By Adrienne Burke, Techonomy Contributing Editor
If you know electronic synthesized music, you know the work of Ray Kurzweil. But the MIT futurist and transhumanist has many more inventions to his name than electronic keyboards. He's also developed a cult following for his prediction of the merging of humans and computers, which he describes in his book The Singularity Is Near. And in a forthcoming book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he offers the most advanced explanation to date for how our brains work.
In the opening session of Techonomy 2012 in Tucson today, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick interviewed Kurzweil on stage. Their conversation covered the exponential progression of software, how the brain works, what it will mean to think "in the Cloud" or have the intelligence of IBM's Watson computer at our fingertips, and what functions humans will still have once computers can do the jobs of even the most educated among us.
"I've been thinking about thinking for 50 years," Kurzweil says. "In coming years we'll be doing a lot of our thinking in the Cloud."
Is that another way of saying we will all have access to Watson, the IBM computer that won Jeopardy, in whatever we do? Kirkpatrick asks. As a first step, yes: "People are quick to dismiss Watson, but Watson got a higher score than the best humans together by reading Wikipedia and 200 million pages of other encyclopedias," Kurzweil says.
As an example of how rapidly society is moving toward that level of information access, Kurzweil points out that "a kid in Africa with a cell phone has access to more intelligence than the President of the United States did 15 years ago."
Ultimately, he says, artificial intelligence will operate at "the best human levels." Will experts such as physicians, for instance, be rendered redundant once computers acquire and are able to act on medical data? Kirkpatrick asks.
In the same way people in Google cars become more comfortable with AI driving than with human drivers, Kurzweil predicts that computer intelligence will become a reliable tool that people will become dependent on. "My sense is we're making computers in our own image and we'll be merging -- we already have -- with that technology. We're going to use those tools to make ourselves more intelligent."
But he doesn't sell short the power of the human brain. His thesis for how the neocortex works is that it has a uniform algorithm. Though humans are limited to 300 million pattern recognizers, only the neocortex can do hierarchical thinking and only mammals have a neocortex. "There are still tasks for humans to do, he says: relating to other humans and understanding them, being funny, sexy, expressing a loving sentiments. These are not sideshows to human intelligence, that's the cutting edge of human intelligence."
Computers can't yet replicate that. "Only recently have we been able to see inside the brain, to see internal connections forming and firing in real time," Kurzweil says. The project to understand the human brain is "grand and somewhat diffuse," but there are three fundamental reasons for it, he says.
1) To be able to fix the brain better, to fix certain connections, such as in Parkinson's disease, based on better insight into how it works and with better tools to intervene.
2) To provide models to create better machines, better artificial intelligence. Kurzweil notes that the technique that has taken over much of AI development is similar to the mathematical technique the brain uses. As we understand how the brain does intelligent things, we can create more intelligent machines, he says.
3) To better understand ourselves. After all, Kurzweil says, "That's the purpose of art and science."
Asked if he's an optimist or a pessimist, Kurzweil says there's a difference between being optimistic about the feasibility of technology versus being optimistic about the desirability for technological advances. "I'm an optimist on feasibility," he says. After all, he's predicted "the singularity" is nearer than most others have predicted. On desirability, Kurzweil says he's considered an optimist, despite having written extensively about the potential undesirable uses for technology. "We're working on programming biology away from disease, but the same tools could be used to develop bioweapons. We've all seen in movies where AI is unfriendly, and that's not crazy at all. If you have an entity more intelligent than you are bent on your destruction that's not a good thing."
How to prevent the use of technology for evil? "AI doesn't exist in a few unstable laboratories; it's empowering all of humanity," Kurzweil says. "The best way to reflect values we cherish in the future is to practice them today. It's not foolproof, but that's the nature of history."
Watch live streaming video of Techonomy 2012 at techonomy.com. Follow and tweet about the conference using the hashtag #techonomy12.
And I am willing to make a bet today that all the results that it will produce over the short term, will be rather quirky, at best. Over the long term it may produce things that will be either markedly different from a human (but exceed human reasoning capacity by quite a bit in fields that require fast access to data) or it will behave like a human in the way a bad Shakespeare actor behaves like a King... by theatrical imitation.
Neither will produce anything of the sort Ray Kurzweil seems to have in mind.
The key to understanding artificial intelligence is understand biological intelligence... specifically the human brain. With recent breakthroughs in brain scanning technology we are ever closer to learning how the human mind works and operates. In turn it can and will be replicated... Kurzweil still places this out at about 2029... a very realistic assessment.
Ray is correct that information technology develops and unfolds in exponential patterns (See the "law of accelerating returns"). In his book "The Singularity" he provides ample examples to reinforce this point. The easiest example was the human genome project... many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10 (when only 3% of the code had been sequenced, but double that for 5 more years and they got to 100%). My guess is that we are somewhere near year "8 or 9" in artificial intelligence... time will tell.... this isn't the "flying car" we are talking about here...
In the year 2067 man will be landing on Europa and make contact with an intelligent race of swimming creatures in Europa's inner ocean.
There... now prove me wrong!
And chances that I will be around in 2067 to eat crow for this nonsense are nil, so what do I care?
Kurzweil's prophecies work the same way, except that he doesn't care about you the second after you buy his books. The money is in the bank, already.
BTW: "A volume about the size of a #2 pencil eraser of water provides as much energy as two 48-gallon drums of gasoline. That is 355,000 times the amount of energy per volume – five orders of magnitude." ( http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/New-LENR-Machine-is-the-Best-Yet.html ).
This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
"Over 2 decades with over 100 experiments worldwide indicate LENR is real, much greater than chemical..." --Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
"Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry." --Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA
By the way, here is a survey of some of the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html
For those who still aren't convinced, here is a paper I wrote that contains some pretty convincing evidence: http://coldfusionnow.org/the-evidence-for-lenr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
:-)
One of the rare occasions when you really should watch the video on hech pea.
The construction of a "brain" that will soon equal and then surpass that typical of our species has for long been a work in progress. Not as a result of any deliberate human "design" but rather as the result of an autonomous evolutionary process that can be seen to have run its exponential course since humankind acquired the ability to share imagination, which we know as language.
The next phase of the on-going evolutionary “life” process is effectively evolving by a process of self-assembly. You may have noticed that we are increasingly, in a sense, “enslaved” by our PCs, mobile phones, their apps and many other trappings of the increasingly cloudy net and the ever-growing insidious connection of peripherals.
We are already largely dependent upon it for our commerce and industry and there is no turning back. What we perceive as a tool is well on its way to becoming an agent.
There are at present an estimated 2 Billion Internet users. There are an estimated 13 Billion neurons in the human brain. Connectivity and cognitive functionality provided by such features as the semantic web continue to advance exponentially. Go figure!
The broad evolutionary model that supports this contention is outlined very informally in “The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” , a free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website
"There are still tasks for humans to do, he says: relating to other humans and understanding them, being funny, sexy, expressing a loving sentiments. These are not sideshows to human intelligence, that's the cutting edge of human intelligence."
Computers can't yet replicate that.
Having spent all my working life working with computers, we are far from creating a computer human. But we are close to the Alan Turing definition of not being able to tell if we are interfacing with a computer or another human. We will always be reaching for "Original Thought", which tells the tale.
Consciousness has been thrust upon us by the process of natural selection.
It is not some metaphysical entity that has popped up out of the blue.
While it would seem very unlikely that a level of consciousness comparable to (or exceeding) our own will be achieved on any individual computer it is almost certain that this will occur in the vast composite that we call the Internet.
Consciousness will be similarly thrust upon what is now the Intenet by the relentless evolution of technology that takes place in the medium of our shared imagination. Its level of interaction can be expected to be well above that of our own and its particular implementation of consciousness at a correspondingly higher level.
As is also the human mind in which consciousness is implemented.
There is nothing mystical about that, either.