This is How Wrong Kurzweil Is

Honestly fully-sentient machines in 16 years seems totally ridiculous on its face to me regardless of what kind of graphs and charts about technological progress can be shown off. While I'm not really up to speed on AI research, in the consumer space at least we've just barely achieved a semi-automated house-vacuuming robot and fumbling speech-recognition in call centers. Unless I'm totally off-base with what's capable today, emotions and intelligence in a decade and a half would seem to require breakthrough after breakthrough in a vast number of nearly unrelated disciplines; plus there'd have to be the commercial demand needed to fund it. (Space stations and flying cars may be technically possible today, but nobody wants to pay for them.)<p>Kurzweil has invented a few cool things but today the guy is essentially a talented sci-fi writer. While those kinds of people are important, I have no idea why so many people take him so seriously.

Less inflammatory title: These are some cherrypicked reasons why Kurzweil might be wrong, ignoring reasons why Kurzweil might be right.<p>But that wouldn't make the front page.<p>Also, I'd be a little less critical if this article wasn't citing all this quantum consciousness pseudoscience as one of the main reasons why Kurzweil is wrong.

&#62; But to say that we will see, by 2029, the development of computers with true consciousness, plus emotions and all the other things that make the human brain human, is nonsense. We'll be lucky to see such a thing in less than several hundred years—if ever.<p>2029 may be a bit early, but I think that actually to say it will take at least several hundred years is nonsense.<p>Look at the timescales of scientific and technological progress. Pretty much 99% of all knowledge and technologies we use are less than 200 years old. Most of it is less than 100 years old. We went from zero to space in a single life time. And the progress is not steady, nor is it slowing down, it's <i>accelerating</i>. One thing Kurzweil is definitely right about is that people don't understand exponential growth. Or any superlinear growth for that matter.

It's a bit presumptuous to think a sentient AI/machine has to replicate the human brain. While there are complexities we still do not understand there are also many shortcomings/defects that we do not necessarily need to replicate to a machine. One of the cognitive biases happen to be us thinking very highly of ourselves. Our brains are far from "perfect" (natural selection and all).<p>While 2029 may be too early (note that it actually might not be. Nature doesn't exactly follow Moore's law, but so far electronics and computing do), I doubt it will be several hundred years. The other thing to keep in mind are geo-political event which may have adverse effects on scientific development/progress. To expect there to be relative peace in the next 15 years is a far better prediction than hundreds of years. We might even loose some advances by then.

So after reading "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins [1], it would seem that the algorithm of the cortex is mostly figured out and it missing only the hardware capable of simulating enough neurons. One comment I read a while back was that the description in the book was good as far as it goes but there's more to do with regards to making it a two way process. I.e. the part where the nervous system takes action to confirm a prediction (I probably didn't explain that very well).<p>My question is why would you want to build a human like intelligence? Wouldn't it be enough to build tools that simulate parts (pattern recognition, inference, reasoning etc) of our own intelligence so that me may augment what we're capable of? What purpose would it serve to include emotions feelings and what makes us human?<p>I'd love to hear from people who actually know more about this stuff than reading a couple of popular science books!<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence</a>

Whenever I see these Kurzweil naysayer articles, I always feel like they are overly pessimistic, or short-sighted. Just because problems seem insurmountable now, doesn't mean that they will be in a few years. People always seem to forget about the exponential growth of information technology. If you look at an insurmountable problem in the context of today's technology and speed of discover, then yeah, it will be tough to believe that we'll have sentient machines any time soon. But please do not forget that tomorrows technology will be exponentially better, faster, stronger than what we have today. In five years, the problems outlined in the article may seem like child's play.

Kurzweil's Discover article says if we build a sufficiently complex machine it will be conscious as fully as humans are conscious. And he says we might do this by 2029.<p>This blog post says there are all sorts of low-level physical processes in the brain like detailed interactions of neurotransmitters and calcium ion channel dynamics which are super complicated and scary. And it will take hundreds of years to figure it all out and replicate it.<p>The answer is we don't have to replicate the human brain to create a system complex enough to exhibit consciousness. Modeling is not simulation, we can model a system after the human brain without simulating every last detail.

Is there really a strong argument that human cognition and/or consciousness relies on quantum effects? (That is, stronger than the vacuous argument that <i>everything</i> relies on some properties of a quantum mechanical system, including our computers, by virtue of being made of matter.)<p>I seem to recall Roger Penrose's argument to that effect a couple of decades ago being soundly criticized.

We're talking about a guy who believes he will be able to literally resurrect dead people by feeding primitive personality data into an AI which in turn would emulate the deceased. So, yes, he's been wrong for a long time. He has always been simplifying issues to the point where they become absurd parodies. This is not new.<p>Having said that, I'm glad he's around though. AI and transhumanism are need of a skilled public advocate, which he is.

While I instinctively agree with the author's conclusion, I have some questions about his argument.<p>1) The foundational assumption is that, by "sentient", Kurzweil means "Homo-complete":<p><pre><code> &#62; Because of some of the criteria Kurzweil has set for sentient machines (e.g. that they have emotional systems indistinguishable from those of humans), I like to go ahead and assume that the kind of machine Kurzweil is talking about would have fears, inhibitions, hopes, dreams, beliefs, a sense of aesthetics, understanding (and opinions about) spiritual concepts, a subconscious "mind," and so on. </code></pre> I'm not sure how Kurzweil feels about that but to me the whole point of creating sentient machines is to achieve human-like intelligence without all hindrances and idiosyncrasies that come with being a human. I'm thinking of a thing like Data (or Spock) from Star Trek. Are these guys not "sentient"? I know they're not real but they don't seem outwardly implausible or self-contradictory.<p>Furthermore, wouldn't some humans fail to qualify as "sentient" (or, at least, "Homo-complete") based on this definition? What about early homo sapiens? Do we know for sure they had the capacity for schizophrenia or autism? Is it at least conceivable that very early humans lacked the capacity to love in the same way as modern humans? How about future generations? If they find a cure for depression, won't tomorrow's pill-popping, ultra-content humans also be "sentient"?<p>2) Even if you grant him this assumption, it seems like the author is essentially saying that the only way to be "Homo-complete" is to be a "Homo" (pardon me). That may very well be true and I think the author makes a compelling argument that it is. But I still don't see why being a human is the only way to be "sentient".

So in addition to serifs being worthless now Kurzweil is completely wrong! This guy is going to debunk all the truths we hold dear.

It is cool to learn about dendrites: <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&#38;q=cache:FIejhf3q_y4J:www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/courses/g6002/2003/Euler-Denk.pdf+dendritic-dendritic+processing&#38;hl=en&#38;gl=us&#38;pid=bl&#38;srcid=ADGEESilRTCj0U6DwT-n--B1QlJo2iUwgo5K1rPheFccDm0c96g48xFlPZoVlJMw00bUeotH6uSEPq_HPrrRjH7DHhK_5-l-zVcwXkgF4-ZWvxF6bGMGFDSsa5-MLyyVd_cxTytyvKAa&#38;sig=AHIEtbRUBN6Mjv0uPjCpkx362m0_7KXeww" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&#38;q=cache:FIejhf3q_y4J:...</a><p>I see now, more intuitively, how the brain's nonlinear triggering might come about, and how plasticity can be achieved.<p>Isn't it worth noting, however: that the singularity may not require 100% replication of the human brain, but rather replication of aspects of it? In other words, mental illness should not be viewed as a requirement... it should be avoided, if possible, in such modeling, assuming we're developing these models to help run our infrastructure.<p>Creating an exact replica of a human brain on a machine seems an unnecessary goal. What we want is a machine that can think like us but orders of magnitude faster/broader. That doesn't mean we want it to think like us in every sense, but rather to accomplish specific goals: like the end of poverty.

"imagine that you are the subject of some mental event--perhaps you are experiencing an intense pain. Now imagine that one of your neurons is replaced by a silicon chip prosthesis that has the exact same input/output profile as the neuron it replaces. At the core of this thought experiment is the presumption that such a replacement would be unnoticeable to you or to anyone observing your behavior. Presumably, you would continue to experience pain even though the physical realization of those mental events includes a silicon chip where an organic neuron used to be. Now imagine that, one by one, the rest of your neurons are swapped for silicon prostheses. Presumably there would be no change in your mental life even though your brain, which was once made of lipid and protein neurons, is now entirely composed of silicon neuronoids." This thought experiment, first presented by Pylyshyn (1980) does not seem too far fetched today.

TL;DR: we are very, very far from understanding the human mind, much less simulating it.

&#62; ... not only computational capabilities but all the things that make the human mind human. .. this requires a developmental growth process starting in "infancy." A Homo-complete machine would not be recognizably Homo sapiens-like if it lacked a childhood, in other words. .. have the potential of becoming depressed, .. compulsivities, .. panic, .. addictions, ...<p>I don't see all that. I don't see why a strong AI would necessarily be equal in emotions to humans and even develop similar behavior.<p>I haven't read any books by Kurzweil though, so I cannot tell if he makes that requirement on a strong AI.

Other great impossibilities: sequencing a human genome in 15 years.<p>Cost of first human genome: $2.7b<p>Cost 20 years later: $250.<p>I think 2029 might be pushing it, but neither would I be surprised. Strong AI is always "20 years away". One day it wont be.

This is spot on, and something I have thought for a long time without the time or ability to elucidate it so clearly.<p>The complexity of the human brain is not just difficult, not just complicated or hard to understand, it is <i>several orders of magnitude beyond our ability to comprehend</i>. IMHO we will need a fundamental leap in our own intelligence before we have the means to comprehend even how the brain works, and one more leap to understand how we might reproduce its behavior.<p>It's a long way off. People who believe otherwise are doing just that—believing.

Ellen Ullman's "Programming the Post-Human" from the October 2002 issue of Harper's sheds some really interesting light on AI research, how the brain functions &#38; what it means to be a human. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in the subject &#38; available for free on Harper's site:<p><a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/programming-the-post-human/?single=1" rel="nofollow">http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/programming-the-post-huma...</a>

People really ought to read "On Intelligence" if they want to understand how wrong the entire academic AI field is.<p>It's not just the approach that is wrong. It is the entire mindset that is wrong.<p>At the same time, people in this field are so wrong that "machines as intelligent as human" may not be that far off because we really cannot be that smart if we have so many experts so wrong in such a field ; )