Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere).<p>But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't.<p>No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though.<p>They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time.<p>But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out.<p>Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true:<p><i>> All prophets are false prophets.</i><p>So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions.<p>They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov</a>).
Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!"<p>Looks like his new stuff is more of the same...
>As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil’s weak efforts at differentiating his theory from Hawkins’s—“the most important difference is the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the size and size variability parameters”—are likely to convince no one.<p>Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this:<p>>So is this On Intelligence 2?<p>I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).
I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry.<p>"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle<p>Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.
In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.”<p>- for anyone interested, the Human Brain Project is at the forefront of this: <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/inde...</a>
Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else), or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the minds that come along and solve them one day.
> Hierarchical Temporary Memory<p>Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.<p>He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.<p>He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.<p>A useless distraction.
"The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own."<p>I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.
I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.