Is Ray Kurzweil The L Ron Hubbard Of Silicon Valley?
Nasa and Google are backing a college in Silicon Valley along with maverick/eccentric Ray Kurzweil, it’s been announced this week. Not one that would teach us how to withhold information and search engine optimise, (which would probably be useful) but a suspiciously non-scientific sounding ‘futurologists’ education institution – a ‘singularity university’ backed by Kurzweil, who has some big money riding on the next few years.
Futurology? Singularity? What do these fancy words mean? Well, we’ve discovered, with a little bit of reading with our eyes, that these supposedly scientific words actually just refer to a bunch of vague and questionable theories!
The field of ‘Futurology’ basically refers to some research which has a guess at what’s likely to happen, given what’s already happened. Wikipedia states, most aptly, that “foresight may be the oldest term for the field”. Round of applause for the guys who cashed in on the funding for what the rest of us call “taking an educated guess”.
Kurzweil’s version of technological singularity however, is a rather more theoretically questionable concept, coined by him in a book he wrote a few years back, which he is currently making into a film (sound suspiciously like another more religious faction yet?) starring Pauley Perrette (who has been in 24, Dawson’s Creek and two episodes of Frasier).
Basically, the stuff you can put in a computer has been increasing exponentially since 1958, and we’re hitting the steep bit of a period of extremely rapid technological progress, so at some point computers will be able to fix themselves. That’s okay right? But Kurzweil expands on this to predict that sometime after 2045 we’ll be human/robot hybrid creatures, the world will have been transformed into a massive computer, and the human race will have succumbed to the higher capabilities of the AI we created. And that’s just for starters.
Ian Douglas, over at the Telegraph, somewhat misses the gaping holes in the theory, and thinks it’s not as daft as it sounds, pointing to a host of correct predictions made by Kurzweil about computer functionality, none of which had to overcome the troublesome conceptual questions about mentality a lot of psychologists, philosophers and scientists have drawn a lot of colourful blanks over, and which plague later predictions in the manifesto.
Kurzweil’s theories carry a pox of assumptions about human intelligence and the definition of a computer, and as a sideline, the nature of asteroids. It’s a theory riddled with problems. To give you a taster, it’s worth remembering the “frame problem”, which questions how you can put a threshold on what you program a computer to consider in making a decision. It’s a darned big question mark, as we humans do all this automatically, filtering stuff in a way that we can’t interrogate. There’s also the unanswered question of how to program things like common sense. And this is aside from broader issues about consciousness and morality, and the assumption that we can literally find everything out about the brain just by looking hard enough (with nano-tech guided brainscanning says Kurzweil).
So why is Google backing this? Is it because their Silicon Valley neighbours (and current playmates) Nasa are backing it, and they’re trying to keep up with the Joneses? Haven’t Nasa and Google been having enough fun making videos of the deep blue sea and Mars to be staying away from such dodgy looking kettles of fish? Surely their combined sources know more about technology’s near future than Kurzweil, but it’s for this reason that it’s a little worrying.
With Kurzweil’s prediction dates fast approaching, we’ll be able to wait and see. But according to Forbes, it’s not AI we’ll be surrounded by in the next 12 months, it’s touchscreens – which are far more annoying than robots when they break.
Posted by Jennifer Allan in Sci-tech | February 4, 2009 10:58AM |
February 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
here’s where futurology falls down – Pauly Perrette doesn’t equal Tom Cruise.
Kurweil needs better celebs to take his confidence trick to the next level.
February 5th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Jennifer
Thanks for the link.
I didn’t exactly miss the gaping holes in the theory, its just that they were less relevant than his successes, given that most futurologists are so hopelessly off the mark their predicitions are comical once the dates roll around, if they’re brave enough to give dates at all.
Computational materialism like Kurzweil’s is terribly reductive, but a few hundred thousand dollars from Google to set up a school for audacious thinkers sounds like it might turn out some exciting ideas, and it’s good to applaud audacity once in a while.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Ian,
Thanks for your reply. I agree that encouraging innovative thought is a positive thing, and the backing of Nasa and Google bodes well, but with Kurzweils influence the project endorses bad reasoning and flawed theories.
To me, the gaping holes in his theory are fundamental, and so I disagree that they are less relevant than any successes. In endorsing him, Google and Nasa are backing openly flawed theories.
His materialism is more than terribly reductive – at its core it fosters an open contradiction which can only be solved by creating a ‘special case’ scenario.
Kurzweil says that one day everything will be a computer. As part of this, anything will be able to become a computer. Here, he is expounding a sort of radical functionalism – whereby the material an input output device is made up of is irrelevant. But if anything can and will become a computer, then why are only ‘computers’ computers now? Is there some special condition which makes something a computer? It seems this would be almost impossible to formulate, given how he sees both the present definition of a computer, and the predicted future computer.
We can take this problem to it’s logical (materialist) conclusion, and say that if Kurzweil is right about anything being able to be a computer, we are all computers, therefore rendering most parts of his theory and predictions about us being separate from the computers meaningless. He is left needing to create another ‘special case’ for humans.
His mixed up idea of a computer is scrappy and inconsistent. To endorse such bad use of language and reasoning does not a positive start to a university make.
February 6th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
It’s a good point. His philosophy is sloppy but he’s a successful technologist. What is or is not a computer is a particularly fuzzy point – he clearly believes that the mind is a computer already but holds machines in immensely high regard so he ties himself up in knots imagining that we can aspire to such a state.
Ideally you’d want someone who both knew what materialism is and could work out what state technology will be in in 10, 20 or 30 years time but we do have something of a shortage there.
The question is whether you’d want this particular kind of flawed person – inconsistent, fuzzy but exuberant and successful – running your university or another kind – rigorous, accurate but not so much fun – in charge? Mostly the latter but Google making a special case for the former seems like a fine thing to do to me.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
“Here, he is expounding a sort of radical functionalism – whereby the material an input output device is made up of is irrelevant. But if anything can and will become a computer, then why are only ‘computers’ computers now?”
Jennifer,could you please explain this a bit more clearly?
February 7th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
@ rob,
of course, this just means that kurzweils view of the future is one where a computer can be made of any material substance – not only wires and metal and things. and if that is correct, then everything already is a computer – and so we aren’t going to turn into one, as the world already is one.
in the present case of computers he seems to refer to only what we commonly think of as a computer – wires, circuits etc.
but for his future predictions he sees the computer as something different than this – a device made of anything which has an input output process. and if this future use of computer is the way he sees things, then we’re all already a computer anyway.
is this any clearer? i hope so.
July 17th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
[...] Critique on the Kurz titled “Is Ray Kurzweil The L Ron Hubbard Of Silicon Valley?“ [...]
November 4th, 2010 at 8:01 am
silicon valley is great because it houses some of the world’s best electronics firm `
December 3rd, 2010 at 6:58 am
i haven’t been on the silicon valley but i would really love to visit that place. i bet that it is a very exciting place to visit ;”*
February 20th, 2011 at 6:17 am
I like your topic .it is interesting for me.it provides nice infos so I’ bookmarked it.thanks for posting it
February 27th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
I really like your topic and appreciate your work.it is so interesting for me because it provides nice infos so I’ bookmarked it.thank you for sharing this topic
March 19th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
I don’t quite understand what you mean exactly by implementing RSS. Could you go into detail about what you’re looking for?