Horgan and Kurzweil duke it out over the Singularity
October 25 2008 / by John Heylin
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 1 Hot
In a futurist battle-royal, John Horgan (author of The Undiscovered Mind) and Ray Kurzweil (CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, author of The Singularity is Near) held a debate over the Singularity in front of the assembled audience. What I thought was going to be rather scientific actually turned out to be a very interesting conversation.
Against
John Horgan started off the debate on the attack. “I’m the skunk at Kurzweil’s garden party” he began, warming the audience to his stance. (To be fair, he was going up against the central figure in the Singularity movement in front of a lot of Singularity proponents – tough by any standards.)
He announced that he himself had once believed in the notion of a Singularity. Jovially, he kidded that once he had in fact experienced the Singularity as he tripped on drugs. “I became the Singularity.” What came next was a traditional thorough assault on the Singularity movement.
For example, he cited how back in the 60s people believed nuclear fusion would soon produce energy so cheaply that you couldn’t measure it in pennies. Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 but even though we spend about five billion on cancer research each year we still have cancer. In 1980 there was the statement that all infectious diseases would be eliminated. Gene therapy is no longer discussed because it is close to impossible to achieve. We claim to map the brain and be close to doing it, and yet we haven’t made any advancements in mental health.
Pro
Kurzweil fired back that reverse engineering can accomplish mapping the brain, critical to achieving the Singularity. He predicted through the World Wide Web and people today are closer to understanding how the brain works.
He added that motor functions and reflexes such as catching a ball are only performed by a few genes in the human body.
“The brain isn’t as complex as it appears,” was the fundamental assertion.
Kurzweil summed up with his traditional argement that there are just 800 million bytes of the genome describe the brain, and that, eventually, we’ll be able to map it out in entirety.
Conclusion
Horgan was on his game, you could tell he was excited about chatting with Kurzweil about the Singularity in front of everyone. Kurzweil himself seemed a little uninterested, probably because ever since he became the Singularity figurehead he has had to provide countless rebuttals in similar situations.
All in all, a great debate for the rapt futures audience.
Comment Thread (5 Responses)
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John Horgan clearly won this battle 1000 times over. He is right and Ray Kurzweil is wrong.
Posted by: adbatstone80 October 26, 2008
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I just wish I could be at the conference.
Posted by: tk421 October 26, 2008
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Adbatstone80 – yawn. Here we go again. You’ve basically said nothing at all, except stated your opinion without explanation, which is your favoured mode of operation. Shall I state my opinion, without justification, for symmetry? Alright here goes:
“Ray Kurzweil clearly won this battle 1000 times over. He is right and John Horgan is wrong.”
See? Easy. Now here comes the hard part – justification.
Horgan falls into the category of people who complain about not having flying cars and talking toasters (as you know I call them the “where’s my flying car people”). Claims of abundant energy from nuclear fission and colonies on the moon were never justified. People in the 1960’s were sometimes damned awful at prediction, mainly because they had little appreciation of how technology matures and develops.
We have such an understanding now. We now know that the previous examples (car, toaster, nuclear powered toilet) were a small handful of negative outcomes borne of ignorance. Those people also missed large changes in communications, electronics and biotechnology which were difficult to anticipate (in other words, there record of both positive and negative prediction was lousy).
Adbatstone80, google “failed predictions” and see how many were underestimations rather than overestimations. You’ll find that the vast majority of failed predictions were naysayer ones. You are setting yourself up to be one of these people, although fortunately for you, you are not famous enough to have your poorly-judged words etched into the books of history.
And remember, Kurzweil says that if you ask him to tell you the share price of google in ten years, he cannot do it. It is a chaotic system. But if you ask him to predict the cost of a MIPS of computing in ten years, that’s quite predictable, which is why he has an amaxing prediction track record (do you think I’m lying? Do some research and find out).
I suggest you print off this comment and pin it to your bedroom wall, because I’m tired of repeating the same rebuttal of your short, void comments. We know that you have an emotional knee-jerk reaction when you hear the name “kurzweil”, and it’s getting boring.
Posted by: CptSunbeam October 26, 2008
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@CptSunbeam
People in the 1960’s were sometimes damned awful at prediction
Thank god these days, because of wide use of computers and communication technologies, we can make very accurate predictions about future developments. Just look at financial markets.
Posted by: johnfrink October 27, 2008
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Obviously John you didn’t note my comment about the difference between a chaotic system and a predictable one. I’m not entirely sure why adbat, and to a lesser extent you, have this intense need to slam any idea which might possibly suggest that science and technology are moving rapidly. I am sure, though, that it disturbs me.
So yes John, financial markets are chaotic and unpredictable, congratulations, you’re a genius. Now that you’ve had your daily dose of negativity, you can get back to whatever it was you were doing, but I suggest taking a minute to think about the great depression, which was an economic “bottom” but did nothing to arrest the form of the economic curve, nor did it halt the progress of the 20th century (unless you deny such progress, and I wouldn’t put it past you). In fact the USA became the greatest economic and military superpower ever known shortly after that “disaster”.
Of course, Kurzweil and others have spoken about these things, but you guys never listen, since the word “Kurzweil” is a by-word for “fool”, right? I think it’s telling that you only picked up on one little sentence from my post, and even in that you were misguided. So where does that leave you? Searching for some other “evidence” that the human race is mediocre or stagnating, in the style of a creationist seeking to validate a pre-conceived idea?
Posted by: CptSunbeam October 28, 2008
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