Spooky Action at a Distance…..
Recently, McKinsey sat down and did an interview with Ray Kurzweil.
www.mckinseyquarterly.com
Never one to be shy about predictions Mr. K out Moore’d Moore’s Law when it came to exponential prowess of information technology. First, he postulated that machine intelligence would rival human intelligence by 2029. Not really a stretch when you consider that IBM’s Watson has a better than even shot of cleaning up on Jeopardy when he (it) debus in a couple of weeks. But the next prediction, that machine intelligence will over take biological intelligence by 2045, has got some nifty implications. Not the least of which is synthetic consciousness.
There are a number of intractable problems that our biologically based brains just don’t do well with. For starters, human metaphysics is rooted in our biology, which is why time and space play such a prominent role in how we view and assimilate the world around us. The same is true for how we construct and manipulate syllogisms. Which leads us into some pretty interesting dead ends that synthetic consciousness could lead us out of.
Let’s take Einstein’s Spooky Action at a Distance (spukhafte Fernwirkung), or how a change in one particle traveling through space is instantly reflected in its entangled twin traveling in the opposite direction on the other side of the universe. Seems no matter what you propose as the root cause of this phenomenon (hidden variables, etc), there is no way around it but to conclude that the particles, separated by billions of light years, actually occupy the same space-time, no matter how far apart they travel. That’s right, they are standing still, occupying the same place and moment, and space-time moves around them. Or as Buckaroo Banzai once aptly put it, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
Now here’s a concept that biologically based intelligence just can’t seem to comprehend but synthetic machine intelligence might not find disquieting all.
I, for one, can’t wait. So let’s hope Mr. K moves that date up a bit.
