[GuiA]

Saw him give a talk promoting his latest book last month, was heavily disappointed. Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights. I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description.

It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field, but I fear he has jumped the shark a while ago. Maybe going to Google will force him to work on solutions to problems of which the correctness can be more easily assessed.

[jere]

>I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description.

Really? Because if so, then they stole that quote almost verbatim from Mitch Kapor when he was discussing the singularity in 2007. And it seems to have a lot less relevance to a book about how the brain works than it does to an imagined singularity.

>Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism

[Osmium]

In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...

[jere]

I'm fine with reusing quotes, but in this instance it seems like a rather ham-handed application of it.

The singularity reeks of religious concepts. Kurzweil even called his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" before it was "The Singularity is Near." He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime). Yada yada... basically what I'm saying is the the quote fits that book perfectly.

Now we're talking about his new book "How to Create a Mind", which is a theory about how the brain works and how reverse engineer it, and the quote doesn't seem to fit. I'm guessing someone was just trying to sound intelligent... but then why does the OP agree with them?

[orangecat]

The singularity reeks of religious concepts.

If by that you mean that scientists are attempting to achieve what religions have been falsely promising, then ok, but so what? Before we had medicine, people could only pray to try to heal the sick. Then physicians actually started studying the body and figuring out how to cure disease, fortunately not abandoning the idea because religions had failed to deliver.

He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime).

An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics (ignoring the heat death of the universe for the moment). I'll take that optimism over the much more common attitude that accepts the destruction of billions of sentient beings as inevitable and often even desirable.

[jere]

I think it's pretty obvious, but let me quote Neal Stephenson:

>I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

Poll Americans (most of whom are Christian). Close to half will tell you the end of the world and thus the rapture is going to happen in their own lifetime. Christians have been believing that the rapture was around the corner for literally the last 2000 years. Arrogant if you ask me.

It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality. He'll be around 97 at the time he's predicting the singularity will occur.

So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike. Sure, Kurzweil will show you a bunch of exponential graphs to make it all seem so reasonable, but that's why Kapor says "creationsim for the IQ 140 people."

That's not optimism. It's wishful thinking. If you can't see that it has all the fundamentals of a religion, I'm not sure what else to say.

>An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics

As far as I know, neither is God.

[swombat]

An interesting set of questions to follow up this fair hypothesis are:

Is it better or worse than existing religions? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Is it better or worse than no religion? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Religion is arrogant, for sure. And it all started when some of our very distant ancestors decided to bury their dead instead of leaving them in a pile of trash. Which, interestingly, is considered one of the defining points where we became "humans" rather than just intelligent monkeys.

[loup-vaillant]

> It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality.

His age had probably little influence on his predictions. The Maes-Garreau law, as fun as it sounds, is probably not true[1]

> So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike.

I'm personally skeptical of b), except for frozen people (cryonics). If entropy wiped out the information, there's no way to resurrect someone. a) and c) however seem to be merely obvious consequences of Friendly AI (I assume immortality and wicked IQ are good things). And intelligence explosion is quite plausible. You're a bit quick to dismiss those ideas just because they happen to pattern-match religion. (Now, I agree more with this[2] than with the specifics of Kurzweil ideas.)

> As far as I know, neither is God.

Current physics are reductionist. A supernatural God wouldn't fit into that. Current physics are deterministic (modulo the many-world lingering controversy), and universal. Miracles, as direct violations of the laws of physics, wouldn't fit into that. A Lord Outside the Matrix, maybe, but that's a different beast.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_g... [2]: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html

[TeMPOraL]

> That's not optimism. It's wishful thinking. If you can't see that it has all the fundamentals of a religion, I'm not sure what else to say.

Fundamentals of religion are irrelevant. The difference between singularity and rapture is that the first one - if we'll reach it - will be of human creation. Of our science and technology, not of supermagical powers. We can pretty much see the steps there, even though we haven't executed them all. Maybe it will take 200 years, not 50, but we will get there (unless we blow ourselves up before that).

Highlighting similarities between religion and singularity has no more merit than saying that addition is bad because Hitler and Stalin did it.

[davesims]

> Poll Americans (most of whom are Christian). Close to half will tell you the end of the world and thus the rapture is going to happen in their own lifetime. Christians have been believing that the rapture was around the corner for literally the last 2000 years. Arrogant if you ask me.

A bit of theological nitpicking: the notion of a pre-millenial 'Rapture' is a late development in Protestant theology that appears first in the 1600s and doesn't achieve mainstream popularity until the late 20th Century. Prior to that, Christian eschatalogical expectations were for the return of Christ to establish a just government once and for all.

Your larger point is still valid, but the application of the notion of a 'Rapture' is mostly anachronistic in any context other than the last hundred years.

[pjscott]

If Kurzweil's technological miracle predictions come true, one of the side-benefits will be that we can start talking about them in phlegmatic, everyday language, and forget that there used to be religious undertones to it.

[Alex3917]

I think age of spiritual machines is actually the perfect title. The whole idea of the singularity is that you can't predict the nature of emergent phenomena based on lower level inputs, specifically with regards to the future of technology. This is basically analogous to the fact that we can't predict consciousness or intelligence by looking at the properties of matter or even biology.

I also don't see anything religious about the concept. Religion by (etymological) definition seeks to understand or connect with ultimate source of things, whereas the singularity is A) about the future and B) says that the future is going to be impossible to predict or understand because of accelerating change. At best you might be able to argue that it's vaguely teleological, but I'm not even sure that that is correct because the theory doesn't make any real predictions for what happens in the longterm after the singularity.

[TeMPOraL]

I think people pattern-match singularity to religion because it, essentially, promises the same things - long life / immortality, solution to many problems of humanity, superhuman beings / intelligences, etc. But this match is wrong; it doesn't matter if religions talk about the same things. It only means that those are human needs and desires. In case of singularity, there's a real chance that we could do all of this without need for supernatural powers, so it's worth discussing.

[macarthy12]

foul?

[Osmium]

haha, thanks for the correction :) that does change the meaning a bit doesn't it? homophones always seem to slip by me...

[shod]

Or the "someone" GuiA recalls was Mitch Kapor.

[vecinu]

I tend to feel the same way about him and the state of his life at the moment.

I am very grateful for the inventions he brought forth and his work on AI but I think his current goals in life are unreasonable and of course, related to the death of his father.

As much as he doesn't want to be human anymore, his entire goal in life relies on the human condition...to reconnect with his father and transgress life in its current form.

I think he could do so much more at the moment if, like you said, he would focus on problems that can be solved as soon as possible and demonstrate a use of his solution.

[Alex3917]

"Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights."

While are a number of obvious problems with the theory, it's still an invaluable idea. Even if 2042 doesn't pan it, Kurzweil has still provided an enormously powerful tool to help understand the world around us. (Well, technically he didn't invent the idea, but he was the one who did most of the work aggregating the data.)

[praxeologist]

>It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field

What field? The fluffsters? Saying stuff like, "Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights.", is saying nothing.

[GuiA]

He did a lot of work in text to speech, speech recognition, OCR, etc. back in the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Mid-life

[praxeologist]

Of course, fluffster was directed at you and I know what Kurzweil did.

[pretoriusB]

No, of course you've been pwned, and you should be more graceful about it.