Spotlight on the Future Podcast. Chapter 1. Will Computers Help Us Live Forever?

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Gerald Chambers
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1 Spotlight on the Future Podcast Chapter 1 Will Computers Help Us Live Forever? In this podcast, Patrick Tucker of the World Futurist Society will talk about the ideas of Ray Kurzweil. After listening to the podcast, be prepared to discuss the following questions, which are also shown in your textbook. Jon Gordon: This is Jon Gordon with the chapter one, Spotlight on the Future podcast for. The following is an interview with Patrick Tucker, Senior Editor at the Futurist magazine. I talked with Tucker about the technological singularity, a concept promoted by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil talks a lot about how technology and computing power have proceeded on a sort of remarkably steady, undeniable exponential pace. What does that mean exactly, help us figure that out? Patrick Tucker: Well, what he is basically trying to convey is that when we think about the future and how technology is going to change our life in the future what we often failed to consider is that the race of technological acceleration is like as you said exponential. And exponential means that it progresses at a rate that isn t just one breakthrough leads to another leads to another it s more like one leads to five leads to twenty five leads to a hundred and twenty five and so this gentle curve upwards seems like a fairly steady increase until you get kind of a elbow of the curve where the levels of multiplication just become absurd and then technological process almost shoots up like a rocket because you are multiplying very large numbers by very large numbers. And this is not something that we think of or that we perceive in our daily life because we are used to things evolving in a fairly regular clip and that failure of consideration is why the future is going to be, according to Ray Kurzweil, so very different from what we expect it to look like. Jon Gordon: And he posits that we are at that elbow right now that you talk about where all of a sudden this exponential process really sort of shows itself and that he says really shows itself and where we are headed because of being at that elbow now is something he calls the singularity what in the heck does that mean? Patrick Tucker: I think that he might say that they were very close to the elbow and that the elbow really began to feel it he paused that because of the date it is singularity to occur is around When he refers singularity he is actually referring to a term in Physics where the gravitational pull of a black hole becomes such that it can like suck light and the entire Physics of the thing completely changes and the nature of the black hole itself reaches a tipping point of no return so when he talks about the singularity he is talking about why I think he would say it s the moment when human civilization becomes radically more intelligent than sort of count for unto itself. So Paradigm Publishing, Inc. Page 1 of 5

2 the amount of technological abilities suddenly multiply we find ourselves with new abilities that we hadn t planned on having and thought about having. All this leads to just a great amount more of awareness of what s going on and abilities to do think that we hadn t before like live much longer and experience things outside of our bodies using technological sensors. And it exists outside anything that s ever before really been described in much detail and it s largely conceptual so talking about it is a little bit different. It is difficult but, the things that are aspect of it include for instance radically increased longevity the human body because of genomics enhancement because of personalized genomic medicines will live for three hundred years, which is sort of the boundary to how long you can extend the physical life of the human body and after that we ll use nanotechnology to enhance like increase our longevity a little further and then after that we upload our neural networks into some sort of computer entity and we exist in some sort of a virtual reality setting or in real world setting by projecting our neural network on to self assembled robots that are made out of molecularly engineered self assembling components like it s completely outside of anything that we think is even remotely possible today and it becomes all of a sudden possible around 2030 about all at the same time and that s the singularity. Jon Gordon: And it s not just as you point out it s not just making humans smarter with technology but, its making computers more human with hacking Biology to create truly intelligent and almost conscious machines and to the point where he says at some point you won t really be able to tell the difference between a human and a machine. That we will sort of merge in to this collection of technology and Biology right? Patrick Tucker: Right, I mean some people would argue that they have already merged in the presence of Ray Kurzweil but, he sees this continuum as unbroken. The technological intelligence is merely in extension of a human civilization the divide that exists between the two is artificial. It s an intellectual construct that we ve created to separate ourselves from our tools but, within the next thirty years we will begin to first accommodate a lot more device functioning computer functioning into our own biological systems this is something that of course we don t do now except for a some people have implants for their heart of for their hearing but, the idea of merging physically with machinery is not something that is very mainstream now. He says that it will become much more accepted because the health benefits will become rather immediately apparent and the technologies that will allow us to do that will be much safer and much more efficient. So that s sort of the first step and then after that we are going to enhance the thinking ability of our one hundred billion neurons through technology to make them more efficient and the computer systems that we ve created will be able to create new ones that are patterned more directly after the human brain so we will be able to re create the human brain with software and with electronic circuitry and this will present us with an artificially intelligent entity that can reason, feel, perform on the level with humanity but, because it s relying on electronic circuits and bits and engineered pieces as opposed to kind of squishy chemicals and neurotransmitters and like flesh tissue it s going to be radically more efficient so not only will it think and act and pursue challenges and feel and communicate and reason on a par with a human being Paradigm Publishing, Inc. Page 2 of 5

3 after a couple of years as it grows radically more and more intelligent it will be able to think and reason on a par with all of humanity, all human brains organic membranes combined won t be able to equal the thought processing power of this artificially intelligent entity or entities. Jon Gordon: Because it will be able to continually improve itself I mean what a human can do now to improve him or herself is sort of quite limited you can t rewire and reprogram your brain but, these entities you talk of will be able to not only be and exist at this incredibly high level but, will be able to look at their own programming and say I could be doing this and this and this better and so I am going to completely redesign myself. Patrick Tucker: Right, exactly and augment themselves and add to their knowledge base and then process stored information at a level of efficiency that we can t begin to comprehend. I mean the human mind, the human brain evolved over billions of years with very specific purpose, which was to track patterns in nature you know I mean to find birds and forest creatures and eat them and avoid being devoured by larger animals. This is the only thing that the brain was evolved to do and it took a very long time for it to do it so now we are stuck in this man made world and we keep wondering why it s so boring or dull or uncomfortable to be at work, or so frustrating and why it s so strange, it s because our brains weren t designed to do it so we keep trying to compensate by learning more about our artificial world that we are creating all of the time, this artificial entity will feel completely home in that setting and because it s designed and self designed it will be able to just process what s going on within this big universe much more efficiently. Jon Gordon: Now it s quite tempting to just feel that this process that Kurzweil predicts just sounds absurd on the face of it but, what s compelling about his argument anyway is this exponential progression of computing power he points out and that has maintained on a steady pace he points out that computing power is like a billion times more than it was when he was a college student for example and so he sees no reason why that kind of progression doesn t continue and in fact in that same period between when he was a student and now if you add the, it s not just going to be another billion times more powerful in forty years or whatever it is exponentially more than that so it s a very compelling argument I think that he makes but, what are the real and legitimate criticisms of Kurzweil s predictions and philosophies of the future here? Patrick Tucker: Well, I think the more on the one hand it is like you said extremely compelling, he is doing some very fascinating and wonderful work in the field of futurism and I think that this entire field owes him a great debt of thanks for the amount of excitement that he brings to thinking about the future in a way that is governed by laws of science and what he is doing is really fantastic for that and it s wondrous original stuff and much of it is boarders on great genius. At the same time there are I think that the scientific criticisms would be he is reducing all human evolution to raw congregational power he sees a clear progression but, even Moore s law, which is a law on, which he bases a lot of his forecast for how this multiplying effect of computer power and the cheapening, the exponential cheapening of that power so it becomes more powerful as it becomes less expensive, which allows it to become more powerful and less expensive. Paradigm Publishing, Inc. Page 3 of 5

4 Even Moore s laws sees an end point for how efficient and how cheap a regular transistor can get and that point it s sort of like a barrier and Kurzweil would say well at this point we would be relying on quantum computing power and the criticism there is that quantum computing does not exist. Ray Kurzweil sees human being lengthening their life spans through the use of nano robotics, nano robotics does not exist it is at this point a hypothetical science. There has been some really interesting and fantastic breakthroughs in nano technology but, these are limited almost entirely to, basic material science. So we are not at the point yet where we can conceive of how to build a microscopic robot that would travel through the blood stream and perform functions, highly, you know, very difficult functions on behalf of like a programmer that s not something that we can figure out and so the criticism is that he is basing his forecast of exponential progress on the basis of things that do not, are within the realm possibility from a physics perspective but that don t yet exist and so I think that months many people say that he is kind of leaping over a lot of boundaries and difficulties without facing them. Jon Gordon: If humans and machines together become this merged sort of all powerful identity then certainly we would have the ability to stop and say is this a good thing or a bad thing and to actually regulate this exponential growth that he talks about and that seems to be kind of a missing piece from the philosophy is this sort of moral sense, which would certainly have to develop in any kind of super creature that he sort of talks about. I mean the ability to actually stop the seemingly inevitable progression of technology. Patrick Tucker: Alright on the one hand I think that you would say that the progression of technology is inevitable with or without him or with or without any legislation on the subject, he thinks that its important that when humans create things that they, that everything that humans create in a way is an expression of human values too. So in much the same way our very elaborate military equipment has fail safes so anything, any artificial intelligent entity in the future will be in all levels of its programming would carry some reverence for the human species it s not one line of code that would be inserted or could be pulled out, it would exist on almost every level that entity existed. But, one of the things that he does talk about is very important that I do think deserves a lot of mainstream consideration is the fact that as you said our institutions aren t actually built to deal with rapidly changing circumstances on a global scale. I mean we have in the United States we have protocols for dealing with war if we re attacked in sort of like a sneak attack fashion, there s aconstitutional process that plays out but, we don t have a protocol for dealing with information technology leading to in a sudden explosion of intelligence. Jon Gordon: Right, which is why it seems to me sort of a natural thing and almost predictable that we will figure out a way to stop the progression that he sees as inevitable because we just won t be able to handle it. Patrick Tucker: Right. Well our inability to handle it doesn t seems to me it wouldn t necessarily mean that it was not going to happen, we invent things that we don t know how to handle over time I mean look at the credit default swap this seemed like a perfectly good idea when we invented it. We actually deregulated in the 90 s, which that deregulation like overturning the Glass Steagall Act led to the creation of what Paradigm Publishing, Inc. Page 4 of 5

5 seemed like a fairly begin financial product. This is just like a product, this is just an insurance contract that you can buy on a bond and we were just enthusiastic as hell about bringing this sort of thing to market and it caused enormous destruction. I think this is the way human beings kind of invent things I think that we create new objects, we create new systems, we bring products to market, and then when it causes a problem we deal with that on the level of either legislation or you know, a company stock that created that product descends. I don t think that, I mean this is the story of all of our inventions. The story this is the story of why cars now have seat belts wouldn t people are driving around them and no one perceives that there could be extremely dangerous until they start crashing into each other and people started flying through windshields but, I am inclined to think that we ll be inventing all sorts of dangerous things before we know that they are dangerous. I think that that kind of the way we have gone about inventing things since we started inventing things. Talk about It 1. What does Kurzweil mean by exponential technological change? 2. What could stop the technological singularity from happening? 3. What are the possible implications of computers developing super intelligence and consciousness that exceeds humans? Paradigm Publishing, Inc. Page 5 of 5

What We Talk About When We Talk About AI

MAGAZINE What We Talk About When We Talk About AI ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY 30 OCT 2015 W e have all seen the films, read the comics or been awed by the prophetic books, and from them we think