Long Live AI - Ray Kurzweil, 08.15.05

Reports of the death of artificial intelligence were greatly exaggerated. Get ready for nanobots in the body that root out disease and keep us young.

A couple of decades before the boom-bust cycle in e-commerce and telecommunications there was a similar phenomenon in artificial intelligence. Many people think the so-called AI winter in the 1980s, when many AI companies folded, was the end of the story. But boom-bust cycles are sometimes harbingers of true revolutions (recall the railroad frenzy of the 19th century), and we see the same phenomenon in AI.

Artificial intelligence permeates our economy. It's what I define as "narrow" AI: machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks. Every time you send an e-mail or make a cell phone call, intelligent algorithms route the information. AI programs diagnose heart disease, fly and land airplanes, guide autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for a trillion dollars' worth of funds and guide industrial processes. These were all research projects a couple of decades ago. If all the intelligent software in the world were to suddenly stop functioning, modern civilization would grind to a halt.

So what are the prospects for "strong" AI, which I describe as machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence? We can meet the hardware requirements. I figure we need about 10 quadrillion calculations a second to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. IBM's Blue Gene/L computer is already at 100 trillion. If we plug in the semiconductor industry's projections, we can see that 10 quadrillion calculations a second will be available for $1,000 by around 2020.

So now the controversy is focused on the algorithms. To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time. We already have mathematical models and simulations of a few dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons. It is reasonable to conclude that in two decades we will have effective models for most of the brain.

Machines can now far exceed human capabilities at such tasks as logical analysis and searching through vast databases. A couple of minutes spent with Google demonstrates that superiority. The strength of human intelligence lies in our ability to recognize patterns. But machines are gradually gaining in this type of ability as well.

Our technology is also shrinking at an exponential rate. By the 2020s nanotechnology will let us build vast numbers of tiny machines at the molecular level. The killer app of strong AI, combined with nanotechnology, will be blood-cell-size robots called nanobots. We'll have billions of them traveling in our bloodstream, communicating with one another on a wireless local area network and transmitting information and software to and from the Internet. They'll keep us healthy by destroying pathogens and cancer cells, removing debris, correcting DNA errors and otherwise reversing disease and aging processes.

They'll also go inside our brain capillaries and interact with our biological neurons. By augmenting and/or replacing the signals from our real senses, they'll provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. "Experience beamers" will send their entire flow of sensory and emotional experiences onto the Internet the way people now beam images from their Web cams. We'll be able to plug in and experience what it's like to be someone else.

The result will be a profound transformation of business, commerce and society. We'll come up with solutions to improve our health, clean up the environment and provide for an expanding human population. Keep in mind that this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming to compete with us. It is already in our pockets, will soon migrate into our clothing and will make its way into our bodies and brains.

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Forthcoming)

http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2005/0815/030.html

i havnt been coming to this website for that long, but everything you seem to post is about living longer or related to it. do you have a fear of death or something. i mean dont get me wrong, this stuff is cool and all but is that like, all you do, search about this type of stuff?

The problem is that humans are too genetically stupid and irrational, so the only hope for upwards evolution is for AI robots to replace us.

ya... i dont think thats the only way for upwards evolution. it is a way for us to create a different life form kinda though. if we do make robits we should make them have a life span. know what im sayin. we should make them stop working after a while so they wont be our betters and so on with the similar things and what not.

Well I prefer science and technology over other topics yes. I do go into spiritualaity skeptics and aliens / ufo's threads and post in space and mind. Since you havn't been here that long, you wouldn't know...

I don't sit here and type all that stuff out Although I do research a lot of it and keep upto date on things like Biolotechnology, Nanotechnology, Robotics / A.I, Computer technology.

Or we could just invest a million dollars into hemp, mark tomions electric generator/water desalinator, bikes, blimps, incinerating toilets, and seament. Hemp would provide cheap food, textiles, soap, and shampoo. Bikes would provide a means of travel throughout towns while blimps could life thousands of people to nearby cities. Then we could make seament homes which only require wire and electricity to be built. Now, whats the negative aspect of this? Right, we won't need oil and everything required to craft the above is abundant or renewable and cheap!

Honestly, we don't need computers to really work and THINK for us, that is stupid. Stop being a lazy ass, you want a better world, help make it a better world and don't really on some artificial intelligence to get a human job done. I mean, the world would be great if making all of the above goods were done by robots, but we do not need them to THINK for us. Also, what makes you think you can transfer the SOUL to another body? Don't say there is no soul, I mean, what was before the big bang, there must be something extraordinary to explain that? YOU CANNOT REPLICATE A HUMANS SOUL, HIS SENSE OF COMMONSENSE, HIS CONCIENCE, A DEVELOPED CONCIENCE IS REALLY WHAT SEPERATES US FROM THE OTHER ANIMALS.

Whats the point of living if we can't explore and discover things on our own? Don't you want to continue the human legacy of human research and exploration?

dont dolphins, apes, and elephants have some kind of conscience? and ya i think we could do the hemp and stuff you were talkin bout, but artificial intelligence is kinda cool, and whats wrong with learning what makes the brain really work and wanting to recreate it? and that last part about being able to uploud our thoughts onto things is flap jacking awsome. ive always wanted to invent something that could print or make videos from my thoughts. you think people would be able to make movies from just their thoughts?

Some people think that humans have absolute dominion over other animals. They are simply property, and the owner has the right to do anything at all with them. However, you are right, animals do have a concience, but it is not proven to be as developed as ours.

Now, the problem is trying to recreate the brain, we can't do that, we can recreate the equivalents to the hardware which allows the brain to function, but we can't just replicate our souls (that is the one software we can't pirate). We can't become part of the computer, we can make computers that think and do like us, but they will never have real feeling or a soul (they can replicate emotion, but they aren't real).

When computers with substantial AI are developed you must remember that they are machines, we need to make machines to do work, they should be nothing more then servants. They really don't need to be smarter then us, they really don't need to have arms or legs, unless, arms and legs are required for them to fulfill their task in society.

Lots of people say:

The soul or spirit exists. There is a spiritual world. You are more than just the matter of your brain and your body. You are not just a biological machine operating according to the laws of physics. You have free will.

I say:

Well what does the brain do then? Why is it the most complex object in the universe?

Also, this spirit clearly must have causal effects on your brain/body. So at what point does it interact? In the brain, should we expect to see uncaused causes? Neurons firing for clearly no physical cause? The idea is outlandish.

Also, how did this "spirit" evolve from creatures that were just matter? (Most of the world still believes in a "first human", over a hundred years after science abandoned the concept.) Evolutionary theory as good as proves you wrong (as Darwin saw, but Wallace refused to see).

(*) Who are "Lots of people"?

Mainly, lots of civilians. - Unable to explain how the brain works, just about every human throughout history has believed in souls or spirits. Even today it is still part of the official doctrine of most churches, and is claimed by almost every religious thinker and theologian. Perhaps 95 percent of the world's civilian population accepts this view.

Strangely, almost no one who actually studies the mind ever argues this view. With a complete disregard for public opinion, most cognitive scientists are materialists (perhaps Eccles is the only exception). Yet if spirits were really needed to explain the mind, then surely it should not be too hard to construct a scientific argument that the brain is not enough. It seems to me that the soul or spirit is merely a remaining example of the "God of the gaps" argument that theists should have left behind in the Middle Ages.

Q. Could we ever prove this? Could AI and Cognitive Science prove that we are material?

A. Very hard to prove it. If we invent AIs, they clearly have no soul. But that doesn't mean we don't.


http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/AI/philosophy.html

i know what you mean about the spirit and stuff and i dont think we should create machines that are our equals or better than us. but couldnt the spirit just be something made up by our extremely complex brains to explain something we cant? i hope we have spirits though.

I encourage us to embrace any and all that modern technology has to offer. Certain tasks are better performed by machines and certain tasks can only be performed by machines. Manual labor is for grunts. Limited existential value in manual labor. Some like to wax on about their various home construction projects etc... they are basically trolling for compliments as the work itself is not wholly satisfying. Better to engage in more esoteric pursuits (things that require "lateral thinking") such as research and development - just those things that AI is not very capable at.

One of my favourite sayings - and it infuriates my grunt friends - is "I don't touch handtools - they slow me up!" or this one infuriates people who eat breath and sleep for welding - "Welding is for robots!"

Thanks for sharing..

But thats what the scientiists want to eliminate, not work, but the need to do lateral thinking, they want to build robots that can THINK for us...

You're saying that all scientists are on a single mission, to eliminate the need to think? That would put them out of their jobs.

No matter what if technology takes over for the "grunt" what will they do for work, or the average scientist for that matter. Before we jump we should see what we are jumping into. Millions if not more with out work, is there going to be a program in place to help thes people including myself, welfare will climb to hights never seen and and the one's with the money will be the ones bitching why don't they go find a job.

If grunt job's are to be replaced with machines the goverment better do something to help the people, and not close plant after plant and then say sorry you don't qualify for help. Better schooling( free job training and school) better job placement or recruiting. Techcnology is going to make a lot of people poor and a few very rich.

thefounder, i saw u talking about souls..
I have some questions.
when does the soul come to exist?
the second when an ovum is fertilized?

and now, we can certainly clone humans. but the cloned human
should and will have a soul. where does this soul come from?