Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain

Irrepressible bio-blogger PZ Myers has attacked futurist inventor and author Ray Kurzweil on his blog, accusing Mr. Kurzweil of failing to understand the human brain. But it seems that Mr. Myers was unwittingly attacking second-hand accounts of a talk given by Kurzweil, rather than responding to Mr. Kurzweil's actual claims. Kurzweil takes Myers to the woodshed for that mistake.

Other prominent tech- and mind-bloggers such as Brian Wang and George Dvorsky have reacted to this tiff, appropriately pointing readers to Mr. Kurzweil's actual words on the topic.

Lost in all the ballyhoo is the obvious fact that in reality, neither Kurzweil nor Myers understand very much about the brain. But is that clear fact of mutual brain ignorance relevant to the underlying issue -- Kurzweil's claim that science will be able to "reverse-engineer" the human brain within 20 years? In other words, Ray Kurzweil expects humans to build a brain-functional machine in the next 2 decades based largely upon concepts learned from studying how brains/minds think.

Clearly Kurzweil is not claiming that he will be able to understand human brains down to the most intricate detail, nor is he claiming that his new machine brain will emulate the brain down to its cell signaling proteins, receptors, gene expression, and organelles. Myers seems to become a bit bogged down in the details of his own objections to his misconceptions of what Kurzweil is claiming, and loses the thread of his argument -- which can be summed up by Myers' claim that Kurzweil is a "kook."

But Kurzweil's amazing body of thought and invention testifies to the fact that Kurzweil is probably no more a kook than any other genius inventor/visionary. Calling someone a "kook" is apparently considered clever in the intellectual circles which Mr. Myers' and the commenters on his blog travel, but in the thinking world such accusations provide too little information to be of much use.

Clearly if Mr. Kurzweil understood the brain, he could simply sit down and design an artificial brain based upon the principles which he already understands. The fact that Kurzweil places the development of such a human-level thinking machine 2 decades in the future, suggests that Kurzweil himself is not attempting to disguise his lack of comprehensive understanding of the brain.

I should point out that it is neuroscientist Henry Markram who is attempting to reverse-engineer a human brain to incredibly exquisite levels of biological detail -- in an attempt to study the function and potential pathologies of the brain. Kurzweil is not taking that path of reverse-engineering, but is rather attempting to extract principles of higher level mental functioning from the study of the brain. These "higher level mental functions" may appear to be quite low-level to a lay-person, but to a neurobiologist they will seem quite high-level indeed.

Life scientists do not understand life, really. Take this interesting Spiegel Online interview with Craig Venter on the genome. You would think that if anyone would understand the genome, it would be Craig Venter. But no, he admits that he does not -- not nearly to the extent that he intends to, at least. That is why he goes to work every day, because he understands just enough to want to understand more.

So while PZ Myers apparently fell off the wavelength upon which Ray Kurzweil was transmitting, that is no reason why the rest of us cannot follow Kurzweil's progress in his quest -- as food for thought.

Full Disclosure: Al Fin has in the past criticised Ray Kurzweil's approach to artificial intelligence as being insufficiently nuanced -- based upon Kurzweil's own writings. But a man with Mr. Kurzweil's track record of accomplishments is not one who should be written off. Such a person has been wrong innumerable times in his past, and has come back to correct his mistakes and move far beyond them. Every person of high achievement must go through such a process of being wrong and learning from it. It is one of the disgraces of modern education, culture, and child-raising that "being wrong" or "failing" at something, is considered to be an object of shame or disgrace. Far from being disgraceful, it is a necessary part of living and learning.

It is the dogmatist who is unwilling or unable to learn from his mistakes who should be avoided. The person who is unwilling to put in the necessary hard work to correct his own faulty assumptions and innate prejudices, is the person who will achieve little in the end. Except, perhaps, for calling everyone who disagrees with him a kook.

Singularity University: Vaulting Into the Beyond

Looking over the array of geopolitical disasters and catastrophic lack of visionary leadership in the world, it would seem that you cannot get to the singularity from here. You will need to either "tunnel" below, or vault above the dysfunctional world of nation-states, religious fiefdoms, and tribal clash. The best work of the best scientists and technologists will only be bent to the will of the worst megalomaniacs and power hungry con-men. What to do?

Peter Diamandis (X-Prize) and Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) decided to jump-start the singularity by opening the Singularity University on the NASA Ames campus, near Stanford University, in the generative Silicon Valley.

The school hopes to attract students from a cross section of emerging disciplines - including nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology - to tackle huge issues facing humanity. Pandemics and global health care concerns would be typical in scope and import.

"We are reaching out across the globe to gather the smartest and most passionate future leaders and arm them with the tools and network they need to wrestle with the grand challenges of our day," said Diamandis, who is perhaps best known for his current work as chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a group that gives $10 million awards to teams working on breakthroughs in fields such as space travel and genomics. "There is no existing program that will offer the breadth and intensity that SU will offer."

...Kurzweil and Diamandis began talking about creating the school last year, which led to a semi-secret meeting on the grounds of NASA Ames on Sept. 20.

Nobel Prize-winning scientists joined up with NASA engineers and executives from companies like Google Inc. to brainstorm ideas for the new university.

In the end, Google provided some money and NASA provided the physical space to house the school.

Google co-founder Larry Page played a key role in focusing the school's mission, encouraging its founders to "address the grand challenges of humanity," according to Kurzweil.

Unlike a traditional university, Singularity will consist of a single, nine-week course of study every summer, during which 120 students from a cross-section of disciplines will mix together to tackle weighty issues. Tuition will be $25,000. Candidates will be chosen mostly from graduate and post-graduate programs around the world. _SFGate_via_BrianWang

Will the Singularity University provide the right mix of rigour, non-conventional insight and inspiration, and directional foresight to produce graduates who are more like the school's founders (Kurzweil and Diamandis) and less like the Ivy League Whizzards of Wall Street and Washington DC -- whose blindly greedy and grasping hands would seemingly steal the future from us in their quest for ever more power and loot? Or will graduates of S.U. become yet more cogs in the machine that empowers the kleptocracies firmly ensconced in the world's capitals?

Believe me when I say that no one in power wants anything even close to "a singularity" to occur, much less "The Singularity." Discontinuities from wildly disruptive technologies will be the end of current power structures. Such disruption would bypass many current problems and create new sets of problems that today's conformists and tenured, bureaucratic minds could never understand -- much less solve.

The Singularity University sounds a good deal more serious about solving problems than most of the "gee-whiz! futurism" that has floated around the various futurist and trans-humanist organisations of the western world for decades. It is likely that some good things will come of it.

But -- "The Singularity?" Probably not. But SU may well spawn some of the seeds that lead to accelerating disruption.

More at Brian Wang's NextBigFuture and at Business Week.

Visionaries, Inventors, Engineers, and the People Who Actually Get Things Done

Nanotechnology theorist and visionary Eric Drexler has played a vital part in bringing the promise and danger of molecular assembly to the public's attention. But he has never actually built a molecular assembler. This is the nature of today's important advances in "nanotechnology:"

A new high-resolution positioning & scanning system providing 25 picometers resolution is available.
The minute P-363 PicoCubeÆ, together with its low noise E-536 driver / controller, provide significantly higher resolution and positional stability than previous multi-axis scanning stages.

How Do PicoCubeÆ Scanners Differ from Traditional Scanner Tubes?
PicoCube systems were designed to overcome the limitations of open-loop piezo-tube based scanners which provide high resolution motion but poor linearity and trajectory guidance.
The compact PicoCube is based on exceptionally robust, high-stiffness piezo drives rather than tubes and employs non-contact, direct-measuring, parallel-metrology capacitive sensors for position feedback. The low-inertia drives allow for a resonant frequency of 10 kHz, important for high speed scanning applications

Source

Such devices are useful for atomic force microscopy and nano-manipulation. Of course, such devices are nothing like a molecular assembler, and can certainly not make copies of themselves. Nevertheless, they are useful in the slow and incremental study of molecular/atomic scale forces and structures. They are designed by engineers, and manufactured by machines and human assemblers.

Drexler's books help to stimulate the imaginations of the people who will actually make the breakthroughs leading to molecular assembly. Drexler is a visionary.

Dean Kamen and Ray Kurzweil function as both visionaries and inventors. They conceive new ideas, and work with their teams to actually develop working devices and machines. Of course, all successful modern inventors work with teams of engineers, craftsmen, attorneys, accountants, financiers, and other vital members of a modern enterprise.

Steve Wozniak served as visionary, inventor, and engineer. But Steve Jobs provided other useful skills that helped the company get off the ground. Other less well known members of the team likewise played vital roles.

In every research lab there are technicians and craftsmen who fabricate tools, software, and equipment that are necessary for testing ideas, and for refining ideas that show promise. Visionaries and inventors cannot do without them.

In reality, visionaries are a dime a dozen. Anyone can think of ideas, as long as the ideas do not have to work or be important. It is the visionaries who think of important ideas that could actually work, who are in demand--or they should be. Positioning is also important, as is who they know and how well they can stick to their purpose. Because a good visionary needs a good team, if anything is ever going to get done.

One of the major problems with a society improving itself, is the setting of priorities in the financing of innovations. In a socialist society, priority-setting occurs at fairly high levels in government committees, and nationalised industries. That is why nations such as North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela see little if any innovation. China saw very little innovation while the Communist Party held its rigid grip on economic planning and enterprise. Russia's neo-nationalisation of oil, gas, and other profitable industries is certain to reduce innovation in that unfortunate country. Theocracies such as Iran demonstrate the same lack of innovation as socialist and other centrally controlled societies.

The more free-wheeling a society's economy, the more innovation that will be seen from the bottom up. It is no accident that revolutionary scale innovations in western nations are more rare, as the nations' economies grow more centralised.

But revolutionary innovations are what prevents economic stagnation. The evolution toward nanny states and greater nationalisation and centralisation of enterprise and innovation suggests that stagnation is coming. Certainly if a person is cared for from the cradle to the grave, regardless of his productive contribution to society, the incentive of that person to innovate will be reduced.

Many idle visionaries dream of a society where machines do all the work, and well-entitled humans sit around composing music, poetry, or producing great art. It may happen that the humans will be well cared for materially, but it is unlikely that most such persons would bother creating anything meaningful. What would be the point? More likely such persons would crave entertainment, amusement, and all manner of pleasure. If most people do not have to work at anything, they will not.

There are ways of educating children to actually want to create, innovate, and produce remarkable things. Those are not ways that most children are educated--and there is no conceivable way that today's education system could evolve into the other educational methods I allude to.

Sadly, today's education creates psychological neotenates--grown children with no experience of meaningful life responsibility or practical skills. University faculties are populated by psychological neotenates, as are civil service jobs, welfare roles, and prison cells.

Kurzweil Predicts Human Immortality

At the recent SCO6 supercomputing conference, Ray Kurzweil predicted human immortality by way of nanomedicine, and more. "Nanobots" in our bloodstreams will repair cellular and tissue damage as fast as it occurs. Affordable computers will be a thousand times more powerful than a human brain . . . Kurzweil clearly believes in "singularity now!"

According to Kurzweil, here's what we can expect in the not-so-distant future:

—Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the late 2030s;

—By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;

—In 15 years, human longevity will be greatly extended. By the 2020s, we'll be adding a year of longevity or more for every year that passes;

—In the same timeframe, we'll routinely be in virtual reality environments. Instead of making a cell call, we could "meet" someone in a virtual world and take a walk on a virtual beach and chat. Business meetings and conference calls will be held in calming or inspiring virtual locations;

—When you're walking down the street and see someone you've met before, background information about that person will pop up on your glasses or in the periphery of your vision;

—Instead of spending hours in front of a desktop machine, computers will be more ingrained in our environment. For instance, computer monitors could be replaced by projections onto our retinas or on a virtual screen hovering in the air;

—Scientists will be able to rejuvenate all of someone's body tissues and organs by transforming their skin cells into youthful versions of other cell types;

—Need a little boost? Kurzweil says scientists will be able to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and then introduce them into our bodies, all without surgery. As part of what he calls the "emerging field of rejuvenation medicine," new tissue and organs will be built out of cells that have been made younger;

—Got heart trouble? No problem, says Kurzweil. "We'll be able to create new heart cells from your skin cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated, young heart with your own DNA";

Source.

Kurzweil as author, is an example of an uber-synthesist. He sifts through mountains of information to find technology trends. He predicts the future, without bothering to have tongue in cheek.

His biological predictions may even be timid, but Kurzweil's predictions of nanotech healers and machine super-cognition may be more than a little optimistic--from his point of view.

Humans are certainly not ready for super-intelligence, and computers have no point of reference. Human intelligence is based on emotions, which are based on biological survival drives. Computers have nothing similar to build on, other than (anthropomorphizing alert!) an unconscious "need" for electricity, more memory, and faster processors. As soon as computers begin to understand the need for speed and power, we may all be in trouble. Computers are not bound by billions of years of kludgy evolution--they can evolve exponentially.

So it comes down to: how soon can engineers/scientists build emotions and drives into computers--computers with actuators and power to act in the physical world? Because that is when Kurzweilian things start happening. Only computers can program massively parallel computers. They simply need a good reason to do so.

Kurzweil uncharacteristically provides a caveat: terrorists may learn to use this advanced technology. But more realistically, modern terrorists would like nothing more than to take human societies back to the stone age, where merely talking about Kurzweil's predictions would get your head chopped off.

Cross-posted at Al Fin Longevity.

Math Geeks and Singularities

Singularity News has a great post entitled "Three Reasons to be a Math Geek." Follow the link, then follow the three links to learn the three reasons. The future looks good for math geeks, but since more males than females are likely to be drawn to math geekhood, the whole issue teeters on the brink of political incorrectness.

The Speculist offers an interesting short essay entitled "God and the Singularity." In it, he addresses some of the same points I briefly discussed in Next Level vs Singularity, The Speculist approaches the issue from a different perspective, more informed from a singularity perspective.

Micah, at Event Horizon, has a post "When Machines Transcend the Mechanical." This posting likewise deals with some of the same concerns about the singularity addressed in the above links.

Geekpress links to a short Kurzweil interview about the singularity. The link to the interview is here.