[ExI] Kurzweil critique

[Michael Anissimov]

On my blog, someone anonymous posted a long rebuttal (
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=606#comment-102290) of
Kurzweil's ideas that I think some people may be interested in.  Note that
just because I post it doesn't mean I agree or disagree with any specific
claims therein. Enjoy!

~~~

Ray Kurzweil is an obvious crackpot. He's nothing but a much better-educated
version of your typical ufologist.

The claims he makes about current technology are provably false, so we
shouldn't be surprised that the claims Kurzweil makes about future
technology qualify as delusional.

There exist so many clear-cut examples of Kurzweil's claims being obviously
and flagrant false that it's hard to choose just a few, but one good example
is Kurzweil's flagrantly false assertion that "We understand the human ear
and we have reverse engineered it," referring to cochlear implants. This is
not just wrong, it's widely known to be wrong.
Roughly 1/3 of cochlear implants work well enough for the recipients to
understand speech in cases where there isn't overlapping conversations or
ambient noise. However, even in those best-case scenarios, the cochlear
implant never works 100% of the time, and basically functions as an aid to
lip-reading. So even in the most successful cases, people with
high-functioning cochlear implants need to lip-read some of the time to
understand human speech. In another 1/3 of the cases cochlear implants work
at a low-functioning level and it's possible to understand some speech, but
music and other sounds don't come through well. (in the best
high-functioning cases, cochlear implants not only allow the recipient to
hear music, but to enjoy it.) And in 1/3 of the cases cochear implants don't
work at all.
www.johnhorgan.org/work16.htm

It should be emphasized that scientists do not understand why cochlear
implants work well in some recipients and don't work at all in others. It's
not the technology since the implants are identical.
It should also be pointed out that whenever anyone gets a cochlear implant,
they initially go through a long period of several months in which they
perceive nothing but noise coming from the implant. The brain gradually
adjusts to the signals and eventually deciphers them (in cases where the
implant works) and over a long period of time, in the best cases, recipients
can hear not only pitch but also timbral differences. However, cochlear
implant recipients who lost their hearing as children or as adults report
that even in the best case, cochlear implants produce input that sounds
nothing like ordinary hearing.

So Kurweil's claim that scientists have mapped the brain and understand how
much of it functions are provably false. Scientists have not mapped the
brain even partially. We still don't know all the functions of (for example)
the left temporal lobe. Scientists do NOT understand how even the simplest
parts of the brain, like the auditory cortex, function — at least, not well
enough to reverse-engineer them.
As for nanotechnology and hard AI, those fields have run into brick walls so
complete that there's no more point in discussing those delusions than in
debating the claims of scientologists or alchemists.
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n02_AI_gone_awry.html

Science is making progress and technology has produced many advances. But
the kinds of advances Kurzweil is talking about are not just futuristic,
they belong to the realm of hallucinogenic self-delusion like GM's nuclear
powered Nucleon concept car, a robot with human-level intelligence and
manual dexterity in every home, a personal helicopter for everyone, personal
jet packs, flying cars, and other seemingly drug-induced fantasies out of
the TV kiddies' cartoon The Jetsons.

Kurzweil's claims about enhancing intelligence through genetic engineering
in particular show his desperate ignorance of basic molecular biology and
population statistics and cognitive psychology. No one knows what
intelligence is or how to measure it — and the evidence for that failure is
overwhelming:

For most of the 20th century, intelligence was viewed as an all-purpose,
monolithic power, christened g by psychologist Charles Spearman. Creativity
was believed to be a side effect of a high level of general intelligence - a
mark of big g. The father of the standardised-testing industry, Lewis
Terman, created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale to quantify this
power. He launched the longest scientific study in history, Genetic Studies
of Genius, to track the accomplishments of highly gifted grade-school
children through the course of their lives. His hope that an impressive IQ
score would augur groundbreaking accomplishments in science and art,
however, didn't pan out. His young Termites, as he affectionately called
them, did end up earning slots at better universities and getting hired for
executive positions, often with help from Terman. They gave the world two
memorable inventions: the K ration and I Love Lucy. (Both Ancel Keys, who
perfected single-meal pouches for the US Army, and Jess Oppenheimer, the
creator of the popular TV show, were Termites.)

For the most part, however, real genius slipped through Terman's net. None
of his prodigies won major scientific prizes or became important artists,
while two students excluded from the study for having insufficient test
scores, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, went on to earn Nobels.
http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/education/a_rage _to_master.htm

A test that allegedly measures "intelligence" but sieves out two future
Nobel prize winners in the sciences constitutes such an obviously grotesque
failure that hardly anything else need be said on the subject of testing for
intelligence.
Clearly, we can't reliably test intelligence. We don't have a ghost of a
clue what intelligence is, and we have no idea how to about figuring out how
to determine what intgelligence is.
What we do know about measured IQ is that it is not correlated with
achievement or general problem-solving ability. Marilyn vos Savant, the
person with the highest recorded IQ, used to author a puzzle column for a
newspaper, and now works as an accountant for her husband's business. Hardly
a stellar record of achievement. You might expect the highest IQ segment of
the population to correlate with the admissions to the top 50 colleges or
the list of Nobel Prize winners — you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Completely
100% wrong. Turns out a Bulgarian woman with one ofhte highest recorded IQs
can't even get a job, much less admission into a top-50 U.S. university.

Nobel Prize winners tend to come from small colleges, not out of the top 50
most prestigious colleges. Nobel Prize winners tend not to come from the top
half percent of the IQ test scorers — Richard Feynman had measured IQ of
120, much much lower than Marilyn Vos Savant or most of hte pople in MENSA.
The delusion that we know what intelligence is, and therefore we can build
smarter computers, and that those computers will therefore be able to build
even smtarter computers, is a chain of errors as foolish and as crazy as the
chain of errors involved in claiming that lightning bugs are produced when
lightning strikes a bug.

We don't know what intelligence is. Even if we did know, there's no evidence
we can enhance it or replicate it. (We know perfectly well what imgaination
is — can we enhance ir or replicate it?) Even if we could enhance or
replicate intelligence in silicon, there's no evidence at all that a
smarter-than-human computer would be able to build a computer smarter than
itself (and there's a huge mountain of evidence showing that it
couldn't…just look how impossible it has been for the smartest humans to
produce computers smarter than themselves). And even if superhumanly smart
computers could produce computers smarter than themselves, what's the
evidence that they wouldn't just sit around contemplaing beautiful paintings
instead of interacting with humans? Do really smart human spend their time
explaining themselves to ants? Why would superhumanly smart computers even
bother to interact with us, assuming they were possible — whiich is
unliikley to the point of practical impossibility?
Nobel prize winners, asked about what produced their breakthroughs, do not
cite intelligence — instead, they refer to qualities like "imagination" and
"persistence." Neither Ray Kurzweil nor any molecular geneticist has
suggested or shown any method of genetically eningeering reliable
enhancements to human creativity or persistence. No one even has any idea
how to measure these qualities quantitatively, much less genetically enhance
them, or even if they can be genetically enhanced.

The usual kooks and cranks and flakes will of course erupt with red-faced
flatulent fury to shriek "that article from Skeptic magazine you linked to
doesn't prove anything!"

That's a lie.

Moreover, it's simple and easy to prove that it's a lie.

The article proves that none of the myriad claims made by AI researchers
have ever panned out, it proves that every single one of the most
prestigious current AI researchers with tenured positions as head of the
best cutting-edge AI resarch labs in the finest universities in the world
all believe "AI is brain-dead" and "AI has hit a brick wall."
The article from the Skeptic magazine cited above proves that there are not
just one, but many incredibly hard problems facing AI research — problems so
unsolvable, so refractory, so shockingly intransigent, that no one has even
been able to suggest even a hypothetical way to get around them, much less
make progress in AI and genetic engineering of human intelligence or build
Drexlerian nanotech assemblers, by solving them. These problems include the
frame problem and the combinatorial explosion search problem for expert
systems and the self-reference problem for AI, the problem of junk DNA and
the RNA world paradigm and the really really tough problem of
reverse-engineering emergent systems for genetic engineering, and the
problem of molecular stiction and Brownian bombardment and the destruction
by Brownian forces and Van Der Waals forces and molecular folding of the
paper-tape-type ecnoded instructions required for a rod-logic atomic level
computer to work and be programmable in a general Von Neuman sense.

Before the kooks and cranks and flakes who deny that Kurzweil is spouting
gibberish continue with their rants, they need to do the following:

[1] Show us a working AI computer program which solves the frame problem.
Not just a diagram, not just pseudo-code, not just a research paper on how
to write such a program — a working AI program that solves the frame
problem. Show us such an example, or shut up because you're an ignorant
liar.

[2] Show us a working automated translation program that reliably takes in
natural language and reliably spits back out idiomatic English without
grammatical or semantic errors. Not just a program that works on 50% of the
words in sentences, not something that needs huge amounts of human
intervention to work, not pseudo-code, not a white paper on how to write
such a program, but an actual working AI program. Show us that, or shut up
because you're an ignorant liar.

[3] An AI program that reads a novel and summarizes the book in a book
report that's accurate and succinct. Not just pseudo-code, not just a
research proposal, but an actual working program. Show us that, or shut up,
because you're an ignorant liar.

[4] A computer program that can listen to a piece of music and tell us
whether it's any good. In other words, a computer program that can realiably
tell the difference between randomly-generated junk and a pop tune. Any
human can tell the difference in 3 seconds, but no computer can. Once again,
don't just provide pseudo-ccde, not just a research proposal, but an actual
working program. Show us that, or shut up because you're an ignorant liar.

[5] An AI program which can negotiate a labor agreement. Not just
pseudo-code, not a proposal, but an actual working program. Show us that, or
shut up because you're an ignorant liar.

Every single time the kooks and cranks and flakes who deny that Kurzweil is
a crackpot get asked to show any of these actual working computer programs,
they always give evasions and excuses. They backpedal and fum-fuh and spin
long-winded elaborate incoherent stories to explain why they can't give us
any evidence.
In short, Kurzweil and his supporters — when asked for evidence — give the
same kind of response you get from ufologists or Bigfoot enthusiasts or
hollow earth proponents when you ask 'em for hard evidence of their claims.
They give you nothing — nothing but smoke and mirrors, lies and bullshit,
incoherent excuses and vague assertions like "it may take many years to
produce results" or "we're just starting to reesarch these areas." The exact
same kinds of vague hand-waving you get when you confront ufologists and ask
them for proof of their wild claims.

As for the kooks and cranks and flakes who will claim "it's easy enough to
debunk all these claims that AI and genetic engineering to enahnce human
intelligence and nanotechnology don't work and aren't working and never will
work, but I don't have the time" — you're lying and I can prove it.

If you can debunk the assertion that these technologies don't work and
haven't worked and can't work, great…do it. Do it now. Do it right now. Give
us the hard evidence that hard AI works. Give us the hard evidence that
nanotechnology works and produced operating Drexlerian assembler. Give us
the hard evidence that genetic engineering can reliably enhance human
intelligence. Give us that hard evidence that claims about people "uploading
their minds into computers" are anything more than a foolishly ignorant
delusion based on the fantasy that Descartes' mind-body divide is actually
real and that there exists some magical intangible Platonic essence called
"the mind" that's distinct from and separable from the human body (meaning
the human brain).
Antonio Damasio, in his book Decartes' Error, has deep-sixed most of the
ignorant misconceptions on which hard AI is based. I.e., that there exists
some magical fluid called "mind" separate from the brain; that human thought
is primarily logical and rational rather than emotion-based and arising from
bodily states; that humans use logic to solve problems, rather than
intuition and experience; that thought involves sequences of computations,
rather than emotions; that the brain is a mere piece of hardware for a
pseudo-computer-program called "the mind." Kurzweil and his followers seem
to be aware of none of this. They never mention Damasio's somatic-sensory
hypothesis:

"Although I cannot tell for certain what sparked my interest in the neural
underpinnings of reason, I do know when I became convinced that the
traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct. I had
been advised early in life that sounds decisions came from a cool head … I
had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in
a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to
intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned
separate neural systems for reason and emotion … But now I had before my
eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might
imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in
the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual
violcation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally
advantageous.

I began writing this book to propose that reason may not be as pure as most
of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not be
intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its
networks, for worse and for better.

I wrote this book as my side of a conversation with a curious, intelligent,
and wise imaginary friend, who knew little about neuroscience but much about
life … My friend was to learn about the brain and about those mysterious
things mental, and I was to gain insights as I struggled to explain my idea
of what body, brain, and mind are about."
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/damasio/descartes. html

Kurzweil and his followers never discuss the frame problem in AI when they
blithely rhadsodize about superhumanly smart silicon intelligences:
www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Frame_Problem

Kurzweil and his sycophants never discuss the death of a patient in a recent
and relatively mild gene therapy attempt when they talk blithely about
genetically engineering much larger wholesale transformations of human
beings into superhumans:
www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/500_gene.html

Ray Kurzweil and his toadies just ignore whole bodies of knowledge in order
to further their crackpot claims.

Show us the hard evidence for Kurzweil's extroarindary claims or shut up.
Point us to a list of peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals providing
hard experimental evidence that these technologies do work.

Everything else is bullshit.
Put up or shut up. Provide hard evidence that the hypothetical technologies
touted by Kurzweil actually could do what he claims they could, or stand
revealed as an ignorant crackpot and compulsive liar.

"Proof" means a peer-reviewed journal article by a reputable scientists
reporting verified and repeated experimental results. Everything else is not
proof.
I'm not interested in anecdotes, or just-so stories, or logical arguments,
or elaborate what-if scenarios — those are the realms in which
scientologists and ufologists and other crackpots prefer to operate.

Out here in the real world, we require proof before we believe a claim…and
the more extraordinary the claim, the more exotraordinary the amount and
quality of the evidence required for us to believe it.

Ray Kurzweil has made not just one, but many, extraordinary claims. He
claims not just that hard AI will produce human-level intelligence, but that
it'll happen soon, and go on from there to produce superhuman levels of
intelligence. Ray Kurweil claims not just that we'll be able to simulate the
human mind in silicon, but that we'll be able to upload our minds into
computers, and that it'll happen soon. Ray Kurzweil claims not just that
we'll be able to reliably genetically engineer traits like human
intelligence which all the evidence shows, if they're heritable at all, must
be polygenic and emergent, but that we'll be able to do it soon, and to
reliably produce enhanced human capabilities that go far beyond the human,
and that this genetic engineering will not have dire side effects like, oh,
say, terminal leukemia, or autism, etc.
Ray Kurzweil claims not just that we'll be able to overcome molecular
stiction and Brownian motion and the bombardment of phonons at the
atomic-level to produce working rod-logic molecular computers, but that
we'll be able to produce molecular assemblers capable of being reliably
programmed and that can tear apart any type of matter and rebuild it into
anything we like, and that this will happen soon.

This is tantamount not just to claiming that an evil Alien Xenu is
responsible for invivible thetans that cause all mental illness…but that
Xenu is real and the earth is flat and there's a an alchemical secret to
turning lead into gold that anyone can use (and that doesn't involve a
cyclotron) and and the earth is hollow and full of Nazis waiting to
re-emerge and start WW III and that lizard men from Zeta Reticuli use secret
underground entrances to get into the White House, where they plot to
convert us all to Rosicrucianism.

Sane people demand hard evidence.

And when you get the truly wild claims of the kind of Ray Kurzweil has made,
we demand not just hard evidnece, but a veritable mountain of bulletproof
evidence before we'll believe claims this outlandish.

Yet what has Ray Kurzweil and his transhumanist extropian Singularitarian
followers given us?

Nothing. No hard evidence at all. Just a bunch of PR. Eric Drexler has
produced zero scientific research to support his claims, he's just given a
bunch of speeches and written some books. Hans Moravec has produced no
scientific research showing that his "bush robots" are possible — he's just
written some books and given some interviews. Folks, people who only write
books and give interviews about fabulous future developments aren't
scientists, they're called "science fiction authors." Science fiction is not
reality. Don't confuse the two.

Have transhumanist extropians like Kurzweil and Moravec and Charles Stross
and Cory Doctorow given us even the level of hard evidence in support of
their claims that we would demand to convict a single person of murder in
court?

Nope. They haven't even given us that. Not even that much evidence.

To convict someone of murder in court, we demand forensic evidence and
eyewitness testimony, not just tall tales and might-be stories and wild
guesses. How much hard forensic evidence have we seen that hard AI will
fulfill its many promises?

Zero.

How much eyewitness testimony have we heard for working Drexlerian
assemblers and mind uploading and genetic engineering that produces
superhumanly smart people?

None.

So we haven't even gotten a minimal level of hard evidence, comparable to
what you'd demand to convict someone in court of murder, out of Ray Kurzweil
and his Singularitarians, in support of their outlandish
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it Singularity predictions.

Yet any sensible person would demand far more and far better evidence than
you'd demand just to convinct someone of murder, in order to get us to
believe their extraordinary transhumanist claims and uploading minds and
creating supermen from DNA tweaks.

After all, people commit murder every day. Murder is commonplace — compared
to mind uploading. Murder is quotidian - compared to creating a superhumanly
smart computer. We see murders all the time, we read about them daily, we
hear about them on the news. No one has ever seen a superhumanly smart
computer. No one has ever shown a person uploading his mind into a computer.
No one has ever genetically engineered a superhumanly smart human being. And
yet Ray Kurzweil and his transhumanist Singularitarians expect us to believe
their much more fantastic claims with much LESS evidence than a sensible
rational person would demand to convict a defendant in court of the far more
ordinary and vastly more credible crime of murder.

Does any of this ring a bell? Does anyone smell a rat? Doesn't anyone see
the scam that's going on here?

I want hard evidence for transhumanism and the alleged Singularity — not
baseless assertions.

I want to see working computer programs…not just-so stories.

I want to see actual functioning robots that don't bang into walls and that
can recognize the difference between a dog and a volleyball…not just wild
claims.

I want to see a functioning AI program that does real-language translation
without appallingly stupid and shockingly obvious errors, like turning the
motto "Out of sight, out of mind," into "Blind and insane," or
mistranslating "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into "The
liquor is good but the meat is rotten."

I want to see a working genetic engineering vector that reliably makes a rat
200% smarter — not just the sequencing of the rat genome.

I want to see a working Drexlerian assembler that can rip apart a spoon and
turn it into a miniature Sterling engine. Show it to me. Let me see it
working.
There are no such AI programs or robots or genetic engineering vectors or
nanotech assemblers..
There is no such hard evidence for Kurzweil's wild claims.

After 50-plus years of sustained effort by the smartest people on earth,
there has been ZERO progress in these areas. In the article "There's Plenty
Of Room at the Bottom," in 1959, physicist Richard Feynman largely
anticipated K. Eric Drexler's ideas from his 1987 Engines Of Creation. In
the 50 years since Feynman gave his lecture, we've seen zero progress in
creating anything like what Feynman talked about. No molecular machines
capable of tearing apart molecules and rebuilding 'em to spec. No Drexlerian
assemblers. No programmable virus-sized machines. No atomic-scale rod-logic
computers. None. Zilch. Zip. Diddly. Bupkiss. Nada. Zippo. Nothing.

Claim I'm stupid or lying?

Great. Show us the proof.

Let us see the hard evidence. Put up or shut up.

Pay attention, folks. Notice the scam here. Every single objection to
skeptical requests for evidence of transhumanist Singularitarian predictions
gets met with the exact same type of reasoning used by ufologists and
scientologists and Bigfoot fancier.
Ufologists claim not enough research has been done on UFOS and that's why
there's no evidence for alien abductions — Ray Kurzweil claims not enough
research has been done on AI and nanotech and genetic engineering, and
that's why there's no hard evidence for superhumanly smart computers and
genetically-engineered supermen and mind uploading and Drexlerian
nanomachines that can rip apart matter at the atomic level and rebuild it
atom by atom. Exact same type of reasoning as ufologists.
Bigfoot enthusiasts claim it hasn't been long enough to give us evidence of
Bigfoot's existence, but that we'll see lots of evidence real soon now. Ray
Kurzweil makes the exact same claim — "it's early days yet in AI research,
we haven't been at it long enough to give us proof of the inevitable triumph
of superhuman hard AI"…the exact same argument as the Bigfoot crackpots.
Scientologists claim people who don't see dramatic cures for their mental
problems need to spend more money — Ray Kurzweil and the AI and nanotch
crackpots also say that we haven't seen dramatic new results like
superhumanly smart computers and mind uploading because we need to spend
more money. And, just like the Scientologists, no matter how much money we
spend on AI and nanotech, it's never enough. We always need to spend more
money. More and more and more money, and never any results. And what's the
answer to any skeptic who objects? "You need to spend more money." Just like
Scientology.
Psychic "researchers" can never provide us with a definitive point at which
a sensible person can conclude "ESP is bullshit." No, they tell us we just
have to keep spending money on their fruitless experiments that never
produce results, we just have to keep supporting their failed psychic
research forever and ever, amen. Same thing with Ray Kurzweil and his crew —
they can never provide us with a single experiment, which, if it fails,
means hard AI is dead. They can never give us a single condition under which
we could conclude that Drexlerian nanotech is a degenerating research
program and must be abandoned. No, just like the psychic crackpots, Ray
Kurweil and his crew continually demand more and more money for their failed
AI efforts, more and dead-end research with no results, forever and ever,
and no matter how unbroken the string of failures, they can never accept any
evidence as being sufficient to disprove their claims ofr superhumanly smart
computers and genetically engineered supermen and mind uploading.

After 50 years of concentrated effort by the greatest geniuses on earth, the
best AI programs today still get fed a sentence like "The astronomer married
a really hot star" and STILL can't answer "What does the word `hot' mean in
that sentence?"

The finest AI programs today get fed a sentence like "Mary saw a puppy in
the window and wanted it," and they still can't answer the simple question:
"Which one did Mary want — the puppy, or the window?"

If you believe Kurzweil's bullshit and you've swallowed the Singularitarian
Kool-Aid, great — show us computer programs that can correctly answer the
above questions.

Otherwise, shut up, because you're spouting ignorant tripe.

-- 
Michael Anissimov
Lifeboat Foundation   http://lifeboat.com
http://acceleratingfuture.com
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