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Topic: Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself (Read 2575 times) |
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MoEnzyme
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Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« on: 2010-07-31 09:26:59 » |
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Numbers 2 thru 5 stand out to me as particularly limiting issues, although the others on the list are legitimate concerns as well.
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/07/6-reasons-why-y.php
6 reasons why you'll never upload your mind into a computer
By John Pavlus
9:02AM on Jul 28, 2010
excerpts/summary:
Quote:1. Two Words: Fail Whale - This may seem like a cheap shot, but "uptime" is something our most advanced computer scientists still struggle with.
2. The Storage Media Won't Last Five Years, Much Less Forever - Stone tablets written in Sanskrit may last millennia, but digital storage media go to shit alarmingly fast when used continuously (and you'd have to assume there'd be constant disk activity if millions of people were "living" on them!).
3. Insane Energy Demand - The human brain only needs 20 watts to run the app called You, but with almost 7 billion of us and counting, we're already straining the earth's ability to host us all.
4. Lack of Processing Power - Singularitarians love to trot out simple arithmetic: add up all the brain's billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, and you get a "total processing power" of about 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops.
5. Minds Don't Work Without Bodies - You aren't "in" your body, like a little homunculus looking out; but nor are you "on" your body, like an OS running on interchangeable server hardware. Quite simply, you are your body.
6. Who Gets Uploaded? - Unless there's a way to instantly "teleport" the entirety of humanity into the cloud simultaneously, you can bet your digitized ass that there'll be fighting over who goes first (or doesn't, or shouldn't), how long it takes, what it costs, who pays, how long they get to stay there… you know, all the standard crap that humans have been busting each other's chops about ever since we could stand upright. |
full article: http://dvice.com/archives/2010/07/6-reasons-why-y.php
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Mo Enzyme
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David Lucifer
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #1 on: 2010-08-01 11:44:45 » |
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I wonder if Mo is posting this article in order to mock it or because he agrees with it.
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #2 on: 2010-08-01 11:51:01 » |
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I wasn't intending to mock it. I can't say I agree or disagree with it, I just found it interesting. How about you?
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Mo Enzyme
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Walter Watts
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #3 on: 2010-08-03 20:49:49 » |
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Quote from: David Lucifer on 2010-08-01 11:44:45 I wonder if Mo is posting this article in order to mock it or because he agrees with it.
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Quote from: MoEnzyme on 2010-08-01 11:51:01 I wasn't intending to mock it. I can't say I agree or disagree with it, I just found it interesting. How about you?
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Finding something interesting is generally (~80% of the time) the reason I post an article authored by someone else.
Not because I'm mocking it or agreeing with it.
Why the pigeonholing of motivations here?
Walter
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Walter Watts
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #4 on: 2010-08-03 21:41:22 » |
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Okay, well, I'll actually dig into the subject a bit.
Quote:1. Two Words: Fail Whale
This may seem like a cheap shot, but "uptime" is something our most advanced computer scientists still struggle with. Hell, our super-sophisticated algorithms can't even keep a text-based microblogging service from crashing during the World Cup — what happens when there's a Fail Whale for your mind? Will it be like getting a hangover, having a stroke, or dying? You'd have to assume we'll all be "backed up," but that raises troubling questions too: when the server running You goes kaplooie, is your "backup" really you, or just a clone of you that takes your place now that the "real" you is lost? The Singularitarians don't have reassuring answers, and I don't want to find out the hard way. |
This objection doesn't impress me. If we CAN upload ourselves then that data is us, all it needs is a computer to run it on. Downtime doesn't end the data or us. So on that one I would say I disagree, but the other objections are more worth consideration. The last one, about who gets uploaded isn't quite so relevant to the technical plausibility of uploading.
Quote:6. Who Gets Uploaded?
And you thought the lines for iPhone 4 were bad… even if all the above problems were magically solved, there's still human nature to contend with. War and conflict may not technically be hardwired into our species, but the past 10,000 years of human history are hard to argue with. Unless there's a way to instantly "teleport" the entirety of humanity into the cloud simultaneously, you can bet your digitized ass that there'll be fighting over who goes first (or doesn't, or shouldn't), how long it takes, what it costs, who pays, how long they get to stay there… you know, all the standard crap that humans have been busting each other's chops about ever since we could stand upright. I'll opt out, thanks. |
And actually that last objection seems to be answered in objection #2
Quote:2. The Storage Media Won't Last Five Years, Much Less Forever
Stone tablets written in Sanskrit may last millennia, but digital storage media go to shit alarmingly fast when used continuously (and you'd have to assume there'd be constant disk activity if millions of people were "living" on them!). Without frequent physical backups, refreshes, and format updates, precious data will quickly be rendered unreadable or inaccessible. So when we're all "in the cloud," who's gonna be down on the ground doing all that real-world maintenance — robots? Morlocks? Even if that works, it just seems evolutionarily unwise to swap one faulty physical substrate (albeit one that has been honed for millions of years, runs on sugar and water, and lasts nearly a century) for another one that can barely make it from one Olympic season to the next, even with permanent air-conditioning. |
Those not uploaded "into the cloud" re:#6 will be the ones "on the ground". We won't be wholesale swapping one substrate for another, just like computers did not instantly make paper obsolete. Indeed I think humans will likely be simultaneously pursuing multiple paths towards immortality just as they always have. So all that said, #1 and #6 don't impress me so much, although that leaves some issues in #2 and #3-5 worth considering.
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Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #5 on: 2010-08-17 17:05:31 » |
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A little point/counterpoint
Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts
By Priya Ganapati
August 16, 2010 |
2:47 pm |
Categories: R&D and Inventions
Quote:Updated at 18:30 EST to correct timeline of prediction to 2030 from 2020
Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.
It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.
This point where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the “singularity.” It’s a term that Kurzweil helped popularize through his book. |
full article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/reverse-engineering-brain-kurzweil/#ixzz0wu3aZBh8
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
Category: Development • Kooks • Neurobiology
Posted on: August 17, 2010 7:33 AM, by PZ Myers
Quote:There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.
His latest claim is that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we'll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He's not just speculating optimistically, though: he's building his case on such awfully bad logic that I'm surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook. |
full article: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php
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Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #6 on: 2010-08-20 16:40:49 » |
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Ray Kurzweil Responds to “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain"
August 20, 2010 by Ray Kurzweil
excerpt:
Quote:While most of PZ Myers’ comments (in his blog post entitled “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain” posted on Pharyngula on August 17, 2010) do not deserve a response, I do want to set the record straight, as he completely mischaracterizes my thesis.
For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.
Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain. |
full article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzweil-does-not-understand-the-brain
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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David Lucifer
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #7 on: 2010-08-21 13:33:25 » |
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PZ replies...
Kurzweil still doesn't understand the brain
Excerpt:
Quote:| For instance, you can't measure the number of transistors in an Intel CPU and then announce, "A-ha! We now understand what a small amount of information is actually required to create all those operating systems and computer games and Microsoft Word, and it is much, much smaller than everyone is assuming." Put it in those terms, and the Kurzweil fanboys would laugh at him; put it in terms of something they don't understand at all, like the development and function of the brain, and they're willing to go along with the pretense that the genome tells us that the whole organism is simpler than they thought. |
What PZ says is true above, but misses Kurzweil's point. Kurzweil is saying you can look at the size of the source code of a computer game and that puts an upper bound on the complexity of the game. The CPU is analogous the laws of physics, not the genome. Whether Kurzweil's point is true is another matter, but PZ doesn't address it.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #8 on: 2010-08-21 14:33:09 » |
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slightly edited irc transcript...
<MoEnzyme> mmmmm, PZ Meyers v. Ray Kurzweil smackdowns . . . . . good stuff. I think Kurzweil made a good rebuttal. I'll be interested to hear any follow up.
<MoEnzyme> Personally I'm a bit skeptical about any "reverse engineering" of the human brain in any useful way occuring anytime soon - although I recognize that in theory there isn't necessarily any reason it couldn't happen.
<MoEnzyme> And plus I'm also optimistic that we yet find through cognitive science and mathematics some useful universal shorthand ways to represent many of the thought processes which we currently think of as distinctly human.
<MoEnzyme> And once that's accomplished, it begins to make at least some efficiency sense to consider things like "uploading". But I still think we are pretty far from that point.
<Lucifer> My colleague, Shane Legg, is doing researchy here http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/intro.html
<Lucifer> he says they are making significant progress in research around reverse engineering neural structures
<Lucifer> this research is informing new machine learning algorithms which in turn informs more brain research
<Lucifer> If this positive feedback loop continues, Shane expects real AI in < 20 years
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #9 on: 2010-08-21 21:27:01 » |
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Later in IRC with some editing
18:54:29 MoEnzyme * MoEnzyme read kurzweil's rebuttal. on to PZ's next point
19:01:13 MoEnzyme * MoEnzyme read it too
19:02:37 MoEnzyme I think I'm a bit on PZ Myers side on this one. I would want some proposed method of reverse engineering before I'm to believe predictions about it.
19:03:43 MoEnzyme It seems a bit abstract.
19:05:22 MoEnzyme Its all well to say why its a smaller task than we imagined, but with no actual method to get from here to there it remains just a vague hope.
19:13:59 MoEnzyme Kurzweil may indeed be right, but I think his case is a bit premature and not yet compelling.
19:16:03 MoEnzyme I would need to see some plausible process by which such reverse engineering may occur before I'd accept any predictions.
19:20:22 MoEnzyme I think we may not really know what kind of a job it is until we've finally begun it.
I just looked up Lucifer's buddy at his link http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/research.html. Very impressive. This may go some way towards explaining possible how-to scenarios. Perhaps somebody might show that to PZ Myers. Computer modeling of neural circuitry . . . hmmmm lots of interesting technical stuff there only some of which I understand. Well it doesn't seem too far out there, we do computer modeling of weather systems with some mixed success and that's a pretty complicated affair too. So perhaps a brain is within only a few orders of complexity of that kind of task. We'll probably get a lot of bad data to start with, but over time we'll get better at it. I still like Kurzweil's vision although I'm sticking with PZ's criticisms for now.
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Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #10 on: 2010-08-21 22:19:42 » |
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Perhaps my point comes down to this. Computer power is the greatest new technology of the human species, and its increasing exponentially. It has become our greatest tool in research. It is inevitable that we shall turn its power on our greatest scientific questions. Indeed we already have repeatedly with great effect. One of those questions is the brain-mind-culture-meme interactions - our evolutionary psychology in short. This breaks down the most basic issues of who we are as individuals and as social animals. When we begin to simulate these aspects of our being, we are truly creating new human intelligence even if it happens to exist in a different hardware substrate. It will of course begin as a poor flawed imitation, but it will improve over time.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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David Lucifer
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #11 on: 2010-08-22 01:13:57 » |
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Here's another reason why technology is accelerating. Not only are computers getting faster, so is technical collaboration.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Singularity fail - 6 reasons why you won't upload yourself
« Reply #12 on: 2010-08-22 01:18:08 » |
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Another view (mostly siding with PZ) http://striz.net/blog/?p=381
Quote:| A lot of people who are far more knowledgeable about the brain than Kurzweil are skeptical of his predictions. He responds by invoking the magic of exponential increases, but that has already been addressed. An exponential increase with a sufficiently long doubling time is irrelevant, and Kurzweil doesn’t know the rate of neuroscientific advancement. Kurzweil bases his estimate on the time it will take to achieve the computational capacity of the brain and simply assumes our knowledge of neuroscience (and our ability to translate that to machine substrate) will be sufficient at roughly the same time. But nobody knows if that is true. Certainly not Kurzweil. So why should we trust Kurzweil’s predictions about the brain? We shouldn’t. |
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