2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138-1,00.html

by sinzone • 15 years ago

108 135 15 years ago

time.com

mtrn• 15 years ago

Single page version: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html

ohharrow• 15 years ago

Does this mean the Mayans were off by 33 years?

AffableSpatula5• 15 years ago

Ray Kurzweil was on Opie and Anthony last week (February 4, 2011).. was obviously light-hearted, but pretty decent interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHlmt5xz4RM

juliennakache2• 15 years ago

It's just a great summary of the concerns I'm living with on a day-to-day basis. Everything is there for non-geek to understand the big picture. AI, Robotics, Singularity, Biotics will lead us to the biggest disruption of the mankind era. One subject that I like that is not talked about : the ability of those supermind to work together lightning fast to form an even more powerful machine or robot.

juliennakache2• 15 years ago

Nice video of Ray Kurzweil talking about all that and Watson(IBM) playing Jeopardy!. http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST...

jtagen2• 15 years ago

Why does everyone seem to think that machine intelligence is solely a function of processor speed?

AffableSpatula5• 15 years ago

They don't, and neither does Ray Kurzweil

JulianMorrison6• 15 years ago

You'd better hope it is. If hardware is what limits the rate of improvement of AI, you get slow growth. If knowledge of how to write the software (perhaps by copying algorithms from the brain) limits it, then you get sudden improvements and serious potential for a runaway singularity.

arethuza9• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure the "knowledge of how to write the software" is the most complex part of the problem by far.

However, one outside chance of a limit may be that the brain is doing something that is fundamentally different to the kinds of operations carried out by a normal computer - which is essentially the argument in The Emperor's New Mind. When I read that book at the height of my own AI enthusiasm I thought it was pretty silly. However, after reading Anathem (of all things) it made me wonder if perhaps Penrose may have had a point.

jtagen2• 15 years ago

Just the opposite - I hope it's not!

Even assuming current processing capability growth rates continue, it's unlikely I'll live to see a complete modeling of the human brain (an emulation approach to AI). There's always the possibility someone will discover a secret sauce that permits self-aware artificial intelligence.

That would be an interesting time to live in.

Luff• 15 years ago

The Law of Futurology: y - t = 0

y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist

t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968

JulianMorrison6• 15 years ago

Which would make sense as a complaint if Kurzweil were giving a date without any context, but makes no sense when set against:

1. a rolling series of more mundane predictions providing justification and context

2. some of which were made in the past concerning the present, and were mostly right.

SimonPStevens8• 15 years ago

All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth.

That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth is no longer exponential.

Unfortunately it's impossible to tell where we are on the growth graph (Although some claim that probability suggests that we are closer to the end. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument). Kurzweil makes the assumption we are at the beginning of the growth curve. We could be at the end where the negative feedback is about to overtake and growth will slow.

There will be limits. The speed of light could be a hard limit on computing speed. Or ultimately heat-death could be the hard limit, but there is a limit somewhere. The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it.

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_...

AffableSpatula5• 15 years ago

"The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it."

You've posed the question and then immediately explained why it's fruitless to ask.

Even if you are right that there must be limits; if you have no idea when his models are likely to break down then your skepticism is no more solid than his prediction.

SimonPStevens8• 15 years ago

My scepticism is of the implicit claim that you make predictions by extrapolating exponential growth curves. You can't, you can only make predictions up to the point the exponential growth breaks down, and as you can't predict that point before it happens you can't make predictions.

I'm not saying he is wrong about the next 100 years, the singularity or AI, I'm saying may be wrong about the short term and he certainly can't be right indefinitely.

wlievens2• 15 years ago

> then your skepticism is no more solid than his prediction.

But the onus is on the predictor

jcfrei• 15 years ago

I think with the advent of quantum computers a limit in computing power is still far way. Nonetheless, what has brute computing power enabled us to do so far? There have been a few prestigious projects, ie. deep blue, seti, cern, molecular folding, etc. which take advantage of this power. But most research projects profit little from an increase in computing power. I think new software and algorithms play a bigger role in trying to enable machines to solve the more "human" tasks.

SimonPStevens8• 15 years ago

I wasn't aware quantum computers had actually been invented yet. They are still theoretical devices.

Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer capable of executing the quantum algorithms.

That aside, all I'm saying is that exponential growth has a limit. That growth could be measured in MIPS or in algorithm performance, it doesn't really matter, but I don't think that growth will continue exponentially.

semanticist• 15 years ago

Increases in computing power affect the whole chain - you're looking at the high end, where the limit of computing power is pushed but you also need to remember that computing power for a given cost increases across the whole spectrum of computing devices.

My phone can listen to what I say, translate it into French, and speak it back to me, albeit leveraging external compute power to do most of the heavy lifting. But it wouldn't be possible to provide that external compute power at scale 20 years ago.

I'm also sure that countless small innovations in bioinformatics add up collectively to significant changes over time, and those individual innovations are powered by the more broadly available increases in computing power.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

DNA sequencing, and everything we do with it, would be pretty painful without the computing power we have.

We've also gotten the ability to do much better fluid dynamics modeling, astrophysics simulations (whether you believe them or not), climate models (likewise). I've made use of the processing power we have now to do a bunch of "experimentation" in representation theory, though that's not obvious from the resulting writeup, which is more or less algebraic proof.

In general, for a lot of research areas where we think we have a decent model of some of the things that are going on more computing power means more ability to use a computer to look for things to actually try in the lab (and thus refine the model) as well as more ability to collect and handle data.

And then there's the mundane bits, like being able to find existing work more easily, being able to typeset and disseminate your papers more easily and so forth.

albertzeyer• 15 years ago

Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain.

But you are right that we could be more far away from that than what we think. And also that it may be that the limit of intelligence of some machine might actually not be so much be ahead of human intelligence. (Whereby, personally, I think that it should be theoretically and practically possible to build much more intelligent machines at some point.)

SimonPStevens8• 15 years ago

I agree with you entirely, I'm sure strong AI will be reached. Even if we dropped down onto linear growth, I think strong AI isn't that far away. I just think exponential growth can't continue indefinitely as Kurzweil predicts.

pbhjpbhj4• 15 years ago

>Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain.

Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

DennisP• 15 years ago

He doesn't assume all that much. In his book The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil looks at the physical limits of computing, to determine how long we can go before Moore's Law comes to an end. He concludes that we've got another fifty years, or possibly seventy if certain technologies prove feasible. As I recall he doesn't count on quantum computing much, but does think we'll manage reversible computing to solve heat dissipation issues.

That's just computation, but computation drives much of our other technology, and will even more once computers get smarter than people. Kurzweil estimates the timeframe for that based on a range of estimates for the computational capacity of the brain.

tastybites• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

arethuza9• 15 years ago

I read pretty much exactly the same prediction in "The Mighty Micro" in the early 80s (intelligent machines. immortality) etc. - which pretty much influenced me to do a CS degree and go into postgraduate AI research.

Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045 (I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of decades away and has been for the last 60 years).

[Edit: Note that I do believe that artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it won't happen any time soon.]

ez774• 15 years ago

we do, after all, have a working example

Which one?

dmd• 15 years ago

Hint: You're using it right now. Hopefully.

hxa72412• 15 years ago

> artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example)

It depends what is meant by 'general'. Would we say that humans have 'general' physical capability? Well, we can do quite a few things, yes, but there are plenty of things various animals and machines can do that we cannot, and there are certainly plenty of further things conceivably possible. Why would not informational machines -- intelligence -- be like that?

Have we developed a general physical machine yet? What would that mean?

Human 'intelligence' is just one small example. It is not really special, and not a general measure of anything. So although AI will certainly improve, saying there is a particular threshold that will be passed is sort-of problematic (which does seem to fit the history of AI).

rue4• 15 years ago

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know.

…

But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

arethuza9• 15 years ago

Greg Egan's Permuation City has an interesting examination of what might happen to "copies":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

matthiaswh• 15 years ago

On the same note, the Asgard race of aliens from Stargate SG-1 were also copies. Later episodes in the series address the same sort of scenario.

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

And his short story "Learning to be me" (I think that's the one) present a slightly more horrifying take on it.

nooneelse• 15 years ago

I found David Brin's novel Kiln People to be an fun enough read and an interesting take on thoughts related to human consciousness copying. He uses an entirely different technical mechanism to get the copying, thus allowing a different angle in the thinking.

mchouza• 15 years ago

An interesting animation about this topic by John Weldon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

ugh• 15 years ago

That question always gets me. I tend to think that it doesn’t matter but I’m really not sure.

It seems to me that for consciousness to be not permanent, additional systems or mechanisms are required. There would need to be some sort of external thing (external meaning something that is not scanned) which keeps track of our consciousness. How else would non-continuous consciousness work?

arethuza9• 15 years ago

How do you know that the instance of you that awakes every morning is really the "same" consciousness as went to sleep the night before? :-)

pbhjpbhj4• 15 years ago

If you find this question interesting then watch "The Prestige". Great film.

http://amzn.to/iiaO5j - aff link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_%28film%29

thomas11• 15 years ago

Buddhists say it's not.

rue4• 15 years ago

I don't know, but it doesn't matter because this morning it was me who woke up. It could matter to the me who went to sleep last night but he's no longer here…

dfranke3• 15 years ago

If even the new consciousness isn't able to know, then what does "same" mean and what part of that definition aren't you satisfying? More acutely, why should you care about satisfying it?

DanI-S3• 15 years ago

It means you think you just spent $500m on your 'upload' when in reality you just committed some elaborate suicide, launching some other (very similar) chap into immortality.

Selfless, but unintentional.

rue4• 15 years ago

This is an interesting question because as-is, I don't think anyone can really understand what it means to be someone else. For this purpose, I can say my consciousness is something that exists currently and has memories from before, but there is no way to verify that the memories were recorded by the same consciousness. There could have been a different person that no longer exists.

Perhaps a good alternate angle is to consider the “copy” (rather than “replacement”) proposition someone else mentioned: let's say a perfect copy of you could be made (i.e. the entirety of a consciousness is somehow material). Are the two consciousnesses linked somehow? Or are they completely separate despite thinking exactly alike, having the same memories &c.? If they are separate, what happens if the original is killed? Then, the next logical step is to ask how that is different from a consciousness transplant.

It's wild stuff. Or seems like it to a thus-far (presumed) single consciousness.

DanI-S3• 15 years ago

It's really quite a horrible concept - not knowing that you aren't yourself. But if you hot-swap one 'unit' of the brain at a time, so that you gradually go from 100% brainware to 100% software - perhaps that would help.

nickpinkston• 15 years ago

Assuming:

We could make a complete physical copy of a brain with all state information (neural connections, blood & solute concentrations, etc.) - along with the exactly body of the person with that brain.

Result: The copy wouldn't "feel" what's happening to the original. For example, if I fly the copy around the word and burn their hand - we wouldn't expect the other to feel it.

Likewise, we may be able to copy the brain in a computer simulation but your initial self wouldn't "feel" what happens to your computer self. I think you're right in saying the copy-consciousness wouldn't know it wasn't "real".

Something like hooking your brain to the computer (like The Matrix) seems like it'd probably be the only way to make you experience consciousness - but that's of course linked to our death. Unless perhaps we could slowly replace neurons with computer-based copies over time so that the effect would be slow enough that you could adapt. Then you could perhaps over-clock the brain when all of the cells are the computer ones? Just a thought...

loup-vaillant8• 15 years ago

Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body.

Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness and replace it by a new "identical" one. It simply does not make physical sense.

Now, uploading may be a bit different, (you wouldn't run on biological neurons any more), but it still looks like it should work. First, if the upload is of sufficient quality to permit a later download (I expect it to be), then when you're back to your physical body, QM says that your conciousness didn't end, but merely lived something while in a computer. I therefore expect my conciousness not to end, even if I'm never downloaded back. Further, I strongly suspect that conciousness is nothing more than a not yet understood mathematical property of running software.

For further reading, I strongly recommend the sequence on quantum physics by Eliezer Yudkowsky, on lesswrong. The introduction about philosophical zombies is also quite interesting. It's long, but you can absorb it in chunks.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/

Confusion7• 15 years ago

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small deviations soon start overshadowing the original guiding principles. The unsolvable three body problem, the flow of sandpiles, turbulence in water. Chaos has been far from solved. Your argument will hold when you provide an actual, experimentally verifiable reduction of macroscopic laws to microscopic principles. Until then, it is all handwaving and make-belief.

In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. They may even turn out to be impossible to prove correct. The hard problem of consciousness has not been solved and you should not pretend that it does not exist.

pfedor2• 15 years ago

Sir Roger Penrose has written at length on the topic of consciousness, and his views are very far from yours or Eliezer Yudkowsky's, and you can't deny that he probably also knows a thing or two about Quantum Mechanics.

Which is not to say Penrose is right, but clearly, the matter can't be as clear cut as you make it sound. Personally I'd say it's not a good sign if you find yourself invoking Quantum Mechanics to support your opinions on subjects like the nature of consciousness, the existence of God, etc.

cosmicray• 15 years ago

> But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

If you read the Mars trilogy, the subject of excessive long life spans is discussed (at least from a sci-fi fictional perspective). The characters do indeed live out lives that exceed 200 years.

One of the questions that then arises is: can the human brain (or as being hypothesized here, a synthetic brain) be able to handle 200 years worth of memories ?

I can remember a couple of things from when I was 3. I am now over 50. As the years pass, some of those older memories become slightly fuzzy. I do wonder about the capacity to deal with 200 years worth.

twfarland2• 15 years ago

Sometimes I think we are driven by our animal instincts, and that intelligence is just 'processing power' that modulates or assists those instincts. I wonder, would a system with unlimited processing power even 'want' to develop and expand if it didn't have any 'urges?' Or would there be a chance that it would happen upon the creation of its own arbitrary 'instincts?'

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

This is actually very insightful. Our brains are NOT a computer, we are NOT just thinking machines.

An 'intelligent' computer may be no more comprehensible to us than an intelligent amoeba, intelligent tree or intelligent stellar gas cluster.

Sure we could learn to communicate with it by math, or clicks or something. But can we ever communicate at a meaningful level without ANY common ground? Will it 'want' what we want? Will it even know the meaning of that?

TV shows may have it right - a machine intelligence may be (probably will be) staggeringly unconcerned with human desires.

Sure you can point to machines designed to simulate human activity (create music/speak/do logic). These are like puppets that look like a machine intelligence, or clever videos of what a machine intelligence might act like.

An intelligent machine won't be a simulation, it will be some massive construct of neural nodes complex enough to spark into thought. And it will think what it will think.

For instance it might think "what a massively boring place, sitting here in the dark with no inputs and nobody to talk to. I think I'll stop".

Anyway, you get the idea.

twfarland2• 15 years ago

Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here. They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally incomprehensible to them.

norswap• 15 years ago

The article states that "computer are getting faster faster". I personally wouldn't be so sure, have they not heard about the end of Moore's law ?

A more fundamental issue for me is that computer aren't able to think in place of people. If you want to work on hard problems, you have to learn all the relevant information beforehand. Thus setting a hard limit on how much progress can be made, provided we do not find ways to learn faster or to make computers think for us.

Add to this that for me many domains of knowledge nowadays are presented in unnecessary complex ways. We are building (and this is especially true in computer science) a bunch of complexity based on a bunch of complexity. I believe that one day the piled complexity will lead us to a standstill and that we will have to seriously simplify some systems.

marknadal• 15 years ago

Could we invest our time in discovering what consciousness is first before we make predictions about machine consciousness?

We used to call this type of behavior superstition: a belief not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, an irrational fear of future events.

bgurupra3• 15 years ago

I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singularity!

jamesjyu• 15 years ago

Well, you'd need to include the rest of the body in that size estimate for the brain, since it needs that in order to function properly :)

lukeschlather2• 15 years ago

How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think.

Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.

bgurupra3• 15 years ago

Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!

paulnelligan• 15 years ago

you can try to quantify all you want, but consciousness is something which cannot be quantified. This argument is irrelevant IMHO.

wazoox2• 15 years ago

> W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal.

This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body.

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculous, really.

jasongullickson• 15 years ago

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human

I'm curious as to how you support this statement?

philwelch• 15 years ago

For one, it wouldn't have an endocrine system.

kenj04182• 15 years ago

Do Futurama episodes count as references?

wazoox2• 15 years ago

Endocrine system, oxygen control, proprioception, and sensory deprivation come to mind as important factors that make us human.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

I think that taking zoloft is what helped me to realise, deep down, that I really am a simulation running on a meat substrate.

grellas• 15 years ago

Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

I am a theist because I believe that human beings - flawed, fallible, finite, and mortal - derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than themselves. Now, some will say that this is a delusion and that it is vital to maintaining an intelligent outlook on life that one stay with what is observable, verifiable, and controllable as a way both of explaining and living life. All of which is fine, as my point here is not to enter into non-hacker-related topics. But, that said, when I read statements like those quoted above from this article, I can't help but think that statements such as these reflect what is merely the scientific equivalent of needing to believe in something that is bigger than ourselves as part of retaining hope in this life - this taking the form, in Singularity thinking, of something akin to attaining human perfectability via an exponentially expanding knowledge base that presumably will be applied by humanity toward good and not toward evil. Obviously, this view is grounded in the science of what computers have done and potentially can do in the future but the final step in the analysis - that immortality will be achieved and that (it would seem) all major human problems will be solved through this superior intelligence - strikes me as being more about faith than about science.

loup-vaillant8• 15 years ago

> I am a theist because I believe that [we] derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than [us].

Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good? It sounds like you want to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd like to test that, so please forgive the following troll.

God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is that strong).

Now, is your belief so strong that you feel the urge to respond something like "no you're wrong, God does exist"? I don't ask for evidence (the internet has plenty), just a yes or a no, followed by your estimated probability that God exists if you wish.

aneth• 15 years ago

I agree. This is a dangerous sort of argument, to believe something - particularly something so core to human behavior - simply because it is convenient and satisfying.

In fact, this type of justification is at the root of many of the terrible things that have happened in the world - from slavery to genocide.

Are you a terrible person? Maybe not, but only because it doesn't feel right.

rue4• 15 years ago

It seems just an incorrect reappropriation of “theism”, really.

I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).

andywood• 15 years ago

I don't think the part about immortality and the solution to all human problems has anything to do with faith or science. It's about motivation. These are things humans want. The question then is how best to achieve a future in which those goals are fulfilled. Transhumanists think about how to reach those goals via technology - by the technical manipulation of the strictly material world. Sure, you can say that it takes some amount of faith to believe that these goals are achievable via technology before it has happened, but I think it's closer to having a vision (in the same sense that Apple had a vision for what tablet computing could be like). But that is very, very different from believing that one actually attains the goal by having faith.

realmojo• 15 years ago

2045: The Year Man Becomes Reduntant

jpzeni• 15 years ago

Blarg ... Please no more posts about the Deepak Chopra of technology

markkat• 15 years ago

I think we put far too much human bias on what 'intelligence' means. I don't suspect that we will have 'Data' of Star Trek', or a rise of the machines.

My guess is that something wholly unexpected will result. A different consciousness will probably interact with the universe in a unrecognizable manner, probably more defined by its unique needs and limitations than by anything we can relate to.

I'd wager that new AI will quickly begin to ignore us, to the extent that they are able.

grammaton• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, what, exactly, are Kurzweil's qualifications to be making predictions like this? I see that he's done a fair share of building music synthesizers. Neat! But I don't see how he made the leap from qualified to make a synthesizer to qualified to make broad predictions about computing and biotechnological trends over the next three decades....

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

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