KurzweilAI.net,
April 30, 2002
Ray Kurzweil and Gregory Stock, Director, UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society, debated "BioFuture vs. MachineFuture" at the recent Foresight Senior Associate Gathering.
Stock challenged Kurzweil's optimistic visions of a cyber future. "We're not going to become the sort of cyborg chip heads [with] high-bandwidth connections through neural implants that Ray Kurzweil talks about in the Age of Spirtual Machines," argued Stock.
"It's an assertion of faith. The growth rate eventually has to slow down…so a lot of these cyberpossibilities are not going to happen. Chip implanting involves brain surgery. I'm not going to go through a brain implant for the equivalent of a programmable toaster."
Stock dismissed the idea of uploading the mind to a computer, pointing out its religious connotations and asserting it "can’t contain consciousness." And even if it were possible to merge with advanced AI, Stock continued, we would be "dominated by computational structures … so it ceases to be an implementation of the human mind."
In Stock's view of the future, "we’ll be a biological core surrounded by -- but not fused with -- intelligent machine swarms. We will have to get used to not being at the cutting edge of intelligent life. We'd better hope for biological advances … from the genomics revolution … and other biological enhancements that offer added health and longevity."
"In the next couple of decades … we're going to experience understanding our biology, reverse-engineering the human brain, continuing gains in computation, miniaturization, nanotechnology," Kurzweil countered. "All of these are going to come together to enable us to get closer and closer to our technology without requiring surgery.
"When we have true nanotechnology combined with molecular electronics we're going to be able to create devices the size of cells that go in our bloodstream to perform biological functions and communicate directly with our neurons," he pointed out. "It's quite conservative to say we will have completed reverse-engineering the human brain within 25 years.
"It's very easy to scoff at [nonbiological systems], just as Kasparov scoffed at machine chess in 1990 … but in 1997 it became comparable to him.
"We have been and will continue to double the paradigm shift rate each decade. The 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress. Right now, biology is dominant, but the nonbiological components are going to grow exponentially. There's no way we're going to be able to vastly expand our biological systems. Nanotechnology is inherently much stronger, much more capable, infinitely scalable."
However, in Kurzweil's view, we will see dramatic growth in both biological and nonbiological enhancements. "The future will be both green and gray."
Text of Kurzweil's slide presentation and audio clips
Transcript will be posted on KurzweilAI.net shortly.
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