Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta singularidad. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta singularidad. Mostrar todas las entradas

sábado, febrero 09, 2013


Ray Kurzweil
Can we reverse-engineer the brain?
Fortune, January 9, 2013: 5:00 AM ET



In his book "How to Create a Mind", futurist Ray Kurzweil explores 
the secrets of human thought.
By Brian O'Keefe, assistant managing editor

FORTUNE -- In your new book How to Create a Mind, you say you've unlocked the secret of human
thought. How long before we can build a functioning artificial brain?

On that question I've consistently said 2029. Both hardware and software are progressing exponentially. If logical thinking were the essence of intelligence, then computers are already superior to us. The areas where humans still have an edge are in our emotional intelligence. Emotion is not some sideshow or distraction to intelligence. Being funny, being sexy, expressing love in a convincing way -- those are the cutting edges of human intelligence.

FORTUNE --In the book you introduce your "pattern recognition theory of mind." What does it tell us about how
the brain works?

The main focus is on the neocortex, which evolved with mammals. It now comprises 80% of the brain in humans. One of the key themes of the book is that neocortex is neocortex. It all runs the same algorithm. This runs counter to the spirit of a lot of neuroscience, which is based on the idea that different regions of the brain run different algorithms for different functions. The neocortex is actually a module of roughly 100 neurons, and it's repeated over and over again. We have a total of about 300 million modules, and they are pattern recognizers. They learn to recognize a pattern, and they're organized in a hierarchy. That hierarchy is built from our own thoughts. So it's true that you are what you eat, but it's even more true that you are what you think.

FORTUNE --When will the average person have his or her brain connected to and supplemented by computers?

One answer is that we have brain extenders already, even though the vast majority are not physically connected. Humans have always built tools to compensate for our limitations. We now have mental tools to extend our reach. So I can access all of human knowledge in sense with a few keystrokes and so can the kid in Africa with a smartphone. So these are very literally brain extenders. To answer your actual question, I would say the 2030s. We will have intelligent computerized devices the size of blood cells, and we'll put them in our blood stream. They'll go inside our brain and provide gateways to the cloud directly from our brain. And one of the things we'll do will be to extend the neocortex so that we're not limited to just 300 million pattern recognizers. Consider the last time we added more neocortex, which is when homo sapiens evolved. That was the enabling factor that permitted the evolution of language and art and science and music and literature. It really came from this additional quantity, which made this qualitative leap possible. So 300 million is a lot in terms of the fact that it made this qualitative leap possible, but it's also very limiting, and we struggle with that limitation every day. Just confront how long it takes to read a book, let alone how long it takes to learn a new language. Suppose you want a billion or 10 billion pattern recognizers for a few seconds because you're doing some kind of complex search. What happens now is it goes out to the cloud. The interesting things that happen on your cellphone
or notebook are not happening in that rectangle, they're taking place in the cloud. And the cloud itself is growing exponentially.

FORTUNE --Will increased processing power change the way we think, or just increase our memory and the amount of information we can access?

As adults, we've filled up our neocortexes. We're constantly needing to forget things to free up neocortex to learn new things of any magnitude just because of that physical limitation. Just imagine what the next expansion of neocortex capacity will permit qualitatively. But there are other advantages of a non-biological neocortex. It's not just additional quantity. Computations can be done faster. Also, information stored biologically is not backed up. We routinely back up everything on our non-biological devices. And you can download new knowledge to it. So we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence. We're not going to be plugged in a la the Matrix. It's going to be WiFi. And it's not going to be one thing. You're not going to get a form: Check here, I want to be enhanced, Yes or No. There's going to be a million choices. There's a million choices now just of iPad apps. Go out to the late 2030s and there'll be some nano-bot software combinations that are very conservative that enhance your immune system and your memory that everyone uses. 

FORTUNE --And there'll be some more cutting edge things that only certain people use. How many people today opt out of this whole connectedness? 

Maybe the Amish. So people generally don't opt out, and there's going to be different choices. 

FORTUNE --Is technology changing our brains now in an evolutionary way?

Not biologically. What does happen though is that our neocortex isn't going to bother using up a lot of its capacity learning things that it knows it can get through its brain extenders. There was a controversy when I went to college about these little devices called calculators. People said, 'Oh, kids aren't going to learn arithmetic.' That turned out to be true. They could probably still add and subtract, but doing long division became a lost skill. But the calculators didn't go away and Google (GOOG) isn't going away. And we don't need to fill up our precious neocortical real estate with lots of facts. The idea of rote learning is obsolete because we carry access to all of these facts and knowledge around with us. We do need to teach people how to use knowledge, how to solve problems and so on. But the brain extenders are not going way. People say, "These things are making us stupider." If you define intelligence as the ability to remember random facts that might be true. But in fact we are much more intelligent with our brain extenders. These powerful tools are making us smarter, but you have to include them as part of who we are. And in my view they are part of who we are.
A shorter version of this interview appeared in the January 14, 2013 issue of Fortune.
More from The Future Issue
The future according to Larry Page
Will.i.am: Corporate America's hit machine
Teaching IBM's Watson the meaning of 'OMG'
Iron Man in the factory


domingo, julio 31, 2011


10 TECNOLOGÍAS QUE VAN CAMBIANDO EL MUNDO

Información recogida de Dave Evans, jefe de Cisco futurista y jefe

de tecnología de Cisco en Internet del Grupo de Soluciones de Negocios ( IBSG).

(NOTA, LA TRADUCCIÓN NO ES MUY BUENA, PERO SE ENTIENDE)

Las Impresoras 3D, redes de sensores, los humanos virtuales y otras tecnologías en desarrollo cambiarán drásticamente nuestro mundo en la próxima década.

Como la potencia de cálculo aumenta de manera exponencial, no lineal, también lo hace la tasa de la velocidad del cambio -y eso significa que en los próximos 10 años deben venir mucho más cambios tecnológicos que en los últimos 10.

La Tecnología de punta es , por su propia naturaleza ,impredecible , pero aún es posible observar el trabajo realizado por los laboratorios de R&D en todo el mundo y ver pistas sobre lo que depara el futuro. Ese es el trabajo a tiempo completo de Dave Evans , jefe de Cisco futurista y jefe de tecnología de Cisco en Internet del Grupo de Soluciones de Negocios ( IBSG) .

1: La Internet de las cosas

Hemos pasado el umbral en el que más cosas están conectadas a Internet que personas. La transición a IPv6 también proporciona conectividad que parece no tener límite. CiscoIBSG predice que el número de conectados a Internet de las cosas va a llegar a 50 millones en 2020, lo que equivale a más de seis dispositivos para cada persona en la Tierra. Muchos de nosotros en el mundo desarrollado ya tienen tres o más a tiempo completo los dispositivos conectados a Internet cuando sus tomas en PCs, smartphones, tabletas, dispositivos de televisión y similares. Lo siguiente son las redes de sensores, utilizando sensores de baja potencia que son usados para "recoger, transmitir, analizar y distribuir datos a gran escala", dice Evans.

Este tipo de sensores, basados ​ ​ en estándares como Zigbee, 6LoWPAN y Z-Wave, se están utilizando de manera previsible y sorprendente. Zigbee está siendo incorporado en electrodomésticos inteligentes y medidores inteligentes. 6LoWPAN (a través de IPv6) es utilizado por Vint Cerf por su bodega de vinos con el clima de monitoreo del sistema. Z-Wave es la base para un crecimiento inteligente de Verizon servicio de automatización del hogar. Pero utilidades más creativas están surgiendo, también. Provocó, que una empresa holandesa, usara los implantes de sensores en las orejas del ganado para controlar la salud de las vacas y su paradero. Los sensores están siendo integrados en los zapatos, medicinas como inhaladores para el asma, y ​ ​ los dispositivos médicos cirugía exploratoria. Incluso hay un árbol en Suecia con sensores que los tweets de su estado de ánimo y pensamientos, con un poco de ayuda a la traducción de un motor de interpretación desarrollada por Ericsson (@ connectedtree o ectree #).

2: No sólo de datos grande, pero un zettaflood

Bancos de 5 exabytes de información única se han creado en el año 2008. O sea, 1 billón de DVDs. El avance rápido de tres años ya estamos creando zettabytes 1, 2, con un zettabyte igual a 1.024 exabytes.

"Esto es lo mismo que todas las personas en Twitter de la Tierra durante 100 años, o 125 millones de años de su programa favorito de televisión de una hora", dice Evans. Nuestro video de alta definición representa gran parte del aumento. Por el número de Cisco , el 91 por ciento de los datos de Internet en el año 2015 será de vídeo.

Gran parte del enfoque de desarrollo de Cisco (por no hablar de su comercialización) que predica la llamada "zettaflood" se requieren redes mejorado enormemente para transferir más datos, y no dejar caer la bola (o los paquetes) de nuestro video amado.

3: La sabiduría de la nube

Gran parte de la zettaflood de datos serán almacenados en la nube. Ciertamente, la mayoría de los que se accede por la nube, y no sólo en las redes privadas. En 2020, un tercio de todos los datos se viven o pasan a través de la nube, predice Cisco . Los i ngresosglobales de la nube por servicios se incremento del 20 por ciento por año, y el gasto en TI en la innovación y el cloud computing podría superar los US $ 1 trillón para el año 2014.Eso es suficiente para crear el próximo Google. "Ya, la nube es lo suficientemente potente como para ayudarnos a comunicar a través de traducción de idiomas en tiempo real, aumentar el conocimiento del acceso a poderosas supercomputadoras como Wolfram Alpha, y mejorar nuestra salud utilizando las plataformas de computación, como Watson de IBM en nuevas formas", dice Evans. "Somos capaces de comunicarnos de una manera mucho más rica."

Además del vídeo, la potencia de computación de la nube enviado a los dispositivos de punto final cambia nuestra habilidad para comunicarse con cosas como la traducción en tiempo real. En este momento, la búsqueda de voz en un teléfono con Android envía la consulta a la nube de Google para descifrar y devolver los resultados. "Vamos a ver más inteligencia integrada en la comunicación. Cosas como la información contextual y basados ​ ​ en la localización."

Con un dispositivo de conexión permanente, la red puede ser más granular, con información de presencia, tocando en un sensor de personal de saber que una persona está dormida, y la ruta de una llamada entrante al correo de voz. O conocer a esa persona está viajando a 60 mph en un automóvil, y que este no es el momento para una llamada de video. (Por supuesto, para entonces, probablemente vamos a utilizar todos los vehículos sin conductor de Google, y ser libres de la charla mientras que nuestros coches nos llevará alrededor.)

4: La próxima .Net Evans habla de su casa como un ejemplo de las mejoras de la velocidad de la red. El rendimiento de la red ha aumentado en 170.000 veces desde 1990, cuando tenía sólo una conexión telnet.

En la actualidad, Evans tiene 38 conexiones permanentes y más de 50 Mbps de ancho de banda, suficiente para que la telepresencia, la descarga de películas y juegos en línea estén disponibles al mismo tiempo. Durante los próximos 10 años, Evans espera que la velocidad de su casa se pueda aumentar en 3 millones de veces.

Mientras que la mayoría de la industria se centra en la 40G y 100G, toda una nueva forma de redes también se está creando. Vint Cerf explica los nuevos protocolos necesarios para construir una red interplanetaria, que puede enviar datos de gran distancia, sin ser molestado por la latencia. Evans señala que multiterabit redes que utilizan rayos láser se están explorando. Y los primeros trabajos que está sucediendo en un concepto denominado "redes cuánticas", basada en la física cuántica. Esto implica el "entrelazamiento cuántico" en la que dos partículas están entrelazadas tras lo cual pueden estar separados por una distancia, y cuando uno se cambia, el otro también cambió de inmediato. La producción de las redes cuánticas son décadas probablemente en el futuro.

5: El mundo se hace más pequeño Con una conectividad siempre disponible, las redes sociales tienen el poder de cambiar las culturas, como vimos con la revolución egipcia, que llevó a la primavera árabe. Las influencias sociales continuarán moviéndose rápidamente entre las culturas.

Un mundo más pequeño también significa más rápida difusión de la información. "Tweets de las personas en Japón durante el terremoto fueron enviados a los seguidores, incluso antes de que el Servicio Geológico de EE.UU. podría emitir su advertencia de tsunami oficial de Alaska, Washington, Oregon y California", dice Evans.

La captura, difusión y consumo de los acontecimientos se van de "tiempo cercano" a "tiempo real". Esto a su vez la unidad más rápida influencia entre las culturas.

6: El poder del poder La población humana también sigue creciendo, y Evans estima que una ciudad de 1 millón de habitantes se construirá cada mes durante los próximos dos decenios. Los métodos más eficientes para suplir la energía de esas ciudades se están convirtiendo en una necesidad, en particular la energía solar.

"Energía solar es lo único que puede satisfacer nuestras necesidades energéticas. De hecho, para hacer frente a la demanda global de hoy en día para la energía, 25 súper sitios solares -. Cada uno de los cuales 36 kilómetros cuadrados - podrían ser erigidos Compare esto con los 170.000 kilómetros cuadrados de la superficie forestal destruida por cada año ", dice Evans. Como un parque solar se pudo completar en sólo tres años.

TRATANDO: Departamento de Energía gasta $ 2B para duplicar la capacidad de EE.UU. concentranndose en la energía solar

Las Tecnologías para hacerlo más económicamente pragmático están en camino. En junio, investigadores de la Universidad del Estado de Oregon, mostraron una novedosa, relativamente asequible y de bajo impacto método para "imprimir" células solares utilizando una impresora de inyección de tinta.

7: Té. Earl Grey. Caliente

Más elementos se mueven desde lo físico a virtual. Hoy en día, debemos descargar los e-libros y películas, en lugar de libros encuadernados y DVDs. Una Tecnología llamada impresión 3D nos permitirá fabricar de manera instantánea cualquier elemento físico de los alimentos a las bicicletas, utilizando la Tecnología de la impresora. Esto es sorprendente, como el concepto de replicador de "Star Trek".

"La impresión 3D, o la fabricación de aditivos, es el proceso de unión de materiales para crear objetos a partir de datos del modelo 3D, por lo general una capa sobre otra", dice Evans.

Ya, las cosas que van desde juguetes hasta automóviles de las estructuras vivientes se están imprimiendo y debido a que el proceso se realiza mediante la adición de capas de materiales en la parte superior de uno al otro, que se imprimen completamente montado y decorado, también.

LEGAL? La impresión 3D puede traer problemas legales, dice el grupo.

En un futuro no muy lejano, seremos capaces de imprimir órganos humanos ", dice Evans. En marzo, el Dr. Anthony Atala de Wake Forest, el Instituto de Medicina Regenerativa pudo imprimir un molde de riñón de prueba de concepto en el escenario de TED. No era un tejido vivo, pero el resultado estuvo bien, aun así.

Tendencia 8: Otro árbol de la familia Los humanos virtuales, avatares físicos (robots) y la línea se añadirá a la fuerza de trabajo. "Ya, personajes animados puede reconocer el habla, convertir texto a voz, y tener conocimiento de los encuentros anteriores", dice Evans.

En 2020, los robots serán físicamente superiores a los humanos. Proyecto Blue Brain de IBM, por ejemplo, es una misión de 10 años para crear un cerebro humano utilizando el hardware y software. "Ellos creen que en una década que van a empezar a ver surgir la conciencia con este cerebro", dice Evans.

En 2025, la población de robots pueda que excedan el número de seres humanos en el mundo desarrollado. Para 2032, los robots serán mentalmente superiores a los humanos. Y para el año 2035, los robots podrían sustituir por completo los seres humanos en la fuerza laboral.

Más allá de eso, vamos a ver la creación de avatares sofisticados. Evans señala a Watson de IBM como una plantilla para el ser humano virtual. Watson fue capaz de responder a una pregunta de devolver un único resultado, preciso. Un paciente puede utilizar una máquina virtual en lugar de una búsqueda de WebMD. U hospitales puede aumentar la atención al paciente con las máquinas virtuales.

Entre ahora y entonces, la realidad aumentada y basados ​ ​ en gestos de computación entrarán en nuestras aulas, instalaciones médicas y las comunicaciones, y los transformaran también. "Ya, la visión artificial permite a los usuarios tomen una foto de un rompecabezas de Sudoku con su teléfono inteligente y lo han resuelto casi de inmediato", señala.

9: Sí, hay una cura para que "Creemos que nada del uso de marcapasos", señala Evans. En los próximos 10 años, cree que las tecnologías médicas crecerá mucho más sofisticada, como potencia de cálculo disponible en formas más pequeñas. Dispositivostales como nanobots y la capacidad de crecer órganos de reemplazo a partir de nuestros propios tejidos serán la norma. "La integración final podría ser interfaces cerebro-máquina que con el tiempo permitan que las personas con lesiones de la médula espinal pueda llevar una vida normal", dice.

Hoy tenemos control mental de videojuegos y sillas de ruedas, el software de Intel que puede escanear el cerebro y decir lo que estás pensando y herramientas que puede predecir lo que va a hacer antes de hacerlo.

10: Los seres humanos o Borg? De acuerdo con Stephen Hawking, "Los seres humanos están entrando en una etapa de la evolución de diseño propio." Tomando la idea de laTecnología médica para el siguiente nivel, los seres humanos sanos se les dará las herramientas para aumentar. Evans ofrece los siguientes ejemplos:

Julio de 2009 - Investigadores españoles descubren sustancia de la memoria fotográfica.

Octubre 2009 - Científicos italianos y suecos desarrollar la primera mano artificial con sentimiento.

Marzo de 2010 - Los implantes Retina restaurar la visión a pacientes ciegos.

Junio ​ ​ 2011 - Texas Heart Institute desarrolla un "spinning" corazón sin pulso, sin obstrucciones y averías no.

Mientras que el uso temprano de estas tecnologías serán para reparar el tejido dañado o reparar las consecuencias de la lesión cerebral, con el tiempo las mejoras de diseño estará a disposición de todos.

En última instancia, los seres humanos utilizan la Tecnología tanto para reparar, mejorar o aumentar nuestros cuerpos, que se convertirá en el Borg. Futurista Ray Kurzweil es pionera en esta idea con un concepto que él denomina singularidad, el punto en el que el hombre y la máquina de fusión y se convierten en una nueva especie. (Kurzweil dice que esto va a pasar por el 2054). Evans no está convencido de la singularidad, en particular en el marco temporal de Kurzweil, pero se instala en la Universidad de la Singularidad en Mountain View y descubre lo plausible de los datos, y está de acuerdo en que estamos en esa trayectoria.

Fuente: Http://images.infoworld.com/

martes, mayo 10, 2011



SOBRE LA INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL Y LA INMORTALIDAD



"2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal"

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011
By Lev Grossman TIME MAGAZINE


On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. (See the best inventions of 2010.)
Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.
If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.
Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity. (Comment on this story.)
The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.
People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there's more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language. (See "Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?")
The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion":
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology. (See pictures of adorable robots.)
But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence."(See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)
In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?
Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project," he says. "So it's like skeet shooting — you can't shoot at the target." He knew about Moore's law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It's a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.
As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore's. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900. (Comment on this story.)
Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.
See TIME's video "Five Worst Inventions."
See the 100 best gadgets of all time.
Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains."
Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today. (See how robotics are changing the future of medicine.)
The Singularity isn't just an idea. It attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.
Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.
In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology. (See TIME's computer covers.)
At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.
After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.
For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger. (Comment on this story.)
Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."
Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.
From TIME's archives: "The Immortality Enzyme."
See Healthland's 5 rules for good health in 2011.
But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.
It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailing to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. "There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people," he says. "But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2010.)
Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.
The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.
Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. (See how to live 100 years.)
Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?
Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?
Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error. (Comment on this story.)
If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools."
Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.
See TIME's photo-essay "A Global Look at Longevity."
See how genes, gender and diet may be life extenders.
Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth."
This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called the Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?) (See portraits of centenarians.)
By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to really look."
In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.
We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species. (See the costs of living a long life.)
Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.
But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?
Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn't strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits. (Comment on this story.)
A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.
But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

domingo, noviembre 21, 2010


PETER DIAMANDIS: THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE
Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-Founder of Singularity University, discusses the best way to predict the future, and shares his personal philosophies on innovation and the commercial space industry. Flimed at Singularity University’s Executive Program, March 2010.
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lunes, julio 26, 2010



LA IRRUPCIÓN DEL FUTURO:
INFORME 2010 DEL MILLENNIUM PROJECT
Héctor Casanueva



Según el informe 2010 del “State of the Future” (SOF 2010), presentado recientemente en Boston por Jerome Glenn, Director del Millennium Project, un think tank global de estudios de futuro que agrupa a dos mil quinientos científicos, académicos, intelectuales, políticos y comunicadores de todo el mundo, la síntesis y convergencia entre las ciencias y la tecnología está teniendo grandes impactos sobre la condición humana, positivos y negativos, pero los tendrá más aún en el futuro cercano, y para eso debemos estar preparados. Los biólogos sintéticos pronostican que así como el código de los computadores se escribe para crear software que aumente las capacidades humanas, también se “escribirá” el código genético para crear formas de vida para el mejor desarrollo de la civilización. Hay ordenadores que están siendo construidos con el objetivo de desarrollar la misma capacidad de procesamiento del cerebro humano. Los productos a base de nanotecnología han crecido un 25 % en el año pasado, llegando hoy a más de ochocientos artículos para liberar medicinas en el cuerpo.
Según Ray Kurzwail, de la Singularity University de Sillicon Valley, uno de los principales desarrolladores de la Inteligencia Artificial, e inventor, entre otros dispositivos, del scanner para computadores, el poder de la tecnología de la información se duplica anualmente. “Estamos ahora en un período de cambio llamativamente rápido. Cinco años atrás la gente no usaba buscadores de Internet, y tres años atrás la gente no usaba el término blog”. Según Kurzweil, autor del libro “La singularidad está cerca: cuando los humanos trasciendan la biología”, en las próximas décadas la inteligencia de origen no biológico va a estar a la par, en capacidad y sutileza, de la inteligencia de origen biológico. Y luego la va a superar ampliamente debido a la continua aceleración de la tecnología de la información combinada con la habilidad de las máquinas para compartir instantáneamente su conocimiento. Nanorobots inteligentes van a estar integrados a nuestro organismo, nuestro cerebro y medio ambiente, ayudándonos a superar la pobreza y la polución, aumentando la longevidad. Además, tendremos una realidad virtual de inmersión absoluta y que incorporará todos nuestros sentidos, “algo así como la mezcla de lo que se vio en The Matrix con lo que se vio en Being John Malkovitch “.Una aplicación de la nanotecnología serán los "nanobots", robots del tamaño de una célula sanguínea que pueden viajar por el torrente sanguíneo destruyendo patologías, sacando desechos, corrigiendo errores del ADN y revirtiendo el proceso de envejecimiento. También estos "nanobots" irán a nuestro cerebro proveyendo de comunicación directa cerebro a cerebro, una inmersión total en la realidad virtual desde el sistema nervioso y, a grandes rasgos, expandiendo nuestra capacidad mental.
Según el SOF 2010 casi el 30 % de la humanidad está unida a Internet, y dentro de cinco años más de la mitad del mundo tendrá el acceso a Internet y dispositivos móviles. Es razonable asumir que en unos años más toda la humanidad puede ser unida por la red. La Internet se ha desarrollado desde ser un depósito pasivo de información (el Web 1.0) a un sistema generado por el usuario y participativo (el Web 2.0) y avanza a la Web 3.0, forma más inteligente que “sabe” el significado de la información que almacena y tiene la capacidad para tomar decisiones con ese conocimiento. Se avanza hacia la informática ubicua: con 5 mil millones de suscripciones de teléfonos móviles, bajando los precios de los smartphones, y un entorno construido de trans-receptores de los multimedia y una variedad de sensores, es razonable asumir que la mayoría del mundo urbanizado experimentará la informática ubicua y tarde o temprano empleará la mayor parte de su tiempo en alguna forma de realidad tecnológicamente aumentada. Mientras tanto, están siendo construidas bases de Internet con transmisión inalámbrica en pueblos remotos, los teléfonos móviles con el acceso a Internet están siendo diseñados para el acceso educativo y de negocios para los grupos de ingresos más bajos, y programas innovadores están siendo creados para unir a las 2 mil millones de personas más pobres a este “sistema nervioso” de la nueva civilización.
Si las actuales tendencias de población, agotamiento de recursos naturales, cambio climático, terrorismo, crimen organizado y enfermedades continúan y convergen durante los próximos cincuenta años, es fácil imaginarse un mundo caótico, inestable y catastrófico. Sin embargo, si las tendencias emergentes de autoorganización para el futuro, crecimiento de Internet, la cooperación transnacional, la ciencia de materiales, las energías alternativas, la ciencia cognitiva, el diálogo interreligioso, la biología sintética y la nanotecnología crecen y convergen crecientemente durante los próximos años, es posible imaginar un mundo diferente, que funciona y sirve al bienestar de todos. Correctamente manejadas, y producidas las sinergias entre la biotecnología, la infotecnología, la nanotecnología, y superadas las brechas de cognotecnología vigentes, es posible superar los problemas ambientales, económicos y sociales de un mundo que al 2050 tendrá aproximadamente 9 mil millones de personas. Este es el principal mensaje del SOF2010. Toda esta revolución debería estar al servicio de la creación de un nuevo mundo, con más libertad, sin pobreza, sin enfermedades, sin conflictos irreductibles, es decir, más feliz.
¿Una utopía? Al parecer, la utopía es posible, pero, como advierte Jerome Glenn, la tecnología no basta. Para conducir este proceso hacia fines compatibles con los valores de la vida y el bienestar humano, necesitamos de una verdadera política global -lo que se menciona profusamente en el SOF 2010- que sea puesta en práctica por gobiernos, corporaciones, sistemas de educación, organizaciones no gubernamentales, Naciones Unidas, organizaciones internacionales. Un diálogo inter-religioso, mejorar el desempeño de los medios de comunicación, acercar a las personas entre si. Cada uno tiene un rol que jugar ante los problemas cada vez más complejos y la articulación de modos de mejorar las perspectivas para la civilización. Pero la explosión del conocimiento unido a la continua sobrecarga de la información y la aceleración del cambio, hacen cada vez más inadecuados los sistemas de información para la toma de decisiones. De ahí que una posibilidad es crear sistemas de “inteligencia colectiva” que facilitan la interacción y la regeneración en tiempo real entre puntos de vista, información y software. Es decir, la creación, usando las tecnologías de la información, de la “inteligencia colectiva”, definida por Glenn como la “sinergia entre datos/información/conocimiento/software/hardware/expertos con nuevas ideas y suficiente autoridad, que aprende, produce y regenera conocimiento en tiempo real y continuo para la toma de mejores decisiones". El capítulo III del SOF 2010 da dos ejemplos recientes al respecto: la “Situation Room sobre Cambio climático Global”, implementada en Gimcheon, Corea del Sur; y el “Sistema de Alerta Temprana” para la Oficina del primer ministro del Estado Kuwait. En esta línea, el Millennium Project ha recomendado desde hace años fehacientemente a los gobiernos que instalen oficinas de análisis prospectivo, conectadas con sus similares en el mundo y con empresas, organizaciones civiles, universidades, para avanzar en este sistema de inteligencia colectiva.

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