Nature reviews Ray Kurzweil’s latest tome of foolishness, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They came up with the perfect illustration for the review.
Ray Kurzweil’s future is bad haircuts and silly gadgets stuck to your head.
The text is no less scathing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you know I despise everything Kurzweil publishes. I appreciate this pithy summary of Kurzweil’s bullshit.
Kurzweil repeatedly muddles computation with intelligence and consciousness. He flirts with materialism, dualism and panpsychism, contending that consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe”. Kurzweil then states that “it is the kind of information-processing complexity found in the brain that ‘awakens’ that force into the kind of subjective experience we recognize”. The words ‘complexity’ and ‘emergence’ are too often used in contexts in which ‘abracadabra’ might do as well.
That’s all muddled up with quasi-religious eschatological crap about the end of the world as we know it in the very near future. The singularity is imminent!
Kurzweil’s hyperbolic technological fetishism does not stop in ‘the cloud’. Apparently, the soul is digital and the body is mechanical. And so, the litany of fiction science, as I call it, goes on: the hype is squared as AI meets nanoengineering, in a revolution that “will enable us to redesign and rebuild — molecule by molecule — our bodies and brains and the worlds with which we interact”. He also argues that diligent people will achieve “longevity escape velocity”, living for much longer than we do now, by 2030. I can only hope that we would have reached bullshit escape velocity by then, too.
OK, you heard him. 2030. The eschaton will be here in 6 years. Maybe we’ll all live to see the prophecy go kablooiee, so we can all laugh at goofy ol’ Ray.
I believe Kurzweill has been hooked on the idea of the “singularity” for a while. There seems to be a common confusion between black hole singularities or the Big Bang singularity with what’s going in brains. I’m fairly sure that’s not a meaningful splurging of the word. Meanwhile, Scientific American has this newsy article about possible research into quantum entanglement and consciousness titled, Experiments Prepare to Test Whether Consciousness Arises from Quantum Weirdness. Seems very speculative. In any case, I keep waiting for a coherent, concrete definition of “consciousness”.
im just saddened by people chasing immortality bc i fucking relate. i want it too, but to me that makes lies and fantasies about it bitterly insulting. deal with it, ray. wake the fuck up.
I, for one, can’t wait to have my consciousness uploaded to a computer, to reside there for all of eternity. I just hope it’s not some old Pong machine; that back & forth beeping and booping would surely drive me mad after a millennium or two.
That’s just the plot of Deus Ex, which came out in 2000. Though Deus Ex had a fun immersive sim game attached. Also greasels.
That is a deepity.
Meaning it sounds all profound and cool (especially after smoking a lot of marijuana), but when you try to figure out what it means,…it is meaningless.
Consciousness is a property of organic brains and we don’t know a lot about it right now.
One of the few findings is the idea that consciousness is present to some degree in all mammals and maybe birds as well.
That “augmentation” makes me think of protruding pineal glands in the movie From Beyond…
We’re within the event horizon of a bullshit singularity. No escape velocity is possible.
LOL.
They are off by a few powers of 10 at least.
In 6 years if we are lucky, we will be hunting down Kevin Roberts of the Heritage foundation and the rest of Project 25 to arrest and try them for crimes against humanity.
Singularity in 6 years? I will consider myself very lucky if I’m still alive in 6 years. The most horrifying thing about all the impending apocalypses is that every one of them is avoidable, we just seem to lack the institutional will to do what’s needed. Nation-states put their faith in the fickle gods of tech and economics, instead of reaching for the simpler tools – renewable energy, public transit, socialism – that are right in front of them. Just like Kurzweil.
I have zero respect at this point for Singularity mongers. The Singularity was a shitty, bro-y, unfun trend in science fiction twenty years ago, and it is even less fun as a third-rate reskin of Christian Millenialism.
The Great Disappointment
You can always predict how far away one of these quacks will say their techbro rapture is by looking at actuarial tables for their demographic and then subtracting their age plus ten years. How do culturally Christian atheists deal with their fear of death? By recreating Christian eschatology from first principles; reason be damned.
Reminds me of that the book, Childhood’s End.
As I explained to my 2 year-old grandson, while I wore a clown wig, when the glingabons upload to the wakkaverse the ims will om quite peacefully with pliptoodles.
feralboy12 @3
Being uploaded into Pong may be worse than anything Harlan Ellison ever
spewednightmareddreamed up. I imagine it’s very similar to whatever is going on in Trump’s head.As for Kurzweil, as long his books keep sellin’, I’m sure he’ll keep predictin’.
Oh sure, everything is great until it’s time for a server update, and the intern hasn’t checked to see if there’s a current backup.
My favorite not-at-all-snarky source, RationalWiki, on Kurzweil:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
I have a bad haircut but I’m not going to strap anything to my head (except my non-silly glasses).
Nanotechnology? Eric Drexler created a lot of buzz with his books on nanotechnology that was going to be able to create anything we could design in a manner almost miraculous. Vast swarms of nanobots that could make anything quickly and so inexpensive it was almost free. Of course the big hopes and promises never materialized. A lot of nonsense about a technological Utopia of the future including uploading our memories to computers found a basis in claims nanotechnology would provide the basic technology that would make it all possible. And well, no. The grand promises of nanotechnology were so much hopeful nonsense. And with it all went big hopes of Singularities, Santa Clause machines, technological immortality, transhumanism and colonizing the Universe.
“consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe.”” When people like this (and creationists) refer to “consciousness” they mean “human consciousness”. What about the consciousness of chimpanzees, dogs, kangaroos, echidna, eagles, parrots, goannas, bullfrogs, octopus, bees….? All “fundamental force of the Universe”? What a silly man, it is like thinking that a telescope is creating stars rather than just seeing them.
Bruce Sterling’s novel ‘Holy Fire’ is a telling portrait of the world you get when the most privileged can live much longer. We don’t want that world…
Increasingly over the last two decades, Kurtzweil’s communications sound to me like the Brownian-motion-induced rattling of supplement pills in an otherwise empty skull.
Why did he pick 2030?
Because Kurzweil is 76 years old and clearly wants to be alive and not completely wizened when it happens.
The fact that we’re closing in on a trillion dollars per year (in the US alone) treating and caring for cancer, heart disease, and dementia treatments/care, there is every incentive for governments and the health care industry to spend billions finding effective treatments for all the major diseases that most impact the elderly, and the deeper we have to dig for those cures, the more we’re going to find out about how the body works and whether there are ways not only to extend our healthy lives, but how to overcome the natural upper age limit of around 120 years. Preventing aging reduces health care costs — or at least delays them indefinitely, which any government would take in a heartbeat.
I have no idea whether we will succeed, but I do know that if it is possible to extend life indefinitely, we’re going to do it eventually simply because the financial incentive will always be there. There is no way to put a time frame on it, but I’d wager it’s decades away at least, probably centuries.
Is it a good idea? Probably not, but that’s not going to stop us from trying, and trying, and trying…
Agreed, but if turns out to be possible, we’re going to have to deal with it somehow, because most people aren’t ready to die when the time comes. By far the biggest expense for Medicare is the cost of patients choosing to undergo heroic measures to keep them alive for another few weeks or months — i.e. expensive hail Mary surgeries and treatments on very sick patients with very little chance of surviving long term and which typically ends up with them dying in pain in a hospital bed rather than passing peacefully at home or in a hospice surrounded by family and friends.
So, if and when it’s possible, the market will be there because the money involved will likely dwarf anything we’ve seen up until now.
Yep. As with almost everything, the real problem is the capitalism…
Very roughly, we’re already at the place where life expectancy in developed countries increases by 2 years for every 10 years that pass, or 1 year for every 5. And the curve is getting steeper. If it ever got to 1:1, we would have reached practical immortality. And it needn’t even get all that close to significantly increase lifespans.
Life expectancy is roughly at 80 years now, but if it increases by 2 years for every 10, that puts it at 96 for someone born now. Average (rather than exceptional) life expectancies of over a century aren’t a million miles away.
But the thing is, it is the wealthiest (and despite being a professor, globally I count myself among those) who will live longest… and we are already the people who use much more than our fair share of the planet’s resources. What happens when we stop dying at a population-stabilizing rate?
@8 yeah, I try not to be overly pessimistic about the very long term possibility (like on the scale of 600 or 6000 or 6,000,000 years as in your example) of humans or our successors achieving something resembling a near total mastery of computation and biology, but these immanent predictions are just a total fantasy meant to sell a scam to silicon valley investors with too much money and not enough sense.
To be fair after seeing the interesting documentary on Kurzweil Transcendent Man I think he has daddy issues wanting to bring him back. And he understandably fears his own death. That’s a basic point of terror management theory based on the ideas of Ernest Becker, that religion eases our fear of death. Gould based spandrels on that existential dread. Kurzweil provides an out for techie atheists.
I felt Depp’s Transcendence a dark distortion of Kurzweil’s immortality project worth pooping his bed over. These fears are real.
I met the son of Martine Rothblatt multiple times at a freethought meetup. She’s trans, the founder of Sirius XM and has transhumanist beliefs of her own. She appears in Transcendent Man briefly. She wrote a book on this stuff called Virtually Human. Do I take any of this soul downloading seriously? No. Umm…swamp man problem.
To me Kurzweil and his ilk seem harmless. If he takes enough vitamins he might make his predicted singularity date and get disappointed. IMO he’s no weeded Musk proclaiming we live in a simulation.
To his credit Kurzweil had developed technology to help visually disabled people. I think he’s done far more for humanity than Musk for that. He is way too eccentric and silly though.
tacitus@23–
In my experience, most people nearing the end of their life are prepared for it and many even welcome it. Most of the people who think they want to live forever have not experienced old age. To be fair to Kurzweil, in his utopian fantasy the uploaded mind would be free from the physical frustrations of the elderly body. But it’s still a fantasy.
And if you want support for Becker’s theories as an explanation for Kurzweil I give you:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terasem_Movement
And Gabe himself:
https://time.com/66536/terasem-trascendence-religion-technology/
And Gabe ran against that Birther piece of shit Bill Posey:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Rothblatt
@27 chrislawson — Not to mention, “old age” includes “old brain” that, at least for me, gets tired of the sameness of things after awhile. Even with an unbreakable body, I couldn’t imagine trying to keep my finite hunk of gray matter enthusiastic about anything over time stretches measured in thousands and millions of years.
So, what you’re saying is they’ve imminentized and immanentized the eschaton? :)
I suspect that a lot of the stuff Kurzweil talks about – greatly lengthened healthy lifespans, advanced general AI, nanotechnology, even copying human consciousness into computers – may someday happen, but not likely in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It’s all empty hype now, but it would be very premature to assume it’s impossible.
@27:chrislawson
Yeah, I might have overstated the proportion of those who don’t want to die somewhat. My own father faced a long slow decline in mental and physical health expressed his desire to die on multiple occasions (and not in a good way), before he passed. He was ready to be done with it.
There was actually another elderly man on the same hospital ward as my dad who had just been told there was no chance of him returning home once discharged and would have to go into a care home. My sister overheard his son on the phone saying he had decided he did not want to live any longer if he couldn’t go home, and was refusing food and water. He stuck to his guns and died two days later, shortly before my dad did.
But regardless, the number of people — even among the elderly — who jump at the slightest chance of extending their life even if it entails pain and suffering is still significant enough to be a major drain on Medicare’s resources. And I think that gives a good indication that should life extension ever become possible, there will be no stopping it.
Of course, nobody wants to be old forever, so a lot depends on whether aging can be halted early or even reversed, and there could well be a psychological limit on how long a person could bear to live, though I suspect it would be different for everyone.
As for the wealth disparity problem, I actually think it would be very difficult for the superrich to keep the technology for themselves in the long run. Assuming the costs come down over time, there will be a point where the wider population of many countries will demand the treatments be made available for all who want them. It would almost certainly be seen as a right in countries like the USA, and political parties will have to promises to deliver it if they want to win elections.
Another form of potential life extension is hibernation or suspended animation. If that technology ever became feasible, it would almost certainly be used as a time machine to fast forward into the future. And if it became available to the masses, you could end up with whole groups of people — families, friends, cults, etc. — going into hibernation together hoping to emerge into a better future a hundred or a thousand years hence. Of course, you’d have to find a way to prevent the world economy from collapsing from the massive drop in available workers and consumers as they opt out of society for a century or two at a time.
It’s fun to speculate, even if the odds of any of us will see such things come to pass are virtually zero.
All this “Singularity” talk is now sounding like nothing more than a happy-fun-sci-fi-technocratic version of End Times prophecies. And such talk, as well as the people doing the talking, are sinking to about the same level of credibility as the End Times crowd too. Just another gaggle of escapist snobs hiding in a fantasy-world because they think they’re too good for the real one.
A potential life extension drug: We have a drug that might delay menopause — and help us live longer. Spoiler: the drug in question is rapamycin, mostly used as an immune suppressor, but has been proposed for many other uses. It also has plenty of side effects when used in doses required for preventing graft rejection. No idea how the dose intended for longevity compares. (A few years ago I ran into someone who was using krypto to buy rapamycin for the prevention of dementia)
As a two times cancer survivor, when I was in my mid thirties, and my son was a preschooler, I was concerned about dying too soon. Second time around, some 15 years later, I wasn’t as concerned. I don’t fear death per se, but I do fear a painful dying process.
Of my grandmothers, the one who was religious feared death and had a hard time coming to term with her impending death. The one who was secular expressed the view that she should have died sooner, when her health was more-or less OK and she was completely functional. Her last 7 years were a slow journey of ever diminishing quality of life, as she had to give up activities she loved.
Well that’s not how it works with cults. At 2028, the prediction of singularity will be pushed back to 2035 and so on and so on.
@#7, drsteve:
A shitty singularity has already been proposed.
@#11, anonymous:
Or as SMBC put it…
“Kurzweil” is German for “amusement” or “trivial entertainment”. Nomen est omen?
Like Harold Camping but with some technobabble.
Anybody eagerly awaiting mind uploading or “full” virtual reality really needs to read more late Iain M Banks… (Particularly Surface Detail, but similar themes appear in other works.) Once you enter a full-fidelity simulation, you are entirely at the mercy of whoever controls that simulation – and once such technologies are available, it will be possible to use them non-consensually. The possibilities are endless… Just for starters, I absolutely guarantee you that the CIA will be able to find a laywer to argue that virtual torture doesn’t count for the purposes of human rights law.
Even if you trust whoever’s running your immortality now, how sure are you that you can trust them (or whoever takes over from them) for eternity?
If you plan diligently, you can still live to the age of 150 by 2030!
Or if you don’t have the time to read an Iain M Banks doorstop or two, spend just ten minutes reading this terrifying short about the fate of the first human to be successfully uploaded.
@26 Kurzweil and his disciples actually wield tremendous influence over people like Musk and SBF. They’re about as harmless as QAnon.
robro@1–
The whole quantum consciousness argument boils down to ‘consciousness is weird and QM is weird.’ I’m surprised they don’t call it the Yankovic Conjecture.
I read the review and it’s not scathing enough. Not of the predictions will come to pass and 2030 will be slightly more technologically advanced, with more smart gadgets mass marketed and slightly better versions of iPhones and galaxies and shit like that. Maybe a slightly cheaper version of the augmented reality stuff but otherwise, 2030 will be exactly the same as today.
New Research Reveals AI Lacks Independent Learning, Poses No Existential Threat
If you have read William Gibson’s Jackpot series, you will be familiar with the concept of peripheral suits (sometimes even linking to other branches of the multiverse).
-I want to download the fully autonomous general artificial intelligence from the last book and let it save the world.
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In regard to drastic extension of life spans, we need to understand and copy the ways many other organisms fight ageing.
If the much larger bowhead whales can live two centuries we can eventually use germline GM to grant long life to the next generations.
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Cryopreservation of whole individuals is a challenge at least an order or two of magnitude harder than that. -First prevent H2O from freezing in the temperature interval 0°C- -10°C so you can slowly replace water with some other liquid before the organism decays. After that you can reduce the temperature further without expanding water chrystals shredding the membranes.
(*there are Alaskan beetles that can avoid freezing using a non-protein substance but I doubt they can survive if the temperature goes much below zero. This is why water needs to be replaced)
L Ron Hubbard was a bad SF author but a good PR expert/grifter.
Dress up your ideas in technobabble and appeal to wishful thinking and you will never be short of money again.
It’s just the rapture nonsense hiding behind a veil of sci-fi soundbytes. The rapture freaks think they can have their eternity of heaven without having to suffer the indignity of dying first and so does the tech-bro variation.
I don’t think we’ll need to worry about human brains being copied/uploaded to “the Cloud” or whatever anytime soon. As I’ve said before, we’d need to know the “machine language” of an organic brain first, and right now I’m not even sure organic brains even have such things, let alone that such “software” would “work” at all in hardware as different from organic brains as computers are. I’m sure we’ll soon be able to create some sort of regurgitative AI system that can talk and act like a certain human; but it would not be an actual copy of that human’s memories, knowledge, desires, priorities, emotions, feelings, etc.
Also, human minds and personalities work in organic brains that are inextricably connected to organic bodies. Our whole concept of “mind-body duality” is simpleminded quasi-religious bullshit: our emotions and our physiological processes are always affecting each other. If a human mind was ever copied/uploaded to any sort of superduperhypermegacomputer, with no connection to an organic body, he/she/it would very likely go completely insane within seconds of startup. This would probably be considered a form of torture that would be literally inconceivable, at least insofar as none of the mad-scientist-wannabees engaged in such a project would have tried to conceive of this consequence.
You didn’t include the, ‘bad art’ as well.
PS: for a really interesting take on the social consequences of mass-uploading of human minds into a virtual multiverse (which still has to be fed and maintained by mortal shmucks in the real world), check out “The Uploaded” by Ferrett Steinmetz. It’s got all the badness you’d logically expect from such a venture, plus an extra twist of badness near the end.
@Dunc #41,
Since your consent itself will be an outcome of the simulation, I’m sure there will be all sorts of ingenious methods of making sure you agree to whatever your owners “request” of you. How would anyone else know whether your digitized brain processes were momentarily altered for increased compliance?
And even with the best of intentions, when have human engineers ever created a complicated computer program that worked perfectly from its very first test? We won’t even be able to develop a full-fidelity simulation without creating and running vast numbers of low-fidelity and medium-fidelity and pretty-good-except-for-occasional-catastrophic-failure-fidelity simulations first. If those simulated minds are sentient, they’ll experience miseries and psychological disorders for which we have no words.
Prax @ 54
Stanislaw Lem had a dark vision of testing out new sapient AI’s in a short story.
A boy sits under a lab window and hears the testing going on; usually a new, garbled electronic voice, and someone in the staff saying “no good, delete it” after which the voice screams “No! Nooo!” until it is cut off.
This is repeated again and again.
.
Anyway, I have no objections to testing zombie AI software on zombie Donald Rumsfeld or zombie Stephen Miller.
You know, Kurzweil et al should just pay to have their bodies flash frozen* within a minute of the heart stopping. That will somewhat reduce the damage to tissue done by freezing (as more advanced methods I described above are unlikely to become available in our lifetimes).
Then they just have to hope nanotech capable of reversing the damage will become available before the money they have set up for the cryogenic facilities run out.
-Ironically their best hope may be the emergence of a post-scarcity society (Star Trek liberals) that are interested in resurrecting people without up-to-date skills.
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* the process – called vitrification- plays a central role in Stanislaw Lem’s novel ‘Fiasco’. The vitrification works, communication with alien societies, not so much.
55:birgerjohansson
Sounds like a short story I wrote years ago (unpublished). In this case, Henry wakes up from suspended animation and is put through a battery of mental and physical tests which are going well until a wave of mind-body dissociation overcomes him.
This continues to worsen until the AI in charge ends the testing and informs him he’s the 100,000th in a line of copies of the original Henry who signed an agreement to become part of the research program to download the human mind into android bodies in exchange for priority access to the stasis facility allowing him and his family to escape the horrors of a world devastated by nuclear war and global warming.
He is allowed to record his thoughts and feelings before deletion.
The biggest problem with uploading or downloading is that it isn’t you. It’s just a copy. You will die just the same.
The only way you can overcome this issue is to find a way to gradually replace your own brain tissue with something far more durable — i.e. something that doesn’t age or need an entire body attached to keep it alive.
If, for example, your brain was replaced one brain cell at a time, there’s never a moment in time when there’s more than one of you. The process could be gradual and once it’s over you just carry on with your life as before, except that your brain isn’t going to age and barring catastrophic head injury, will survive your body’s death.
Of course, there would have to be a replacement body (clone or android) available to make it worthwhile. I doubt many would want to live indefinitely as a head in a jar, a la Futurama, though I guess it might be okay if the VR options were good enough…
Another way of looking at it, if the uploading is good enough, is that there are then two of you, until the original dies. The copy would presumably regard itself as you, and telling it “No, you’re just a copy” is not likely to convince it. There’s no “right answer” here, because this is a situation that has never yet arisen (and probably never will).
One need not restrict oneself to one copy.
Or to an unedited copy.
cf. Dunc @43
John @60:
Of course one needn’t do that. After all, this is fantasyland. When you have any idea how to faithfully (to the cellular level?) copy a brain without destroying it, we’ll talk.
Author Peter F. Hamilton has fun with downloading multiple copies of the same mind into cloned bodies. Lots of fetishistic opportunities open up, especially if all the copies share in the experiences.
Because we all know that’s one of the first things people will try if it even does come feasible.
AFAICT, that author has a formula: write giant doorstop space operas, and then sequels that make each single series bigger than the entire collected works of Shakespeare; fill them with sex and at least a little torture; and at least occasionally toy around with hebephilia or incest, to boot. Morality tends to grey-and-black on the human side, blue-and-orange wherever aliens become involved. When there are hostile aliens, and there usually are, they go straight to Ridley Scott levels of horror.
You might call him a mildly problematic space Stephen King.
Brain copying/backups and other immortality tech is near universal in his settings, and is a common refrain also of Greg Egan and Charles Stross. They couldn’t be more different otherwise. If Hamilton is a Michael Bay/Ridley Scott big-screen teamup, Stross is usually more cerebral (think Arrival or Solaris), and Egan is … those mushrooms you probably shouldn’t have eaten before the film. :)
Its so wierd that they think AI being able to do what people already can do is a life shattering event.
People can drive cars. With a better track record than robot cars.
Sex robots, well ok, they don’t need much to cater to their clientel and it means real humans don’t have to.
AI is a useful tool, but we seem no closer to AI designing new AIs.