has already thought about it and has his answer ready. "

I feel ya, buddy, I hate it when someone presents facts that are incompatible with my worldview!

Letters to the Editor

Letters@newsweek.com
Newsweek
251 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

Re: I, Robot, One Man???s Quest to Become a Computer, Newsweek, May 25, 2009



Dear Editor:



I appreciate your bringing my ideas to your readership. However, there are numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Daniel Lyons??? story. For example, of the many accurate predictions for the year 2009 that I wrote in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in the late 1990s, only three are listed in the sidebar ???Kurzweil???s Crystal Ball??? while a larger number are listed as ???false.??? Of these ???false??? predictions, a number are in fact true, and others are only a few years away. For example, ???Computers will be commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry??? is listed as false. When I wrote this prediction, portable computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm. Today they are indeed embedded in shirt pockets, jacket pockets, and hung from belt loops. Colorful iPod nano models are worn on blouses as jewelry pins, health monitors are woven into undergarments, there are now computers in hearing aids, and there are many other examples.

???Most portable computers will not have keyboards??? is listed as ???False.??? When I wrote this, every portable computer had an (alphanumeric) keyboard. Today the majority of portable computers such as MP3 players, cameras, phones, game players and many other varieties do not have keyboards. The full quote of my prediction makes it clear that I am referring to computerized devices that ???make phone calls, access the web, monitor body functions, provide directions, and provide a variety of other services.???

???The deaf will commonly use portable speech-to-text machines to ???hear??? what others are saying??? is not true today, but sophisticated voice-recognition software that works on anyone???s voice is in wide use (using my own technologies) and speech recognition suitable for use by the deaf are technically feasible now and expected on the market in the near future.

Lyons cites my prediction that ???by 2009 a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)??? and dismisses my contention that this and a couple of other predictions are ???off by a few years??? saying they are ???not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong.??? Yet IBM???s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer is already under construction and IBM has announced that it will begin operation in 2012.

Lyons dismisses my accurate prediction (written in the mid to late 1980s) of a world web of computing and communications ubiquitously tying together people with each other and with vast information resources. He writes ???But hold on a minute. Who didn???t think the Internet was going to catch on???? The answer is virtually everyone. I wrote this when the entire U.S. defense budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the Arpanet. My pre

Kurzweil's dream-read "nightmare"- is the fleshing out, as it were, of the Matrix series. Never mind Hal, or Asimov's rebel robots; if we have real people living in the Matrix there is no telling what chaos they would be capable of. The very first pioneers into cyberlife will be financial systems hackers who will make Maddoff seem benign. Society had become essentially amoral, or immoral, anyway. Remember the Lords of the Universe who ran Wall Street so well? Imagine when very rich people- already amoral sociopaths with ego and power- get into the grid? There won't be any spiritual life there, only rampant ego and greed, unchecked. Toss in a few religious nuts, and we'll have Armageddon in no time at all. Power attracts megalomaniacs. Normal, spiritually fit people won't seek the escape and power of such a life. Only abberants. The only moral use for cyberlife would be for people who have fatal diseases to upload into such a system so they can simulate a life. But even then, ...don't we ALL have a fatal disease? Somebody has to stay in the flesh to make the donuts. Post -human life is not a goal. It is a hell.

Maybe Kurzweil's views really are fascinating as some commenters say, but they're fascinating in a 1960s science fiction sort of way. For someone who gives $30,000 speeches about how one day humanity will merge with machines, he seems to be blissfully unaware that things like mind-uploading technologies simply won't work. He doesn't understand that human brains don't work like computers. He just latched on to the idea that the human soul is the electrical pulses flying through the brain and thinks he can download that to a machine. Sorry, but that's not how it works.

http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/05/11/please-leave-your-brain-where-it-is/

And his assertion that without disease humans would live up to 1,000 years in his latest book is downright absurd. Any doctor will tell you that the maximum is between 120 and 135 years, give or a take a few. There have been people who's ages have been recorded as older than that, but keep in mind that record keeping back then wasn't what it is today and all those dates of birth are highly subject.

Kurzweil's views are nothing is not fascinating. And they are certainly are worthy of debate. But two key points really shatter his credibility with me. First, his refusal to even consider the possibility of a "Terminator Judgement Day" type future. Vastly superior mechanical lifeforms would look at us as termites, regardless of whether they are our "ancestors". I'm decended from single cell organisims but that doesn't stop me from wiping down my bathroom with disinfectant.

The other problem is his obsession with resurrecting his father. Let's grant that the technology would support his plan. Creating a new human from the DNA of his dead father doesn't make the new creature his father. It makes him his clone or twin. This would be a new human with individual rights to it's own life. It's not Kurzweil's play thing to stuff his father's paper memories into hoping to recreate his beloved daddy.

The man is clouded by his obsession with death.

I dunno, this article kinda gave Kurzweil a poor finish. I think the guy's a genious, whether he's sincere or not. Just for example, he inspired this guy here, and much of this guy's work is based off of Kurzweil's research:

http://www.doctorsteel.com

I've always found it interesting that "Kurzweil" is the opposite of "Langweil," the German word for boredom. So his name means the opposite of boredom.

maybe he should do this asap - produce and star in his own movie, terminator 5: the documentary.