Kevin Kelly Debunks Kurzweil’s Imminent Singularity

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, writes a convincing argument for why Ray Kurzweil needs to just relax and accept his mortality, explaining that, even if a super-AI emerged from the Google-Interwebs in 2045, simply being a supermind isn’t enough to solve all the world’s problems:

No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working nuclear fusion in a day. Between not knowing how things work and knowing how they work is a lot more than thinkism. There are tons of experiments in the real world which yields tons and tons of data that will be required to form the correct working hypothesis. Thinking about the potential data will not yield the correct data. Thinking is only part of science; maybe even a small part. We don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. And in the case of living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. Thinkism may be instant for a super AI, but experimental results are not instant.

I find this line of reasoning extremely persuasive, especially when considered in the context of the historical debate on the subject. Essentially, we are revisiting the Cartesian versus Newtonian methodologies for understanding the world. The Cartesian method, embodied in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes, hypothesizes that all empirical things may be discovered through logical inference. The Newtonian methodology, found in Newton and Locke, argues that reality may only be discovered through experimentation and experience.

In other words, is reality best known through experience or meditation? With perhaps the exception of mathematics, history has hammered into our heads that, if you want to know the laws of the Universe, you must test them. If you think the Moon is made of cheese, better go there and find out. If you think the world is flat, better sail to the edge and make sure.

In order for a super-AI to solve the entire world’s problems, it would have to either simulate the Universe or have us humans do the legwork of conducting experiments to figure out how it works. There is neither the computing power, personnel, nor money available to generate a singularity in the next century. Our best hope is to contribute as much as we can to human progress in our lifetimes, in hopes of the species eventually advancing enough to resurrect us out of the space-time continuum.

I’m not taking any bets on the probabilities of that happening.