He writes, “[The] film is as much about Ray Kurzweil as it is about the Singularity. In fact, much of the film is concerned with whether or not Kurzweil’s predictions stem from psychological pressures in his life.” [Oh, my! Oh, no! How many times have we seen a movement that influences the fate of millions turn out to be the personification of one man’s neuroses?!!]”

I have seen Transcendent Man… twice! At Tribeca and AFI. It was an absolutely amazing, beautiful, life changing event for me. I am still looking forward to the others. So I can not comment on them, but I will say that Transcendent Man very clearly and elegantly articulates Kurzweil’s vision of the future while staying restrained and unbiased. I did not take away from it that Kurzweil’s predictions stem from his personal psychosis. On the contrary I think the film maker Ptolemy was seeking to show that no man is an island and revealing that everyone has psychological issues to deal with. This never clouds Kurzweil’s empirically based predictions. Like he says in the film he didn’t discover the Singularity and work backwards, he continued looking forward based on the trends that he grew up with and discovered a future period which will undoubtedly be quite profound. I think Kurzweil deserves credit for being so open and transparent. After all he is working on helping people, informing people. He welcomes criticism, doesn’t run from it. The truth (as subjective as that is) is a long distance runner. I believe these films (at least Ptolemy’s) will vindicate Kurzweil in future years and decades.

AX

____________

Dudley

thank you very much for your article. Your description of the ominous singularity and its followers is spot on.
I’ve been lurking about the more relevant outlets for information about the singularity for some time now and have been starting to doubt myself a little bit. May my doubts about the singularity have been unfounded? Is it maybe just me who can’t see the inevitable conclusion as clearly as them? Your article really helped me to answer those questions with a clear No!

Now I also understand a little better why I so often felt like running in circles when arguing with singularians. It’s the feeling you get, when trying to argue with someone who has built himself an impenetrable ideological defense (Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my mind).

Greetings,
Wolfgang

The critical threshold is not human level intelligence. That’s a philosophically important transition, a threat to our ego, a deep transformation of our place in the world, but it is not at all the most important threshold. The important point– though it’s hard to say just where it is– is when AIs are smart enough to think constructively about the very problem of artificial intelligence itself. It doesn’t matter when they can talk or laugh or write poetry, it only matters when they are substantially helpful in producing the next, smarter generation of themselves. That is when the feedback loop becomes much tighter, and something very new (though it’s hard to say what) must very quickly emerge.

Dear Mungojelly,

Mr. Anissimov is correct in that “irreverent” was not a good word choice to attach to his views on Howard Gardner’s views. Or more correctly, his views on Howard Gardner were not the right choice to illustrate Mr. Anissimov’s tendency to be free-wheeling, free-swinging and occasionally irreverent in his commentaries. For example, he loves to call humans “klutzes” and “apes” and to downgrade humans’ views of the relative position of their brand of intelligence in the overall spectrum of universal intelligence (at least as Mr. Anissimov anticipates it). All of which makes him a really fun read. Don’t miss Michael Anissimov.

For instance, why is it likely that true artificial intelligence could be created within the next few decades rather than hundreds of years? Well, no one knows for sure, but even if the probability is 10%, it’s worth paying attention to because the consequences could be so large. Working from a utilitarian calculus, looking at the issue makes sense.

Why do we have reason to worry? Because AIs might pursue convergent subgoals, that, if pursued aggressively enough, destroy human value. Why is human value fragile? Because it’s extremely complex and evolved piecemeal over millions of years, for one. Why don’t people realize this? Because we all have similar values in the universal sense, and because of moral realism. So people will program advanced AI while thinking that the values part will take care of itself, because morality is intuitive to humans because we have oodles of complex neural hardware which makes us think so. That neural hardware wouldn’t create itself spontaneously in artificial intelligences.

There is a lot more, but it’s somewhat time-consuming to get into. I published a sort of “response” to your post here.