One of the points that Kurzweil repeatedly asserts in the “Response to Criticism” chapter of The Singularity is Near, is that the machines of tomorrow will be much different than the machines of today. This is most pointedly voiced in response to the criticism of Dembski and Denton, who believe that machines do not have access to spirituality and that biological life can’t be recreated or matched due to our flawed approach, which dissects integrated parts and that by doing so, misses a fundamental aspect of unity, respectively. I like that Kurweil constantly argues that future machines will be fundamentally different than current machines and may be just as likely to be conscious as dolphins. It does seem to me that the current hang ups really do stem from a belief that machines are simply nuts, bolts, and grease: linkages, rather than processors. But as we continue in the direction of pattern recognition software that displays emergent properties of intelligence our language to describe this software will change (this kind of parallels the fact that successes in AI become their own fields and are no longer called AI) and we’ll stop calling software and computers machines.
Kurweil is wrong when he says that technology will transcend biology because strong AI will surpass technology (maybe that’s why the cover reads “When humans transcend biology”). One way to think of it, but a sloppy mish-mashed way, is that strong AI is biological and technological, insofar as it can think and therefore is alive: cogito ergo sum. In terms of the direction of technology that Kurweil charts out, the terms technology and biology act more as barriers than useful partitions to guide our thinking and therefore the language must change out of a necessity to understand the world we’ll inhabit. And to me, it’s not unnerving that there may be living-technology. I know that the way that I’ll think about it when I interface with it will be so different than the way I currently project. Right now, I don’t have many points of reference because the debate is about possibilities yet to be measured, as we continue in this direction, there will be more measurements, new words and new commonplaces, albeit foreign commonplaces.
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Hmm, those are some interesting ideas that you’ve pulled out of this chapter. For the most part I felt like the things that he talked about had been covered in the earlier chapters. Also I didn’t even think that his response to criticism was very good. He just seemed to say that everything his critics said wasn’t accurate. I put examples of this in my post, but I just felt that it was kind of a waste of a chapter.
There’s something I admire about Kurzweil including this chapter. The whole book reads as though the singularity is not bizarre; it is definitely radical, but not absurd. And as such, there is not much criticism within the book. Notwithstanding the incredible nature of the predicted changes, within the text he presents his outlook as viable and even inevitable. But culturally, that is not how people feel. Society at large does not currently assume that within fifty years we will become immortal, or at least have found the holy grail. By including this chapter Kurzweil acknowledges that he knows where he stands in relation to centrist views and that he has thought much about why he is standing where he is standing.
Yeah it’s hard to imagine how we would react to something that we usually only see in movies. I think it is really a struggle for us to think we would want to become machines when it’s so against our nature. I think Mr.Ray is more that a little contradictory when he is on the subject of extending our life spans as machines. Yet as you say for now we can only speculate. I’m not sure how I’ll react to some of the technology Mr.Ray presents. How I think then will be totally different from how I think now.
When I meet some of the ideas presented in this book with distaste, I think it is simply because they are unprecedented. I don’t have references, mirrors to help me see the back of my head, so to speak. What I dislike is not the new idea, but the fact that it is new in such a way that my barometer can’t read it. I know that I will be much more comfortable with uncomfortable technology when it is a part of my daily experience because I will have many references, many points of reflection, and many new words to make sense of the pieces that don’t currently make sense. I’m not sure how I’ll react to some of the technology Mr. Ray presents, but I do know that aspects of the technology that may be unsettling now, will be less unsettling then, by virtue of the fact that I will be able to communicate about the technology in a way that I currently cannot.
I am watching Futurama right now, so I’m kind of thinking about conscious machines. The Robot Devil is trying to cheat Fry, the main character, out of his hands and fails, so it’s funny. But imagine if machines were greedy like people are? There are already scams committed via machine; in the future, our sentient machines could decide to cheat us out of our money, happiness, or health. Yes, we’ll always be superior to technology, but if we depend upon it too much, we could be putting ourselves in a bad position.
And I bet robots have really good poker faces, talk about belying emotions.
Yeah so I can definitely see machines changing in the future. They change every minute so I don’t see why its so hard to believe they will be radically different a few years from now. Eventually becoming just like us is probably the most interesting aspect of it. The way I see it they can either be our friends or end up being our enemies. If it comes down to who is more human, robots or humans, well its fight to the death I suppose.