newsmaker Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was ranked 14th in the 2008 Agenda Setters list of ZDNet Asia's sister site Silicon.com.
He has invented and commercialized a raft of innovative technologies, including a text-to-speech synthesizer, voice recognition software and a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, garnering a clutch of awards in the process. He has also written extensively on artificial intelligence and robotics.
In several of his published books--including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near--he describes a vision of the future where machine and human intelligence are increasingly combined, augmenting each other and ultimately, in Kurzweil's view, enabling humans to become both smarter and better.
"These technologies can enhance not just our intelligence but our ethical and moral sense, our emotional intelligence, and make us more exemplary of what we consider to be human," he noted.
Key to understanding Kurzweil's philosophy is what he dubs 'the law of accelerating returns', or a belief that technological change has an exponential not linear progression and thus information technologies which today seem to be inching forward at a snail's pace will actually reach a tipping point much faster than expected and accelerate ever more rapidly thereafter, enabling disruptive change in the relatively near term.
"The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller [than the one computer at MIT in 1965] and so that's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we've actually seen in the last 40 years," said Kurzweil.
"The rate is actually speeding up a little bit so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years. And another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking," he added. "So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years."
Kurzweil discussed with Silicon.com his vision of a man-plus-machine future, what intelligent computers will mean for human society and jobs, and what dangers we might encounter in a world awash with advanced technology.
Q: What is the most exciting technology that you've seen in recent years?
Kurzweil: One industry that is just in the last few years transformed from a pre-information era to becoming an information technology is health and medicineÂ… We have software that's running in our bodies that's thousands of years old or more and it evolved when conditions were very different. For example the fat insulin receptor gene says hold onto every single calorie in your fat cells and that was a good idea 1,000 years ago--it's not a good idea today, it underlies an epidemic of obesity certainly in my country. And what would happen if we turned that gene off?
There are other genes that are necessary for heart disease or cancer to progress that we'd like to turn off and we've come up with a new technology...RNA interference, that can turn off selected genes...We also have new methods of adding new genes so...we can update this outdated software that runs in our bodies. We can also turn on and off enzymes and proteins and really reprogram the information processes of underlying biology--and we can design these interventions on computers rather than just try to find some substance that happens to work and we can then test them out in biological simulators.
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| You won't be able to walk into a room and say 'OK, humans on the left, machines on the right,' because it's going to be all mixed up. |
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Now all of these developments...are in an early stage but they're information technologies so they will advance exponentially not linearly--these technologies will be a thousand times more capable in 10 years, a million times more powerful in 20 years and according to my models we'll be adding more than a year every year not just to infant life expectancy but to your remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in rather than running out.
When will the Turing Test be passed? And what will it mean for human society?
I've been quite consistent that it'll happen by 2029. I think [the rules that a computer passes if it fools the judges 30 percent of the time are] actually too lenient--in the recent test it fooled the judges 25 percent of the time. Every time they run that test the computers do a little bit better. The first reports [of a computer passing] I probably won't accept it myself...but then as time goes on the computers will pass more and more stringent sets of rules and by 2029 it'll be unarguable that computers have passed. And I do think it's a good test. It's not by the way a test of human consciousness--it's a test of human intelligence. Which is something we can objectively measure even though we can argue about how to measure it.
Consciousness is not something we can readily measure in another entity. However in order for a computer or any entity to pass the Turing Test it has to master human emotion--and human emotion is not some sideshow. What humans do well is both pattern recognition and our emotional thinking, which is a form of recognizing patterns that we find in situations. Getting the joke, being funny, expressing a loving sentiment--these are actually the most complicated things we do, the cutting edge of human intelligence.
In terms of the impact on society it will be an important threshold but it won't transform things right away...because having a few more equivalents of human intelligence isn't necessarily going to change things. But because non-biological intelligence will be subject to the law of accelerating returns it will continue to progress both in hardware and software because these intelligent entities can access our source code, they can upgrade themselves.
Ultimately non-biological intelligence will be much more powerful than biological human intelligence but it's not an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars--it's coming from our own civilization. And we will use it as we do today to expand our own reach--we will make
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Certainly food for thought...but really hard to believe
Those comments about exponential advances in technology rather than linear are hard to swallow. For example, AI has taken so long to be where it is now, and it's still not widespread commercially, plus there's still so much about how our brains work that we don't know, except for being able to point out what changes occur physiologically but that doesn't mean that's correct. It may also vary from individual to individual. But as I've said, certainly food for thought!
Posted by Derick Goh on Wednesday, January 07 2009 05:40 PM