Transhumanism, is it possible?

First, we must differentiate three different concepts:

a)   Technological singularity: the apparently exponential increase of our technological advances will tend to infinity in a very short time. By then, anything we may want to do, will be possible.

b)  Transhumanism: the amelioration of the human species by means of technology.

c)   Posthumanism: the generation of a new species as a hybrid of human beings and technology.

Some predictions by Ray Kurzweil for 2020

Ray Kurzweil

Short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

On December 13, 2009, the New York Daily News published an article with the following headline:

Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

The limits of technology

Exponential curve

Transhumanists claim that technology is about to reach singularity: exponential growth towards infinity that will allow us to achieve goals such as immortality, strong artificial intelligence, the hybridization of machines and human beings, and much more. They thus make the same mistake made by the members of the club of Rome when in 1975 they predicted that the world's population would grow exponentially and reach catastrophic values ​​by 2020. It is the same mistake made by Malthus at the end of the 18th century, for the growth curves of natural systems are never exponential, but rather follow the logistic curve, as I have pointed out more than once in this blog.

To this criticism, transhumanists (such as Ray Kurzweil) argue that the human species is capable of linking two or more logistic curves, so that, even if real processes follow this curve rather than an exponential, growth would continue and the singularity could be reached, maybe a little later, but it will come anyway.

Those who say this are dreaming, and show they don’t know ​​mathematics. I show here two linked logistic curves, and compare them to exponential growth. It will be seen that the beginning of the two curves is quite similar, up to the point of abscissa 8.5. However, from that point, the differences are disproportionate. At the point of abscissa 10, the exponential curve reaches the value 3, while the logistics has not yet reached the value 1. At the point of abscissa 30, while the logistic curve reaches the value 2, the exponential would be at about 1446 million. So, claiming that several linked logistic curves equal one exponential, is mathematical folly.

Kurzweil also says that research in quantum computing should very soon send us into a new linked logistic curve. This shows that he does not know, or does not want to be aware, that quantum computing, if achieved, will make it possible to speed up the resolution of certain types of problems (NP-complete problems), but won’t let us solve new problems, such as I pointed out in another post. Although it is true that solving this challenge could send us up to a new logistic curve linked to the previous one, this advance won’t be as momentous as the media and some scientists would have us believe.

It is evident from the comparison made that, to approach exponential growth, it would be necessary to concatenate an enormous number of linked logistic curves, a number tending to infinity, which would require a time tending to infinity. But is it possible to link a very large number of logistic growths, or would we find a limit, if we tried?

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his monumental 12-volume Study of History, pointed out that human civilizations go through a stage of growth, during which they are subjected to several successive challenges that they usually manage to overcome, although as a rule each challenge solved causes new problems, and thus opens the way to the next challenge. Furthermore, he argues that the number of challenges that a civilization can successfully solve is usually not large: after defeating three or four, each of which may cost one to several centuries, it usually fails in the next one and collapses. Toynbee points out that Western civilization went into political collapse in the early 20th century, with the two world wars. In this he agrees with the diagnosis of Oswald Spengler, who reached the same conclusion in the interwar period.

It is true that the scientific-technological history of our civilization may not exactly coincide with its political history. However, I don’t think its decline is very far, as I have been predicting here. So, announcing that in the next hundred years we’ll reach singularity (as transhumanists do) is not doing science, but dreaming. At most, these musings could be the subject of science fiction novels, but nothing more.

Certainly, the limits of technology are practical, not theoretical, and further advancements could allow them to be transgressed. But the hopes of transhumanists in this regard are so exaggerated that they will probably never be achieved.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread of Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Conscience, Self-conscience and Artificial Intelligence

Ramón López de Mántaras

In an article published on 3/22/2021, these words are attributed to Josu Bilbao, head of the ICT area of ​​IKERLAN:

In three years, artificial intelligence will make an intelligent dialogue with machines possible.

We have seen many similar predictions since the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was invented over 60 years ago. In most cases (if not all) those predictions have been too optimistic. Is the same going to happen here?

I have consulted with one of the world's leading experts in the field of the automatic analysis of natural language, a technique used to implement the type of applications referred to in the article I am commenting, and he told me this:

It depends on how "intelligent dialogue" is defined. If it is restricted to a specific domain, for example, controlling your home automation systems using Google Home, that can be done now with a success rate above 70%, while ten years ago it was science fiction. If you want to have a philosophical conversation where your interlocutor understands what he is saying, rather than generating texts from a language model, this is too optimistic.

Scientific predictions for 2020

Arthur C. Clarke

It is well known that future forecasts are all the more risky the further in time they go. Readers of my blog know that I love keeping scientific forecasts to use in the future, so as to check them when the corresponding dates arrive. Sometimes I have waited for half a century to perform these checks, which in general prove that the forecasts tend to be unsuccessful, generally due to too much optimism, although sometimes they are correct. In this previous post, I checked some of the predictions made by such distinguished popularizers as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The three predictions I’m going to check today were made for the year 2020, with less time to go: 25 years in the first, just 10 years or a little above in the other two. Let’s look at them:

Productivity measures for the increase in life expectancy

In my previous post in this blog I spoke about the article entitled Are ideas getting harder to find? which can be downloaded from the Stanford University website. In this paper, the authors also analyze the increase in life expectancy in the USA and the effort necessary to achieve it, and reach the following results:

Will we live 500 years?

James H. Schmitz

A few years ago, especially in 2015 and 2016, news began to appear in the mass media announcing the imminence that our life expectancy is going to rise in an accelerated way, so we’ll soon achieve immortality. At that time I wrote in this blog three posts (this, this and this) where I declared myself skeptical about these forecasts. In another post, also published in 2016, I distinguished between two very different concepts:

• Life expectancy: the average duration of human life. Although it depends on the age of the person, the value usually given corresponds to the moment of birth. Life expectancy has been growing progressively in recent centuries, mainly due to advances in medicine, although recent data from the UN seem to indicate that this increase is decreasing.
• Longevity: the maximum duration of human life. Its value seems to be around 120 years, and no significant increase is noted in recent decades. In fact, there are only two people who were thought to have exceeded that longevity, the Japanese Shigeziyo Izumi and the French Jeanne Calment, but both cases are currently in doubt. The first lost his title of the longest-lived man in the world when it was discovered that his date of birth could actually correspond to a brother of the same name, older than him, who died quite young. In the case of the French woman, there is a controversial Russian study that asserts that her daughter could have exchanged her identity for her mother’s when the latter died, supposedly in 1934.

When can we expect a strong artificial intelligence?

Ramón López de Mántaras

It has been said that man is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone. In other words, it is difficult to learn from history (especially when history is not taught) and it is difficult to learn from our own mistakes. This is happening in relation to the field of Artificial Intelligence. In the previous article I mentioned that the creators of the name of this discipline predicted that in 10 years spectacular results would be obtained. Twenty years later, something similar happened when expert systems were invented. In 1990, Ray Kurzweil predicted in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines that strong artificial intelligence would come by the year 2000. In 1999, when he saw that this prediction was not going to be fulfilled, he moved it to 2010 in his new book The age of spiritual machines. As this prediction was not fulfilled either, between 2009 and 2014 he delayed it until 2029. It seems that now he is making less optimistic predictions in this field, and more about immortality, as I mentioned in another article.

Lately the media are announcing the coming of strong artificial intelligence, the real one, in just three years, or at most ten. What do the true experts say about this, those who are doing research on Artificial Intelligence? Let us look at the opinion of Ramón López de Mántaras, director of the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence (IIIA, of the Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research, CSIC). He has received the Donald E. Walker Award for Artificial Intelligence in 2017; the EurAI Distinguished Service Award in 2016; the Spanish National Computing Award in 2012; and the Robert S. Engelmore Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2011. This is what he thinks about all these announcements:

Futurology

In an earlier post I mentioned that many of scientific news published today are not really new discoveries, but future previsions. What I did was analyze a specific issue of the magazine Science News, and found that just three news, out of 18 it contained, corresponded to concrete findings.

At the suggestion of one of my readers I made a more meaningful analysis, by reviewing, not just a single magazine, but 40, of four different years, to see if the effect stays constant or changes with time. The results were as follows:

Year	Nr. of articles	% Futurology
1990	176	32
1995	162	33
2001	177	47
2006	167	40
2008	161	48

More about immortality

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil calls himself futurist, meaning that he knows how to predict the future of technology. Actually, what he does is adjusting his predictions as time passes, when he sees that they won’t be fulfilled, as I explained in a post on the horizon effect, which dealt with his predictions about artificial intelligence.

Lately, Kurzweil’s predictions have expanded their scope to medicine. One of his obsessions is that we are about to become immortal. At first he thought this would happen when we will be able to download our consciousness into the memory of a computer, and continue living inside it after our biological death. A few years ago, he predicted that this would take place before 2035.

No longer so confident in this prediction (2035 is around the corner), he now expect us to be immortal shortly before 2050, when he will be 102 years old, so that, by delaying the fulfillment of his prophecies, he begins to risk not to be able to see them.

In a widely publicized interview with Computerworld, Kurzweil now expects us to become immortal through the development of a family of nano-robots that will be injected into our blood and act as a new, much better than our original immune system, detecting and attacking all possible pathogens and cancer cells before they can affect us. Without diseases, we would be immortal. Let's look at a paragraph about that interview:

Imaged prepared by Waquar Ahmad

Futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive come 2040 or 2050 could be close to immortal. The quickening advance of nanotechnology means that the human condition will shift into more of a collaboration of man and machine, as nanobots flow through human blood streams and eventually even replace biological blood, he added. That may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Kurzweil, a member of the Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, says that research well underway today is leading to a time when a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology will wipe out cancer…

That figure, 86% hits, is provided by Kurzweil himself, and in my opinion is far from being real, as Kurzweil usually does not score failures, just delays the date of his predictions. The headline of the story (Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says) would be more suitable if it had been replaced by the following: Ray Kurzweil delays by 10 years the date when we will attain immortality.

Normal and cancer cells

One must be very optimistic to think that in 30 years we will be able to design a better immune system than the one we acquired during a 1000 million years evolution, after a never ending arms race between multicellular beings on the one side, and pathogenic microorganisms and cancer cells on the other. Also remember that these organisms are quite capable to adapt to new situations very quickly, so they would probably find ways to escape from our nano-robots, whose software would have to be constantly changed to adapt to them. I think it probable that we will never be able to defeat them completely.

Finally, overcoming disease is not enough to achieve immortality, we must also stop aging. Otherwise, as I said in last month’s post, we would live for 100 or 110 years, and then die. Too many advances, to be achieved in just about 30 years.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic thread on Immortality: Preceding Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Disappointment in the face of unreasonable optimistic forecasts

Arthur C. Clarke

The future is unpredictable. The information revolution that began in the 80s with the personal computer, followed in the 90s with the global expansion of the Internet, and continued in the first decade of this century with the smartphones, came as a surprise for many futurists. Half a century ago, all predictions agreed that future computers would be larger. In fact, they became smaller. By 1965, something like Internet seemed a prediction for the next century (see the story by Arthur C. Clarke, Dial F for Frankenstein). Looking back, many of the scientific advances of the twentieth century were surprising. Why then do we insist on making predictions, if they are almost never met?

The March 2016 issue of the Spanish version of the journal Scientific American includes an article entitled Neuroscience: how to avoid disappointment, by Professor Alfredo Marcos, which reviews some of the modern predictions about research on the human brain, which he considers far too optimistic. If these forecasts are not met, as can be expected, the disappointment of the public and the governments that sponsor and fund these scientific efforts could lead to a wave of excessive skepticism. These are a few of his words:

However much we learn about the brain, we must not expect that it will provide us with the immediate healing of all our medical and social ills, from Alzheimer's to violence; much less with the keys to human existence.

The horizon effect

We are well aware of the horizon effect: as we walk towards the horizon, the horizon gets further away. In science sometimes this effect seems to apply. Let us look at a few examples:

Mycoplasma genitalium genetic map

• Synthetic biology: In 1960, producing living cells in the laboratory was predicted to be feasible by 1970. In 2015, Craig Venter (1) sees it feasible soon, perhaps by 2030. It is true that we have come very far, that great strides have been made, but the ultimate goal seems to be always at the same distance, or even a little further away. Moreover, the origin of life remains a mystery. The simplest being able to live independently (Mycoplasma genitalium) is very complicated, light-years away from the hypothetical first living being.