[tt] Critique of Kurzweil's AI & uploading projections

[Hughes, James J.]

http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil_sb

WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.04

Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science

By Mark Anderson Email 03.24.08 | 6:00 PM

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to
Witness the Singularity

Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will
become conscious. Led by futurist Ray Kurzweil, proponents of the
so-called strong-AI school believe that a sufficient number of digitally
simulated neurons, running at a high enough speed, can awaken into
awareness. Once computing speed reaches 1016 operations per second -
roughly by 2020 - the trick will be simply to come up with an algorithm
for the mind. When we find it, machines will become self-aware, with
unpredictable consequences. This event is known as the singularity.

These techno-utopians should pay closer attention to developments in
neuroscience. Sure, artificial intelligence techniques like neural
networks have led to better spam filters. But research suggests that the
current approach to AI won't result in a conscious machine on anything
like Kurzweil's timeline. The latest evidence shows that, when it comes
to consciousness, the brain simply doesn't work the way computer
scientists think it does. Almost nothing is known about how the brain
produces awareness, and current models of brain function don't accord
with the little that is known.

Singulatarians would respond by predicting that exponentially growing
scientific progress will fill the gap. This notion sweeps under the rug
a messy philosophical problem: An algorithm is only a set of
instructions, and even the most sophisticated machine executing the most
elaborate instructions is still an unconscious automaton. Philosophy
aside, a constellation of recent scientific findings indicates that no
matter how fast CPUs become in future decades, they'll be no more aware
than a toaster. Building a conscious machine will likely require
paradigm shifts in brain science - conceptual leaps that, by definition,
won't come on a schedule. Here, then, are five reasons why the
singularity is not near.

The mind is synchronized, but no one knows how. New York University
neurologist E. Roy John has established that the hallmark of
consciousness is a regular electrical oscillation, or gamma wave,
readily detected by electrodes attached to the scalp. More recently,
Wolf Singer and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Brain
Research in Frankfurt, Germany, confirmed that brain cells flicker in
time with the gamma wave. This flickering takes place among widely
dispersed neurons throughout the brain with no apparent spatial pattern.
What keeps these ever-shifting, widely distributed groups of cells in
sync? Neurochemical reactions take place too slowly to explain the
phenomenon. This mystery alone seems to demand a wholesale rethinking of
AI's underpinnings.

Current brain maps are of little use in explaining awareness. For more
than a century, the brain cell, or neuron, has been seen as a tiny
switching station with multiple signals coming in through many input
wires, known as dendrites, but only one signal going out through a
single output wire, or axon. AI is based on this circuitry model. When
it comes to consciousness, though, the model has its wires crossed.
Singer has discovered that gamma waves - the indicators of consciousness
- issue from the neuron's supposed inputs, not its output. Confusing
matters further, researchers, including Takaichi Fukuda and Toshio
Kosaka of Japan's Kyushu University, have revealed that many inputs
interconnect, forming an altogether different set of networks. In other
words, the vast strides made by neuroscientists in their attempt to map
the brain may reveal little about consciousness.

The brain is faster than singularity theorists think. AI assumes that
the neuron is analogous to a single computer bit. But it turns out that
each neuron is supported by a supercomputer's worth of additional
circuitry. MIT bioengineer Andreas Mershin and UCLA psychologist Nancy
Woolf have independently confirmed the importance of microtubules, the
scaffolding that undergirds each neuron, in animal memory and learning.
At the University of Alberta, physicist Jack Tuszynski has developed
computational models suggesting that these supposedly dumb structures
could be smarter than previously recognized. Stuart Hameroff at the
University of Arizona argues that trillions of computations per second
take place in the microtubules of each neuron. If he's right, the
brain's speed is 1028 operations per second - a trillion times faster
than is generally thought - which pushes the vaunted singularity back by
decades.

The on/off switch isn't where it's supposed to be. As it happens,
doctors have a handy way to flick the switch of consciousness:
anesthesia. When you're under, awareness is disabled, but everything
else in the brain operates normally. So how does anesthesia work?
Hameroff has come up with a simple model in which anesthetic drugs
interact almost exclusively with microtubules; the rest of the neuron
plays only a marginal role. This model is the closest anyone has come to
a unified theory of anesthesia - yet it flatly contradicts the notion
that consciousness arises from firing neurons.

Understanding consciousness may require new physics. In his 1989 book,
The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the
classical physics ruling neurobiology can't explain consciousness. The
mind, he declared, relies on the baffling mechanics of quantum physics.
Although his point remains controversial, evidence in its favor is
accumulating. Most recently, physicist Efstratios Manousakis at Florida
State University showed that certain confounding quirks of visual
perception are most easily explained by quantum mechanics. If
consciousness is indeed a quantum phenomenon, then AI becomes an
entirely new game. The singularity will have to wait for engineers to
catch up.