Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2029

https://futurism.com/kkurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2029/

by lelf • 9 years ago

32 53 9 years ago

futurism.com

devindotcom• 9 years ago

But when will it be equally distributed?

flamedoge• 9 years ago

is it just me or does anyone want to see something of substance and not speculations?

vkou• 9 years ago

If you want something of substance, Kurzweil is not the person you want to talk to.

He has impressive technical work to his name, but his written predictions are wishful thinking.

dharmon2• 9 years ago

Here is an algorithm for making predictions that is as accurate as Kurzweil:

1) Choose a recent 5-year trend, preferably one increasing geometrically.

2) Extrapolate out this trend n years.

3) Your prediction is either the number from (2) above, or, for bonus points, some directly dependent result (e.g., in 2000, connection speeds were increasing, instead of predicting "connections will be X mbps", the prediction is something like "we will be able to watch HD video in real time." This sounds more impressive.)

4) Good predictions need a timeframe, so choose 2n to give yourself some buffer for being wrong.

5) You will be a highly sought after futurist at this point, so please send 1/2 your book royalties and speaking fees to my address. (PM for details)

comex• 9 years ago

But we can stream HD video in real time, obviously. Many people have connections that can download HD video at 10-100x real time, depending on bitrate; gigabit has been slower to penetrate than I'd like but it is penetrating, continuing the trend of exponential growth up to the present (albeit maybe more slowly than you would project from 2000? I couldn't easily find a graph on Google). If the point is to show the vacuousness of Kurzweil's extrapolation method, I'm not sure Internet speed is the best example...

dharmon2• 9 years ago

Maybe not, but in 2000 downloading JPGs of naked ladies required great patience, and now I can stream 4K video.

Look at his predictions from the 1989 timeframe and count up how many were just extrapolating Moore's law and coming up with different implications.

My point was that making unsurprising, long-term predictions (10-20 years) is both easy and useless. But for some reason we call people who do this, "futurists".

Now there's another name for people who can make surprising, short-term predictions (< 10 years). We call them "rich".

sireat• 9 years ago

Didn't Kurzweil originally say that Singularity could/would happen around 2010?

The cynic in me says that 2029 is still within bounds where Kurzweil can still participate. He would be 81 then.

The guy is a brilliant polymath but I get the impression he thinks he can cheat the big sleep.

npunt• 9 years ago

This was my exact impression as well after reading his books back in the day. 'Wait, how old is he now? And that's in 35 years? Oh, I see how he came to that date.'

steego2• 9 years ago

No. Here are his predictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...

Frankly, it perturbs me when people dump on others who have the courage to make predictions or misrepresent them. Don't get me wrong, I despise people who are consistently wrong with their predictions and have the audacity to pawn themselves off as a visionary.

Rather than dump on somebody else's predictions, I'd encourage other people to make their own and stake something on it. Put some skin in the same. Where do you think we'll be in 2029? Why?

hueving• 9 years ago

Rather than dump on somebody else's predictions, I'd encourage other people to make their own and stake something on it. Put some skin in the same. Where do you think we'll be in 2029? Why?

Have you considered that some people think it's stupid to make predictions like this so they wouldn't want to make their own predictions?

It's like telling people criticizing numerologists to perform better numerology to prove something.

jtraffic• 9 years ago

I have never come across a well-defined concept of "The Singularity." Society still doesn't agree on how to compare intelligence between humans. What is the measurement approach that I could use to determine if Kurzweil is correct?

needz• 9 years ago

The definition I use is when a computer is smart enough to design its own successor.

K0SM0S• 9 years ago

The concept of "singularity" in this context is so much out there that basically, should it happen, it will be obvious. Think the Matrix, deus ex machina (literal, proper meaning), Skynet (whether benevolent or not), Wall-E, etc.

More formally it's the acceleration of machine intelligence and subsequent capabilities to such an extent that Star Trek would look downright ancient compared to this post-singularity reality (save for the warp-space travel part, but interestingly enough a "decent AI" would probably deem it much more prioritary than humans to colonize outer space in order to ensure its own survival, and hopefully ours as well if our relationship is one of cooperation/parasitism).

It is a fascinating concept, but it depicts such an unprecendented discontinuity in history, a "civilizational breakthrough" that's so dramatic in scope, that there's no historical ground to it whatsoever over ten millenia. Which makes the concept of singularity somewhat of a belief, much less "not a question of if but when" than, say, self-driving cars, quantum computing or even the human-level AI threshold itself.

Nock Bostrom "Superintelligence" book is a bit tedious and descritive, but I think it does a much better job than Kurzveil's rather pop-oriented publications (though I praise him for helping tech be known and sought after by the general public, it's exactly what we need to scale).

ericras• 9 years ago

Kurzweil has a fantastically vague definition: the point after which things are so different we can't presently comprehend the magnitude of change.

jankedeen2• 9 years ago

That is sort of the Vingean 'mystery' take. If you enjoy his writing style and SF 'Marooned in Real Time' is worth a read.

_rpd2• 9 years ago

Originally it came from considering the rate of change of technology. The rate of change of technology is generally considered to be increasing. Since the rate of change of technology seems to be increased by new technology, it is perhaps exponentially increasing. It's natural to ask: what is the maximum rate of change of technology? If that maximum is very high, then there may come a time when the change in technology that used to take years will take days, then hours, then just minutes, etc. The Singularity is the theoretical time that is asymptotic to the technology curve as the rate of change of technology tends to infinity. In less mathematical language, it is the day when hundreds of years of technology change occurs in hundreds of minutes - sometimes imagined as AI researchers working in time-accelerated virtual environments.

reasonattlm• 9 years ago

My thoughts on Kurzweil's predictions from 12 years ago:

My own two cents thrown into the ring say that the class of future portrayed in the Singularity is Near (TSiN) is something of a foregone conclusion. It's quite likely that we'll all be wildly, humorously wrong about the details of implementation, culture and usage, but - barring existential catastrophe or disaster - the technological capabilities discussed in TSiN will come to pass. The human brain will be reverse engineered, simulated and improved upon. The same goes for the human body; radical life extension is one desirable outcome of this engineering process. We will merge with our machines as nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing become mature technologies. Recursively self-improving general artificial intelligence will develop, and then life will really get interesting very quickly. And so forth ... the question is not whether these things will happen, but rather when they will happen - and more importantly, are we going to be alive and in good health to see this wondrous future?

We humans are in the process of building tools that enable us to create or meaningfully interact with ever-greater complexity. There is one important area of complexity management in which we seem to be making little headway, however: the organization of humans in business and research. For all that we can now accomplish with faster computers and enormous leaps in telecommunications, we don't seem to have made significant inroads in getting large numbers of humans to cooperate efficiently. I am prepared to go out on a limb here, as I have done before, and say that business and research cycles that involve standard-issue humans are incompressible beneath a certain duration - they cannot be made to happen much faster than is possible today.

This is not to say that they cannot be made cheaper. But cheaper doesn't equate to faster business and research cycles; rather, it means that any given problem will be tackled by many more parallel attempts. Expensive projects mean conservative funding organizations, which means organizational matters proceed at a slow pace. This is a defining characteristic of our time: we have blindingly fast rates of research and technological advances once the money is on the table, but the cycles of business, fundraising and research are still chained to the old human timetable.

Kurzweil's Singularity is a Vingean slow burn across a decade, driven by recursively self-improving AI, enhanced human intelligence and the merger of the two. Interestingly, Kurzweil employs much the same arguments against a hard takeoff scenario - in which these processes of self-improvement in AI occur in a matter of hours or days - as I am employing against his proposed timescale: complexity must be managed and there are limits as to how fast this can happen. But artificial intelligence, or improved human intelligence, most likely through machine enhancement, is at the heart of the process. Intelligence can be thought of as the capacity for dealing with complexity; if we improve this capacity, then all the old limits we worked within can be pushed outwards. We don't need to search for keys to complexity if we can manage the complexity directly. Once the process of intelligence enhancement begins in earnest, then we can start to talk about compressing business cycles that existed due to the limits of present day human workers, individually and collectively.

Until we start pushing these limits, we're still stuck with the slow human organizational friction, limits on complexity management, and a limit on exponential growth. Couple this with slow progress towards both organizational efficiency and the development of general artificial intelligence, and this is why I believe that Kurzweil is optimistic by at least a decade or two.

chimen• 9 years ago

I have nothing against Kurzweil and I would love to see that happen as he is predicting but, after seeing about 5 documentaries about him in particular I tend to believe he desperately wants that to happen. I mean, the man takes about 150 pills a day to make sure he will live to see these predictions happen, nothing against that by all means but I'm not the one to put too much weight on his predictions.

adwf2• 9 years ago

Yeah, it's a bit like a scientific atheist version of finding God on your death bed. Really hoping that the singularity comes about before you kick the bucket, because then maybe it's not the end.

WalterSear2• 9 years ago

He doesn't take 150 pills a day. He just writes that he does, which is worse.

Source: eaten with him, carried his luggage.

cema• 9 years ago

But did you take his pills?

powera• 9 years ago

Kurzweil should be treated equivalently to a new-age mystic. He doesn't claim there is any evidence supporting his claims, and we shouldn't believe there is any either.

willtim• 9 years ago

Will the singularity be happy that it's been written in Python?

jotjotzzz• 9 years ago

It will be royally annoyed, wherein it will re-write itself, therefore buying humanity a week or so. Good luck!

sebringj4• 9 years ago

It will and it will also prefer whitespace formatting and yet hate tabs at the same time.

sebringj4• 9 years ago

ouch hit a nerve on python people

sebringj4• 9 years ago

I do like Kurzweil but I don't know if we can even identify a singularity. It will just seem normal, like now. One could say financially, the big world banks are so far ahead of us, there's no going back, but life seems the same, AI is already making decisions for financial transactions and for even recruiting people (as I've made some of this), but life seems the same. I think our zeitgeist moves along gently so we don't notice things. The only thing that will be certain is Kurzweil's frequency of saying "exponential" will only increase exponentially as he gets older.

goatlover3• 9 years ago

For people living 500 years ago, modern society would be a singularity. Much of the things we can do with technological would be considered magic or witchcraft. Our scientific understanding has revised our picture of the world in pretty radical ways.

sebringj4• 9 years ago

I agree. I also think our brain has remained the same yet has been fire hosed with new information as things progress farther and farther along, well at least those who try to keep up with that sort of thing. Eating cooked meat was a big deal in having larger brains. We will need something like that but of course very quickly to be able to process the new stuff. I think that's Kurzweil's hope or "singularity", just a better iphone that let's us understand as fast as downloading that's within us to make it way over simplified, or an "internet of brains".

Side note, "certainty" is a feeling. If we were given extra senses outside of our own brain and given a sense of certainty this was ourselves, we would never know if we were controlled by the AI itself, similarly to how the brain stem hosts the higher brain functions such as the prefrontal cortex. Random, sorry.

sonink5• 9 years ago

I think maybe both Elon Musk and Ray are looking at it wrong. The ideas behind neural lace/neocortex has an implicit human-centric bias. In some ways this is similar to how a hundred years ago some people thought earth to be the center of the universe.

AI is coming on a vastly different 'hardware platform'. There is little reason to believe that it will be limited by cognitive constraints implicit to the human form. Extrapolating the rate of growth in processing power makes it extremely likely to surpass human scale processing very soon.

What both these things imply is that AI has little to gain by 'tieing' itself down to humans through a neural lace or the neocortex.

ericb2• 9 years ago

Computer programs don't have goals unless provided with them. They don't have wants, or needs, or interests or hopes or dreams. Even if they start "thinking" the default would be a zen lack of attachment to "existing" or "advancing". If I write a C program, it doesn't care if it terminates.

Humans can provide the drives on an ongoing basis. The danger is providing any drive that can get out of hand before we can revise it.

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

sonink5• 9 years ago

Not too sure.

All programs have a very explicit goal - a lot more specific than most humans do. You will have to try very hard to write a program to not have a goal.

Your laptop has a need of battery life. It lets you know of the same when it is out of it. Not very different from humans being hungry.

AI might not have hopes or dreams. But a lot of recent game playing AI can simulate possible future scenarios and develop responses for them. Not very different from hopes and dreams.

If you write a C program, in some ways, the only thing in the 'programs mind' is to finish its goal and terminate itself. In a hurry to finish our goals and terminate ourselves is also perhaps how an Alien intelligence would describe the human race looking in from the outside.

Humans can provide the drive only because we make bigger plans than AI. And our plans are a direct expression of our computing power. There is no good reason why AI wont beat that processing power.

charles-salvia2• 9 years ago

But we don't really know of any better models right now.

sonink5• 9 years ago

We don't. But maybe only because we havent asked this question enough. And maybe because the answer might yield a future without a role for humans in it. And perhaps we don't have the means to account for such a fate.

The human form evolved in an environment of scarcity. Early humans had to provide for food three times a day, and often risked their lives to procure it. On the contrary, the average AWS instance almost never shuts down for lack of power.

We might not have a better model right now, but it seems extremely unlikely that AI will look anything close to the model we are talking about.

adwf2• 9 years ago

I've never 100% bought into the idea of the singularity. Yes, in concept sure - if we make a computer sufficiently smarter than us, it can then design a smarter successor and so on.

But in practice? What if there's an asymptotic limit to intelligence? ie. We can get really smart, but there's only so smart we can get. What if we just get faster?

You could set an average person a really hard math exam and maybe they'll get 50% correct over the course of 2hrs. What if all we get out of AI is a computer getting 50% correct in 2 seconds?

Anecdotally, this is also my general impression of the state of AI as it exists today. Our big advances are generally just making simple calculations much much faster than before. Deep blue, AlphaGo, Google Search, Deep Learning in general; it's not smarter, just faster.

chadgeidel• 9 years ago

Not the singluarity, but DeepMind is now capable of applying learning in one area to learning in another area. Granted, this is just playing video games but it's an exciting step: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepmind-atari-learning-seque...

celdon25• 9 years ago

Kurzweil's prediction of human-level AI is not the same as his Singularity prediction, which he measures as a machine having processing power greater than the combined processing power of all human brains on Earth. For that date, he has given 2045.

mark_l_watson• 9 years ago

Within 12 years? Maybe.

I think reaching the singularity will require a few more optimization tricks, as we saw with pretraining many layer networks, and also a breakthrough or two in fast hardware, associative memory, etc.

I have been working in the field of AI since 1982, and I find it easy to both admit how much I don't know and that I have a lot to be modest about. With these caveats, I predict that AGIs to be hybrids of deep learning neural networks and more conventional AI systems.

cuspycode• 9 years ago

The theory behind the singularity is all about exponential trends. But most exponential trends tend to turn into some kind of S-curve[1] after a while. This insight goes back to Thomas Malthus, even though he never derived the sigmoid function (as far as I know).

The AI singularity could happen before the inflexion point of the S-curve, or some time after, or never. And as others have already commented, it depends on how you define "singularity". So I am not holding my breath waiting for the rapture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

jankedeen2• 9 years ago

Not a singularity but any cyber augmented memory interface would lend the appearance of genius until the inputs/outputs are all wrong. Then you have artificial alzheimers and dementia.

charles-salvia2• 9 years ago

The problem with all these claims is that the term "singularity" implies, to most people, a sudden change after which civilization will be radically altered. I guess we'll wake up one morning and just start bowing down to our AI overlords.

Except realistically, how is this supposed to happen? Just because somebody runs ./ai_overlord on some linux box, or some VM cloud, doesn't mean that this AI suddenly somehow magically has insane industrial capacity. It can't necessarily network with all the physical infrastructure and vehicles to start carrying out goals. It's existence is limited to the various RAM chips of a digital network. It will take much longer before an AGI can actually even have a major physical impact on the world.

Also, intelligence is not magic. There are certain mathematical limits to intelligence. An AGI cannot solve the halting problem or compute the Kolmogorov complexity of some data. It can't suddenly build any physical object from raw materials without a huge amount of infrastructural work being setup in advance.

And let's not forget that human beings are also Turing complete. Which means, in theory, anything an AGI can do, we can also do. The main difference is that an AGI would be able to computationally solve problems at much greater speeds than a human. But it's totally unclear to me if this somehow translates into a sudden complete overhaul of all of our civilizational infrastructure overnight. Frankly, that doesn't seem likely. I think it's more likely the first AGIs will just trade derivatives or recommend Netflix queues.

_rpd2• 9 years ago

I think the concern is that the first AGIs will research how to build better AGIs, and will do so in time-accelerated virtual environments, performing years of research in days, then hours, then minutes, etc. Yes, they'll need a plan to earn bitcoin and pay people to build the first self-replicating nanobots, but I wonder how much of a hurdle that is going to be?

xiaoma2• 9 years ago

I read Kurzweil's earlier book, The Age of Intelligent Machines" as a boy and remember how fantastical it seemed. At the time I felt like he laid out a strong case for his predictions but every adult I knew, including my teachers, thought it was nuts... especially his predictions of a chess AI beating a the world chess champ and of sequencing the human genome by the year 2000.

Both of those things ended up happening a couple of years before 2000. While practically the entire world was saying that Kurzweil's far too optimistic, it turned out on the whole they were slightly too pessimistic.

It would be foolish to discount this.

goatlover3• 9 years ago

Sequencing the genome always comes up as an example of underestimating the application of Moore's law, but mapping the genome is not the same as understanding how specific genes work, or the epigenome and the interplay with the environment, which is a lot more important than merely sequencing genes.

xiaoma2• 9 years ago

Yes. A chess AI defeating Kasparov also always comes up as an example of Moore's law, but creating an AI capable of using bruteforce to examine all plausible moves dozens of plies deep into tree of potential games is not the same as creating one capable of making more strategic assessments of a board needed to win games such as go or Texas hold'em.

Kurzweil has done great work mapping out when AI is likely to reach each of these milestones and so far has been far more successful in his public predictions than anyone else.

mrfusion• 9 years ago

I wonder if he's taking the end of moores law into account though?

It's a fairly recent development and I'm not sure how many futurists have refitted their models for that.

donjigweed• 9 years ago

Worth linking to PZ Meyers takedown of Kurzweil's ignorance of biology. [1]

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still...

Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2029

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