Cory Doctorow interviews Ray Kurzweil

[jrtom]

picked up (natch!) from Boing Boing: Though Experiments: When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil

Interesting. My gut feeling is that, in this context--that is, making predictions about the future of the human race as informed by new things we'll be able to do with AI Any Day Now--Kurzweil is a kook. A highly intelligent, informed, entertaining, and articulate kook, but a kook nonetheless.

I'd also like to point out the two, um, big holes in the second paragraph:

When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "prog-ress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.

(1) Moore's Law (which seems to be what this notion is taken from) doesn't suggest that the doubling rate for processor speed is going to increase at any point.

(2) The end of Moore's Law's applicability is in sight.

Cory, I have a lot of respect for you and your writing, but, well, you goofed.

Comments

Interpreting Cory

[(Anonymous)]

Not that I agree, but I think the concept is that if we get human-level cognition on day x, then that cognition will be used to design improved processors as well as improved cognition. In x+18 months, the cognition has doubled in power, and so has the processor. Which means that the next iteration happens at x + 9 months. (I don't know how he gets from 18 to 12. Maybe he's figuring that cognition increases less quickly than processors.)

-D

Re: Interpreting Cory

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I suppose that's what he might have meant. But (a) that's not what it sounded like (he merely suggests that if brains can make direct use of computers--already a strong assumption--then "cognition [will be] hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors", which sounds like it's trying to appeal to Moore's Law to me), and (b) suggesting that greater intelligence comes with faster processor speed seems like a stretch to me, and should be at least explicitly mentioned as an assumption, if not justified.