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-- Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

Globe and Mail
Kurzweil sees a future in games
March 3, 2008
By BLAINE KYLLO

Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.



The 60-year-old futurist, best knows for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.

�Games are a harbinger of everything,� said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. �In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.�

Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.

Mr. Kurzweil is what you'd call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest � he has a bachelor of science from MIT � he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.

Through his numerous companies he's invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He's the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990's The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world's chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.

Mr. Kurzweil's predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.

A Persian folk tale tells of a king presented with a beautiful chessboard, and when the king offered anything in return, the craftsman asked for a grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, 16 on the fourth and so on. The king agreed, but by the time he had reached the 19th square, more than half a million grains of rice were required. The king forfeited his realm instead.

The problem, said Kurzweil, is that humans seem to be hardwired to intuit things as following a linear trend. On a linear graph, for example, the growth of the World Wide Web seems like it came out of nowhere. But when plotted as an exponential curve you see �exquisitely smooth exponential progression,� said Kurzweil. Which is why, he explained, he was able to accurately predict the growth of the Internet twenty years ago.

In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the �70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore's Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.

But what does all this have to do with video games?

Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we'll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we'll have the software to do the same.

Kurzweil used the �Uncanny Valley� phenomenon � which refers to the negative emotional response that humans have toward simulated humans (such as robots) that are �almost human� � as an example. The reason computer-created characters can �seem like demented humans,� he suggested, was not because of modelling or mapping, but language. �The key to human intelligence was language,� he explained. The moment, then, at which software is able to generate human speech and dialogue, will be when the valley is traversed. �We'll be there by the late 2020s,� said Kurzweil.

But we're already seeing changes in the gaming industry, and Kurzweil suggested that the rate of change is such that anyone working on a project that will take more than six months needs to be aware of this fact. �Pong was crude,� he said. �That was 1972.�

By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. �They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,� he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects �full-immersion� games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don't forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We'll have to �enforce reality,� maybe �by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.�

A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called �an intimate merger.� Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having �complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.�

�A kid can become a virtual Ben Franklin,� said Kurzweil. �Everyone will be able to expand their intelligence by virtue of using such devices.�

In a backstage interview after his presentation, Kurzweil said he thinks the descriptor �video games� is limiting �because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life ... But it's been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity.�

�Play is how we principally learn and create,� said Kurzweil.

The continuing growth of computers is already leading to a democratization of gaming, he said. The price of gaming systems means that more people have them and they are more powerful than the supercomputers of the sixties. �The tools of production are also being democratized,� he said. Creating a new game that can be played by multiple players around the world can be done with a $1,000 laptop.

Massively multiplayer experiences, in games or in virtual worlds, harness the ability to interact. The �dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication� harnessed by the gaming industry will �create new, emerging forms of intelligence.�

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv...Technology/home

Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by SuperJimbo A Persian folk tale tells of a king presented with a beautiful chessboard, and when the king offered anything in return, the craftsman asked for a grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, 16 on the fourth and so on. The king agreed, but by the time he had reached the 19th square, more than half a million grains of rice were required. The king forfeited his realm instead. ...This refers to Moore's Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.

Isn't it a chinese folk tale? And Moore's Law isn't every two years, it's every 18 months.

quote:

The problem, said Kurzweil, is that humans seem to be hardwired to intuit things as following a linear trend. On a linear graph, for example, the growth of the World Wide Web seems like it came out of nowhere. But when plotted as an exponential curve you see �exquisitely smooth exponential progression,� said Kurzweil.

If the number of websites each year followed an exponential trend, then the growth of WWW is an exponential function, regardless of how the human brains interprets the data. ie. if you took the data, threw it in Excel and plotted a graph, it would look exponential iff the growth rate is exponential.

quote:

In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we'll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we'll have the software to do the same.

And that is the crux of the problem. Building super super fast computers still doesn't solve the problem of AI, and without AI being realized, it's kind of silly to make predictions about it. When researchers first started trying to develop AI, they were able to make significant progress in a relatively short time, and everyone got all excited that in the next few years AI will be completed. The problem was (and is) that their initial work was based in highly-simplified worlds, and the algorithms on which their AI worked fell apart when they were scaled up to the real world. And this is where we are stuck today.

I don't like how he basically predicted that by 2029 we will have succeeded in creating AI. What is he basing this on? Research can't be predicted like that, especially not with a hard problem like AI.

Also, I liked how his most distant prediction is 2029, which also coincides with the completion of AI. Is he unable to make any predictions past that cause he's not sure if the human race will survive to see 2030?

Great post Andrew. I've been following Kurzweil for about a year now.
edit

Here's a 3 part speech he did at a "Singularity Summit." He talks about everything from AI, to the genome project, nanotechnology, molecular computing, etc etc etc. Mind blowing stuff

quote:

Originally posted by Cosmic Fur Also, I liked how his most distant prediction is 2029, which also coincides with the completion of AI. Is he unable to make any predictions past that cause he's not sure if the human race will survive to see 2030?

No, he believes that by then the lines between humans and computers will be so blurred that we'll take a step into the "singularity" direction. He's not some crazy fortune teller. You can predict technology only so far before what's available to us runs out of steam and we have, what Kurzweil likes to call, a paradigm shift. The development of nanotechnology will only increase year by year; and faster and faster every year. Then there's DNA Computing or Quantum Computer which are slowly accelerating.

Check out those video's I posted.

quote:

Originally posted by infinity HiGH Check out those video's I posted.

Unfortunately, it appears the second and third are no longer available. He does have a lot of interesting things to say. I was introduced to his theories by a friend of mine. I can understand where he is comming from, but working with code for the last couple of years has led me to believe that he may have really failed in his analysis of computer code evolution, a fundamental requirement in every aspect of his evolutionary theories. There are also some under-statements regarding the complexity of the human mind and its processes, something very difficult to model accurately within any virtual environment without a full and solid grasp on the original subject matter. Also, with respects to computer code, some can argue that current trends and applications of code have not been better, but have in fact become convoluted, bloated, and inefficient over the last 40+ years of computing. In fact most of the theorems that govern programming have been around since the 50s and 60s, and have not really changed nor evolved, but have become diluted in a quest towards economic progress, rather than evolutionary progress. Anyways, I've got lots of ideas when it comes to futurism, and definitely enjoy his speaches.

^ Yep, great points Zokissima.

Also, I think he wrongly draws the parallel between backwards-engineering the brain and understanding how your mind and cognition works. Backwards-engineering a computer won't lead you to the algorithms of the software that runs it, and think your mind and your brain have a similar relationship. So saying that if we backwards-engineer the brain we'll be able to create computers as intelligent as us is a bit of a stretch. Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.

Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by SuperJimbo Although his academic foundation is modest � he has a bachelor of science from MIT � he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.

quote:

Originally posted by zokissima but working with code for the last couple of years

lol

Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by SuperJimbo �Play is how we principally learn and create,� said Kurzweil.

This alone proves the article headline imo

Re: Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by jon jon This alone proves the article headline imo

The developmental concept of "play" is easily 50+ years old.

lol ya thanks

Re: Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by jon jon lol

What?

Honestly, I never said he is wrong, but there are two principle ideas of his that I strongly disagree with, this comming from studying computer science and writing code in particular. His 15 years of experience = meh. As I said, the fundamental theorems governing these ideas have not changed for 40+ years.

Key, as Cosmic Fur stated is the lamens explanation of reverse-engineering the brain. With modern methods, we are only successful in completely reverse engineering mechanical 'organisms', thus organisms exhibiting clear action->reaction behaiviour. Decompiling code to get an accurate starting point is extremely difficult. Thus the first point of his that I disagree with. Leading on from that, I would say his estimates for some technologies and breakthroughs are incredibly optimistic. You have to realize that there is a HUGE gap between computing power rising exponentially, and our understanding of the human mind, quantum computing, AI, etc.

Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on ...

quote:

Originally posted by SuperJimbo �In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.�

quote:

Originally posted by zokissima there are two principle ideas of his that I strongly disagree with, this comming from studying computer science and writing code in particular. His 15 years of experience = meh.

HAHAHA BUDDY, he has fucking 15 honorary DOCTORATES, NOT 15 years of experience! BAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

Did you even read his background? He's a fucking software pioneer, although I'm sure he has nothing on your "writing code" skills. HAH

quote:

Originally posted by zokissima comming

coming

Your appeal to authority argument (wait, what argument) is weaksauce.

Edit: authority*

quote:

Originally posted by Cosmic Fur Your appeal to autority argument (wait, what argument) is weaksauce.

i raffed, i rused

BOOOOORRRIIINNNGGGGG.....


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