The most compelling counter is one throwaway comment I saw here - that things are just going to get so complex we will be overwhelmed with complexity and leaky abstractions and progress will crash into a wall before intelligence amplification helps us pass said wall.
I prefer the ideas of Aubrey De Gray, because while they require future-technology and future-developments, they don't require intelligence amplification or AI or thought-to-be-impossible technology, and if done successfully would give us longer lives which might be the equivalent of amplified intelligence allowing a way round said wall (i.e. work at the same level of smartness, but for longer).
Ray's argument against things getting complex would probably be something like: Why would things suddenly get "so complex" when the trend has been going on for millions of years.
Douglas Hofstadler (Godel Escher Bach author) says that perhaps humans aren't smart enough to understand and recreate consciousness.
That's the nature of exponentials. It will look like we have a lot of headroom to spare, but in a couple of steps - wham.
Exponential doubling run backwards:
100% - full.
50% - one step earlier.
25% - two steps earlier.
Two doublings before the limit, you look around and see 75% room to grow into - why would there suddenly be a problem, there's so much room for manoeuvre, stop worrying.
Does anyone know more about this movie? The trailer isn't especially informative (nor is the press kit), but it seems like the movie will be low on content (excluding stuff that Kurzweil and others have been saying for years) and high on self promotion. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it would just mean that I'm not the target audience.
My mom is extremely unlikely to watch a film called "Transcendent Man". I doubt if the technical people I know would be interested. Even the people here at HN are skeptical.
This film has a feeling to me of a ... startup trying to launch on technical impressiveness. Only a few people will care, and they have probably already heard about it.
Actually my mother is the one who introduced me to Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and she bought me the book for Christmas.
My mother is not a scientist -- she only graduated from High School. She is also very religious and spiritual.
So you might be inclined to stereotype or judge her (or other people's Mothers) and assume that you know their points of view on Ray Kurzweil, or science in general.
But you might be surprised, if you actually got to know some of these people.
I really credit my Mother with inspiring my interest in computers and science. When I was younger she used to read me "science books for kids" and then bought all the Time-Life Science books (including the one on the "Universe") she could get her hands on, for me to read.
She even signed me up for a subscription to "Discover-Magazine" and "Popular Science" when I was a teenager!
Not bad for a "stay at home Mom" who has serious Catholic views, and "just a high school diploma".
Hopefully the movie will contain a subliminal message which implants itself into the brain's of all its viewers. The viewers then will then go out and simultaneously engage in activities that serve to bring us closer to the Singularity.
I'm sure the actual movie will be much better than the trailer. 95% of the the content of the book can be summed up in about 10 line graphs. They probably just haven't hired someone to take those and make them pretty yet.
This doesn't look very good, as it focuses on Ray, and not on the issue. I'd rather hear what Kevin Kelly and others shown have to say about the tech. I don't care what they think about each other personally or politically.
I think Kelly is right by the way (he's the guy with white hair and a chin strap beard). There has been too much focus on this guy, and the hope he brings to people. It should motivate people, but only enough to learn or tech more engineering to get there faster with practical, immediate action.
Kurzweil is one of the few guys whose predictions I take serious, simply because his track record is solid... in fact quite a few of is predictions he's directly made happen. If you look at the claims made in "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and the follow up a decade later in "The Age of Spiritual Machines", you realize the guy is pretty on the ball. Not 100% of the time, but even when he's wrong he usually got some part of it right.
It's horrible. I like Kurzweil and singularity doesn't seem so unlikely - just the trailer is unbearable for me, for too many reasons to count (like cutting from Captain Kirk to "The Singularity Is Near" lieing on a desk).
Serious question--how does the struggling global economy factor into all of this? I'd think it would, at the very least, postpone a technological singularity.
Right, but let's consider the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is a contraction in a healthy economy. It's normal, and probably necessary. A depression is something worse. We don't know yet if this is a recession or a depression.
At worst, we're talking about a stagnation, a flatlining in the exponential curve for a few years. I doubt that we'll get to that point. To see growth completely stop we'd need a nuclear war or something to that end.
Life was still better during the Great Depression than it was only a few decades earlier. Progress will continue even if the political and economic landscape is unfavorable.
The D word is mainly used to fill the time in between commercials with talking heads debating irrelevant semantics. I also doubt a long recession or depression would significantly impact a decades long trend by much.
The singularity prediction relies on a trend of technological advances that is ever increasing. The only thing it forgets is that resources are not infinite. Hey, bacteria on a plate grow exponentially, but eventually they run out of resources and just die.
Which makes for another interesting issue. Some Packlid may be reading this and thinking, "What do you mean "we" human?" Kurzweil may still (already) be proven right, whether we make it happen or not. Just some whimsy for thought.
The nice thing about being Ray Kurzweil is that he can keep making predictions on the most simple things and get them right. So much that if hes wrong on any he can easily push them aside.
Technology won't slow down, it can't, not even a depression could slow it down. The information is too available and the school numbers are still high.
"God is who he is, and our challenge should be to know Him, not try to create Him."
That's the tough thing. Maybe the only way to know God is to become God, at which point we just take it all for granted, like any other technology we integrate into our lives.
No, but the pills are supposed to give them better ods to live until 2040-2050 where they think the Singularity will allow them to transcend their human bodies.
Other people prefer go and live in Florida or Spain :-)
"no medical studies"? That seems like a very interesting claim, but the article you linked doesn't support it much, instead just listing a few studies which found that specific vitamins failed to improve health in specific areas.
What about the case where someone has an otherwise undiagnosed vitamin deficiency? E.g. B12 supplements to combat the neurological effects (like depression, distractibility) of B12 deficiency?
Whatever this guy thinks he can do, I am sure he won't be able to make humans live forever, or even "get his father back to life".
Maybe he can make a machine that lives forever, but he can't make a human to live forever. There are things that god forced in this world, and it will continue regardless if you believe in god or not. And I think that god forced humans to die, and this won't change in the future.
It might be more productive if you argued why others should share your belief in fate or God, instead of just stating your belief without any justification. I do believe in God, but I do not find your statements very interesting without at least some attempt to persuade.
EDIT: [You are right that medicine helped alot, but what I wanted to say is... death is something that will continue to happen regardless how much scientific progress we make, and you will still find kids at 5 or 6 yrs old die regardless of any "medical progress", simply because this is what's called "fate"!
And I am sure that you heard of kids who died at very young age]
You have a right to believe in God or not, or even make your "brain" as your own God, it's all up to you.
But it's NOT funny to make jokes about God, and I had to response to you, although I knew that it will lead to reduce my karma, but I had no choice anyway.
The book (The singularity is near), which serves as the basis for the movie is one of the most thought provoking reads I have had in a long time.
He looks at various trends throughout history (like Moore's Law) which follow an exponential curve, and he extrapolates the curve into the future.
There may be some arm waving here and there, but there is definitely something to his theories.
Summary: "Most people overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term".