ZenPundit
Thursday, October 06, 2005
 
A POINT OF SINGULARITY [ Updated]

Glenn Reynolds the famed Instapundit, reviews Ray Kurzweil's new futurist tome ,The Singularity is Near. This one is on my " must-buy soon" list but I as I haven't read it yet, I have no commentary to offer. An excerpt from the review:

"People's thoughts of the future tend to follow a linear extrapolation -- steadily more of the same, only better -- while most technological progress is exponential, happening by giant leaps and thus moving farther and faster than the mind can easily grasp. Mr. Kurzweil himself, thinking exponentially, imagines a plausible future, not so far away, with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual), vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today), other miraculous machines (nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt) and, thanks to these technologies, enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today).

Naturally, Mr. Kurzweil has little time for techno-skeptics like the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who in September 2001 published a notorious piece in Scientific American debunking the claims of nanotechnologists, in particular the possibility of nano-robots (nanobots) capable of assembling molecules and substances to order. Mr. Kurzweil's arguments countering Dr. Smalley and his allies are a pleasure to read -- Mr. Kurzweil clearly thinks that nanobots are possible -- but in truth he is fighting a battle that is already won. These days skeptics worry that advanced technologies, far from failing to deliver on their promises, will deliver on them only too well -- ushering in a dystopia of, say, destructive self-replication in which the world is covered by nanobots that convert everything into copies of themselves (known in the trade as the "gray goo" problem). Mr. Kurzweil's sense of things isn't nearly so bleak as that -- he is an optimist, after all, an enthusiast for the techno-future -- but he does sound a surprisingly somber note."

Kevin Drum also posted on Singularity recently.

ADDENDUM:

Sean recommends this counterpoint to Kurzweil
 
Comments:
Kurzweil is crazy! Jaron Lanier settled the issue of 'spiritual machines' for me back in 2000. it's a very long article, (and sufficiently robust) that i would thumbnail as 'we can't even get Windows right'. and a self-organized AI (like SkyNet in Terminator) requires a much bigger leap of faith than i'm willing to make. it could happen and prove me wrong, but i'd put money against it (if i had any ;-)
 
I love Kurzweil. He's one of the few people out there who's mastered the art of exponential thinking and is taking this stuff seriously. But I agree with Arnold Kling (and Sean and Jaron Lanier, apparently) that he's over-optimistic about AI. When it comes to solving engineering problems humans are brilliant, but AI is a solution in search of a problem in addition to being a qualitatively different sort of problem from things like nanotech and biotech.

I think the gradual blurring of the line between human and machine will happen, but it'll start from the other end -- humans augmenting themselves with technology, as is already happening on a small scale today.
 
Hi Sean & Matt,

Given my personal ineptitude with all things online, I'm not the best person to be pontificating here but there is an important general point to consider regarding advancements in supercomputing.

Regardless of whether the next major breakthrough in magnitude comes from Ai or quantum computing or something else, that breakthrough reprsents a tipping point where concepts previously stymied by intractable math problems become unstuck by the breakthrough and can be developed.

Assembling the new supercomputers in arrays( the first thing that would be done with them) allow all kinds of new progress to begin in pure science and later applied science ( incidentally a tremendous comparative advantage for the state that has a transient monoply on the breakthrough supercomputer).

In other words, there's a *very* wide societal ripple effect when computing tech jumps by several orders of magnitude.

Whether Kurzweil's scenario is probable I'm not qualified to say - and most likely won't be even after reading Singularity. BUT the alinear nature of possible future scenarios ( think of a decision tree stretching out for, say, ten generations of outcomes) means Kurzweil's scenario should not be dismissed out of hand.
 
wow, thanks for linking me up front, Mark!

i like your link, too, matt.

from what i've read, i still dismiss Kurzweil's causative scenario 'out of hand', but not the effects he speculates about. this is sort of what you're getting at in your comment, i think, Mark.

certainly crazy things can and will happen in technology. biotech will certainly host the next revolution and i wouldn't be surprised by 100+ life spans.

the current revolution in computing is in memory. there's enough cheap memory to store everything now, but what to do with it?

another possibly profitable area is the Network itself. i think this is the place to look - not physical computers in real life.

aren't we going to come up against physical limits pretty soon in 'transistors'? maybe we can break through in quantum, maybe not. maybe bio-computers...
 
It's funny, all of the objections and questions y'all have are addressed in the book in detail. Give it a read sometime. then you'll be better informed.
 
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