We are Borg

[Rally_man]

Link

Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil.

He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.


"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said.

"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

Man versus machine

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

"We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.

 

[Plecostomus]

Hmmm, we shall see. Be interesting if our Eugenics War is actually fought against cybernetic "Supermen" rather than just genetic augments.

"I AM NOW THE UNDISPUTED MASTER OF HUMANITY I SHALL ERADICATE ALL INFERIOR FORMS OF LIFE--Hey who unplugged my battery charger sys*brrrrBLIP*"

"For all his vast superior-ness he didn't see that coming, eh?"

 

[StarMan]

We all need to "merge" simultaneously if and when this technology is developed. If only a select few are enhanced, the rest of humanity will be enslaved under their hideous intelligence.

 

[ITL]

Kurzweil's been saying that for years. Some would say he's obsessed...

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Machines 'to match man by 2029'

and the guy who wrote this is REALLY optimistic and probably delusional, I think a year of 2229 would be more like it.

2029 what a laugh.

 

[jeff lebowski]

Fire said:

Machines 'to match man by 2029'

and the guy who wrote this is REALLY optimistic and probably delusional, I think a year of 2229 would be more like it.

2029 what a laugh.

I imagine he's thinking of a breakthrough that will cause an exponentail growth in A.I. intellignece.

Perhaps an artificial neuron or something.

I don't think it's that impossible.

You never know what we'll come up with.

In 1903, humans recorded the first flight.

A mear 66 years later, WE LANDED ON THE FRIGGIN MOON!

That's a pretty big leap in a short period of time.

 

[M'Sharak]

ITL said:
Kurzweil's been saying that for years. Some would say he's obsessed...

Kurzweil does have an aura of "true believer" about him, no question, but he also has had this rather annoying habit of being right about a lot of stuff which sounded pretty crazy in the beginning.

Is he right about this? It's hard to say (even he has admitted that predictions he made in his 1999 book won't necessarily take place right on schedule) but it could be interesting to see in 2029 just how far off he turns out to have been.

 

[ITL]

I'm sure that AI will improve in leaps and bounds, but I have no idea when...lol

 

[Lindley]

AI research isn't even trying to make it more human-level, for the most part. The majority of research has given up on that direction by now.

There are certain things computers do well, and certain things they do not do well. If you put together the things they do well in certain ways, they can appear pretty darn smart. But that's all it is----appearance.

A human figured out how the machine should interpret its inputs in order to achieve that result. The fact that the machine can then achieve good results with a wide variety of inputs doesn't make it intelligent.

Theoretically, with enough processing power, a neural network could learn from experience not only a few probabilities as it does now, but how to configure itself for better results, or even how to configure another neural network from scratch to do better. But the computational explosion with each new level of abstraction you add.....it's not going to be feasible any time soon. Especially since processor speeds aren't increasing as fast as they used to----hence the shift in focus to multiple cores.

 

[Deleted 2]

And understand, our notion of intelligence has shifted quite a bit. Being able to do complex calculations quickly and correctly used to be considered a mark of high intelligence. Now it's considered to be a simple mechanical process, even though computers aren't so bad at problem solving (within reasonable limits) either. Being a good chess player used to be a mark of high intelligence. Now chess is a past station as well.

While there certainly are levels of abstraction and understanding that are currently--and perhaps even theoretically--beyond the scope of machine intelligence, it's also a very human tendency to quietly move the goalposts so that "intelligence" can remain a uniquely human quality.

Even in fiction featuring AIs with capabilities far exceeding those reasonably conceivable today, humans are painted as having certain qualities (be it "intuition" or a degree of emotionalism) that makes them somehow superior to the machine intelligence.

Up to a certain degree, it's chauvinism.

 

[zenophite]

Take such prognostications with a grain of salt and the knowledge that other such predictions have been made before only to be woefully inaccurate. In terms of AI we are not really anywhere closer to creating 'sentient' computers than we were when they started the field back in the 50's-60's. I suspect that genetic engineering and bioscience will make the biggest changes over the next 20 or so years.

 

[Meredith]

Is this more fusion and flying cars or more jet aircraft and computers?

 

[K-Star]

To be honest I'd rather they start building more sophisticated humanoid robots/androids before trying to stick AI in our brains. And I'm not sure I'd want to undergo that procedure... sounds potentially painful and I don't want no one messing with my brain! I'd like to see a Data before I see a Borg.