~ Singularity

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"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. The results on the other side of the "event horizon," they say, are unpredictable.

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 15:54 schreef Angst het volgende:
kan je ff in een zin zeggen van singularity is?

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 16:03 schreef Noin het volgende:
In 1 zin: er wordt iets zo slim gemaakt, dat wij te dom worden en dus onnodig zijn voor dat slimme ding.

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 16:30 schreef Kjew het volgende:

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Euh, dat is toch nu al? Toename van elektromagnetische golven, synthetische stoffen in voeding, etc.

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 16:39 schreef soylent het volgende:
Op de Nederlandse wiki-pagina (klik mij) wordt het misschien duidelijker uitgelegd.

Ik geloof er zelf trouwens niet in. Er zijn bij technologie-ontwikkelingen ook vele dempende factoren, zoals gedane investeringen en lock-in. Probeer als voorbeeld daarvan maar eens een succesvolle verbetering op Windows te maken, of een auto met een niet-benzine aandrijving. Je kan het verzinnen maar je vecht tegen extreem succesvolle en alomvertegenwoordigde systemen.

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 17:19 schreef alien8ed het volgende:

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Daar komt ook nog bij dat de term singulariteit oorspronkelijk een wetenschappelijk natuurverschijnsel omschrijft, dat zich niet aan bestaande natuurwetten houdt.

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Op zaterdag 27 januari 2007 17:52 schreef alien8ed het volgende:

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De bedenker van Technological singularity gelooft denk ik te veel in de korte termijn kennis die de laatste 20 jaar is opgedaan en baseert daar zijn grafiek op, zonder oog te hebben voor lange termijn natuur processen.

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Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York. In his youth, he was an avid consumer of science fiction literature. By the age of twelve he had written his first computer program. Shortly after his discovery of programming, he appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he had built. In 1968, at the age of twenty, he sold a company he created that matched high schoolers with prospective colleges by answering a 200 question survey. He earned a BS in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.

Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.

He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000.

He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents.

He has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen “revolutionaries who made America” [1], along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

Kurzweil's musical keyboards company Kurzweil Music Systems produces among the most sophisticated and realistic (and expensive) synthesized-sound creation instruments. Ray sold Kurzweil Music Systems in the early 1990s to Korean piano manufacturer Young Chang. He has no current involvement with Young Chang or Kurzweil Music Systems.

Kurzweil has also created his own twenty five year old female rock star alter ego, "Ramona", who he regularly performs as through virtual reality technology [2] to illustrate the as-yet untapped possibilities of computers to enhance and alter our interpersonal interactions. This project inspired the plot of the movie S1m0ne.

In 2005, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called Ray Kurzweil "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence".

Kurzweil has been associated with the National Federation of the Blind, many of whose members use his products. After speaking at their convention in 2005, he received a special award, an honor received by few sighted people.

He is on the Army Science Advisory Board and has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology.

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Response to 'The Singularity Is Always Near'
by Ray Kurzweil



In "The Singularity Is Always Near," an essay in The Technium, an online "book in progress," author Kevin Kelly critiques arguments on exponential growth made in Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil responds.


Published on KurzweilAI.net May 4, 2006

Allow me to clarify the metaphor implied by the term "singularity." The metaphor implicit in the term "singularity" as applied to future human history is not to a point of infinity, but rather to the event horizon surrounding a black hole. Densities are not infinite at the event horizon but merely large enough such that it is difficult to see past the event horizon from outside.


I say difficult rather than impossible because the Hawking radiation emitted from the event horizon is likely to be quantum entangled with events inside the black hole, so there may be ways of retrieving the information. This was the concession made recently by Hawking. However, without getting into the details of this controversy, it is fair to say that seeing past the event horizon is difficult (impossible from a classical physics perspective) because the gravity of the black hole is strong enough to prevent classical information from inside the black hole getting out.


We can, however, use our intelligence to infer what life is like inside the event horizon even though seeing past the event horizon is effectively blocked. Similarly, we can use our intelligence to make meaningful statements about the world after the historical singularity, but seeing past this event horizon is difficult because of the profound transformation that it represents.


So discussions of infinity are not relevant. You are correct that exponential growth is smooth and continuous. From a mathematical perspective, an exponential looks the same everywhere and this applies to the exponential growth of the power (as expressed in price-performance, capacity, bandwidth, etc.) of information technologies. However, despite being smooth and continuous, exponential growth is nonetheless explosive once the curve reaches transformative levels. Consider the Internet. When the Arpanet went from 10,000 nodes to 20,000 in one year, and then to 40,000 and then 80,000, it was of interest only to a few thousand scientists. When ten years later it went from 10 million nodes to 20 million, and then 40 million and 80 million, the appearance of this curve looks identical (especially when viewed on a log plot), but the consequences were profoundly more transformative. There is a point in the smooth exponential growth of these different aspects of information technology when they transform the world as we know it.


You cite the extension made by Kevin Drum of the log-log plot that I provide of key paradigm shifts in biological and technological evolution (which appears on page 17 of The Singularity Is Near). This extension is utterly invalid. You cannot extend in this way a log-log plot for just the reasons you cite. The only straight line that is valid to extend on a log plot is a straight line representing exponential growth when the time axis is on a linear scale and the a value (such as price-performance) is on a log scale. Then you can extend the progression, but even here you have to make sure that the paradigms to support this ongoing exponential progression are available and will not saturate. That is why I discuss at length the paradigms that will support ongoing exponential growth of both hardware and software capabilities. But it is not valid to extend the straight line when the time axis is on a log scale. The only point of these graphs is that there has been acceleration in paradigm shift in biological and technological evolution.


If you want to extend this type of progression, then you need to put time on a linear x axis and the number of years (for the paradigm shift or for adoption) as a log value on the y axis. Then it may be valid to extend the chart. I have a chart like this on page 50 of the book.


This acceleration is a key point. These charts show that technological evolution emerges smoothly from the biological evolution that created the technology creating species. You mention that an evolutionary process can create greater complexity—and greater intelligence—than existed prior to the process. And it is precisely that intelligence creating process that will go into hyper drive once we can master, understand, model, simulate, and extend the methods of human intelligence through reverse-engineering it and applying these methods to computational substrates of exponentially expanding capability.


That chimps are just below the threshold needed to understand their own intelligence is a result of the fact that they do not have the prerequisites to create technology. There were only a few small genetic changes, comprising a few tens of thousands of bytes of information, that distinguish us from our primate ancestors: a bigger skull (allowing a larger brain), a larger cerebral cortex, and a workable opposable appendage. There were a few other changes that other primates share to some extent such as mirror neurons and spindle cells


As I pointed out in my long now talk, a chimp's hand looks similar but the pivot point of the thumb does not allow facile manipulation of the environment. In contrast, our human ability to look inside the human brain and to model and simulate and recreate the processes we encounter there has already been demonstrated. The scale and resolution of these simulations will continue to expand exponentially. I make the case that we will reverse-engineer the principles of operation of the several hundred information processing regions of the human brain within about twenty years and then apply these principles (along with the extensive tool kit we are creating through other means in the AI field) to computers that will be many times (by the 2040s, billions of times) more powerful than needed to simulate the human brain.


You write that "Kurzweil found that if you make a very crude comparison between the processing power of neurons in human brains and the processing powers of transistors in computers, you could map out the point at which computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence." That is an oversimplification of my analysis. I provide in book four different approaches to estimating the amount of computation required to simulate all regions of the human brain based on actual functional recreations of brain regions. These all come up with answers in the same range, from 1014 to 1016 cps for creating a functional recreation of all regions of the human brain, so I've used 1016 cps as a conservative estimate.


This refers only to the hardware requirement. As noted above, I have an extensive analysis of the software requirements. While reverse-engineering the human brain is not the only source of intelligent algorithms (and, in fact, has not been a major source at all up until just recently because we did not have scanners that could see into the human with sufficient resolution until recently), my analysis of reverse-engineering the human brain is along the lines of an existence proof that we will have the software methods underlying human intelligence within a couple of decades.


Another important point in this analysis is that the complexity of the design of the human brain is about a billion times simpler than the actual complexity we find in the brain. This is due to the brain (like all biology) being a probabilistic recursively expanded fractal. This discussion goes beyond what I can write here (although it is in the book). We can ascertain the complexity of the design of the human brain because the design is contained in the genome and I show that the genome (including non-coding regions) only has about 30 to 100 million bytes of compressed information in it due to the massive redundancies in the genome.


So in summary, I agree that the singularity is not a discrete event. A single point of infinite growth or capability is not the metaphor being applied. Yes, the exponential growth of all facts of information technology is smooth, but is nonetheless explosive and transformative.

© 2006 Ray Kurzweil