Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045

[jazzpiano88]

Among other things.  Along the topics of AI and the future being discussed.  He posits human intelligence is no different than the LLMs and we'll use these models as backup to reconstruct ourselves in case we die.   Within a year LLMs will be human capable.      Rogan questions whether that will be an actual human or a zombie.    Here is that portion of the discussion:

 

 

[K K]

1 hour ago, jazzpiano88 said:

...and we'll use these models as backup to reconstruct ourselves in case when we die.

 

Fixed.  

[jazzpiano88]

2 minutes ago, K K said:

1 hour ago, jazzpiano88 said:

...and we'll use these models as backup to reconstruct ourselves in case when we die.

 

Fixed.  

 

His view is that death will eventually only come from accidents, not disease because disease will be eliminated.    So if you can eliminate accidents, which seems infinitely easier than curing disease, then ......  

[The Real MC]

Ray Kurzweil's utopian fantasies are not going to happen as long as there is a population that neglects their health and diet.  Viral diseases like polio that have been "eradicated" have a nasty tendency to resurface.  And Kurzweil is not an authority on medicine.

I had a book that Kurzweil authored in the 1990s.  While preparing to relocate 1100 miles to a new job in 2021, I purged many books and the Kurzweil book was one of them.

[KenElevenShadows]

I don't know if I am underestimating what we will be able to do with computational intelligences, or Kurzweil is overestimating what we do. i just don't see what he is describing as happening nearly that soon. 

 

Regardless, if we should come across this sort of technology, the ramifications of that will be astounding. We think wrestling with AI "deep fakes" is concerning now...that's a much larger can of worms, ethically and otherwise. A fascinating can of worms, but a can of worms nonetheless.

[David Emm]

I already feel like a zombie half the time. No point in resurrecting that!

 

There is also the high probability that only the super-rich will be able to afford its first iterations. That works for me. If an Assburger's™ case like Elon goes for it, he'll be a good beta test. If he grows tentacles, we'll know its a no-go. If it leads to the means to re-grow a lost limb like a lizard's tail, I'll follow the upscaling process keenly. I have a few things that need re-growing. 🤨

 

As a synthesist, one secondary life lesson I've learned is that I can't dismiss a parameter just because it doesn't fit my whims. You have to be either subtractive or additive. Sorry!

 

I'm reminded of a screen shot from a breezy Friday night NINE P.M. news magazine show on NBC, back in the Age of Dinosaurs. Just before the commercials, they posted this: "Thesis; Antithesis; Prosthesis." I'd buy that stitched on a pillow.

 

Now, let's talk about the soul. *CRUNCH* Oh, sorry, no religion or politics.

[Philbo King]

His predictions have a tendency to be wrong a lot.  Like the TV weatherman, you can't really fault him; he operates at the mercy of factors beyond his control.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate/

[jazzpiano88]

Kurzweil is applying the concept of exponential progress to everything.  I don't agree with that.    There are some areas we've made zero progress - ex. consciousness.  

 

He believes that Moore's law applies to Solar where we figure out how to harness more than the impinging ~400 W/m^2  flux density of the Sun. 

[KuruPrionz]

I predict that Ray Kurzweil can and will say stuff...

 

Big whoop!!!

[KenElevenShadows]

I didn't mean to crap on his predictions, only to suggest that he might be a bit optimistic in the growth of technology. When you look at this, even when he gets it "wrong", it's still not always far off, it's just earlier than the technology evolved.

 

https://medium.com/@sgunnisonmiller/ray-kurzweils-prediction-scorecard-7d40ee2ff42a

 

These are the predictions he got wrong, for example, according to medium.com:

 

Quote

COMPUTERS SOUND FULLY HUMAN

This is a hard call as there are some well-doctored deep fakes out there. Furthermore, we all have access to some very advanced voice generators, such as WellSaid Labs and soon Microsoft’s VALL-E, which are difficult to discern as artificial voices in short bursts. However, “fully human” is a high bar and if we listen long enough to these voices, we can still detect a tinge of automation, and this is a milestone Kurzweil thought we’d surpass by 2009.

 

AI-ROBOTIC DISABILITY ASSISTANCE

Kurzweil envisioned a 2019 where people with disabilities had very helpful computerized assists. Someone with a spinal cord injury could walk upstairs, blind people could wear special glasses that helped them interpret the world around them, and the deaf could see words spoken to them as people were talking. While we see impressive advancements of this type of tech on YouTube now (such as exoskeletons that help people walk or sunglasses for the deaf), they aren’t commonplace unfortunately.

 

BOOKS WILL BECOME OBSOLETE

Print isn’t dead. In a 2022 study, it was revealed that people still prefer paper books (65%) over E-Books (21%), and these purchases of tangible books vastly outnumber that of digital books too. So while devices like DVD Players, Tivos, non-phone cameras, and other recent tech are quickly fading, it may take a lot for simple words on paper to ever disappear. Do we need all these physical books, probably not, but it is our original form of media, and it may be more ingrained in humanity than we realize.

 

AI TAKES THE STEERING WHEEL

Kurzweil was not alone in this prediction. Many futurists felt that computers would be doing most of the driving by now. True, some modern cars can drive themselves in limited capacities. My Honda, for instance, knows how to stay in its own highway lane and can make speed adjustments when put on cruise control.

There are even arguments that autonomous vehicles are safer than human-driven ones.

 

Despite the impressive features, the technology keeps running into roadblocks. One CNN Business article put it this way back in November 2022: “The technology could do impressive things but mastering all the situations we face as human drivers is tough.” Even the CEO of Waymo LLC (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project) has said it will be decades before the roads are taken over by AI.

 

VR EYEWEAR IS EVERYWHERE

Kurzweil had this whole vision that by this time we’d be wearing 3-D VR glasses or contact lenses. And this eyewear was going to send digital displays right into our retina. He brought up these VR glasses many times in his predictions, describing a world where wherever we looked, we could do our emails, search the web, watch TV shows, play augmented-reality video games, and even interact with virtual assistants. Everything we’d see would be half reality and half computerized visualizations.

Today the technologies for “Virtual Retinal Displays” and “projections” do exist, but not in the way Kurzweil foresaw. What’s more, the idea of computerized eyewear hasn’t become a tech people wanted, let alone needed.

 

AI-ROBOTIC HOUSEKEEPERS

Kurzweil expected us to have a lot more than Roombas in 2023. He thought that we’d have one or more housekeeping robots in every home. To the relief of my two dogs, Roombas and their buddies haven’t caught on… unless you count a plain old dishwasher as a robot, in which case I’d argue it is the most amazing robot ever. How it cleans everything I cram in there always blows my mind.

 

VR CAN BE FELT, NOT JUST SEEN AND HEARD

Virtual Reality really only has audio and visual components at the moment. Kurzweil theorized that the technology would have gone a step further by now, in which we could feel the virtual environment by wearing special gloves and suits. This is called “haptic VR”, and while there have been some advancements in this vein, haptic technology is far from mainstream and it has a lot of challenges if it wants to match the audio-visuals we already experience in VR.

 

AI-DRIVEN MEDICINE

Probably Kurzweil’s most disappointing misses came in the field of medicine. He had some high hopes that by 2019 AI would help us “largely overcome the major diseases that kill 95 percent of us in the developed world” (predicted in 2006) and that life expectancy would be over 100.

A lot of this hope came from the idea that “bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease [would] have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases.” Clearly, we are far short on all these marks.

 

HUMANS HAVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH AI

Kurzweil probably wasn’t thinking that we’d be falling in love with our computers like in the film Her (with Joaquin Phoenix), but he did believe that relationships with AI would be much more prevalent at this point in time.

 

He predicted that come 2019, we would verbally communicate with simulated people in full-blown back-and-forth conversations. He even thought there would be a visual element to these discussions, like head nods and gestures.

 

On top of that, we would now be thinking of our digital counterparts as advisors, friends, and yes, some of us would even believe that our computers possess a human-level of consciousness. At present, I’d say we are far from that relationship stage, and it’s hard to know when, if ever, we will get there.

 

elevenshadows.net - I photographed Ray Kurzweil in 2010.

[Anderton]

When the original Kurzweil was demoed at AES, I was amazed at the sound quality and seamless velocity and positional splits. I made flattering observations that were used in a "quotes by an expert" context.  What I heard didn't seem at all possible with the RAM and computational limitations at the time.

 

Well, apparently it wasn't. A Kurzweil employee told me several years later there was a hard drive under the table holding the keyboard, and the hard drive was doing the heavy lifting. I felt deceived and exploited. Even if Kurzweil didn't actually plan the stunt himself (and I kind of assume he did), the buck stops with the name at the top of the company. 

 

I never reviewed or covered anything else done by Ray Kurzweil after that.

 

As to his predictions, I predicted physical media would go away and we'd stream everything from a "celestial jukebox" back in the early 80s (the word "cloud" didn't exist then). Anyone with more than two brain cells could have predicted that computers would get smaller and would end up in phones and such. Over 40 years ago I said "Slowly but surely, computing power will decentralize. Using one box for widely diverging applications makes about as much sense as buying an internal combustion engine and putting it in your car when you want to go someplace, taking it out and strapping it to your lawnmower when it’s time to cut the grass, or putting it in your boat when you feel like going for a cruise. It makes more sense to just buy cars, boats, or lawnmowers with an optimized engine already built in." Think of how many devices, including phones, TVs, toys, tablets, cars, etc. have proven that computing has indeed become decentralized.

 

Over 30 years ago, I said hard disk recording would disappear in favor of recording into RAM. And anyone who played with Dr. T's software on the C-64 or Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse on the Amiga could tell that algorithmic-based composition would only grow in the years ahead.

 

I mean, c'mon - who can't "predict" that 2 + 2 = 4? Gimme a break.

[KenElevenShadows]

They're not startling, off-the-wall predictions by any stretch. If you know a reasonable amount about technology, you could have probably predicted a reasonable amount that he did.

 

That Kurzweil demonstration is pretty messed up.

[Anderton]

I predict that technology will continue to advance. Brilliant, ground-breaking insights like that are why I'm a Nobel Laureate. 🤣

[KenElevenShadows]

Most insightful. I feel that this will indeed happen. And if it doesn't, well, you'll probably have your Nobel Laureate revoked.

 

I wrote an article where I asked Gemini AI to predict what features cameras would have ten years from now that cameras don't have now. I think Gemini did rather well. You'll have to decide whether this is better than what Ray Kurzweil could have done.   

 

AI’s crystal ball: Predicting future camera features in 2034

 

https://photofocus.com/photography/ais-crystal-ball-predicting-future-camera-features-in-2034/

 

Let's meet back here in ten years and see how how accurate the predictions are!

[Anderton]

11 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

I think Gemini did rather well.

I do too, although I'd consider it more like a wish list of things that will be technically possible. A prediction that's really out of the box would be something like being able to photograph light outside of the range of human vision's bandwidth, and transpose it down into our visible range...like the way we can "see" infrared. Maybe that would allow seeing what's considered paranormal phenomena, or unknown aspects of the human body (like "auras") that would be helpful for medical applications. 

[KenElevenShadows]

6 hours ago, Anderton said:

I do too, although I'd consider it more like a wish list of things that will be technically possible. A prediction that's really out of the box would be something like being able to photograph light outside of the range of human vision's bandwidth, and transpose it down into our visible range...like the way we can "see" infrared. Maybe that would allow seeing what's considered paranormal phenomena, or unknown aspects of the human body (like "auras") that would be helpful for medical applications. 

 

Those sorts of cameras already exist, I believe. https://kolarivision.com/product/uv-photography-ready-converted-camera-kit-canon-eos-rp/

 

We also have infrared cameras, which require a little bit of post-processing, but are really quite good. I have thought to get into this or UV photography in the past, but have never actually done it. Infrared usually requires modifying the camera although there are lens filters as well.

 

Then there is the James Webb Telescope photography. The photography, especially the processing, is rather involved. This is not quite what you are discussing, but perhaps it deserves an explanation as well.

 

"Infrared light is invisible to our eyes, so image processors translate these wavelengths of light, in order, to visible colors.

 

Webb observes infrared light, light that is beyond what human eyes are capable of detecting. However, the process of applying color to Webb’s images is remarkably similar to the approach used with the Hubble Space Telescope and other astronomical observatories that observe visible light. Telescopes use advanced filters that can detect specific elements or molecules. This is also why telescope images are typically layered with two or more images from different filters.

 

In addition to stretching, scaling, and cleaning up artifacts, STScI’s imaging specialists carefully assign individual images from Webb’s various filters to blue, green, and red color channels to align with the color palette human eyes perceive. All the colors we can see are composed of those colors and any digital image we view on a screen can also be broken down into red, green, and blue color channels.

 

Color is applied chromatically: The shortest wavelengths are assigned blue, slightly longer wavelengths are assigned green, and the longest wavelengths are assigned red. If more than three images make up the final composite image, purple, teal, and orange may be assigned to additional filters that fall before or in between blue, green, and red. Assembling the color image from these images gives our imaging specialists the initial composite image. Yes, there is still work to be done! These initial color images are still only drafts."

[David Emm]

On 3/24/2024 at 11:25 AM, Anderton said:

When the original Kurzweil was demoed at AES, I was amazed at the sound quality and seamless velocity and positional splits. I made flattering observations that were used in a "quotes by an expert" context.  What I heard didn't seem at all possible with the RAM and computational limitations at the time.

 

Well, apparently it wasn't. A Kurzweil employee told me several years later there was a hard drive under the table holding the keyboard, and the hard drive was doing the heavy lifting. I felt deceived and exploited. Even if Kurzweil didn't actually plan the stunt himself (and I kind of assume he did), the buck stops with the name at the top of the company. 

 

I never reviewed or covered anything else done by Ray Kurzweil after that.

 

That chaps my @$$ so badly, you'd have to see in the ultraviolet range to view my blisters. Then again, half of everything reeks of AI flummery lately. It can be hard to see where the line is drawn. Ethics have been something of a vestigial organ for a long while now. 🤨

   

This reminds me of an antique "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" strip. Phineas has a nightmare where he's approached to be President. He proceeds to list his dubious habits and then light up a spleef. The agents pull out a super-dusty, cobwebbed stovepipe hat and thrust it at him, saying "You'll be the first honest one we've had in quite a while!" Of course, he wakes up screaming. I can relate to that a lot these days.

 

Historical note: Patrick Moraz and Bill Bruford did a duo tour for their album "Flags," with Patrick on a lone K250. Its the best overall showcase the instrument ever had, even though a few notables like Paul Shaffer took them up. (Eons ago, when Letterman was still on NBC, they had a "Paul's Top Ten Synthesizer Sounds." One was a big downward swoop that ended with a thump, entitled "Plane landing and running over a monkey on the runway.")    

 

As to paranormal phenomena, I have a picture of some dark woods with two blurry yet very eye-like lights in the middle. The legend says: "This is what your dog is barking at that you can't see." 😬

[jazzpiano88]

1 hour ago, KenElevenShadows said:

9 hours ago, Anderton said:

I do too, although I'd consider it more like a wish list of things that will be technically possible. A prediction that's really out of the box would be something like being able to photograph light outside of the range of human vision's bandwidth, and transpose it down into our visible range...like the way we can "see" infrared. Maybe that would allow seeing what's considered paranormal phenomena, or unknown aspects of the human body (like "auras") that would be helpful for medical applications. 

 

Those sorts of cameras already exist, I believe. https://kolarivision.com/product/uv-photography-ready-converted-camera-kit-canon-eos-rp/

 

We also have infrared cameras, which require a little bit of post-processing, but are really quite good. I have thought to get into this or UV photography in the past, but have never actually done it. Infrared usually requires modifying the camera although there are lens filters as well.

 

Then there is the James Webb Telescope photography. The photography, especially the processing, is rather involved. This is not quite what you are discussing, but perhaps it deserves an explanation as well.

We also have X-ray photography as well as positron emission photography.   

These penetrate materials and show normally opaque objects.   They are used in both medicine and nondestructive evaluation for materials testing.  
 

Their downside is that the radiation is ionizing, and can therefore cause cellular and dna damage and potential cancer-causing mutations over time.  

[KenElevenShadows]

On 3/26/2024 at 7:07 PM, jazzpiano88 said:

We also have X-ray photography as well as positron emission photography.   

These penetrate materials and show normally opaque objects.   They are used in both medicine and nondestructive evaluation for materials testing.  
 

Their downside is that the radiation is ionizing, and can therefore cause cellular and dna damage and potential cancer-causing mutations over time.  

Yeah, there's that....

[David Emm]

Gulp!

 

[Thethirdapple]

Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045… with a hard-drive strapped to their underside.

 

 

PEACE

_
_
_

[Polychrest]

On 3/28/2024 at 1:31 PM, Thethirdapple said:

Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045…

If I get to choose which one (and I’m still breathing), can I be Don Henley?

[Thethirdapple]

17 minutes ago, Polychrest said:

If I get to choose which one (and I’m still breathing), can I be Don Henley?

He would definitely sue you!!! Or in this case you would have to sue yourself🙃

 

 

 

PEACE

_
_
_

[jazzpiano88]

Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045…

 

1 hour ago, Polychrest said:

If I get to choose which one (and I’m still breathing), can I be Don Henley?

 

 Sure, if I can be Steve Miller 😀