Ray Kurzweil, Singularity, downloading our conciousness and so on

Dep!

I watched a fascinating documentary last night called Transcendent Man about Ray Kurzwell and his absorbing viewpoint on where we are going with humanity with technology and invention.

From his Wiki:

Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. He says this will lead to a technological singularity in the year 2045, a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans' ability to comprehend it.

Irreversibly transformed, people will augment their minds and bodies with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil predicts machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined.

Basically in 2045 we could have a "Skynet becomes aware" situation with our newly advanced technology

As luck would have it I just found the full documentary on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsg-__K_IAI

He is not the only Futurist spoken to in the film and others on it touch on things like:

Being able to upload your conciousness onlne over 50 years from now as a form of immortality.

Nanotechnology. Tiny, microscopic chips that will be placed inside humans to fix ailments.

More than one predicts a world war over two differing views over building technology like this.

And much more besides. It is a captivating documentary to say the least. The only part that turned me off Kurzwell was his constant vitamin popping throughout the film.

When you look at how far the PC has come in just 10-15 years the extrapolating power is incredible. The smartphone is a great example of this. So where will this exponential growth lead us technology wise in 30 or 40 years?

Will there come a time when we can live forever? Would you want to? Where does that leave religion?

nokia69

it might happen but poor Ray is too old to see it

sad really, he sits around all day taking pills in an effort to live forever

he should just live his life and enjoy it

TheSheriff

Ah, I was just looking for something to watch!

nokia69

Dep! wrote: »

He is not the only Futurist spoken to in the film and others on it touch on things like:

Being able to upload your conciousness onlne over 50 years from now as a form of immortality.

I don't think thats immortality, I would still be dead

Dep!

nokia69 wrote: »

I don't think thats immortality, I would still be dead

Its as a form of immortality The debating question being: if our conciousness lives on forever is that immortality?

Karl Stein

Yes but a kitten and ducklings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOX8YbhVs-g

The Backwards Man

We won't live forever, Brian May was a bit of a visionary himself and this is what he said about uploading our consciousness to the main server

There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?

nokia69

Dep! wrote: »

Its as a form of immortality The debating question being: if our conciousness lives on forever is that immortality?

no, its not IMO

a copy of me, is not me, no matter how perfect a copy

the best way to achieve immortality is to not die

Dep!

A prediction he got right

Kurzweil extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000".[3] In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament.[4]

A huge list of more here.

AnonoBoy

I bet It'll be just like that movie The Lawnmower Man in that Pierce Brosnan will be to blame somehow

These are the sort of ideas that will be laughed at 50 years from now.

Just as we laugh at the way people in the 1950's and 60's thought we'd all be zooming around in flying cars and the like.

hmmm

It's only a matter of time before science makes us immortal. The only question is when. Some of the current developments in bio-medicine are incredible, I wouldn't be surprised if the first human to live forever has already been born.

Dep!

Deleted User wrote: »

These are the sort of ideas that will be laughed at 50 years from now.

Just as we laugh at the way people in the 1950's and 60's thought we'd all be zooming around in flying cars and the like.

Those predictions were made by fiction novelists and TV producers looking for attention and ratings. Unlike Kurzwell who has over 30 patented inventions to his name and a track record for getting predictions about technology 100% correct.

Big difference.

TheSheriff

"I have over 300 cat figurines" - weird

Dep!

Dep! wrote: »

Will there come a time when we can live forever? Would you want to? Where does that leave religion?

My feeling is yes.

My opinion is no. I value my mortality too much. And I value too much how much value it gives to everything I am - do - have - or would want to be. Even when I look at my daughter - my mortality defines every moment I spend with her and every moment I want to give her. The idea of eternal life would not only undermine my value to her - but her value to me - and her value in even existing.

As for religion? It will leave it where it always should have been left - in the dark ages where it should have always belonged.

Dep!

TheSheriff wrote: »

"I have over 300 cat figurines" - weird

As far as people collecting things it ranks as some of the more normal stuff Ive seen

How ya liking it so far Sheriff?

Clandestine

"As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

-Unabomber

Clandestine

Clandestine wrote: »

"As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

-Unabomber

How many cat figurines did he have?

Grayson

nokia69 wrote: »

no, its not IMO

a copy of me, is not me, no matter how perfect a copy

the best way to achieve immortality is to not die

lets say you write a book and constantly save it to dropbox. Is there any real difference? Do you care about it?

All we really are is a collection of information and neural pathways. If you replicate the neural pathways and copy the information then there's next to no difference. What makes you isn't where the information is stored, it's what the information is.

evolving_doors

All posts that have ever appeared on After Hours will combine into a singularity to bring forth a hideous creature in the form of...
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.Yor Da!

nokia69

Grayson wrote: »

lets say you write a book and constantly save it to dropbox. Is there any real difference? Do you care about it?

All we really are is a collection of information and neural pathways. If you replicate the neural pathways and copy the information then there's next to no difference. What makes you isn't where the information is stored, it's what the information is.

but your old body would still die, you would experience death

the new copy is not the real you

riffmongous

nokia69 wrote: »

but your old body would still die, you would experience death

the new copy is not the real you

Exactly, everyone else will experience your immortality but not you

evolving_doors

Grayson wrote: »

lets say you write a book and constantly save it to dropbox. Is there any real difference? Do you care about it?

All we really are is a collection of information and neural pathways. If you replicate the neural pathways and copy the information then there's next to no difference. What makes you isn't where the information is stored, it's what the information is.

Ah yeah you could replecate or copy neural networks with a tonne of wires.. but the algorithms that make up human nature from embryo to human is filled with a bunch of incoherant stumblings and mistakes that it would be impossible to account for and thus create.

Dep!

nokia69 wrote: »

but your old body would still die, you would experience death

the new copy is not the real you

Our conciousness lives on. We dont need the body.

riffmongous

Dep! wrote: »

Our conciousness lives on. We dont need the body.

But it doesnt live on, it is merely copied and the copy then lives. To everyone else it will appear as if there is no difference, but you will still be dead and know nothing about what the copy does.

pueblo

The Backwards Man wrote: »

We won't live forever, Brian May was a bit of a visionary himself and this is what he said about uploading our consciousness to the main server

There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?

There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us, peace and quiet and open air,wait for us, somewhere.
West Side Story

nokia69

Dep! wrote: »

Our conciousness lives on. We dont need the body.

no, its a copy of your consciousness

the original one dies with your body

TheSheriff

Dep! wrote: »

As far as people collecting things it ranks as some of the more normal stuff Ive seen

How ya liking it so far Sheriff?

Its pretty interesting, although I am a sucker for any of these "futurism" type documentaries tough.

I do agree however, he hopes all this will occur within his life time as evidence by his collection of his dads possessions

The_Valeyard

Our soul or essence of who we were would probably die. What would remain would be a poor ghostly copy.


Or we would become one with the Borg. Is that what you want OP? Resistance is futile.

renegademaster

hmmm wrote: »

It's only a matter of time before science makes us immortal. The only question is when. Some of the current developments in bio-medicine are incredible, I wouldn't be surprised if the first human to live forever has already been born.

this guy reckons the same

http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en

wil

Deleted User wrote: »

These are the sort of ideas that will be laughed at 50 years from now.

Just as we laugh at the way people in the 1950's and 60's thought we'd all be zooming around in flying cars and the like.

Sounded a lot more fun than an immortality of infinite Facebook likes and infinitesimally informed tweets on a 5 inch touchscreen that you can no longer touch or even recall what an inch was.

20Cent

Doctor: You have six months to live.
TV: Scientists have figured out how to allow people to live forever. The system will be rolled out to all citizens in seven months time.


Doh!!!!

wil

20Cent wrote: »

Doctor: You have six months to live.
TV: Scientists have figured out how to allow people to live forever. The system will be rolled out to all citizens in seven months time.


Doh!!!!

scientists are not that stupid. It would be trialled on superhero character actors and various comic book adaptation hotties for the first few thousand years.

jimgoose

I was David Bowman.

Grayson

Armelodie wrote: »

Ah yeah you could replecate or copy neural networks with a tonne of wires.. but the algorithms that make up human nature from embryo to human is filled with a bunch of incoherant stumblings and mistakes that it would be impossible to account for and thus create.

It doesn't have to be a ton of wires. you can do it virtually. You just need hardware that can support that kind of system.

Nucular Arms

Also it's worth bearing in mind that you basically are a copy of yourself at any given moment in time.

The cells that made up your body six months ago are not the same cells that make up your body now (except for a lot of the brain matter which has a longer cycle than six months).

When your cells divide they replicate the genome into a daughter cell which lives on and the original is programmed to die in a process called apoptosis.

You don't experience any change but on a cellular level we are all just copies of copies of copies. That's basically what the ageing process is. The deterioration in the information due to copy errors in the genome.

Dep!

renegademaster wrote: »

this guy reckons the same

http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en

That's some beard! I'll watch this later however, despite him looking like a deranged homeless man

Ben D Bus

nokia69 wrote: »

the best way to achieve immortality is to not die

The problem I see there is that even if science finds the cure to all disease and to ageing, the laws of probability mean that sooner or later we'll all get run over by a steamroller or some-such. Ain't no nanites gonna fix that mess.

nokia69

Ben D Bus wrote: »

The problem I see there is that even if science finds the cure to all disease and to ageing, the laws of probability mean that sooner or later we'll all get run over by a steamroller or some-such. Ain't no nanites gonna fix that mess.

well of course, even Kurzweil would agree with that

Useful.Idiot

I have been thinking a lot on this topic recently, mainly prompted from reading this excellent article which outlines why it is very likely that this singularity will happen very soon. It makes a lot of mention of Kurzweil's ideas, but also includes arguments from another camp of experts who believe it may not be a good sign for humanity: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

To the above who said a copy of us wouldn't be us; yes it would be us. If you re-created every single cell, you would recreate all thoughts/feelings/consciousness, so you would be the exact same person. The proposed principles behind teleportation involve breaking down a human being and recreating them exactly in another location. It doesn't involve any transportation in the traditional sense.

I for one would be all up for nanotech-aided immortality if it meant experiencing life in a way we've never experienced it before in history, armed with super intelligence that will allow us to have experiences that we couldn't even begin to comprehend now, perhaps completely changing what we think it means to live. Exploring the universe would be a nice plus too :P

riffmongous

Useful.Idiot wrote: »

I have been thinking a lot on this topic recently, mainly prompted from reading this excellent article which outlines why it is very likely that this singularity will happen very soon. It makes a lot of mention of Kurzweil's ideas, but also includes arguments from another camp of experts who believe it may not be a good sign for humanity: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

To the above who said a copy of us wouldn't be us; yes it would be us. If you re-created every single cell, you would recreate all thoughts/feelings/consciousness, so you would be the exact same person. The proposed principles behind teleportation involve breaking down a human being and recreating them exactly in another location. It doesn't involve any transportation in the traditional sense.

I disagree, there is no transfer of consciousness, which is why I also think the teleportation idea, while great for everyone else and your copy is also flawed. If I make a copy of myself without destroying the original (me), is my consciousness now split between the two Riffs? No, there is still me and the identical copy which from that point on has nothing to do with me anymore, it is a separate being.

nokia69

Useful.Idiot wrote: »

To the above who said a copy of us wouldn't be us; yes it would be us. If you re-created every single cell, you would recreate all thoughts/feelings/consciousness, so you would be the exact same person. The proposed principles behind teleportation involve breaking down a human being and recreating them exactly in another location. It doesn't involve any transportation in the traditional sense.

no its just a copy

imagine if right now an exact copy of you just appeared beside you, exact in every way

its still not you, only you are you

if the copy is sitting beside you and you take a sip of beer, only you taste the beer, because there can only be one you, you are still a separate and different person

Dep!

Useful.Idiot wrote: »

I have been thinking a lot on this topic recently, mainly prompted from reading this excellent article which outlines why it is very likely that this singularity will happen very soon. It makes a lot of mention of Kurzweil's ideas, but also includes arguments from another camp of experts who believe it may not be a good sign for humanity: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

That looks like some bedtime reading for me tonight, so long as its not too heavy. Thanks for the share.

The majority of Futurists in that documentary I linked to in my first post would agree that we're looking at a "Skynet becomes self aware" situation with AI. So the question must remain: why build these machines in the first place or even if we build them for health benefits, why let them get to those levels of intelligence?

Dravokivich

I dont think its all that great an idea, why would we want to be npc's?

nokia69

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html#.VNjnAyl3Zz8

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0211/056.html

is suspended animation related to this

Dep!

Dravokivich wrote: »

why would we want to be npc's?

A National Parents Council?

evolving_doors

Useful.Idiot wrote: »

I have been thinking a lot on this topic recently, mainly prompted from reading this excellent article which outlines why it is very likely that this singularity will happen very soon. It makes a lot of mention of Kurzweil's ideas, but also includes arguments from another camp of experts who believe it may not be a good sign for humanity: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

To the above who said a copy of us wouldn't be us; yes it would be us. If you re-created every single cell, you would recreate all thoughts/feelings/consciousness, so you would be the exact same person. The proposed principles behind teleportation involve breaking down a human being and recreating them exactly in another location. It doesn't involve any transportation in the traditional sense.

I think the link between the physicality of cells and the 'magic' of thoughts/feelings and consciousness is being over played here.

To me the 'me-ness' is primarily made up of all the thoughts feelings and consciousness... if we take an analogy of all my thoughts/feelings and consciousness being contained within little parcels (like cars on a road), each of these parcels has a relationship between each other and has communication with each other, thid is dependant upon the time spent with each other (like passangers waving to each other out the window of different cars)..

So... by building an exact physical copy, all folk can do is build the cars and the road, the passangers within have no memory of each other ). To do an EXACT copy you would have to have little algorithms for each passanger ... and each algorithm is related to other algorithms.

To my mind its too complex, given the amount of neurons firing every second at specific levels. So it may as well be a very expensive computer but with no manual (the most we'll get is a basic operating system...).

So therefore we would havw to assume that a 'copy' with all the physical bits mapped would need some time to learn our memories... how would it do that?

Poor Kurzweill should stick to making keyboard synthesisers rather than hoping for human ones.

hmmm

I read an article from I think it was Marvin Minsky years ago (he's an AI pioneer).

He described a thought experiment. You replace one brain cell with an exact computer copy - are you still the same person? Most people would say yes. You replace a second cell with another computer copy. And so on. Eventually, you will have swapped out all of your physical brain cells, and replaced them with computer copies - there's been no point at which you've stopped being you, you've merely swapped out the hardware so to speak.

At that point you have a computer for a brain and the possibilities are endless. A faster processor. More memory. Backups. Emailing yourself to a new country

nokia69

hmmm wrote: »

I read an article from I think it was Marvin Minsky years ago (he's an AI pioneer).

He described a thought experiment. You replace one brain cell with an exact computer copy - are you still the same person? Most people would say yes. You replace a second cell with another computer copy. And so on. Eventually, you will have swapped out all of your physical brain cells, and replaced them with computer copies - there's been no point at which you've stopped being you, you've merely swapped out the hardware so to speak.

At that point you have a computer for a brain and the possibilities are endless. A faster processor. More memory. Backups. Emailing yourself to a new country

well thats not a new idea the Greeks wondered about the same thing

Wereghost

Singularity evangelism strikes me as having the character of a millennial cult; apotheosis and deliverance from the harsh realities of life are presented as being just around the corner. I tend to assume that physical immortality won't become accessible until roughly a month after I die.

The Backwards Man wrote: »

We won't live forever, Brian May was a bit of a visionary himself and this is what he said about uploading our consciousness to the main server

There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?

* checks to see that nothing has happened to Brian May *

Phew!

Great song; used to be my all-time favourite.

reprise

hmmm wrote: »

I read an article from I think it was Marvin Minsky years ago (he's an AI pioneer).

He described a thought experiment. You replace one brain cell with an exact computer copy - are you still the same person? Most people would say yes. You replace a second cell with another computer copy. And so on. Eventually, you will have swapped out all of your physical brain cells, and replaced them with computer copies - there's been no point at which you've stopped being you, you've merely swapped out the hardware so to speak.

At that point you have a computer for a brain and the possibilities are endless. A faster processor. More memory. Backups. Emailing yourself to a new country

If only someone hadn't obfuscated the source code. :mad: