I’m pretty confident that Myers is wrong on this, unless there is another information rich source of inheritance besides DNA, which Myers knows about but Kurzweil and I do not.
Myers’ thesis is that you are not going to figure out by brute-force physical simulation how the genome gives rise to the organism, knowing just the genomic sequence. On every scale—molecule, cell, tissue, organism—there are very complicated boundary conditions at work. You have to do experimental biology, observe those boundary conditions, and figure out what role they play. I predict he would be a lot more sympathetic if Kurzweil was talking about AIs figuring out the brain by doing experimental biology, rather than just saying genomic sequence + laws of physics will get us there.
Myers’ thesis is that you are not going to figure out by brute-force physical simulation how the genome gives rise to the organism, knowing just the genomic sequence.
And he is quite possibly correct. However, that has nothing at all to do with what Kurzweil said.
I predict he would be a lot more sympathetic if Kurzweil was talking about AIs figuring out the brain by doing experimental biology, rather than just saying genomic sequence + laws of physics will get us there.
I predict he would be more sympathetic if he just made the effort to figure out what Kurzweil said. But, of course, we all know there is no chance of that, so “conjecture” might be a better word than “predict”.
Myers doesn’t have an argument against Kurzweil’s estimate of the brain’s complexity. But his skepticism about Kurzweil’s timescale can be expressed in terms of the difficulty of searching large spaces. Let’s say it does take a million lines of code to simulate the brain. Where is the argument that we can produce the right million lines of code within twenty years? The space of million-line programs is very large.
I agree, both regarding timescale, and regarding reason for timescale difficulties.
As I understand Kurzweil, he is saying that we will build the AI, not by finding the program for development and simulating it, but rather by scanning the result of the development and duplicating it in a different medium. The only relevance of that hypothetical million-line program is that it effectively puts a bound on the scanning and manufacturing tolerances that we need to achieve. Well, while it is probably true in general that we don’t need to get the wiring exactly right on all of the trillions of neurons, there may well be some where the exact right embryonic wiring is crucial to success. And, since we don’t yet have or understand that million-line program that somehow gets the wiring right reliably, we probably won’t get them right ourselves. At least not at first.
It feels a little funny to find myself making here an argument right out of Bill Dembski’s playbook. No free lunch! Needle in a haystack. Only way to search that space is by exhaustion. Well, we shall see what we shall see.
I agree, but at the same time, I wish biologists would learn more information theory, since their focus should be identifying the information flows going on, as this is what will lead us to a comprehensible model of human development and functionality.
(I freely admit I don’t have years in the trenches, so this may be a naive view, but if my experience with any other scientific turf war is any guide, this is important advice.)
Myers’ thesis is that you are not going to figure out by brute-force physical simulation how the genome gives rise to the organism, knowing just the genomic sequence. On every scale—molecule, cell, tissue, organism—there are very complicated boundary conditions at work. You have to do experimental biology, observe those boundary conditions, and figure out what role they play. I predict he would be a lot more sympathetic if Kurzweil was talking about AIs figuring out the brain by doing experimental biology, rather than just saying genomic sequence + laws of physics will get us there.
And he is quite possibly correct. However, that has nothing at all to do with what Kurzweil said.
I predict he would be more sympathetic if he just made the effort to figure out what Kurzweil said. But, of course, we all know there is no chance of that, so “conjecture” might be a better word than “predict”.
Myers doesn’t have an argument against Kurzweil’s estimate of the brain’s complexity. But his skepticism about Kurzweil’s timescale can be expressed in terms of the difficulty of searching large spaces. Let’s say it does take a million lines of code to simulate the brain. Where is the argument that we can produce the right million lines of code within twenty years? The space of million-line programs is very large.
I agree, both regarding timescale, and regarding reason for timescale difficulties.
As I understand Kurzweil, he is saying that we will build the AI, not by finding the program for development and simulating it, but rather by scanning the result of the development and duplicating it in a different medium. The only relevance of that hypothetical million-line program is that it effectively puts a bound on the scanning and manufacturing tolerances that we need to achieve. Well, while it is probably true in general that we don’t need to get the wiring exactly right on all of the trillions of neurons, there may well be some where the exact right embryonic wiring is crucial to success. And, since we don’t yet have or understand that million-line program that somehow gets the wiring right reliably, we probably won’t get them right ourselves. At least not at first.
It feels a little funny to find myself making here an argument right out of Bill Dembski’s playbook. No free lunch! Needle in a haystack. Only way to search that space is by exhaustion. Well, we shall see what we shall see.
I agree, but at the same time, I wish biologists would learn more information theory, since their focus should be identifying the information flows going on, as this is what will lead us to a comprehensible model of human development and functionality.
(I freely admit I don’t have years in the trenches, so this may be a naive view, but if my experience with any other scientific turf war is any guide, this is important advice.)