Review of Kurzweil, 'The Singularity is Near'

It isn't. I first heard of the Singularity by reading Wikipedia's list of pseudosciences or something similar. I had decided to read it because there was a chance that something was miscategorized and I reasoned that if there was an idea that people thought was pseudoscientific but was actually correct, it could be important to know that. The Wikipedia article was filled with quotes from Kurzweil and pictures of exponential graphs, so I dismissed the Singularity group of memes, while still believing that AI was achievable and that it would have a profound effect on the world.

Prize quote:

Faced with a question like “How can we stop death?” or “How can we build a human-level AI?” you learn to respond: “What’s another question that’s easier to answer, and that probably has to be answered anyway before we have any chance on the original one?”

Please give three examples.

It's not difficult to think of wide areas of technology where decades of extremely rapid progress have been followed by decades of utter stagnation. For example, transportation technologies are generally in this category. This might change soon with the advent of self-driving cars, but it's still hard to reconcile any "law of accelerating returns" with four decades of no meaningful progress. (And in some cases even retrogression -- the fastest military and passenger aircraft of all time, the Blackbird and the Concorde, were both launched around 40 years ago, and have been retired from service since. The current world record in manned aircraft speed was set in 1976!)

In fact, on the whole, it is hard for me to think of many examples of technologies where we do see anything resembling accelerating returns and exponential growth by any meaningful metrics. There are the integrated circuits, fancy thin displays, and sundry signal-processing technologies that enable fast long-range digital communication -- but except for these and their direct applications, what is so much different compared to 30-40 years ago that it would be meaningful to talk about "accelerating returns"?

Please give three examples.

• Computer clock speed (Kurzweil got this wrong).
• Nuclear power.
• Transportation.
• Agricultural yields.
• Mining and resource extraction (on a price per unit basis; total production has gone up).
• Drug discovery (Kurzweil mispredicted this one too).
• Skyscraper construction.
• Construction costs generally.
• Electricity costs.
• Household cleaning devices.

Graphical calculators: when I was in high school there were these brand new high-tech graphical programmable calculators that got me wondering what great tools students of the future would have. now a dozen years later, what do high-schoolers use? The same old TI 89 that I had at the time (OK, smartphones may be taking over that niche soon, and laptops already ate up part of it). So that's one area where I was expecting progress and got nothing.

Economic growth on the whole is exponential, that's why it's expressed as percentage growth.

The rest of technology looks like many separate curves, which do tend to show exponential or logistic shapes, at least for long periods, from agriculture yields to coal plant efficiency, to solar. Economies do that too: the norm is exponential growth, n% multiplicative increase per year, rather than linear growth. There are shifts, e.g. the fast exponential for top speeds in aerospace ended once we got into space, while DNA sequencing just increased its growth rate several fold, but it's common for annual change to be multiplicative rather than additive.

Check out the Performance Curve Database for many individual improvement curves.

Amdahl's law comes to mind in these discussions. The question is to what extent computing power can substitute for other things.

Clock speed isn't the only measure of CPU performance. In fact, it isn't much of a measure at all, given that new processors are outperforming Pentium 4 chips (ca. 2005) by the factor you'd expect from Moore's law, despite the fact that their clock speeds are lower by as much as a half.

The original Moore's law talked about not the clock speed, but the number of gates per IC, which has been holding up OK, if you count multicores, although even that metric shows signs of falling below exponential.

I agree with the information theoretical claim, and I think you could prove it with the usual language-to-language argument for Kolmogorov complexity; the gist: the brain is the result of a program written in DNA for a certain extremely complex language known as 'the human body', which when run, takes an extremely complex input known as 'life' (all of which can be modeled in binary thanks to the universe apparently being computable). We want to translate the program written in DNA to a program written in x86; both are languages, so the translation only requires a certain fixed-length prefix interpreting the DNA for x86.

I take your link as agreeing that it works in theory but disagreeing about the practice: 'yeah, but all of those parts are extremely extremely complex and that fixed-length prefix is a really big prefix which we aren't even close to writing, and X and Y and Z; hence, Kurzweil's forecasts are way off and ridiculously optimistic'. Notice he doesn't talk in terms of it being impossible, period, but rather of missing parts and explanations of how something will be accomplished:

I presume they understand that if you program a perfect Intel emulator, you don't suddenly get Halo: Reach for free, as an emergent property of the system. You can buy the code and add it to the system, sure, but in this case, we can't run down to GameStop and buy a DVD with the human OS in it and install it on our artificial brain. You're going to have to do the hard work of figuring out how that works and reverse engineering it, as well. And understanding how the processor works is necessary to do that, but not sufficient.

(Having the fixed-length interpreter for the DNA program is necessary but not sufficient; having the input for the program is necessary but not sufficient; etc.)

Fixed, thanks.