Comment by ConceptJunkie
8 years ago
I think you're right. I haven't read the article, but I think Kurzweil is perpetually too optimistic about what we can achieve, at least in how fast it will happen. There are cool things happening, and lots of advances being made, but we are nowhere near anything that could really be called AI.
Plus, I think all the marketing use "AI" is giving a very distorted and inflated view to the average person of what software is actually doing, and what it's capable of.
It's a buzzword, full stop.
Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die. So all of his predictions are always timed just so that the technology needed to live forever will be within his projected natural lifespan.
That doesn't make him wrong, but that's the personal bias he's operating under.
I'm really happy that the world is shifting from billionaires that just want more money to billionaires that understand that it doesn't mean anything if they don't finance solving the problem of dieing.
I view all the polititians who have the power of advancing healthcare research but not doing it stupid.
I can see a world with the means to escape natural death be one of social, cultural and technological stagnation.
Just living longer doesn't mean that humans become any wiser on average. There will maybe be some benefits of longer-lasting first-hand experience of historical events (pushing the 'historical horizon' to more than 100 years) but to me it's like switching from a simulated annealing method (or stochastic gradient descent) to a simple local gradient descent in terms of getting society/culture/technology to adapt and find anything better than the status quo.
Worst case, such a technology serves to create an almost eternal ruling class. Best case, it results in societies with either two classes of people (those who may extend their lives longer and those who may not) or societies that tightly regulate who may have children.
Getting rid of suffering and cancer is one thing, getting rid of natural death carries a rat-tail of consequences.
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> it doesn't mean anything if they don't finance solving the problem of dieing.
There's no solution to death. You can only put it off, but something will assuredly kill you in time. If it's not aging, then it will be cancer, heart disease, an accident, etc. Ultimately, entropy will get you one way or another.
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Yet die he will.
> That doesn't make him wrong, but that's the personal bias he's operating under.
And in the meantime he can sell his vitamins and supplements to "make people live longer" despite zero evidence. Good business both ways.
> Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die.
So strange, considering that non-existence is the one thing that every conscious being is guaranteed to never experience. Why run from something that can never catch you?
Because creatures who felt compelled to run from it had a better chance of passing on their genes than creatures who didn’t, leaving us all with an instinctual desire to avoid death.
That is a logical argument, but presumes existence is logical. - Another thing to cast into doubt when staring as deep as you do seem to into the abyss.
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He values continuing to experience, like most people.
> Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die
What a shit life must that be. And I say this in a very sympathetic way. However, feeling you are almost in reach of eternal life, but not being sure you'll make it in time, being constantly afraid of an accident, or illness, taking that away from you... It's a recipe for anguish and panic.
Dying is not that terrible when you know everybody else will too, sooner or later; but try accepting the idea of being among the last to die..
Isn’t his argument basically that humans suck at estimating exponential growth, tending to be biased towards a linear expectation?
Wait but why had a nice article series digging a bit deeper into that https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
It's kind of funny since I would say the singularity is a result of being bad at estimating exponential growth, since all exponential growth eventually hits some limiting factor and slows down, like a sigmoid.