Comments on: Ray Kurzweil talk at DEMO Oct. 2 to be streamed live

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 23:32:25 +0000

Video posted here:
http://www.itworld.com/virtualization/300282/ray-kurzweil-talks-about-human-brains-ai-and-watson

By: Diam

Diam — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:37:17 +0000

Scratch that – They started uploading videos today on youtube account “democonf”.

By: Diam

Diam — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:33:41 +0000

I would also like to watch this talk and some others from the conference. I see no reason why it hasn’t been uploaded already given that it was live streamed.

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:08:09 +0000

That’s true, and noone has any objections to Mr Kurzweil. But that doesn’t change fact that listening to same thing is not that kind of music to be interesting every time :)

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:44:16 +0000

Thanks for trying. If you parsed my sentence correctly, you might have noticed the ‘too’ at the end which in this case refers to an additional conference and also implies I already know what you said. But you did try, and that is pretty nice for a random stranger.

By: snake0

snake0 — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:11:22 +0000

Any chance of this being uploaded to youtube?

By: Camaxtli

Camaxtli — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:15:40 +0000

As far as the asteroid mining goes, I don’t discount what you’re saying about 2020-2025, but Planetary Resources PR often has a hypey vibe that just turns me off. But maybe that’s just me and they need to do that to get people excited. They got James Cameron excited, so who am I to complain. :)

By: anthony hadfiedl

anthony hadfiedl — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:38:16 +0000

It’s still the same old, of what we already know, with various groups on the DARPA reverse engineering the brain project, and its variable guessable achievement. And that’s just the hardware. No one knows what it will do if and when they boot it. It’s still a lot of speculation hype. And no doubt along the right lines, but we won’t know much else till around 2020 or so. So Ray can speculate all he wants to but time will tell. I mean all things come to pass, but it somewhat undermines the challenge of getting there, ala Exascale computing, it a buzz word, but the issues involved are huge.

By: anthony hadfiedl

anthony hadfiedl — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:30:31 +0000

I don’t know about that, intel has a roadmap down to 5 nm, and they half their gate ever 4 years, so 5 nm, which will take EUV lithography with be due around 2018-2020, on which no doubt they base their claim to reach Exascale computing.

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:55:36 +0000

Right, concert attendance is seldom composed of fans!

Couldn’t you come up with a better(a good one) analogy? I go to concerts BECAUSE they can’t play the EXACT same song ever.. otherwise we’d just pop a cd or mp3 to listen!

And even studio recordings last longer than flowery predictions =)

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:48:54 +0000

You talkin’ to me?

I think that is pretty obvious from the paragraph I directed you to, why you assume my reply was positive?!
Anyway, good you have answered your own question “yourself”.

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 04:54:29 +0000

Both Seth Lloyd and Max Tegmark said “All things are information”.
Therefore everything can also be IT.

By: Singme

Singme — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:22:42 +0000

I really enjoyed the talk, thanks for providing the link to it.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 01:55:59 +0000

“No exponential is forever…but we can delay forever”

The thing about Moore’s Law, is that it depends on how broad you interpret it to be – everytime something ends, something new takes it place that continues down exponentially and you could call that Moore’s Law.

It’s important to remember that, originally, it was only supposed to refer to the exponential growth in semiconducters in chips…Kurzweil sort of expanded it with the Accelerating Returns law and people sort of mesh the two.

By: Vlad

Vlad — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:25:47 +0000

IDF 2012: Moore’s Law good for another 10 years
http://asia.cnet.com/idf-2012-moores-law-good-for-another-10-years-62218706.htm

By: de Broglie

de Broglie — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:01:59 +0000

When will Moore’s law become obsolete?

No exponential goes on forever, and we’re approaching atomic dimensions. I’ve always said it will last two or three more generations [of chips], but the technologists have surprised me, so I guess they’ve still got some tricks up their sleeves.

By: de Broglie

de Broglie — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:59:23 +0000

There was a recent article in Fortune Magazine. It was a Q&A interview with Gordon Moore. He was asked about whether Moore’s Law and whether it would continue. He replied that although his namesake law seems like it is bound to fail a decade from now due to size constraints, scientists and engineers always seem to devise a clever way around it and that the end of Moore’s Law seemed like it was always on the horizon. Moore seems to agree with Ray’s larger observations that although the strict interpretation of Moore’s Law will no longer apply, other media and devices will be used to continue the exponential trend.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:53:33 +0000

I don’t believe DEMO is that kind of conference. It’s true that science and engineering go hand in hand with purpose of business but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:20:59 +0000

3rd paragraph probably answers your question? =)

you’re welcome =P

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 22:25:20 +0000

Is Ray going to present his ideas to a primarily scientific audience too?

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:56:24 +0000

That’s something Kurzweil brings up alot — that Information will be everything and the IT department will grow and grow to encompass everything, not only bring “double”-exponential growth, but also being smooth and predictable in it’s trends which is how he was able to write his books.

By: gmike555

gmike555 — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:46:55 +0000

His talks have to be the same because the audience is different. It’s like a band going on tour. They don’t play different songs every single time

By: Vlad

Vlad — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:07:55 +0000

Well the problem is that information technologies are the only ones that have exponential change, all other technologies are stagnant (like medicine, space travels,…) but the good news is that many other stagnant technologies are slowly becoming IT (such as medicine – genetic engineering is basically IT, nanobots are IT even more, driverless cars are based on IT and so on).

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:19:25 +0000

Remember to shoot them in the head or they will keep coming back. =)

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:16:56 +0000

I know, man, I know. It is just a joke, I am NOT complaining.

I was going to leave at that but then I read “Don’t laugh,” which to me is an invitation to do just that… I know everything there is from microarchitecture to big A architecture and I have no idea what a 10 gigabit processor is supposed to mean or even what is this EB unit you speak of, lol I guess I must still be in the old days… =)

By: Clyde

Clyde — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:46:29 +0000

Respectfully, to the Kurzweil critics: In spite of your legitimate comments – Mr. Kurzweil remains one of the greatest minds in our world today!

Clyde of Las Vegas

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:20:34 +0000

He has to keep repeating himself, Marcos. There are too many people in the world who don’t understand accelerating progress. Too many people in high places are making plans for the future without once thinking that the rate of change is exponential and soon the exponent will have an exponent.

Elsewhere on this site a lot of us have been commenting on asteroid mining. People who can’t understand how fast things will be changing keep throwing cold water on the idea. Things that will be done after the year 2020 or 2025 will be done with much greater technology than we have today.

Just look at desktop computers and apply Moore’s Law, doing the arithmetic on the back of an envelope. With processing power doubling every year and a half between now and the year 2025, there will be nine doublings of transistors in your processors. Today you can go to Best Buy and pay $750 for a desktop that has a 10 gigabit processor. After doubling nine times that comes to 5,120 gigs for under $1,000. Don’t laugh, it will happen.

I just found an old magazine in the bottom of a drawer, from June 2000. I found an ad in it for a Dell computer for $899 that boasts of 64MB SDRAM, 4.3 GB hard drive, and a Pentium III processor at 600EB MHz. The processors now go up to 3.5 Gigahertz. Do you remember those old days? The time we now live in will be the old days of AD 2025.

By: Editor

Editor — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:07:23 +0000

tnx. copy/paste zombie removed.

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:03:40 +0000

Null Pointer Assignment:

What that asterisk refers to?

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:00:50 +0000

haha yes, I used to joke when he got to the “exponential increasing returns” part how his talks about it have been increasing exponentially. =)

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:57:35 +0000

I would agree with you in any other situation, but now he is clearly going to focus on ‘the brain’ and ‘AI’, as described. Why? Money. He must sell those books, right? =) expect more from now to november 13 and a few weeks beyond.

By: Editor

Editor — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:36:04 +0000

We’re checking on a transcript and on-demand access to the video.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:00:58 +0000

Tell me about it — I really wish someone would challenge Kurzweil into explaining or talking about new things instead of basically explaining the same things over and over (and over…) again.

Even if it’s something about his vision of the Post-Singularity world (like say, what would be the nature of crime), I would find it vastly more interesting then him basically explaining what is the Singularity…again.

By: John

John — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:45:38 +0000

Man, you probably heard that multiple times already. Mr Kurzweil doesn’t bother to come up with new things for different talks, it’s all the same.

By: Bri

Bri — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:58:42 +0000

I won’t be able to listen. Would it be possible to make a transcript available to us?