Busy weekend

[theengineer]

Started off Friday by attending the Planet in Focus presentation of the doc Transcendent Man, about futurist and engineer Ray Kurzweil. He thinks we're likely only two decades away from cracking AI and making the sort of breakthrus that will make functional immortality possible, and he's had a pretty good track record at predicting the future (

Comments

Kurzweil and Singularity prediction

[ionelv]

RK is full of it. His only significant non-technological prediction was the prediction of the Soviet Union fall in The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in Sept 1990. Alas, the fly in the ointment with this prediction is that, a full 6 months before his book publishing, in March 1990, USSR already signed its death warrant by changing its constitution to remove the exclusivity of Communist Party as the only legal party. That was the coup de grace from Gorbachev's Perestroika that accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union, and not the technology which RK touted as the primary factor. If technology was as big a factor as he claimed, China's CP would have fallen long time ago...

Unto his Singularity prediction in 20 years time: that's just hog wash. AI research has managed to make little significant progress in the past half of century in the Strong AI category and there is no reason to believe that this will change just because tech gimmicks such as foglets, nanobots, IBM's Cat Brain project or defeating the Turing test will somehow allow us to bypass nature and create something smarter than we are. Face it: the guy's creative juice has run out and he resorted to peddling Nuovo-Nostradamian books and seminars to the gullible.

Re: Kurzweil and Singularity prediction

[theengineer]

They should have had you on the panel!