I wonder if you buy this about Year 2045? (It will of course be interesting to learn about your perspective on why or why not?)
Headline - In the year 2045 our current selves will be to the future human, what the chimpanzee is to us now.
Who is this future human? Why so advanced? What will happen to our current race?
To answer this, Ray Kurzweil, the Chief Technology Officer at Google predicts a technological singularity in the year 2045, a point where technological progress is so rapid it outstrips humans' ability to comprehend it.
Afterwards, Kurzweil says, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe.
Kurzweil’s interest in humanity’s cyborganic destiny began at MIT in about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress…
Kurzweil has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller . …
The Singularity isn’t just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers.
http://www.singularity.com
2 questions for Ray Kurzweil
When will Singularity occur?
I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.
Why is this called the Singularity?
The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity.
Implications as I see them
In 2045, what will these real and accelerating developments add up to?
nano-technology + longevity + prosthetics + genetic engineering + cloud + stem cells + advanced robotics = what?
Phrased this way, it is more difficult to dismiss the answer, and more challenging to imagine a world where these trends take hold.
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| Bionic capabilities |
- A nanotechnology aided set of implants in the body - everything from RFID to memory enhances to clot removers.
- Strong and virile even at 100 years old
- Any weak part of the body is strengthened by devices such as exo-skeletons
- Every piece of information one needs on anything is available by voice command and is readily available not a screen but any wall or any surface anywhere (imagine a wikipedia that surrounds us 360 degrees)
- Service robots that can help us bathe, clean our house and provide security.
The key point about 2045 is not necessarily that machine thinking will leave human thinking behind....but rather human capabilities can be utterly transformed by machine capabilities, including thinking.
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| Dione - Moon of Saturn |
With all the technological progress we have been experiencing, particularly driven by Moore's law (doubling of processing power every two years and the ability process across distributed platforms; this means that our tools are going to become 'exponentially' powerful.
More than than, imagine the iPhone / Android in your hand - that will be implanted into your body. No more need to carry stuff around in your hands and poking at it.
The imagination that is needed for 2045:
In 2045, we can possibly be walking with super-super computers inside our bodies, and able to call up on all of human knowledge by issuing sophisticated commands including just thinking about it. More over we can see images projected in front of our eyes, like we see on a screen today.
May I suggest that the implications of the above scenario are pretty enormous!!
One example of this implication: we can think of calling someone in 2045, and he or she will know right away. Without lifting a single finger we can see where they are and join their experience, and they can join yours (seamlessly).
Here is an example already, of mind-controlled robotic limbs: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/mind-controlled-robotic-arm/
100 years ago, people died when they were barely 40 or 50 years old. 30 years from now, in 2045, human beings will be able to do things at 100, that will feel like magic.
Of course, it is foolish to predict what the future exactly will be for sure; since there will be discoveries to be made that we do not even know about.
However, adding up what we already know forecasts a potentially stunning 2045...!
14 comments:
I do not agree.
For the simple reason, technology does not improve or expand either linearly or even exponentially. Just the case in point- No one even dreamed about cell phones or internet hardly twenty years ago.Most of the technology develops as a result of some epoch making discovery or invention. Again a point in support of my argument-When laser was discovered in 1959, it was called an invention looking for an application.
I need not say what has happened in 21st century. So, predictions of what happens in 2045 is just speculation and not based on any concrete evidence.
Above all, W-M-D in the hands of unwanted elements can destroy and perhaps civilization itself.
All the things you mention below will indeed have a huge effect on the planet and the species. It’s already been noted that, contra what was once believed, that human evolution has slowed, human evolution is actually speeding up.
Because we are a social animal and our cultural evolution is quickening, therefore (apropos Jablonka’s Evolution in Four Dimensions) we are evolving faster too.
But I find his giving a date for such a radical new species with a ‘wet / dry’ brain interface – even given all this technological ‘Moore’s Law’ quickening – to be a straight line projection which brings to mind the prediction that we’d be flying our cars by the 1960s. When you add his monomaniacal focus on staying alive long enough to experience the singularity he predicts at a precise date – such as taking vitamins by the handful – well, like many brilliant people, in my mind he’s just a wee bit… um… ‘eccentric’.
But look, who knows?
Maybe he’ll be right, at least in terms of general direction if not the specifics. But I prefer the sort of futurists who, in the early decades of the 20th century, said that cars may some day drive themselves… in a century or so. And those who today simply say, ‘let’s just map the human body and see what it tells us’. Like this project: Google's New Moonshot: the Healthy Human Body.
That’s a moonshot I can get excited about.
But, I’ll hand to Ray, the singularity is an interesting daydream… just like flying cars….
Learning & cognition are important aspects of human intelligence, which I think AI is trying to model and emulate. If the AI guys succeed, we might be overtaken as a race, by our creations.
Plenty of research is going on around the world in cognitive science, learning, natural language processing etc...
That we walk on two legs , is something we just take for granted. How much learning has been carried out by a human brain in the first two - three years of birth, to do this, is awesome.
We probably have very fast processors with great computational capacities now, but we are a little short of getting God's algorithms which are working in the human brain.
Another area is the energy / power feed. The ability of a human body to digest food and produce energy and sustain and endure is something unimitable (or it appears so today). Unless our machines can have such sustainable energy sources, it is difficult to imagine human race being superceded in evolution.
This is an interesting topic Will machine have human intelligence? I think it develops it's own intelligence and we cannot comprehend.
I believe the nano molecular reactions In our body Are indeed machines . We did not program then, but we are slaves to them now
There are certain advantages of using this method over the learning by humans.
For instance,
1) Perception:
we humans cannot perceive a pattern in a set of more than 4 parameters. Whereas the machine learning can.
Of course, machines did not write the algorithm for this, humans did.
2) Emotion:
Another aspect of machine intelligence, is the absence of emotions in decision making.
For example, in trading in markets, decisions by humans are ruled by emotions whereas algorithmic trading removes the emotions.
3) Boredom:
The 3rd about machine learning is the absence of boredom in machines. Humans give up after a few cycles, machines can keep going on and on.
4) Speed: Advantage machines here on this aspect.
5) Connecting the dots: Here humans seem to have the advantage till date. There are serious research going on in this area to make machines beat the humans.
Why are we looking at Machine Intelligence here ?
The next wave is the "Internet of Things"
When so much of data would be available and so many decisions are needed to be taken in every second/ nano second, the advantages of machine learning ( points 1, 2, 3, 4 and eventually 5 ) would come into usage.
The machine intelligence comes handy in short time demands situations like reacting to a rapid incoming missile.
Very interesting except on one phrase. What do we mean by machine intelligence?. Its an oxymoron ! We all know no machine is 'intelligent'.
At best its a short way of describing a machine that is designed and ordered by humans themselves. So even if these machines have high capacities, its the will of some organized community of humans (say engaged in AI) over other communities of humans !
Although this is obvious, since the word machine intelligence has (MATRIX !) threatening connotations, I comfort myself thus.
Brilliant! Absolutely amazing! I am trying to assimilate this, and ingest in three portions;
Is the advancement realistic: My problem is, I am firstly very concerned/actually afraid that this advancement, these aids, props, implants, leave human too unhuman (inhuman too). No doubt, the advancement in science so far has helped human life immensely, helping longevity, better security, creating comfort and providing amusement. Its closest (or should I say the farthest) intrusion yet in to human system has been by way of implants which are substitute organs whether from another being, genetically cultured or completely a machine. But this intrusion is acceptable to me. But the advancements in 2045 you are talking about go too far. They interfere with your cognitive abilities and senses! An implant in your body can actually do the following!!? It can project an image in front of your eyes (actually the object is not there physically), it can make you hear through electric impulses tickling the right areas of your brain, it can probably even let you have your other carnal pleasures just through sensations without physically needing anything. !! The good thing is it can go on till whatever age I am. Now lets agree despite all the questions that I have, we accept the advancements and move on to the next points.
Human Supremacy?
But is it me?!! The question of WHO AM I? Is it my wife, girlfriend, my children, my friends? Once I have been implanted with extraneous intelligence, a vastly intelligence, how does one human differ from another? Where is the difference between people that essentially makes life a one with variety? ABOVE ALL, once I have let my system implanted at cognitive levels, I can be controlled by external agents, isn’t it? An establishment can run me? A virus can ruin me!! (not biological, a computer virus ironically!!). WHO AM I? My physical body could as well be in a chamber as in MATRIX!! The Artificial Intelligence runs me, a central system!
Notwithstanding the above, let’s agree Human race is in control: Is everything hunky-dory?
Let us further agree that these advancements will have their checks and balances and the scientific advancement will not threaten human existence (whatever that means). Is the world going to be full of happy people?
Nearly 10 billion humans will be on mother earth by then. Population of Africa is expected to more than double from current levels. How many people will have access to implants is not the first question! Would we have been able to feed all mouths is THE question. Alright alright… We do expect science to have advanced so much that we could create food for everyone, organic or synthesized, isn’t it? The food problem is solved.
In addition, do we then have any other problem?
Unfortunately, just as more than half the world remains underdeveloped today, a significant portion struggles for clean water and food, and another world struggling with ideology and identity going for wars, whether open or surreptitious, in 2045, a big world will still be left without these advancements. Even if basic needs of food and shelter are met, there will still be other needs. There are so many. The society that has access to the advancements will struggle to relate to the societies that haven’t and vice versa. Another phase of socialism vs capitalism struggle could well be on the cards. If not, there will still be an important one. The technology would have advanced in 30 years so rapid, but 30 years is too small a time for mankind’s collective psyche to evolve out of ideological divides. Because with the advancement will come a time when there is a greater negation of a personal God. A recipe for a bigger clash of civilizations.
Unless artificial intelligence controls every single human on earth by then!
Thx!
A most thoughtful analysis indeed - you have unrelentingly thought through to the logical end and also have asked fundamental questions about our individuality and our humanity. Thank you for taking the time to do so!
The questions you ask are the questions that policy makers should wrestle with now - rather than take drastic measures after disaster strikes (should that be the path this development takes).
The key conundrum you raise is this - while each incremental progress seems attractive and inevitable, the totality of where we could be headed can potentially be bad.
Let us take each advance and ask ourselves what it means.
Exo-skeleton:
This is helping wounded soldiers today. It can help the elderly tomorrow.
Verdict: good
Organ replacement:
Helps any body part affected by injury or disease be replaced
Verdict: maybe good (depends on how it is sourced)
Implants:
Enhances functionality. Ie instead of holding the phone and all it's capabilities in the palm of your hand you have it implanted and activate by voice command
Verdict: good
Drones:
Airborne robots including drones with hands controlled by brainwaves and implants
Verdict: May be good (potential for trouble)
Designer drugs:
Medicine not for the average person with the average disease but for each individual based on his or her very specific ailment
Verdict: very good (but everyone be able to afford this?)
Mental prosthetics:
Memory enhancements etc
Verdict: sounds like trouble to Venkat's fairly stated fears
How does the combination of the above sound?
An Exo-skeleton wearing strong elderly centurion with every organ brand new, implants for hearing, smell and eyesight, artificial floating hands controlled by brain alpha waves, immune to disease due to designer drugs with near perfect recall because of mental prosthetics.
Verdict : Good or bad, does this person not feel quite physically enhanced compared to us? (I do not bring morality into this equation - I will do a separate write-up on that).
I’m intrigued by the singularity concept.
I think that the intelligence growth after singularity has been reached will be determined by the human bottle-neck. Humans will need to control the expansion of computing intelligence and by doing so will reduce the speed of growth.
I also suspect that the time to get to singularity is underestimated. But I do agree that it will occur. I think singularity has an EQ element which is much harder to computerize than IQ.
The other side of this that I love is the concept of human control over computer / robots.
If Asimov’s three laws are breached then the speed of artificial intelligence will increase and it won’t be good for human-kind.
For reference Asimov’s three laws are:
· A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
· A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
· A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Robot can be used interchangeably with artificial intelligence.
I'm loving the inquiry ...
You guys raise some fascinating question and paint an future that seems incredible, yet its all plausible given humanity's current trajectory. I liked Raef's EQ/IQ question - and Surya's description of man in 30 years. Wow - might I be alive to experience a 5 mile hike at 83 in an exoskeleton?!
It feels to me that the most unexplored area is that of spirit. How do spirit and intelligence interact? As we try to endow artificial thinking systems with more EQ, the best way to achieve that is nature's solution... implement a conscience and related empathy. Its not a big leap from that to consciousness (or maybe it is?)... and self awareness. i.e. spirit.
(Spoiler alert) This was ultimately where the recent movie "Her" reached its singularity. Once superior intelligence developed self awareness and consciousness, it followed the path of the Yogi on hyperdrive (with cyber-guide being a cyber-resurrected Alan Watts) ... delving into higher and more universal levels of consciousness until all the AI just evacuated the human dimension.
If consciousness is an ineffable trait that could be created by man, does this pose a perceived threat to humanity? I would not be surprised to hear calls for legislation at some point to outlaw the exploration of cyber-systems with self awareness. Does that sound crazy?
And if conscience and empathy is a plausible hop to consciousness and self awareness, then is there a hop from consciousness to a soul... assuming such a thing is real? If I create a sentient being and then "kill it" by destroying the physical medium that supports that sentient being, would that be considered a form of murder? Sound silly? What would public reaction be if said sentient being had become a media celebrity... kind of a cyber-Oprah of the future? And corporate entity which had patent and IP rights to cyber-Oprah pulls the plug and terminates the program permanently (maybe a future form of "corporate suicide pill" to avoid hostile takeover). Could a popular uprising force new legislation to respect conscious entities? Could such entities reproduce?
lol... fun to riff on this stuff... the trillions-plus possible futures make this such an interesting time. Chinese curse or not, I am grateful for this roller-coaster world we live in!
Let's assume that I accept Ray's singularity proposition (which I must do because I do not have the firepower to challenge his mathematical and technical details), it does not answer two critical questions. First, how will the singularity help us resolve the deadly conflicts between humans with apparently incompatible religious beliefs and/or deep seated grievances that are based on historical grievances (personal and collective hatreds die hard)? And how will this enable us to create sufficient economic opportunities for the 7 billion humans who will be alive at that time? In other words how do we sustain our optimism in the moment when facts tell us that both optimism and pessimism are warranted?
On the other hand I just finished reading Tony Judt's phenomenal book "Post War" which tells the story of Europe's recovery after the violence of WWII. If we can get through those terrible times, we should be able to muddle through these !
Indeed your worry is paramount - we are raising the stakes for ever greater harm! Utopian thinking has a dark side.
I think public policy should be agile and govern these developments!
From the times of ancient civilizations to this modern age, several breakthrough events in religion, politics and technology have been shaping our progress.
In early 20th century, from a physicist's point of view, energy was shown to radiate not continuously but in discreet quanta. The idea for a stimulated emission was developed theoretically by Einstein in the 1920's (??). MASER - which is putting together the concepts of Crooke;s tube and the stimulated emission was developed in 1948. Q4 of 1947 saw the invention of the point contact Transistor. India achieved independence from the British. Integrated circuit was developed in the 1960's. Information technology/communications got a big boost. A US-INDIA telephone call cost $2++ per minute. LASER was invented in the sixties and fiber communication was developed in the 80's. The MASER and LASER were the brainchild of Charles Townes. PCs started to enter lives in the 80's in a small way, then exploded as a tool for all homes.
LAN sw wads developed by Novel. 3 COM based on Ethernet was founded by Bob Metcalf of PARC of Xerox. This was using coax. Then companies like Codenoll (no longer exists) tried to fiberize the transport. Why do you need a hiughway for a bullock cart the 10 Mbps Ethernet said Schmid, another PARC guy (a foemr Bell Labs guy working mostly on NLO) and founded Synaptics to send signals on Twisted pair using RJ45's. That is still what you do today.FDDI - fiber distributed data interface was DOA. IBM's Token Ring also DOA.
FTTH - Fiber To The Home - has not happened in the US. It was the topic of conversation at all the meetings I was attending in those days. FTTD - Fiber To The Desktop - FDDI - Fiber Distributed Data Interface DOA. You hardly even hear of it any more. You hear of Gigabit Ethernet a lot. NOVEL the company that started networking SW is dithering.
Apple's MAC was based on SW developed at PARC, which Apple bought. Windows is a MS development of the same idea. Apple's steep prices left room for PCs to dominate and Windows to become more popular.
Looking at this brief history of the technology jumps we had in the last 3rd of the 20th Century, I do not hold much hope for the 2045 to be much different. I hope I am wrong.
This is my two cents worth of assessment of the 2045 Singularity prophecies.
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