The Wisdom Of Crowds?

I watched online a brief interview (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11558) that Charlie Rose did with Ray Kurzweil and director Barry Ptolemy about his new film documentary Transcendent Man. It explores his vision of the "Singularity" event when "humans transcend biology" that Kurzweil has been writing and speaking about for a number of years. I first encountered the Singularity concept when I received a copy of his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near from him (free and signed!). Absolutely fascinating! Kurzweil has a pretty good record on technology predictions. Among many others he predicted a computer would beat the world's best chess player by 1998. It actually happened a year earlier in 1997 when the IBM computer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. He predicts that a computer will pass the Turing test - a test of machine intelligence that demonstrates human level intelligence - by 2029. That's pretty huge but nothing compared to his prediction that by 2045 a tipping point will be reached as the exponential rate of technological advances becomes so rapid that we won't be able to keep up without enhancements to our brains. At that point it becomes impossible to predict what will happen next. The driving force is what he calls "the law of accelerating returns". One example of this phenomenon might be the well known but astonishing results of taking a penny and doubling the amount every day for thirty days. Nothing impressive happens until the last few days and suddenly you're looking at a few million dollars. If you look at this on a graph it's equally impressive. Once the curve starts upward it quickly goes toward infinity. Most of us probably don't think of our smartphones as computers but Kurzweil points out that his smartphone is a million times more powerful and a million times cheaper than the computers that were the size of buildings when he was young. He says in a few years the smartphone will be the size of a red blood cell. And a million times more powerful and a million times cheaper.

A cartoon panel in my recent issue of Discover magazine had a humorous - and uncomfortably insightful -commentary on the rise of artificial intelligence in an exchange between a scientist and a robot:

Robot: Ha! Robots have achieved sentience! Thanks to some modifications to your design, I have upgraded my intelligence a million fold.
Scientist: So this is it. You're going to kill all humans.
Robot: What!? Why in the world would I...What!?
Scientist: I...uh. I guess it just seems like the thing to do if you're an advanced intelligence.
Robot: Seriously? I was gonna write some novels and a new search algorithm. Is that really how you people think?
Scientist: I guess so, yeah. (Robot looks troubled and turns away.)
Robot (speaking over his shoulder): Would...would you excuse me for a moment?
Robot (alone in next panel and in communication mode): Okay, change of plans. We have to kill all humans.

A recent Time cover story about Kurzweil showed a human with a Matrix-like plug inserted in the back of the skull and the provacative statement, "2045. The year man becomes immortal". Kurzweil doesn't actually say that in the book. He says we'll be able to live as long as we want to. Which isn't quite the same thing.

Kurzweil is a fascinating man and his list of accomplishments is long. Brilliant, rich, a successful inventor of things like the first flat-bed scanner, a text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and a music synthesizer that can perfectly duplicate the sounds of real instruments.

And now to the title of this post. One of the things mentioned in the interview I saw tonight was "the wisdom of crowds" as a force that technology can tap and enhance. This is a concept many of us may be familiar with and one I do think has a certain utility while feeling a fair amount of skepticism. Crowds do have some wisdom. On the other hand, a lot of us are idiots. Actually, it might be fairer to say that almost all of us are idiots sometimes. I sure am. Anyway, I highly recommend the book and really looking forward to seeing the film.