Thanks for reading. But I think a key take-away is that even with infinite computing power, you only increase the chance of being right a little. It's still a guess.
That's the real surprise. It's not a question of computing power.
That's the real surprise. It's not a question of computing power.
It's not happening in space (although hypersonics seem to be getting more real). It's not happening in AI or speech recognition/understanding. It's not happening in medicine.
So the net empirical situation looks like the opposite of what Kurzweil says. Only IT and Moore's Law are going totally nuts. One can conjecture about why, but I think that's conjecture and there aren't deep fundamental principles about scientific and technological progress, at least that we've found so far.
I was very surprised to find that recognition accuracy stopped getting better a long time ago. I do poke fun, but I also think Kurzweil (as I said in the piece) very reasonably believed that Moore's Law would get us a long way to AI. And surprisingly, it hasn't.
I like to think I don't have a stake in the argument and just let what's actual decide whether or not we're going to get to computer understanding of language and/or AI.
However, if P=NP then there are better algorithms that can solve the problem. Does P=NP? Nobody knows but to me it seems to be true because when anyone interprets speech they definitely are not searching a 10^570 domain to solve the problem.