Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Singularity - the opinion of Peter Norving

Interview of Peter Norving: "Do you agree with Kurzweil's forecast regarding the singularity?"
"So Ray is great and I appreciate all that he's done, I appreciate all the advances in AI that he has done in reading, in music and so on, so he's a great technologist. I think in terms of these predictions, euh, I think he's doing the best he can by saying, I wanna nail down this prediction, I'm gonna look at the data that we have, I'm gonna extrapolate from that data and come up with an answer, euh, I think the only problem is that the data is not conclusive, right. So you look at, Moore's law, yes, you can say computers are going at this particular rate, but I don't think you can necessarily say that when we pass a certain number of transistors, that corresponds to a certain number of neurons and therefore the 2 are equivalent, I think that's where the analogy breaks down."

What are your thoughts on molecular manufacturing and Bio-Engineering?
"So it's fascinating to me, euh, I'm trying to learn something about it. I'm educating myself, I gotta long way to go. I think it does tie-in because it is a mix between the physical world and the world of information. Euh, I think it is likely that in the coming century a large part of manufacturing will be done with cells or with atoms. I kind of think it'll be more done with cells than with atoms just because they're bigger, they're easy to manipulate, they've already got this 3 Giga bite computer on board, we just gotta figure out how to program it."
Peter Norving is director of research at google.

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