106 comments
only 7 top level comments
Thank you lord for this feast you have blessed me with.
How much worse it must be for the people in the lemmieverse (are we calling it that?) who don’t have accounts on awful.sys directly. The neuralink is life extension (unless you are a monkey) that proves Ray is right person is still going at it.
in the brained stem. straight up “shorkening it”. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s just say. My liffspan
searches for who tf this is
Wikipedia:
Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying “known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything” I’ve seen.
His keyboards kick ass tho 🤷♀️
That is what imho sets Ray apart from the other singularitarians (fear of robot god optional), he has actually done a lot of stuff. The keyboards, all the work in helping people with disabilities (sorry, I need to clarify, people currently alive with disabilities, not future humans who might have them) etc. Just sad that more of his life is spend on this rapture of the nerds stuff.
yeah, I knew about kurzweil reading machines for years before I connected them with ray kurzweil, and I don’t know how much of his tech ended up in speech rec during the scansoft / dragon systems / nuance / lernout and hauspie katamari years, but that tech has enabled me to be an independent working adult for more than 20 years. So I owe him a debt of gratitude, but also, he needs to not be on his bullshit.
I like how os/2 warp isn’t in that list
Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
In the US? Fat fucking chance. The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
I don’t believe I’ll see UBI in my working lifetime. There are too many powerful interests that oppose it.
Yes, so many people fail to see the existential stakes here. They think that even a bandaid like ubi is inevitable, because they don’t acknowledge the possibility that we could just die.
Like that if it’s cheaper to let us gather in unregulated tent cities and croak from the new plagues that blossom there, then that’s what’ll happen.
Obviously it’s not good for anyone in the long term, but corpos can’t think long term.
but corpos can’t think long term
they can. it’s just that, structurally, incentives are far more strongly geared to not do that in almost all cases.
I hovered on that word while writing it; almost put “can’t afford to think long term,” but that is even more ambiguous…
Anyway, thank you, I agree with your distinction.
My feeling is those incentives are so strong that anyone behaving too long term will usually get their lunch eaten by someone who is just out to make a quick profit.
The US doesn’t have a functional healthcare system yet, and they’re like a century behind on that at this point.
A friend of mine got the shit end of a “restructuring” at work the other day and immediately started applying for unemployment. Florida hasn’t increased that benefit in almost a decade (probably longer) so he’ll be getting the same paltry $275/wk that I got many many years ago when I was on unemployment for a bit. I hope he finds a new job soon because there’s absolutely no way to live on that.
The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
In .nl our far right gov has seen this and decided to uncouple unemployment and wages/inflation as well. So yeah lol.
he thinks we are going to survive to 2045
His synths are still legendary
Synths are to him what linguistics is to Chomsky
Can someone explain why this level of hate?
I mean dude wrote a book about exponential progress (it works well in computers IMO) and tried to predict a lot of stuff. I read that lots of his predictions was “sort of” correct too?
Edit: thanks for nothing I guess. Downvotes and scorn lol.
Re his book, a glance at wikipedia (helpfully linked to the relevant section, im not one of those LMGTFY link twats) might help.
Fuck those assholes. I think Ray is blinded by his own success of pointing at graphs, number go up, but there was no reason to be mean to you. There’s an underbelly of smelly smugglings in Lemmy.
and there’s no reason for you to try excuse their laziness with airdropped feelings of cozy of your own!
wild, full circle!
Fair point
Welcome! Please leave.
Ha ha Love it
It hasn’t worked ‘well’ for computers since like the pentium, what are you talking about?
The premise was pretty dumb too, as in, if you notice that a (very reductive) technological metric has been rising sort of exponentially, you should probably assume something along the lines of we’re probably still at the low hanging fruit stage of R&D, it’ll stabilize as it matures, instead of proudly proclaiming that surely it’ll approach infinity and break reality.
There’s nothing smart or insightful about seeing a line in a graph trending upwards and assuming it’s gonna keep doing that no matter what. Not to mention that type of decontextualized wishful thinking is emblematic of the TREACLES mindset mentioned in the community’s blurb that you should check out.
So yeah, he thought up the Singularity which is little more than a metaphysical excuse to ignore regulations and negative externalities because with tech rupture around the corner any catastrophic mess we make getting there won’t matter. See also: the whole current AI debacle.
you could just have read downthread for actual details before posting, y’know. that waaaah edit isn’t helping
ah yeah, 3 downvotes (and one of them’s mine) and zero replies of scorn directed towards you (well, one now)
how about you take your bullshit elsewhere
First, learn the difference between scorn or disdain and hate.
Second, read the comments in the thread already made about those “‘sort of’ correct” predictions.
Yes Scorn is a nightmarish universe of odd forms and somber tapestry.
ah, you beat me to it
@AllNewTypeFace @cstross did he ever leave his bullshit?
@AllNewTypeFace @cstross if a couch potato is someone who never leaves their couch, does this make Kurzwell a bullshit potato?
Kurzweil has been right on tons of his predictions.
What a shitty, ignorant title.
He’s been as right as Alex Jones has been
but was Kurzweil sued (and lost) for his bullshit?
@Varyk Kurzweil thought we’d all be quasi-cyborgs on 2 wheels by now.
clicking out my heelies kurzweil wins again
I predict you are going to have a bad time here. And that is far before 2045.
(Edit: I hear you think, but predicting after a thing has already happened and keeps happening, that isn’t really predicting now is it. And Varyk was enlightened).
Haha, see, one prediction and it’s already wrong.
That’s why kurzweil is so impressive with all of his correct predictions.
fuck almighty it’s gonna be one of those weekends isn’t it
Dang I hope so.
Not sure what the alternative is.
for you? you get banned for jacking off in public, because all of your posts here are masturbation
Yeah, I had not seen your post of 10 correct predictions, sorry enlightenment is mu, a bit like the question if a dog has Buddha nature.
Name ten.
Easy peasy:
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Computers would beat humans at chess(happened in 1998)
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Digital information explosion(The information on the internet rapidly becoming too much for the entire world to read)
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Medicine becoming information technology(genomic, sequencing and crispr)
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The inevitability of direct human computer interfacing (neuralink)
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Life extension(cryonics/neuralink)
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AI becoming a major industry(AI)
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Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
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Cpu processing speed explosion(Moore’s law)
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PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
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Exoskeletons render the disabled able (3d printable prosthetic limbs)
There are many, many more correct predictions by this guy
If you think those are impressive, you’re very very stupid
I think this has been satisfactorily established by now
- Sure, I’m not even going to verify this one since it’s so low stakes.
- This is ill-defined.
- Again ill-defined, and I need dates on this, we’ve been sequencing DNA for like 50yrs at this point.
- Lol, Neuralink kills monkeys, there’s zero indication of its “inevitability”.
- Lol^2, none of that shit works mate. Name one person whose life was extended with cryonics.
- AI is ill-defined, plus dates please.
- And how well did that go?
- First of all, that’s called Moore’s Law after the actual guy who made this prediction, you can’t credit someone else than Moore for Moore’s Law, wtf. Second, this hasn’t held for at least a decade now; we’ve been focusing on completely different things than raw CPU speed to actually increase compute.
- “Answer questions” there is a load-bearing term. Did he mean search engines? Is this deriberately vague?
- I’m sorry? First, a 3D printed prosthetic is not an exoskeleton, what kind of a logic leap is that. Second, citation needed on “3D printable prosthetic limbs” actually being in use right now on any scale.
ah you see cryonics does increase life expenctancy, i.e. E(life length). As long as P(cryobubonics works) > 0, which, according to Yudkowskian Probability Theory, is true for any probability, then E(life length) = infinity, since cryonica will let us live forever /big fat fucking S
Yudkowskian Probability Theory
what a throwback
- that also isn’t what Moore’s law said iirc. It is about transistor density, not processing speed.
“Computers will be really good at chess” was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don’t get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.
Absolutely amazing post, thank you so much. So that’s one correct prediction and nine on a spectrum from wrong to meaningless!
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2009:
- “Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
- “The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
- “Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
- “the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
- “Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
- “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
- “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion”
- “Cables are disappearing.”
- “grammar checkers are now actually useful”
- “Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.”
- “The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software”
- “Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.”
brain-generated music
???
“In the future, there will be brain-generated music”, said Ray Kay, to a young disciple.
“But Master Ray, isn’t music generally brain generated?”, the disciple asked.
“No, you fucking idiot. You fucking buffoon. How dare you question me,” replied Ray. It was then that the disciple reached enlightenment.
I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never let the left-turn signal turn green. Harrowing.
Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2019:
A $1,000 computing device is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere. Three-dimensional virtual-reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, provide the primary interface for communication with other persons, the Web, and virtual reality. Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural-language spoken communication. Realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody regardless of physical proximity. People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.
Also:
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
And:
Autonomous nanoengineered machines can control their own mobility and include significant computational engines.
And:
ʺPhoneʺ calls routinely include high‐resolution three‐dimensional images projected through the direct‐eye displays and auditory lenses. Three‐dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.
And:
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness. Although the visual and auditory aspects of virtual reality involve only devices you have on or in your body (the direct‐eye lenses and auditory lenses), the ʺtotal touchʺ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth. These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions with other human partners or simulated partners. In fact, it is often the preferred mode of interaction, even when a human partner is nearby, due to its ability to enhance both experience and safety.
And:
Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads.
And:
The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual‐experience software, which ranges from simulations of ʺrealʺ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.
And:
The expected life span, which, as a (1780 through 1900) and the first phase result of the first Industrial Revolution of the second (the twentieth century), almost doubled from less than forty, has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred.
Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.
I’ve reread this sentence a few times now and I am just gobsmacked as to what it was intended to have meant. never dug into this particular espouser because from the moment I came across their name I smelled the kook, but I’m
notnow almost deathly curious to know exactly what the context of this particular prediction was (which near certainly was some shit riffed on from half a bit of statement of research people were looking into)(e: whoops hella-freudian typo)
The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness.
I’m picturing the VR dildo-suit from Upload.
Kurzweil really is indistinguishable from a shitty phone psychic, including the followers who cherry pick “correct” predictions and interpret the incorrect ones so loosely they could mean anything (I’m waiting for some fucker to pop up and go “yeah duh Apple Vision Pro” in response to half of those, ignoring the inconvenient “works well and is popular” parts of the predictions)
The Nostradamus play.
if only he’d written in quatrains!
the underclass is politically neutralized…
Jesus, Ray, phrasing
To be fair, those words were written around the End Of History, when fascism was known to be safely extinct and nobody in their right mind would have assumed that such a phrase referred to it.
Francis should not have, in fact, lightened up
“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
if you have budget for that, against an enemy that doesn’t
If only there was any large active warzone that has largely devolved into positional warfare for two years now to disprove that claim, damn.
Damn, if only.
Drones mostly target humans and crewed vehicles, not other drones (and disable rapidly and suddenly un-crewed vehicles) (with rare exceptions of recon drones crashing other recon drones by breaking their propellers and like 1 or 2 cases of FPV drones shooting down fixed wing recon drones. anti-drone warfare is mostly EW, then AAA and things like MANPADS or even bigger missiles depending on how valuable that drone is as a target)
Besides, last time i’ve checked it was not drones that took or retook Vovchansk (80% ish Ukrainian controlled last week), it was tanks, arty, mechanized infantry, maybe a dash of CAS and loads of AA and jammers, you know, just like in every war since 80s or even bit earlier. Loads of small cheap PGMs do work great in anti-vehicle role, and drones are just that, so it makes everybody hide fair bit harder
if i have to guess, the thing that prevents mobility now is constant surveillance, also by drones + lots of artillery, and some attack drones too. the thing that will enable large scale movements will be air dominance and even more EW
“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle” (if you don’t count the people that the drones are blowing up)
To be fair, this can be made true by the simple expedient of redefining who counts as “human”
Something about redefining a person as a shield based on how much of their body absorbs the blast. Below that threshold they contain the property of the US military and are considered potential recycling recepticles.
yeah, and it’s been like this since brits used freshly invented heavy machine guns in their colonial wars. machines killing machines is just what will cause army bean counters to burn at stake operators of these machines
“Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
Neuralink
“The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
VRChat
“Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
Algoraves
“the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
Obamacare
“Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
Asimo
You are dumb
Thanks!
Buh bye now.
you might not be tall enough for this ride
Cryonics is a grift, nobody is going to be cured of death by future Dr Jesus.
The pioneers of cryonics ended up as a very rich soup
Only plebs pay for e-girl bathwater. I prefer to drink 30-year aged billionaire bisque (chilled of course)
@Varyk @jonhendry Neuralink? How’s that going? I presume extremely well with no problems, I haven’t got time to check right now
Hey, that guy’s brain was holding it wrong
He still loves the brain though.
Why did you think it was working well with no problems?
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
You hecka optimistic.
I mean, it’s pretty crazy how well the design did work considering it’s the first of its kind.
The latest thing I saw, a bunch of the wires are becoming detached from the very first prototype, which of course is being worked into the subsequent models.
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
Pretty sure keyboards are older
Literally the first human-cpu interface?
I wish I had the confidence of a techbro who thinks any of the BCI tech in neuralink is new and isn’t just a set of techniques that have existed for decades and have a shitty track record
the only thing neuralink seems to add is wireless control, which doesn’t work, partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements, but mostly because it’s a project driven by Musk’s whims
partially due to impossible bandwidth and compression requirements
It still amazes me they publicly posted a request for help with these compression req which are physically impossible to achieve. Nobody with a CS degree is anybody near the leadership of neuralink. In other words, you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.
oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention
I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it
I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.
okay but if they hadn’t done that we wouldn’t have gotten this work of art
you do not have much medical knowledge, do you?
I seriously don’t know where these fuckers have been that they’re supposedly excited about implanted BCIs now that musk’s doing a monstrously shitty one, but somehow they managed not to ever read about any of the previous research into this that had the same outcome as neuralink (basic, inaccurate computer mouse control) with the same major caveats (the electrodes become unusable in short order due to scarring and can’t be repaired), except that the neuralink version is unnecessarily risky* cause startups gotta go fast
[*] and the risk here is that something truly fucking awful will happen to the patient, because it’s the fucking human brain and they’re treating it like a submarine made of secondhand carbon fiber, including the ignored track record of failed lab tests before disaster struck
I still don’t think cortical electrodes should even be described as a direct interface. A direct interface would speak action potential and connect to your spinal cord, like Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix. I do not see a lot of people lining up to test what would probably entail having your brainstem dissected!
A lab I worked in (as an IT guy) used them for data collection, studying visual attention in monkeys.
Not a happy place for the monkeys although I’m confident the scientists did their best to not make it any worse than it had to be.
@Varyk oh wait so it *doesn’t* work? But it’s still a good idea to attach it to your brain?
| AI becoming a major industry(AI)
Yes, but in the same way that tax shelters and carbon offsetting are major industries. All the useful things done by “AI” tend to happen outside of the hype mills and be relatively boring statistical models like autocomplete, which nobody points to as a sign of the coming Computer God.
| Computers built into eyeglasses(google glass)
They build single-use computers into pregnancy tests. They’re powerful enough to run DOOM, despite being doomed to immediately become e-waste. Is this a sign of the imminent Singularity as well?
| PCs would be able to answer questions wirelessly (search engines and the internet)
Someone built a radio into a computer? Really? I wonder why nobody thought of that before.
are these meat popsicles in the room with us?
gif, sorry for being annoying
Haha, nice
what is nice about this, half of the shit you listed is either scam for hype-susceptible cultists or is not what you present as when marketing fluff is removed
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I do subscribe to his ideas that technological growth is not currently exponential but even steeper
You know that Factorio is a fictional video game, right?
Technically it is a real video game but yes. Amazing piece of technical work. Sad that the main dev seems to be a bit of chud. (But he now has a ~30 person team).
you can unsubscribe. that’s allowed.
Hey wanna get in on the ground floor of my new cryptocurrency offer? You seem like just the person we are looking for.
logarythmically… what?
logarhythmically, n.: in the manner of making banger beats composed in the method of striking logs
They corrected it and made it even dumber, tech growth is steeper than exponential growth.
i gues we’re all living in the post-scarcity utopia then, because otherwise such growth would exhaust resources.
Wow yeah boss, just keep buying working machines until we don’t have to work anymore, brilliant we’re going to be so rich, hey wait where are you going take my with you
Like the turbo-encabulator’s malleable logarithmic casing
I misspelled the word I wasn’t trying to use
