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Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With AI 151

Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, 76, has doubled down on his prediction of the Singularity's imminent arrival in an interview with The New York Times. Gesturing to a graph showing exponential growth in computing power, Kurzweil asserted humanity would merge with AI by 2045, augmenting biological brains with vast computational abilities.

"If you create something that is thousands of times -- or millions of times -- more powerful than the brain, we can't anticipate what it is going to do," Kurzweil said. His claims, once dismissed, have gained traction amid recent AI breakthroughs. As Kurzweil ages, his predictions carry personal urgency. "Even a healthy 20-year-old could die tomorrow," he told The Times, hinting at his own mortality race against the Singularity's timeline.
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Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With AI

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  • Meet them half way (Score:3, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @04:49AM (#64601993)
    "Machines will one day exceed human intelligence." - Ray Kurtzweil

    "Only if we meet them half way." - Dave Snowden

    I see the Silicon Valley hype machine is still in top gear. I guess they need to raise more funds for even bigger LLMs. Making them bigger won't make them any less dumb.
  • there's a surge in software-based tech hype. He was there at the dotcom bubble in 2000 when similar carnival barkers were talking about the "end of history" because the internet had arrive. Pointing at irrelevant charts of data out of context like some white-suited tent revival preacher predicting the exact date of Armageddon... Shove it up your ass, Ray, and give it a rest, media.
  • Probably not because he's too busy, quote, "masturbating with lasers". That's what the early welcome letter for Singularity U said.
  • People who can't come to grips with mortality are easy marks.

  • IMO (Score:2, Informative)

    Ray has become spiritual recently (too much faith), to the point of being inadequate. I don't see us merging with AI because we are yet to crack AGI and we still have no clue what intelligence really is and how it comes about. LLMs are fine, can do a ton but they mostly synthesize knowledge based on what they already know, they don't invent something radically new. And they do it by consuming gigawatts of energy vs. less than 50W for the human brain. Something is missing.
  • LOL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @05:15AM (#64602037)

    Intelligence requires 3 things:

    1. memory/knowledge base
    2. reasoning outside of immediate context
    3. imagination

    AI is so stupid if a bunch of idiots say the world is flat, it will believe that.

    • So, AI could not be construed to be as dumb as you say. Humans require to be fed knowledge too to become more 'intelligent'. Granted humans have an inate need to acquire knowledge and to make discoveries. That's missing from current LLMs.
  • Probably Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)

    by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @05:53AM (#64602117)

    We still don't know how the human brain works - our present understanding of it is extremely clunky and mostly based on conjecture. Rapid progress is being made, but like many parts of life science, the more you dig, the more complex you realise it is. Just consider how there are now theories that all the 'junk' sequences in DNA may actually have uses in other parts of gene expression.

    What we have built with computers is really impressive, but just making some kind of blind connection that 'computers are powerful, so we should be able to make a human brain soon' is dumb. Classical computers can't even fold protein sequences of any significant length, and without some kind of algorithmic or quantum breakthrough they never will, no matter how much we keep increasing their FLOP rate. The same thing happens with any kind of molecular simulation - you quickly run up against big-O issues that cannot be fixed by increasing computing power. Yet your body can fold protein sequences in mS. It may turn out that the ability to do this sort of chemical processing is a requirement for sentience, or it might not. But we have no idea really.

    Until we better understand the problem (what is consciously) making these sorts of predictions are dumb. At the moment we can barely predict when computers will be able to fold a pile of washing.

    • by Bumbul ( 7920730 )

      Classical computers can't even fold protein sequences of any significant length, and without some kind of algorithmic or quantum breakthrough they never will, no matter how much we keep increasing their FLOP rate. The same thing happens with any kind of molecular simulation - you quickly run up against big-O issues that cannot be fixed by increasing computing power. Yet your body can fold protein sequences in mS. It may turn out that the ability to do this sort of chemical processing is a requirement for sentience, or it might not. But we have no idea really.

      It seems that you are comparing a calculation with a physical event... If turned the other way - human brain cannot calculate the exact way how the CPU fails if it overheats - but the CPU itself can fail just in mS if overheated. Does it mean that human brain is inferior?

  • by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Friday July 05, 2024 @06:15AM (#64602161)

    Augmenting your mind with a computer is something a lot of people already do... for decades. A question pops into your mind you can't answer, you get to a computer keyboard and ask it. This is common from simple web search engines, via specialized query languages to writing a short program to answer that question.

    It's a trend that has been slowed by the advent of "smart"-phones where the input is limited almost to the point of uselessness.

    Of course what we now also see is that unrestricted capitalism will essentially ruin those ideas. While in the past we thought that brain interfaces would stream ads directly into your brain, we now see people enslaved by "smart"-phone notifications.

    • That's simply using tools to access knowledge created by other humans. A thing we did since the first written word. The only difference is that now it's a bit faster.

      And AI is the same: a tool for retrieving info we create, Ray's delusions notwithstanding.

      • Well so far AI text generators are fairly bad at storing knownledge. However maybe they could translate "natural language" into query languages in an interactive way, asking the user the questions they need to clarify the question.

  • >"Kurzweil asserted humanity would merge with AI by 2045, augmenting biological brains with vast computational abilities."

    I think that is nonsense. No way that is happening in 25 or so years. Not saying it won't happen at some point, but not that quickly. And it is likely we will have enough fear of the danger of that type of technology, and rightfully so, to prevent mass adoption. That is on top of just how little we really know about the human brain/mind.

    >"If you create something that is thousan

  • If the AI version of you requires a small modular reactor to power it, I don't see how that's going to be accessible for some 20 year old. Nor is any single human intelligence worth preserving at that cost.
  • AI: "Please, no"
  • I tend to agree more with this one:
    https://techcrunch.com/2024/06... [techcrunch.com]

    • Came here looking for this comment. His track record is consistent with that of a broken clock. Why do people keep listening to this windbag? Because he occupies that iffy space where science fiction is dressed up as plausible reality through the use of misdirection and fuzzy narrative. He's basically the tech version of Deepak Chopra.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. The comparison to Chopra does fit. But, like every peddler of pseudo-profound bullshit, he finds his fanbois that completely fail to be able to fact-check but want to believe deeply.

    • Hey, smart people do not always stay as smart for all time. He could have been super smart in the past. Oh, and I am not saying old people can't be way smarter than the average young adult - some people degrade much faster as well.

      Furthermore, a smart computer person can remain brilliant and capable but OUTSIDE their domain be complete idiots. Unlike most things, you can overlap computers with absolutely every topic, so you can have a brilliant person and their works wasted on idiotic goals. Such as tryin

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Ok, can you live better with "moron savant"? Although from my reading it looks more like he is more limited that a savant would be. He did pick some low-hanging fruits in his early career, but he certainly has a flawed self-evaluation and has no clue how wrong he is on many things. He does have some "guru" skills so many mistake his statements for great wisdom. They clearly are not as soon as you have actual fact-checking abilities.

  • Be EMULATED by AI, sure.

    Merge with? No. At his age, it's far too far off for him to be augmented with AI in any but the most deluded fantasy, and augmentation is the first step to 'merging'.

    My kids might one day, if they're unlucky enough, have accidents that end up with bits of their brains replaced by AI.

  • Kurzweil is in denial. The promise and religion of the Singularity is a cloud of super-humanlike, and yet godlike, machines that appear to act like us but live in an electrical nowhere-everywhere. But it also touts the ability for human brains to "live on" in this form. Here, Kurzweil is badly projecting his desire to live longer than his genetics would dictate. His LLM, trained on his media and ongoing blathering, will /not/ be him. He will die like us all, and we'll be stuck with a Lawnmower Man ver
  • For endless reasons. I mean, if he wants to train a LLM on all his, err, musings, go ahead, but nobody is keeping that going for long.

    Frankly, a bot that just spews out variations of "I'm so smart" and "the singularity is a thing because (random)" would be just as good.

    People get old, they die. When they can die well, that's a good thing.

  • As he feels the cold hand of death creeping closer, his belief in salvation strengthens.

    But he will find the same fate as all who have striven for immortality. The same fate that awaits us all. There's nothing more natural than death. We were born for it.

How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb? "Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."

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