https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/29/ray-kurzweil-google-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The Google futurist talks nanobots and avatars, deepfakes and elections – and why he is so optimistic about a future where we merge with computers
Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
In the US? Fat fucking chance. The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn't pace with inflation and can't even cover rent anymore.
I don't believe I'll see UBI in my working lifetime. There are too many powerful interests that oppose it.
A friend of mine got the shit end of a “restructuring” at work the other day and immediately started applying for unemployment. Florida hasn’t increased that benefit in almost a decade (probably longer) so he’ll be getting the same paltry $275/wk that I got many many years ago when I was on unemployment for a bit. I hope he finds a new job soon because there’s absolutely no way to live on that.
The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
In .nl our far right gov has seen this and decided to uncouple unemployment and wages/inflation as well. So yeah lol.
The US doesn't have a functional healthcare system yet, and they're like a century behind on that at this point.
Yes, so many people fail to see the existential stakes here. They think that even a bandaid like ubi is inevitable, because they don't acknowledge the possibility that we could just die.
Like that if it's cheaper to let us gather in unregulated tent cities and croak from the new plagues that blossom there, then that's what'll happen.
Obviously it's not good for anyone in the long term, but corpos can't think long term.
but corpos can’t think long term
they can. it's just that, structurally, incentives are far more strongly geared to not do that in almost all cases.
I hovered on that word while writing it; almost put "can't afford to think long term," but that is even more ambiguous...
Anyway, thank you, I agree with your distinction.
My feeling is those incentives are so strong that anyone behaving too long term will usually get their lunch eaten by someone who is just out to make a quick profit.
You hear UBI thrown around a lot by the AI crowd, often before or after the word "obviously" and the phrase "the government will." The people who talk about such-and-such political solution being INEVITABLE due to (some non political thing over here) have almost never spent even a moment paying attention to actual policy conversations that touch on their proposal. They usually have not looked at the political context either.
It is, in the year 2024, a Herculean effort to get the U.S. Congress to pass a functioning BUDGET. Every. fucking. year. The institution nominally in charge of the country grinds to a halt as it debates "Hey, should society continue existing? I'm not sure" for a few weeks because some asshole decides to throw sand in the gears over what the culture war issue is trending that day. Modest improvements to existing infrastructure or policy areas are MONTHS and YEARS long battles to get passed. And in the lucky event something does get happen, no one ever looks deeply into either the sustainability of the policy nor the implementation of the policy. Making sure the-thing-we-passed-helps-the-people-we-intended-and-is-functioning is always a Next Year problem for Somebody Else.
The very idea that, like, our government could get it together long enough to create and fund a long-term permanent UBI program is laughable. Insulting. "Well, it's a very obvious problem that a government will have to solve" you say. "How could they not solve it?"
My dude. Not solving very obvious problems that it is their job to solve is our legislature's speciality. It's what it lives and breathes for. On the metaphorical resumé of Congress, "finding reasons to not do things" is the first bullet point under "Strengths."
And UBI is not some trivial post-office naming bill. It would be a hugely contentious issue, as you'd have to decide fun questions like who qualifies to receive the money, how much money do they get and, most fun of all, who is going to pay for this. And whatever clever answer you think you have for that third question, I guarantee you they will immediately launch an all-out assault on your very soul once they catch a whiff of you attempting to redistribute THEIR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to hoard piles of cash large and small alike.
It's an annoying statement to hear repeated because it's such a STEM-head "on my napkin this is all very simple" reflex that totally ignores the reality of the human beings and the society they live in.
searches for who tf this is
Wikipedia:
Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying "known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything" I've seen.
That is what imho sets Ray apart from the other singularitarians (fear of robot god optional), he has actually done a lot of stuff. The keyboards, all the work in helping people with disabilities (sorry, I need to clarify, people currently alive with disabilities, not future humans who might have them) etc. Just sad that more of his life is spend on this rapture of the nerds stuff.
yeah, I knew about kurzweil reading machines for years before I connected them with ray kurzweil, and I don't know how much of his tech ended up in speech rec during the scansoft / dragon systems / nuance / lernout and hauspie katamari years, but that tech has enabled me to be an independent working adult for more than 20 years. So I owe him a debt of gratitude, but also, he needs to not be on his bullshit.
106 comments
only 7 top level comments
Thank you lord for this feast you have blessed me with.
How much worse it must be for the people in the lemmieverse (are we calling it that?) who don't have accounts on awful.sys directly. The neuralink is life extension (unless you are a monkey) that proves Ray is right person is still going at it.
oh I’m not at all surprised. part of why we ban early and often is it’s very easy for posters like that to flood threads with utter bullshit, beyond anyone’s amusement but their own, much faster than anyone can respond with anything approaching the truth (because writing truth takes time, but being a big pain in the ass fanboy for a telephone psychic takes no time at all)
wonder if it'd be worthwhile to make an AP mod that replies to banned posters with "ur bannd dumbo"
I guess it's not a great idea because a lot of the Indignant types are probably likely to then start alt-accounting
there were guys i muted on twitter and would occasionally see still reply-guying months later, oblivious
also that conversation looks like it's happening on the mastodon bits of the fedi
eventual consistency (of porridge)
As @soyweiser@awful.systems says, this is not just an eyesore for people not on awful.sys, but unmoderated bullshit that is, for some reason, being federated out to everyone (except awful.sys).
I bring this up because this is some fresh new jank, not from concentrate: who is supposed to moderate hate speech or disinformation that is being spread in this way? Why does lemmy federate comments from banned people? This happens in techtakes as well, another user has no idea they're banned, posts regularly and is having conversations [removed link] with no indication that this guy is persona non grata.
I meant the user they're speaking to, compare to [removed link]
EDIT: spoke to self, just more free jank, almost all of the visibility should be gone for the banned to howl into the void as intended.
it's only a sneer if it's from the Snierre region of awful systems, on mastodon it's just sparkling snideness
I miss the good old days when they had to make sneersneerclub to talk behind our backs instead of chatting up a wall, oblivious.
in the brained stem. straight up "shorkening it". and by "it", haha, well. let's just say. My liffspan
The neuralink ... person is still going at it
shouting into the void with all their being. willing, nay, DARING it to shout back. entirely unawares that the void does not care about them.
@AllNewTypeFace @cstross if a couch potato is someone who never leaves their couch, does this make Kurzwell a bullshit potato?
Can someone explain why this level of hate?
I mean dude wrote a book about exponential progress (it works well in computers IMO) and tried to predict a lot of stuff. I read that lots of his predictions was "sort of" correct too?
Edit: thanks for nothing I guess. Downvotes and scorn lol.
Edit2: omg is reddit incels leaking or what?
It hasn't worked 'well' for computers since like the pentium, what are you talking about?
The premise was pretty dumb too, as in, if you notice that a (very reductive) technological metric has been rising sort of exponentially, you should probably assume something along the lines of we're probably still at the low hanging fruit stage of R&D, it'll stabilize as it matures, instead of proudly proclaiming that surely it'll approach infinity and break reality.
There's nothing smart or insightful about seeing a line in a graph trending upwards and assuming it's gonna keep doing that no matter what. Not to mention that type of decontextualized wishful thinking is emblematic of the TREACLES mindset mentioned in the community's blurb that you should check out.
So yeah, he thought up the Singularity which is little more than a metaphysical excuse to ignore regulations and negative externalities because with tech rupture around the corner any catastrophic mess we make getting there won't matter. See also: the whole current AI debacle.
Your comment is by far the nicest, still feels like from a 13 yo lol.
We do double processing power on the dollar every 18-24 months still, and I do recommend you upgrade your pentium, you'll be blown away.
Such anger, such hate.
First, learn the difference between scorn or disdain and hate.
Second, read the comments in the thread already made about those "'sort of' correct" predictions.
ah yeah, 3 downvotes (and one of them’s mine) and zero replies of scorn directed towards you (well, one now)
how about you take your bullshit elsewhere
you could just have read downthread for actual details before posting, y'know. that waaaah edit isn't helping
Fuck those assholes. I think Ray is blinded by his own success of pointing at graphs, number go up, but there was no reason to be mean to you. There's an underbelly of smelly smugglings in Lemmy.
and there's no reason for you to try excuse their laziness with airdropped feelings of cozy of your own!
wild, full circle!
Thanks!
I read his books when they came out and they are not without incorrect stuff or weird takes IMO (like that big log/log diagram in singularity is near that IMO is completely worthless), but there are also interesting things to discuss I think amd some are indeniable. But here in this thread it's just some bizarre anger everywhere. I mean I wonder what happened in those angry peoples lives to be so upset lol.
I do subscribe to his ideas that technological growth is not currently exponential but even steeper
Hey wanna get in on the ground floor of my new cryptocurrency offer? You seem like just the person we are looking for.
Technically it is a real video game but yes. Amazing piece of technical work. Sad that the main dev seems to be a bit of chud. (But he now has a ~30 person team).
They corrected it and made it even dumber, tech growth is steeper than exponential growth.
logarhythmically, n.: in the manner of making banger beats composed in the method of striking logs
I predict you are going to have a bad time here. And that is far before 2045.
(Edit: I hear you think, but predicting after a thing has already happened and keeps happening, that isn't really predicting now is it. And Varyk was enlightened).
Haha, see, one prediction and it's already wrong.
That's why kurzweil is so impressive with all of his correct predictions.
Yeah, I had not seen your post of 10 correct predictions, sorry enlightenment is mu, a bit like the question if a dog has Buddha nature.
In?
Alex Jones was right about the gay frogs and Bohemian Grove, but that's not a very long list, and he reports things rather than predicts them.
Easy peasy:
Computers would beat humans at chess(happened in 1998)
Digital information explosion(The information on the internet rapidly becoming too much for the entire world to read)
Medicine becoming information technology(genomic, sequencing and crispr)
The inevitability of direct human computer interfacing (neuralink)
Life extension(cryonics/neuralink)
AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
Cpu processing speed explosion(Moore's law)
PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Exoskeletons render the disabled able (3d printable prosthetic limbs)
There are many, many more correct predictions by this guy
Some of Kurzweil's predictions in 1999 about 2009:
Some of Kurzweil's predictions in 1999 about 2019:
A $1,000 computing device is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere. Three-dimensional virtual-reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, provide the primary interface for communication with other persons, the Web, and virtual reality. Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural-language spoken communication. Realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody regardless of physical proximity. People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.
Also:
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
And:
Autonomous nanoengineered machines can control their own mobility and include significant computational engines.
And:
ʺPhoneʺ calls routinely include high‐resolution three‐dimensional images projected through the direct‐eye displays and auditory lenses. Three‐dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.
And:
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness. Although the visual and auditory aspects of virtual reality involve only devices you have on or in your body (the direct‐eye lenses and auditory lenses), the ʺtotal touchʺ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth. These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions with other human partners or simulated partners. In fact, it is often the preferred mode of interaction, even when a human partner is nearby, due to its ability to enhance both experience and safety.
And:
Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads.
And:
The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual‐experience software, which ranges from simulations of ʺrealʺ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.
And:
The expected life span, which, as a (1780 through 1900) and the first phase result of the first Industrial Revolution of the second (the twentieth century), almost doubled from less than forty, has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred.
Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness.
I'm picturing the VR dildo-suit from Upload.
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
I've reread this sentence a few times now and I am just gobsmacked as to what it was intended to have meant. never dug into this particular espouser because from the moment I came across their name I smelled the kook, but I'm not now almost deathly curious to know exactly what the context of this particular prediction was (which near certainly was some shit riffed on from half a bit of statement of research people were looking into)
(e: whoops hella-freudian typo)
To be fair, those words were written around the End Of History, when fascism was known to be safely extinct and nobody in their right mind would have assumed that such a phrase referred to it.
“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
if you have budget for that, against an enemy that doesn't
"Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle" (if you don't count the people that the drones are blowing up)
To be fair, this can be made true by the simple expedient of redefining who counts as “human”
Something about redefining a person as a shield based on how much of their body absorbs the blast. Below that threshold they contain the property of the US military and are considered potential recycling recepticles.
yeah, and it's been like this since brits used freshly invented heavy machine guns in their colonial wars. machines killing machines is just what will cause army bean counters to burn at stake operators of these machines
If only there was any large active warzone that has largely devolved into positional warfare for two years now to disprove that claim, damn.
Damn, if only.
Drones mostly target humans and crewed vehicles, not other drones (and disable rapidly and suddenly un-crewed vehicles) (with rare exceptions of recon drones crashing other recon drones by breaking their propellers and like 1 or 2 cases of FPV drones shooting down fixed wing recon drones. anti-drone warfare is mostly EW, then AAA and things like MANPADS or even bigger missiles depending on how valuable that drone is as a target)
Besides, last time i've checked it was not drones that took or retook Vovchansk (80% ish Ukrainian controlled last week), it was tanks, arty, mechanized infantry, maybe a dash of CAS and loads of AA and jammers, you know, just like in every war since 80s or even bit earlier. Loads of small cheap PGMs do work great in anti-vehicle role, and drones are just that, so it makes everybody hide fair bit harder
if i have to guess, the thing that prevents mobility now is constant surveillance, also by drones + lots of artillery, and some attack drones too. the thing that will enable large scale movements will be air dominance and even more EW
I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.
“In the future, there will be brain-generated music”, said Ray Kay, to a young disciple.
“But Master Ray, isn’t music generally brain generated?”, the disciple asked.
“No, you fucking idiot. You fucking buffoon. How dare you question me,” replied Ray. It was then that the disciple reached enlightenment.
“Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
Neuralink
“The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
VRChat
“Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
Algoraves
“the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
Obamacare
“Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
Asimo
Absolutely amazing post, thank you so much. So that's one correct prediction and nine on a spectrum from wrong to meaningless!
Only plebs pay for e-girl bathwater. I prefer to drink 30-year aged billionaire bisque (chilled of course)
"Computers will be really good at chess" was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don't get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.
ah you see cryonics does increase life expenctancy, i.e. E(life length). As long as P(cryobubonics works) > 0, which, according to Yudkowskian Probability Theory, is true for any probability, then E(life length) = infinity, since cryonica will let us live forever /big fat fucking S
@Varyk @jonhendry Neuralink? How's that going? I presume extremely well with no problems, I haven't got time to check right now
Why did you think it was working well with no problems?
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
You hecka optimistic.
I mean, it's pretty crazy how well the design did work considering it's the first of its kind.
The latest thing I saw, a bunch of the wires are becoming detached from the very first prototype, which of course is being worked into the subsequent models.
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
I wish I had the confidence of a techbro who thinks any of the BCI tech in neuralink is new and isn’t just a set of techniques that have existed for decades and have a shitty track record
the only thing neuralink seems to add is wireless control, which doesn’t work, partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements, but mostly because it’s a project driven by Musk’s whims
partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements
It still amazes me they publicly posted a request for help with these compression req which are physically impossible to achieve. Nobody with a CS degree is anybody near the leadership of neuralink. In other words, you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention
I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it
I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.
What is the original requirement? I've never seen this and I feel a mighty sneer that I'm missing. A Fear of Sneering Out if you will.
Not the first, actually a late entrant.
I worked in a lab using implanted brain-computer interfaces 14 years ago.
Other labs using the same system had monkeys controlling robot arms, and a human controlling a computer.
I seriously don’t know where these fuckers have been that they’re supposedly excited about implanted BCIs now that musk’s doing a monstrously shitty one, but somehow they managed not to ever read about any of the previous research into this that had the same outcome as neuralink (basic, inaccurate computer mouse control) with the same major caveats (the electrodes become unusable in short order due to scarring and can’t be repaired), except that the neuralink version is unnecessarily risky* cause startups gotta go fast
[*] and the risk here is that something truly fucking awful will happen to the patient, because it’s the fucking human brain and they’re treating it like a submarine made of secondhand carbon fiber, including the ignored track record of failed lab tests before disaster struck
I still don't think cortical electrodes should even be described as a direct interface. A direct interface would speak action potential and connect to your spinal cord, like Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix. I do not see a lot of people lining up to test what would probably entail having your brainstem dissected!
| AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Yes, but in the same way that tax shelters and carbon offsetting are major industries. All the useful things done by “AI” tend to happen outside of the hype mills and be relatively boring statistical models like autocomplete, which nobody points to as a sign of the coming Computer God.
| Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
They build single-use computers into pregnancy tests. They’re powerful enough to run DOOM, despite being doomed to immediately become e-waste. Is this a sign of the imminent Singularity as well?
| PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Someone built a radio into a computer? Really? I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
are these meat popsicles in the room with us?
::: spoiler gif, sorry for being annoying
:::
what is nice about this, half of the shit you listed is either scam for hype-susceptible cultists or is not what you present as when marketing fluff is removed
The two-minute ten-piece listicle that took you almost 2 days to read that somebody else requested and this community has been failing to refute for 2 days?
I'll pass on your message.
https://indi.ca/how-futurists-got-the-future-all-wrong/
Considering the first computer to beat a human in chess was 1956 when Kurzweil was 8 years old, that's not much of a prediction.
"Kurzweil for some of his incorrect predictions for 2009, such as that the economy would continue to boom, that a U.S. company would have a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, that a supercomputer would achieve 20 petaflops, that speech recognition would be in widespread use, and that cars would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways."
He predicted VR in 2009 would be indistinguishable from reality.
"Cpu processing speed explosion(Moore's law)"
Moore's law died around 2005.
This explains why all his predictions have been wrong.
Life extension(cryonics/neuralink)
Anyone can say that a particular technology will exist in the distant future. Kurzweil made specific claims that we would already have that now.
PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly
When did he make that prediction? Because his famous book of predictions was from 1999 when we already had that ( Palm pilot with cell data add on).
Congratulations on finding technical ways around a couple items on this hahah.
Unfortunately, the other ones are obviously correct and there are many more.
"Anyone can say that a particular technology will exist in the distant future."
Except Kurtzweil actually did make specific predictions and was proven correct over and over again.
Remember you asked for examples and then you got a whole bunch of examples where that was correct and then really struggled with a couple inapplicable technicalities to throw a couple of them since the other ones are indisputable?
Good times.
Except Kurtzweil actually did make specific predictions and was proven correct over and over again.
You missed the part where the specific predictions you listed were wrong. Because the specific part is the date.
Anyone can say "human lifespan will get longer in the future" But Kurzweil said average human lifespan will be over 100 by 2009. VR will be visually indistinguishable from reality in 2009. Self driving cars in 2009. Most diseases will be eliminated by the 2020s, thanks to nanobots. Translating telephones allow two people across the globe to speak to each other even if they do not speak the same language in 2009.
He has been wrong about most everything because his dates were wrong. His dates were wrong because Moore's law ended shortly after he made his predictions.
Vague predictions about the future don't prove anything but imagination.
He's been correct in most of his predictions, and wrong about the dates on some of his predictions.
Yes.
"Vague predictions about the future don't prove anything but imagination"
Imagination, you mean the creative process by which inventors and developers create the literal future?
Dismissing imagination in the role of creation is as ineffective an argument as dismissing the air in your lungs.
No he hasn't been correct on his predictions.
He self judged himself that he was mostly correct and then published that as if was a fact.
You can't claim VR indistinguishable from reality in 2009 and then call it a correct prediction because we got Meta 3 goggles with Halflife 2 level graphics in 2023.
You can't claim Petaflop CPUs in 2009 and then say, well if you add up every computer that Google owns, it's like a Petaflop CPU (yes, Kurzweil made that excuse).
That's like if I predict a colony on Mars by 2030 and then call it correct when a manned landing finally happens Mars in 2055 (but no colony). What's 50 years and 1 man instead of a colony? I said a man would be on Mars so I'm right. Ignore that I was 25 years wrong.