My favorite part is when they talk about having robot best friends that you tell your secrets to. It's like the singularity will be one big sleepover with Judy Jetson.
Calling this sort of idle speculation documentary work is pretty charitable.
They should get someone like Minsky and have him talk about seminal ideas in AI research and make an argument for the direction of future advances based on those. Saying "maybe we'll have robots someday" for an hour is just a huge waste of time.
I have a love hate relationship with Kaku because he has to fantastisize everything- he tries to make things extra exciting for the public, and in the process he walks the line of completely misrepresenting the things he's talking about. Sometimes they are so off it feels like he's just lying, but I understand his usefulness in a society that is growing more and more anti-intellectual every year.
I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I assume at some point it either juts up against or goes directly into Ray Kurzweil-esque singularity nonsense.
I'm all for people being amazed at the possibilities and potentials of technology and science, but I hate this "science mysticism" garbage which leads people down an unrealistic road. We are not remotely anywhere near some strange future of AI controlled robots and transferring our minds into computers etc. It's true that computer technology has made astounding leaps and bounds since it was first introduced, but the fact that computer power keeps exponentially growing is not proof that it will KEEP exponentially growing. Many experts in these fields now believe we are steadily reaching a point where the technology may reach an impasse where our advancements can no longer be sustained by other sciences, and thus computer power will stop at a certain point until various other obstacles can be gotten around.
It's just religion for nerds. Google "the forbidden basilisk post" for a hilarious anecdote in which some singularity 'sperg accidentally invents Original Sin, in the form of a forum post that causes Computer God to damn you to Computer Hell if you read it but don't devote your entire remaining life to bringing about the singularity, because that is Computer God's way of motivating people in the past, to avoid delaying the Singularity. But if you are unaware of this idea, you can't be held responsible for not obeying it, so you're okay.
I guess that pretty much *is* the basilisk post. And now that you know about it, you too are damned to eternal punishment unless you devote every iota of your life to the Singularity. Computer God will resurrect you and torture you someday if you don't.
Everyone assumes that we can have machines that have both human (or better) smarts without having a will of its own. Even the Singularity Institute guy they interviewed assumes it.
Hofstadter said something like "maybe we will build the ultimate chess player, and maybe it won't want to play chess" which makes far more sense to me.
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