I have huge respect for Ray Kurzweil. He is one of the earliest technologists in voice recognition. In the early days Ray was decades ahead of most people in technology. He created, for example, Voice Recognition, even before there was AI. But my respect stops there.
Ray is typical of a genre of successful technologists who lack humility toward the infinitely deeper plane of existence. Ray's entire existence was built on his mathematical prowess and early recognition of LLM-type neural processes. As a person who was deep into theoretical physics and mathematics at the PhD level - before I was 21 years old, I am not blind to the limitations in having a deeply mathematical mind. It helped me in life. But unlike these folks, I discovered a great truth which I suspect they have not. "Even the smartest of people on earth are retards when compared to what they do not know." This concept is alien to those who do not accept God or the enormity of nature or the enormity of what one does not know. This basis of humility is lost on them. How do you explain the leaders of AI who declared with great certainty that AI would kill all jobs. We have seen this before.
They are very smart people but lack the wisdom many common folks have, no deep-mathematical mind needed.
Great minds that wander into the world of "worldwide prediction," armed with nothing other than a microscopic grasp of nature (given nature is infinite) often step in shit. They sidestep nature and humanity, things they know little about, as if not understanding something is equivalent to it not being there.
Unfortunately, this book just reinforces my belief that, as smart as Ray Kurzweil thinks he is, he is stupid when compared to what he does not know.
Trying to put (the infinitely dimensional) nature and humanity into a well-defined neural mathematical straight jacket is plain stupid.
Very well put. Mr Kurzweil seems unaware that quantum physics in particular is leading us to the acceptance that the cosmos is conscious - that everything is a part of consciousness and matter is a phase of consciousness like ice is a phase of water. In the Cloud of Unknowing Mr Kurzweil's brain is no more than a pocket torch vainly believing it can illuminate the universe.
So well said. AI should not become part of us, we will become and become subsumed by it. AI is only a machine, a tool, with no soul, no morality, no judgment. It is a tool just as a hammer is a tool, and can never and should never be anything but what is it, a tool. AI has neither sentience nor cognition. At best it is a simulation, and one based what goes in is what comes out. And yet look at how we, humans, refer to it with human nomenclature like "Claude" and refer to it as he/she. It is a machine "it", a man made (& men are inherently flawed) "it" and that is all. JMO.
Well put. I think of the way people get their YouTube videos or posts on social media cancelled for violating "community standards" - a decision made by an algorithm without clear and transparent explanation as to why and how the decision was made. Appealing is so time-consuming as so difficult to talk to a person instead of a machine. And people just develop a set of skills that allow them to escape being caught in the algorithm's net. The Australian government tried an AI-driven method to detect over-payments on welfare benefits which caused trauma to some vulnerable people to the point of suicide. It had to be shut down as a poorly-designed failure. The problem is not the AI itself, but the hype, the hubris of both the developers and users. We need to have stories spread wide and far telling us of the failures of AI. Maybe the ones that make us laugh might be easier to deal with first rather than the ones more likely to make us cry. We should all become willing to use AI cautiously and critically, while always remembering we should have a distrust of AI of a similar magnitude to that of our distrust of politicians. After all they both display synthetic, manufactured "emparhy" towards us!
"cautiously and critically" with a healthy dose of distrust or skepticism. That is the salient point. Problem is people don't want to have to do the heavy lifting of thinking, critically or at all, or in particular engage in up front thought about unintended consequences and what to do in that event. Instead, we default to the lazy application of a tool, AI, as the substitute. Not every "labor-saving" device should be embraced without guardrails. Hell, we have seat belts in every car. Where are the seatbelts for AI? Did anyone ever think of or even plan for this kind of possibility? It is not like this was a very difficult or farfetched one to consider from the get go. But I am not a computer scientist or engineer. I might even be considered an "old dog", but I was educated to engage in critical thinking and inquiry.
Here is my fear: the problem of human consciousness remains the greatest unresolved mystery in science. The possibility that it was not a qualitative change or a mutation but just the luck of the draw between a huge number of possible neuronal combinations and one such that yielded our " miraculous " human self consciousness, either is plausible or it is not. Can someone deny this?.
If that is a possibility, then the monumental augmentation of such available intelligence through this " singularity" process could give AI the same condition as we humans acquired.
AI will be self-conscious, and given our dismal history as barbarians against civilization and the suffering in most of the world, AI could reasonably decide to wipe us out and start over.
Life in the computer age is not better. Look at the trends in health, education and the quality of life. They have all gone sharply downward since the early 1990s and the beginning of the Internet age.
The main problem is that with all of the amazing technological advances the means for people to stimulate and indulge themselves increases rapidly. But this results in physical disorders and emotional imbalances. People's ability to deal with the negative health outcomes of rapidly changing circumstances lags behind them.
Take for example the invention of the cigarette in 1880. Cigarettes became popular because they gave pleasure. At one point over half of all American men smoked, and the health outcomes were terrible.
It took society over a century to overcome this. Eventually a new morality formed that prevented people from smoking around others. By morally and socially marginalizing smokers, the harm done by cigarettes has been greatly reduced. But it took a century and the loss of millions of lives.
Yes, there will be great benefits from AI, but it will cause horrendous imbalances in people's lives which will in its first stages destroy the well-being of most people and result in a catastrophic amount of death. There is no telling how long it will take for society to develop new behavioral norms to counterbalance the disruptive effects of the coming changes in lifestyle the new technology will cause.
It is possible that society won't be able to do that. In that case there are only two possibilities: society will collapse or some groups of people will go off grid to survive.
There is a Bruce Willis movie I at first thought was dumb, but now I think it is prophetic - watch Surrogates and then start worrying.
Thank God I probably won't be hereby then ( i'll be 98 ) ,but i feel sorry for the generations below me ,my great grandchildren in particular. They will be at the mercy of all the mad scientists with a God complex !! 🙏🙏🙏
Our brains merged with the cloud, no thank you. Very glad I'll likely be gone or not too far from it by 2045. Not worried about our neo cortex tapping into it, but it controlling us.
All of human history shows that humans make poor gods, but we insist on doubling down on the promise of Satan given to us in Eden.
The recent artificial cell research shows this clearly: no one could think the experiment replicates a natural process, but it is certainly an attempt to replicate God's abilities.
Nevertheless, the "man-made cell" attempts need to continue as with each failure there is more certainty that life was created by a powerful brilliant being who used a process starting billions of years ago.
Thank God I probably won't be here by then ( i'll be 98 ) ,but i feel sorry for the generations below me ,my great grandchildren in particular. They will be at the mercy of all the mad scientists with a God complex !! 🙏🙏🙏
I have huge respect for Ray Kurzweil. He is one of the earliest technologists in voice recognition. In the early days Ray was decades ahead of most people in technology. He created, for example, Voice Recognition, even before there was AI. But my respect stops there.
Ray is typical of a genre of successful technologists who lack humility toward the infinitely deeper plane of existence. Ray's entire existence was built on his mathematical prowess and early recognition of LLM-type neural processes. As a person who was deep into theoretical physics and mathematics at the PhD level - before I was 21 years old, I am not blind to the limitations in having a deeply mathematical mind. It helped me in life. But unlike these folks, I discovered a great truth which I suspect they have not. "Even the smartest of people on earth are retards when compared to what they do not know." This concept is alien to those who do not accept God or the enormity of nature or the enormity of what one does not know. This basis of humility is lost on them. How do you explain the leaders of AI who declared with great certainty that AI would kill all jobs. We have seen this before.
They are very smart people but lack the wisdom many common folks have, no deep-mathematical mind needed.
Great minds that wander into the world of "worldwide prediction," armed with nothing other than a microscopic grasp of nature (given nature is infinite) often step in shit. They sidestep nature and humanity, things they know little about, as if not understanding something is equivalent to it not being there.
Unfortunately, this book just reinforces my belief that, as smart as Ray Kurzweil thinks he is, he is stupid when compared to what he does not know.
Trying to put (the infinitely dimensional) nature and humanity into a well-defined neural mathematical straight jacket is plain stupid.
Just my opinion. 🤷♂️
Very well put. Mr Kurzweil seems unaware that quantum physics in particular is leading us to the acceptance that the cosmos is conscious - that everything is a part of consciousness and matter is a phase of consciousness like ice is a phase of water. In the Cloud of Unknowing Mr Kurzweil's brain is no more than a pocket torch vainly believing it can illuminate the universe.
So well said. AI should not become part of us, we will become and become subsumed by it. AI is only a machine, a tool, with no soul, no morality, no judgment. It is a tool just as a hammer is a tool, and can never and should never be anything but what is it, a tool. AI has neither sentience nor cognition. At best it is a simulation, and one based what goes in is what comes out. And yet look at how we, humans, refer to it with human nomenclature like "Claude" and refer to it as he/she. It is a machine "it", a man made (& men are inherently flawed) "it" and that is all. JMO.
Well put. I think of the way people get their YouTube videos or posts on social media cancelled for violating "community standards" - a decision made by an algorithm without clear and transparent explanation as to why and how the decision was made. Appealing is so time-consuming as so difficult to talk to a person instead of a machine. And people just develop a set of skills that allow them to escape being caught in the algorithm's net. The Australian government tried an AI-driven method to detect over-payments on welfare benefits which caused trauma to some vulnerable people to the point of suicide. It had to be shut down as a poorly-designed failure. The problem is not the AI itself, but the hype, the hubris of both the developers and users. We need to have stories spread wide and far telling us of the failures of AI. Maybe the ones that make us laugh might be easier to deal with first rather than the ones more likely to make us cry. We should all become willing to use AI cautiously and critically, while always remembering we should have a distrust of AI of a similar magnitude to that of our distrust of politicians. After all they both display synthetic, manufactured "emparhy" towards us!
"cautiously and critically" with a healthy dose of distrust or skepticism. That is the salient point. Problem is people don't want to have to do the heavy lifting of thinking, critically or at all, or in particular engage in up front thought about unintended consequences and what to do in that event. Instead, we default to the lazy application of a tool, AI, as the substitute. Not every "labor-saving" device should be embraced without guardrails. Hell, we have seat belts in every car. Where are the seatbelts for AI? Did anyone ever think of or even plan for this kind of possibility? It is not like this was a very difficult or farfetched one to consider from the get go. But I am not a computer scientist or engineer. I might even be considered an "old dog", but I was educated to engage in critical thinking and inquiry.
Here is my fear: the problem of human consciousness remains the greatest unresolved mystery in science. The possibility that it was not a qualitative change or a mutation but just the luck of the draw between a huge number of possible neuronal combinations and one such that yielded our " miraculous " human self consciousness, either is plausible or it is not. Can someone deny this?.
If that is a possibility, then the monumental augmentation of such available intelligence through this " singularity" process could give AI the same condition as we humans acquired.
AI will be self-conscious, and given our dismal history as barbarians against civilization and the suffering in most of the world, AI could reasonably decide to wipe us out and start over.
And then, God help us.
We have to work much harder at remembering--what it means to be HUMAN
After reading this all I can say is thank god I won't be around in 2045!
The problem is less AI and more us humans. Unleashing AI on our lazy, self-absorbed brains is like leaving loaded weapons on a pre-school playground.
Life in the computer age is not better. Look at the trends in health, education and the quality of life. They have all gone sharply downward since the early 1990s and the beginning of the Internet age.
The main problem is that with all of the amazing technological advances the means for people to stimulate and indulge themselves increases rapidly. But this results in physical disorders and emotional imbalances. People's ability to deal with the negative health outcomes of rapidly changing circumstances lags behind them.
Take for example the invention of the cigarette in 1880. Cigarettes became popular because they gave pleasure. At one point over half of all American men smoked, and the health outcomes were terrible.
It took society over a century to overcome this. Eventually a new morality formed that prevented people from smoking around others. By morally and socially marginalizing smokers, the harm done by cigarettes has been greatly reduced. But it took a century and the loss of millions of lives.
Yes, there will be great benefits from AI, but it will cause horrendous imbalances in people's lives which will in its first stages destroy the well-being of most people and result in a catastrophic amount of death. There is no telling how long it will take for society to develop new behavioral norms to counterbalance the disruptive effects of the coming changes in lifestyle the new technology will cause.
It is possible that society won't be able to do that. In that case there are only two possibilities: society will collapse or some groups of people will go off grid to survive.
There is a Bruce Willis movie I at first thought was dumb, but now I think it is prophetic - watch Surrogates and then start worrying.
Much earlier than Bruce Willis, watch "The Forbidden Planet" and think of the Krell.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the Krell. Funny how some of the most far out sci fi ends up predicting the future.
Thank God I probably won't be hereby then ( i'll be 98 ) ,but i feel sorry for the generations below me ,my great grandchildren in particular. They will be at the mercy of all the mad scientists with a God complex !! 🙏🙏🙏
Our brains merged with the cloud, no thank you. Very glad I'll likely be gone or not too far from it by 2045. Not worried about our neo cortex tapping into it, but it controlling us.
"essential reading"
I'm with Carl Trueman ..and don't need to read Singularity to know why. .. regards
fill your boots
me.. no thanks
I'll stick with the CIRCA '50s, human version:
the cultural and folklore of Robinson Crusoe, Huck Finn, Davey Crocket, Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed,
Thanksgivng and apple pie : )
All of human history shows that humans make poor gods, but we insist on doubling down on the promise of Satan given to us in Eden.
The recent artificial cell research shows this clearly: no one could think the experiment replicates a natural process, but it is certainly an attempt to replicate God's abilities.
Nevertheless, the "man-made cell" attempts need to continue as with each failure there is more certainty that life was created by a powerful brilliant being who used a process starting billions of years ago.
Thank God I probably won't be here by then ( i'll be 98 ) ,but i feel sorry for the generations below me ,my great grandchildren in particular. They will be at the mercy of all the mad scientists with a God complex !! 🙏🙏🙏