TagRay Kurzweil
Artificial Intelligence, Worshipped as God, Is No Ordinary Deity!
Not only will we be reborn into new, immortal silicon bodies but rules regarding theft don’t seem to apply anymore…This article was published in The Stream (July 6, 2022) under the title “The Church of Artificial Intelligence of the Future” and is republished with permission. There is a church that worships artificial intelligence (AI). Zealots believe that an extraordinary AI future is inevitable. The technology is not here yet, but we are assured that it’s coming. We will have the ability to be uploaded onto a computer and thereby achieve immortality. You will be reborn into a new, immortal silicon body. Of course, through salvation in Jesus Christ, Christianity has offered a path to immortality for over two thousand years. Someday, we are told, software will write better and better AI software to ultimately achieve a superintelligence. The superintelligence Read More ›
Robert J. Marks: Zeroing In on What AI Can and Can’t Do
Walter Bradley Center director Marks discusses what’s hot and what’s not in AI with fellow computer maven Gretchen HuizingaWhat makes mankind special? And what does it mean to flourish on the frontier of a technological future? In a recent podcast, “What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence?”, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks discusses what artificial intelligence can and can’t do and its ethical implications with veteran podcaster Gretchen Huizinga This interview was originally published by Christian think tank, the Beatrice Institute (March 3, 2022) and is repeated here with their kind permission: https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Mind-Matters-Episode-176-Beatrice-Institute-Rebroadcast-rev1.mp3 Here’s a partial transcript of the first segment, with notes and links: Gretchen Huizinga: Well, Bob, you’re not just a senior fellow and director of the Walter Bradley Center, but you’re also a co-founder and were instrumental Read More ›
George Gilder: An Economic Genius Talks About Gaming AI
George Gilder talks to Robert J. Marks about his book Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs. Show Notes Additional Resources
Peering Into the Future with Nikola Danaylov
In a new online series, futurist Danaylov shares both wisdom and folly about future expectations for science and technologyIs our future determined? And if so, what is it determined by? These are the questions Nikola Danaylov is discussing at Singularity Weblog, an online format the futurist author and podcaster uses for addressing topics of science, technology, humanity, and the future. In his latest series, Danaylov – who playfully addresses himself as “Socrates” – posits that humanity’s future is, indeed, determined – determined by the stories we tell ourselves. Before we jump into his fascinating analyses, let’s take a look at Danaylov himself to understand the worldview from which he writes. Danaylov is a futurist author and speaker based in Toronto, Canada. As a futurist, Danaylov is optimistic about the future of technology and the possibility of an age Read More ›
George Gilder: Google Does Not Believe in Life After Google
Will technology permanently solve the problem of human productivity? Does the future look like a life of leisure while robots do all the work we currently do? In a panel discussion at the 2019 Dallas launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, George Gilder offered some thoughts on the evening’s topic, “Will ‘Smart’ Machines Take Over Read More ›
Geoffrey Simmons: Human Design and Robots (Bingecast)
“Machines will never fall in love with each other, they will never say a prayer in earnest and they will never comprehend their own death,” writes Dr. Geoffrey Simmons. In today’s bingecast, Dr. Robert J. Marks talks with author and retired physician Simmons about his book, Are We Here to Re-Create Ourselves?: The Convergence of Designs. The two spin off Read More ›
Nobel Prize Economist Tells The Guardian, AI Will Win
But when we hear why he thinks so, don’t be too sureNobel Prize-winning economist (2002) Daniel Kahneman, 87 (pictured), gave an interview this month to The Guardian in which he observed that belief in science is not much different from belief in religion with respect to the risks of unproductive noise clouding our judgment. He’s been in the news lately as one of the authors of a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, which applies his ideas about human error and bias to organizations. He told The Guardian that he places faith “if there is any faith to be placed,” in organizations rather than individuals, for example. Curiously, he doesn’t seem to privilege science organizations: I was struck watching the American elections by just how often politicians of both Read More ›
Are We Spiritual Machines? Are We Machines at All?
Inventor Ray Kurzweil proposed in 1999 that within the next thirty years we will upload ourselves into computers as virtual persons, programs on machinesI’ve been reviewing philosopher and programmer Erik Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. See my earlier posts, here, here, here, and here. The event at which I moderated the discussion about Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines was the 1998 George Gilder Telecosm conference, which occurred in the fall of that year at Lake Tahoe (I remember baseball players Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire chasing each other for home run leadership at the time). In response to the discussion, I wrote a paper for First Things titled “Are We Spiritual Machines?” — it is still available online at the link just given, and its arguments remain current and relevant. According to The Age of Spiritual Machines , machine intelligence is the next great step in the evolution of intelligence. That man Read More ›
Artificial Intelligence: Unseating the Inevitability Narrative
World-class chess, Go, and Jeopardy-playing programs are impressive, but they prove nothing about whether computers can be made to achieve AGIBack in 1998, I moderated a discussion at which Ray Kurzweil gave listeners a preview of his then forthcoming book The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he described how machines were poised to match and then exceed human cognition, a theme he doubled down on in subsequent books (such as The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind). For Kurzweil, it is inevitable that machines will match and then exceed us: Moore’s Law guarantees that machines will attain the needed computational power to simulate our brains, after which the challenge will be for us to keep pace with machines.. Kurzweil’s respondents at the discussion were John Searle, Thomas Ray, and Michael Denton, and they were all to varying degrees critical of his strong Read More ›
New Book Massively Debunks Our “AI Overlords”: Ain’t Gonna Happen
AI researcher and tech entrepreneur Erik J. Larson expertly dissects the AI doomsday scenarios
Are We Facing the Next, Very Rapid Stage of Evolution, via AI?
Prof. Mark Alan Walker: “Person-engineering technologies will make it possible to accomplish in a matter of years what evolution would take thousands of millennia to achieve.”These are certainly heady times in the biotech world. With the new mRNA vaccine being created in just a few days in January 2020, someone can mass produce DNA in their garage for the price of a hamburger, and Alpha Fold 2 can predict proteins from DNA with accuracy, rivalling wet lab results, it seems we are on the cusp of something extraordinary. Most viral infections will cease if all we need to do to roll out a new vaccine is sequence the virus genome and mass produce the portion that binds to human cells. On the darker side, it will also likely mean a greater threat of biowarfare. Creating a new virus may just be a matter of downloading Read More ›
Bingecast: Enrique Blair on Quantum Computing
What is quantum mechanics? What can quantum computers do that classical computers can’t? Has Google achieved quantum supremacy? Robert J. Marks discusses the weird world of quantum mechanics with Dr. Enrique Blair. Show Notes Additional Resources
The Aliens Exist—But Evolved Into Virtual Reality at a Nanoscale
That’s the Transcension Hypothesis, the latest in our series on science fiction hypotheses as to why we don’t see extraterrestrialsReaders will recall that we have been looking at science writer Matt Williams’s analysis of the various reasons that we do not see extraterrestrials except at the movies. Last week, we looked at the Firstborn Hypothesis: We don’t see aliens because they haven’t evolved yet. And, when they do, we must be careful not to harm their development through colonization. This week is a bit of a deeper dive: The extraterrestrials have evolved so far beyond us that perhaps we could not encounter them. … the Transcension Hypothesis ventures that an advanced civilization will become fundamentally altered by its technology. In short, it theorizes that any ETIs that predate humanity have long-since transformed into something that is not recognizable by Read More ›
Has the Singularity Been Called Off? Indefinitely Postponed?
If a human brain has as many connections as the whole internet, why should we merge with computers in a Singularity?In this week’s podcast, “George Gilder on Superintelligent AI,” tech philosopher George Gilder and computer engineer Robert J. Marks, our Walter Bradley Center director, continued their discussion of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). This time, they focused on whether, in terms of AI, we are in an Indian summer (a warm period just before winter sets in). Or is AI advancing to a superintelligence that eclipses the intellect of humans? You can download Gilder’s new book, Gaming AI, for free here. The two earlier episodes and transcripts are linked below. And now … https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-107-George-Gilder.mp3 From the transcript: (Show Notes, Resources, and a link to the complete transcript follow.) Robert J. Marks: Why do you believe that we are on Read More ›
George Gilder on Superintelligent AI
George Gilder and Robert J. Marks discuss the human brain, superintelligent machines, artificial intelligence, and George Gilder’s new book Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs (which you can get for free here). Show Notes Additional Resources
A Neuroscientist on Why We Can Build Human-like Brains
Manuel Brenner, a particle physicist as well as a neuroscientist, thinks pattern recognition is the answerManuel Brenner, a particle physicist who became a theoretical neuroscientist, made the argument last year that human intelligence is less complex than we make it out to be. Thus, building an artificial intelligence might be easier than we suppose. He offers some intriguing arguments and here are some responses: ➤ Is the information we need for building human-like AI in our genes? He doesn’t think so because a tomato has 7000 more genes than a human being. Further, our human genome offers only 25 million bytes of information for our brain’s design but there are 1015 connections in the adult neocortex. His conclusion? “there needs to be a much simpler, more efficient way of defining the blueprint for our brain Read More ›
Why AI Geniuses Think They Can Create True Thinking Machines
Early on, it seemed like a string of unbroken successes …In George Gilder’s telling, the story goes back to Bletchley Park, where British codebreakers broke the “unbreakable” Nazi ciphers. In Gaming AI, the tech philosopher and futurist traces the modern concept of a machine that really thinks for itself back to its earliest known beginnings. Free for download, his concise book also explains why the programmers were bound to fail in their quest for the supermachine. But let’s start with why they thought—and many today still think— it could work. Success emboldened the pioneers to dream of a final AI triumph They had every reason to be emboldened by success. Special computers called “bombes,” created by Alan Turing’s team, broke every version of the famous Enigma code used by the Read More ›
George Gilder on Gaming AI
AI is good at winning games. But how does this (and other) accomplishments translate to applications in the real world? George Gilder and Robert J. Marks discuss artificial intelligence, games, and George Gilder’s new book Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs (which you can get for free here). Show Notes Additional Resources
Bingecast: Selmer Bringsjord on the Lovelace Test
The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. Many think that Turing’s proposal for intelligence, especially creativity, has been proven inadequate. Is the Lovelace test a better alternative? What are the capabilities and limitations of AI? Robert J. Marks and Dr. Selmer Bringsjord discuss Read More ›