Kurzweil's Future Coming Fast

Kurzweil's Future Coming Fast

By Mark K. Anderson Mark K. Anderson | Also by this reporter

2001-04-25 02:30:00.0

There are those who eagerly await things such as Apple's OS X or the latest build of Linux or whatever twist Microsoft has in store for its windowed world. And then there are others whose interest in operating systems runs on a longer clock. Take Raymond Kurzweil. His life and work revolves around a singularly significant launch he expects within the next 20 to 30 years: something one might call Human Brain 2.0.

Kurzweil, pioneer of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition technology, will be awarded MIT's annual $500,000 Lemelson Prize for Invention and Innovation on Wednesday. He, along with MIT-Lemelson Lifetime Achievement Award winner Raymond V. Damadian -- inventor of the first MRI scanner -- will be honored in a ceremony at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Kurzweil's interest in computationally emulating human capabilities dates back to the early '60s, when at age 15 he wrote a computer algorithm that could compose music. "He ended up on I've Got A Secret because of that invention," said Annemarie Amparo, director of the Lemelson-MIT program. "He played a tune for Steve Allen and the rest of the panel that had actually been composed by a computer." In the interim, Kurzweil has developed the first all-purpose, omni-font optical character recognition system, the first text-to-speech reading machines, and the first commercially available speech recognition software.

He now uses the speech recognition software to compose his books, which promote technological awareness and preparedness for the coming waves of change. His writing is something akin to a Unabomber manifesto, divorced from its own twisted history and turned inside-out on itself. Kurzweil's Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) each address aspects of the physics, psychology, physiology and even philosophy behind the drive toward a silicon brain.

Kurzweil's latest work -- given the ominous title The Singularity is Near -- forecasts a century that he claims will see the merging of "biological" and "artificial" intelligence to the point that, by 2099, the two distinctions will have conjoined and perhaps even fused. At the core of Kurzweil's thesis, summarized in his précis of Singularity, is what he argues is a double-exponential growth in technology to date. "The key thing is that the rate of technical progress is itself accelerating," Kurzweil said Tuesday. "If you say that, a lot of people are quick to agree to it. But very few people have really internalized the implications of that prediction."

Although humanity has previously existed on the asymptotic arm of the exponential curve, with slow growth rates and manageable levels of technological progress, this fact may not hold true over the coming decades. The tall arm of the growth curve -- approaching an unreachable that Kurzweil calls "the singularity" -- is the part Kurzweil claims we'll be climbing over the next century. "Most people have a linear view of the future," he said. "People look at the 21st century, and they expect 100 years of progress at today's rate of progress. But because we're doubling the rate of progress every 10 years, we're actually looking at 20,000 years of progress during the 21st century. That's quite a difference in outlook. You get to a point where the rate of progress is so fast that it's virtually a rupture in the fabric of human history."

Of course, a quick rejoinder to this claim is that Kurzweil bases his claims on mathematical models of technological progress, a phenomenon that's ultimately a human construct. And as economists know well, social equations of motion are notorious for their spurious predictions. However, Kurzweil replies to this charge with a counter-example: "That's one of the key aspects of 'the singularity': Biological intelligence is not needed for the continuous development of technology. That's one of the predictions.

"It's a continuum. If you look at how computers are designed today, human designers specify the top couple levels of parameters," he said. "But then the next 12 levels of design are done automatically by computers. Then the computers are assembled by computerized systems. It's very much a collaboration. If you compare that with how computers were first built, it was done entirely by hand."

So if the exponential growth models -- such as the famous Moore's Law of microprocessors -- not only hold true but also grow exponentially themselves, what's in store for homo sapiens? This is where Kurzweil turns on the after-burners. "Human beings get our power from having a hundred trillion inter-neural connections operating simultaneously," he said. "But we've modeled many of those inter-neural connections, and they're extremely slow. They calculate at only 200 cycles per second, which is ten million times slower than today's electronics."

This means that, as he predicts, the brain's roughly ten-thousand-trillion calculations per second (a 1 with 16 zeroes after it) can likely be achievable in neural network environments sometime within the next quarter century. Scanning the brain -- which Carnegie Mellon University's Andreas Nowatzyk has already proposed doing at near-neuron sizes for a mouse -- would then be the likely software project that could yield a machine whose actions, thoughts, and perhaps even nascent emotions begin to resemble those of humans. And if one's entire brain could be scanned and run on a neural net computer capable of holding it, does a person's consciousness come along? Is it the "same" being, or is it just a fancy program that talks and acts like you?

Even if this forecast is grossly inaccurate or incomplete, it's still enough to get some critics -- such as Sun Microsystems' cofounder Bill Joy, writing in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine -- to call for pulling the plug on our Frankenstein quest before homo sapiens have created a super-intelligence that grows out of human control. But this, Kurzweil says, is as impossible as it is undesirable. "Brave New World is a vision of what would be required to implement Joy's recommendation," he said. "The only way you can stop technology advancement -- even focused on one area like nanotechnology -- would be to have a totalitarian, state-enforced ban."

What Kurzweil proposes instead is an awareness of the double-exponential trends and a willingness to grapple with the profound philosophical, political, ethical and spiritual questions in the quarter century before something resembling "Brain 2.0" becomes reality. "I don't think we can stop it. I think there are profound dangers and I would not say I'm sanguine. But I would say we can deal with them. I don't think Bill Joy's solution of relinquishment is the right approach. "The flaw in the concept of relinquishment is to think that we can keep the good technologies, but those dangerous ones, let's just not do those. The problem is those dangerous ones are the same as the useful ones.... I call it the deeply intertwined promise and peril of technology. You don't have to look further than today to see that."

Searching for the soul in the machine

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.

With funding from the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world – one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture.
This kind of social interaction is a tantalising prospect for the artificial intelligence (AI) experts, computer scientists, sociologists and linguists working on NEW TIES. The keyword here is ‘social.’ “While individual (or machine) learning and evolutionary behaviour have been quite well studied, social learning is still an unknown quantity,” says project coordinator Gusz Eiben, an AI professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
Joining the Vrije Universiteit are the University of Surrey, Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University, Edinburgh’s Napier University and Tilburg University in The Netherlands. The multidisciplinary team has a dual goal: to study natural processes (like language development), and to advance the construction of collective artificial intelligence.
“For the linguists and sociologists, the main motivation is to study existing processes in societies and languages,” Eiben explains. “The computer scientists on the other hand want to develop and study machine collaboration, with an eye on future applications in robotics. Robots in the home are only five to 10 years away, and in the future we might be able to send robot rescue teams to disaster areas to search for survivors. They could even one day travel to Mars. Obviously, it will be important for them to be able to cooperate with each other – especially if they are in a hostile environment.”
From thousands to millions of agents
Future disaster victims rescued by robots may perhaps owe their survival to the software agents currently being prepared for life in the NEW TIES engine – which, within a few months, will be running across a Grid of 60 computers. “No one has ever created an engine of this complexity,” says Eiben, adding that it will support about 1,000 agents at first, building up to millions – each one a unique entity with its own characteristics, including gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism. The agents will not be labelled, but will have their own distinguishing characteristics to make them recognisable. Their traits will be inherited from their parents, and passed on to their offspring, but they will be able to learn from their own experiences and from each other.
“It’s a given of the NEW TIES project that we are not hardwiring agents,” says Eiben. “We are not programming how they behave. Each entity has its own ‘controller,’ analogous to a brain. And because we want to create an interesting controller, we have to produce a challenging world – otherwise there would be no impetus for development. So, in one scenario, we have created a world with seasons – so that the agents have to learn to find, transport and store food. And there are two rival groups, so they will have to learn to tell friend from foe.”
The agents will have the ability to communicate, using a ‘native vocabulary’ of a few simple words like, ‘food’, ‘near’, and ‘agent’. “One interesting question is how they will communicate,” says Eiben. “Naturally, the linguists want to see how they develop a spoken language, but for the AI researchers we will also test to see if there are possible alternatives – telepathy, for example.” Some basic rules will also be given, along the lines of, “if it’s hot, it burns,” but agents are expected to add to the rule set as they discover new ‘laws of nature.’
Ready to start experimentation
Currently, NEW TIES is on the brink between development - now pretty much complete - and scientific experiment, which can begin once calibration is completed. “We are ready to start the interaction,” says Eiben, adding that the team hopes to scale up to 5,000 computers, and a vast population of agents, because “then we’ll really see some emergent behaviours.”
In the meantime, he points to some intriguing results obtained from other platforms. His own findings have established that aggressive behaviour, surprisingly, increases in agent-worlds as life becomes easier, while an ideal world (‘ideal’ meaning maximum survival) has two main attributes: flexibility and mobility.
Eiben cautions against applying the findings from simple computer worlds to reality, yet admits that this ‘shadow world’ effect is the reason why the press have shown so much interest in NEW TIES, and why the project’s ‘it might look like this’ images have been taken as literal representations. Now, in fact, the project is working on a state-of-the-art visualisation for its interface, to make its agents more comprehensible to a public well versed in The Sims and other computer realities.
By the time it has run its course in August 2007, NEW TIES will have provided food for thought in several fields, and perhaps taken us a step closer to the days Eiben anticipates, when politicians will be able to run simulations on computers to test scenarios (for new tax laws, for example) before carrying them out in real life. “Simulators now allow us to optimise car engines or train timetables,” says Eiben. “But why shouldn’t they help us optimise social decision-making?”
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Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

posted: 12 October 2007 04:46 pm ET

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.

Pygmalion to Roomba

The idea of romance between humanity and our artistic and/or mechanical creations dates back to ancient times, with the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion falling in love with the ivory statue he made named Galatea, to which the goddess Venus eventually granted life.

This notion persists in modern times. Not only has science fiction explored this idea, but 40 years ago, scientists noticed that students at times became unusually attracted to ELIZA, a computer program designed to ask questions and mimic a psychotherapist.

"There's a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans," Levy said. "At first robots were used impersonally, in factories where they helped build automobiles, for instance. Then they were used in offices to deliver mail, or to show visitors around museums, or in homes as vacuum cleaners, such as with the Roomba. Now you have robot toys, like Sony's Aibo robot dog, or Tickle Me Elmos, or digital pets like Tamagotchis."

In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," Levy conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them.

"It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."

Sex in 5 years

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."

In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that's quite likely. There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, "and it's just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration," he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. "That's fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there."

As software becomes more advanced and the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal, marriage could result. "One hundred years ago, interracial marriage and same-sex marriages were illegal in the United States. Interracial marriage has been legal now for 50 years, and same-sex marriage is legal in some parts of the states," Levy said. "There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with."

"The question is not if this will happen, but when," Levy said. "I am convinced the answer is much earlier than you think."

When and where it'll happen

Levy predicts Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize human-robot marriage. "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."

Although roboticist Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta does not think human-robot marriages will be legal anywhere by 2050, "anything's possible. And just because it's not legal doesn't mean people won't try it," he told LiveScience.