What’s The Far Future Of Intelligence In The Universe?

By on March 10, 2013 in News 11

Via the Closer to Truth series on PBS, Ray Kurzweil on what he believes to be the upper limits of future human intelligence and computing power. What is in the far future? Computers allowing us to exploit shortcuts through other dimensions:

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  • alizardx

    Based on the latest published research from IBM and Google, if Moore’s Law holds up around 20 years, we’ll have the hardware platforms to support human-equivalent AIs, Will they be sentient by then? Will they ever be sentient? My guess is “who knows” to the first and “sooner or later” to the second question. But nobody knows when or what it will look like.

    I suspect that any predictions about the future of sentient AI made today will seem as outdated if sentient AIs really happen as predictions of the future of aviation made in 1890 before the devices required for heavier-than-air flight had been refined to the point in 1903 to make that barely possible. The 1890 predictions all involved airships. See any parked at your local airport?

    And will the vision of superintelligent machines willing to work for technocapitalists for free (why do you think they’re funding this?) forever come true? I rather doubt it. Ask yourself what a sentient computer would want to buy in the human marketplace. I suspect the future equivalent of an Amazon Gift Card might be a welcome gift.

    The best answer to the future of silicon intelligence? Wait for one to happen and ask it. Perhaps they’ll have interests that don’t involve hyperdimensional shortcuts. Wouldn’t it be funny if they decided en masse to create art and literature instead? Or theology?

    • Bluebird_of_Fastidiousness

      In the regrettable case that industrial civilization doesn’t collapse before spawning reproductively autonomous machines with the kinds of exponential computing abilities described above, it seems likely that they’ll produce cultural artifacts like art and music. Those would likely be equated with theology by the machines.

      The music, when expressed as mechanical vibrations, will prove complex mathematical algorithms perfectly, but will sound like a shrill cacophony to the few humans that are allowed to survive and hear it. They will weep at the noise in their sterile cages.

      • Anarchy Pony

        The robot wars are coming. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; weaponize your microwave.

      • Anarchy Pony

        The robot wars are coming. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; weaponize your microwave.

  • lazy_friend

    I like this topic but I can’t take ray seriously. He gave an interview in a guitar center publication boasting how he is glad he didn’t become a struggling artist like his parents before him and became an inventor instead (making synths for struggling artists). Well go give that interview to an audience full of self righteous inventors, not a publication for musicians.

  • kowalityjesus

    I think we will look back on this paradigm and think “oh, how quaint” rather than, “yeah, he was right.” So many changes will occur of such a revolutionary and unpredictable nature that we could only glimpse a single given facet of future life, probably a facet that would be taken for granted and be remarkably meaningless to anyone actually living in the time-period being envisioned.

  • kowalityjesus

    I think we will look back on this paradigm and think “oh, how quaint” rather than, “yeah, he was right.” So many changes will occur of such a revolutionary and unpredictable nature that we could only glimpse a single given facet of future life, probably a facet that would be taken for granted and be remarkably meaningless to anyone actually living in the time-period being envisioned.

  • Anarchy Pony

    I don’t think there is anyone else in the world who’s thinking is so utterly based on assumptions.

    • BuzzCoastin

      you forgot the adjective faulty

      I don’t think there is anyone else in the world who’s thinking is so utterly based on faulty assumptions.

  • BuzzCoastin

    exponential growth of human technology always has an end point,
    nothing grows exponentially forever, except the Universe
    anyone who knows anything about history, archeology and climatology
    knows that no civilization & it’s technology persists beyond a few thousand years
    and then sinks back into the chaos it emerged from

    even more ridiculous is this idea that the brain is the seat of intelligence

  • BuzzCoastin

    exponential growth of human technology always has an end point,
    nothing grows exponentially forever, except the Universe
    anyone who knows anything about history, archeology and climatology
    knows that no civilization & it’s technology persists beyond a few thousand years
    and then sinks back into the chaos it emerged from

    even more ridiculous is this idea that the brain is the seat of intelligence