Image via WikipediaRay Kurzweil has officially lost it. I have never been a fan of the Singularity, but reading what he had to say in a recent post by Nick Carr just makes me shake my head. In the post, Carr references a Rolling Stone arcticle (not online, which is ironic) that talks about how Kurzweil plans to preserve living people for eternity. One could imagine capturing the knowledge within someone’s brain, but Kurzweil takes this one step further, talking about grand visions of bringing his father back from the dead.
How does he plan to do this? And I quote
We can find some of his DNA around his grave site – that’s a lot of information right there. The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’ll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.
and
Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories
when asked about extracting memories and knowledge.
Perhaps Nick Carr’s lack of incredulity surprised me more than the nonsense that Kurzweil is spewing. Nick’s not exactly known to be the kind to jump into the arms of the first futurist meme, although here he seems to address this in terms of science fiction, and personal feelings. Or perhaps he is just laughing inside, and I didn’t get that part.
Kurzweil’s naivete continues to astound me. I am no luddite, and perhaps I am being unfairly cynical, but none of this makes sense to me, never has. It’s not the philosophical questions that bother me, although I continue to wonder what drives a lot of these needs. It’s certainly not intellectual curiosity. What bothers me is the seeming lack of respect for the complexity of biology. There is so much we need to learn and understand about our bodies, about our brains that a lot of what is required to even do this at a toy level is not going to happen in Kurzweil’s lifetime.
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4 Comments
I don't see anything fundamentally impossible about what he's suggesting. It just takes a lot of intelligence. Let's say you set a million people to work on it for a million years. Would it be possible then? Kurzweil thinks we can run a simulation of a million people working on a problem for a million years on a sufficiently powerful computer.
In other words, if the information is there, in the DNA and in the memories of people, we can use it.
I don't think he's suggesting the result would *actually* be his father, just a simulation of his father that is arbitrarily similar to the real person.
Let's have that discussion when we figure out how to fold a small protein or simulate protein transport properly. We are so far away from that, and there are a million things to do before we can even think about solving.
I don't see anything fundamentally impossible about what he's suggesting. It just takes a lot of intelligence. Let's say you set a million people to work on it for a million years. Would it be possible then? Kurzweil thinks we can run a simulation of a million people working on a problem for a million years on a sufficiently powerful computer.
In other words, if the information is there, in the DNA and in the memories of people, we can use it.
I don't think he's suggesting the result would *actually* be his father, just a simulation of his father that is arbitrarily similar to the real person.
Let's have that discussion when we figure out how to fold a small protein or simulate protein transport properly. We are so far away from that, and there are a million things to do before we can even think about solving.