The 'futurist' title seems to reside somewhere between science fiction, pop culture with some business credentials thrown in. I don't know what to make of it.
I'm reminded of the complaint that startups are disproportionately geared toward solving the problems of highly educated, able-bodied adults who have more money than spare time. "I'm like this, my friends are like this, and by the principle of mediocrity we're not unusual... therefore, iOS could use another food delivery app." You need to measure, rather than guess, whether you are unusual relative to large numbers of other people.
On top of that Kurzweil appears to have some good old fashioned self-delusion about death: believing he can "bring back" his beloved dead father as software, the life extension supplements, etc. (I don't believe in souls or uncomputable quantum woo in brains. I have no problem in principle with "brain uploads." I think that the obstacles in practice are extremely formidable and typically underestimated by people who have spent more time with computers than with biology.)
But why?
He is just 69. Gets up in the morning goes to work for Google. He's a director, got a team, plays with this reply thing on gmail. Couple of years down the road, maybe he gets board? He got credentials. Facebook hires him. Maybe can help with reply thing on messenger or something. He can float around. It's the valley. A decade at Twitter, Two as a VC. No rush.
Dude got time, man. No need to pity.
He's cool.
My main objection is a philosophical one. I just don't believe that whatever is in the machine after such an "upload" will be me -- no matter how accurately is mirrors my brain.
I'll still be in my own body, and don't want to kill myself for the sake of the life of the one inside the machine. Nor do I think my life will continue inside the machine. Whatever/whoever is inside the machine at that point will no longer be me, and will continue their own life without me -- even if they think exactly like me and have exactly the memories I had at the point of upload, etc.
At best, such an upload is more akin to giving birth to a separate entity.
People who think they are extending their own lives by doing this are deluding themselves.
But even then, I like what I imagine it could become after being me, and I imagine it will always be able to remember what it was like to be me afterward. It's a lot more comforting in the shadow of my mortality than the idea that undetectable interdimensional beings will upload your mind to their network at the point of your death, then link your program to either the bliss simulator or the torture simulator.
It isn't immortality. It's saving your soul. Literally. To the filesystem. With journaling and backups.
Would you reall want this creature to have anything to do with your family, though?
Think about it: here's this newly created entity thinking it's you.. maybe even thinking it's more you than you are, thinking it's your parents' child just as much or more than you are. Even though it may have your memories, it was never actually born from your parents, your parents never brought it up, it never actually shared any of the experiences with your parents that it has copies of in its memory.
I would find it kind of creepy for that thing to be hanging out with my parents, talking to them, and pretending it's me. I mean, if it say, merely helped my parents financially, I wouldn't have a problem with that any more than I would with having an insurance agency that contributed to my parents welfare after I died, but we're not really talking about that but about a relationship between this thing and my parents.
Here's another example. How many people do you think would be ok with a copy of themselves sleeping with their wives, or spending time with their kids and having the kids potentially become more attached to the copy than to the original? If the copy really was them -- really was "their soul", there should be no jealousy, as you can't be jealous of yourself. Yet there probably would be jealousy in a lot of cases, because they're actually two different people.
If I was intentionally copying myself, both the original and the copy would know that there would be another instance on the other side of things afterward, and we wouldn't necessarily know which was which at first.
Just like in The Prestige, or that episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker got duplicated in the transporter accident, neither wouldn't know ahead of time whether it would be the lucky one, or the unlucky one.
Because of that, I have to settle myself mentally before doing it, and know that it wouldn't be a real me and a fake me. It would be two copies of me--one that made it across the digital barrier, and one that got put back into the biology. The robo-me was born and raised by my parents, just as surely as the bio-me was.
And you don't know my parents. Both of us would be glad to share the burden of dealing with them with someone else that knows exactly what that entails.
And I know right now that it would be the spouse that might not be okay with us sleeping with each other, as they might not buy the "and how is this really different from before?" argument.
You could pretty much say the exact same thing about ordinary death. In fact, I can't figure out how it'd differ from ordinary death in any way, except that hypothetically there'd now be an extra entity inside a machine, and that entity would resemble me in some ways.
If you tried to tell most people they wouldn't care about dying, that they'd just go to sleep and never wake up, and they wouldn't feel any pain, few would be comforted by it and take your proffered suicide pill.
You are already a ghost riding a skeleton. Your body is simply a biological host required to sustain your brain software.
But if you are interested in this further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
That said, it could be argued that this sort of thing happens all the time anyway. I'm not the person I once was. In a sense, the old me died and was replaced by the new me. Yet I still consider the new me to be myself.
Or maybe not. The child me is dead, though echoes of him may live on in me.
I guess what disturbs me about a mechanical/cybernetic brain replacement is that it would feel to me too much like some technological virus or disease taking over my mind and body -- even if it gave me some super powers or preserved me in some way. I guess some injured people or people who are dying anyway might not have much of a choice.. but as long as I still have a choice I think I'd choose to remain organic.
It's not an easy choice, however, and I would have no problem use various prosthesis like glasses.. or enhancing my memory with external devices like smartphones/PDA's/computers. It's just too invasive for that to be made a part of me... at least if it starts to make decisions. But probably children born in to a world where that sort of thing was commonplace probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it.
They don't necessarily. Some people do feel like they're not themselves after organ transplants. Like their hand isn't theirs after a hand transplant.. or that it has a mind of its own. Some experience personality changes or feel like the new body parts have their own desires.
Oliver Sacks and other neurologists and psychologists have written about and studied this phenomena.
Gradual brain replacement might have none of these issues, or it might have them, or even worse ones, or perhaps the changes will be more insidious and not noticeable by the people who they have them but could be noticeable by others.
Even in the best case scenario, when they're without these neurological or psychological issues, that would not clear them on the philosophical level. The questions of identity would remain.
The uploaded consciousness or gradual brain replacement are pretty different from this case, though, it's true. So maybe these issues wouldn't exist or not exist in the same way, but philosophical issues of identity would remain.
I'm curious because I don't see the parallels between the two, while you seem to imply some obviousness.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcbbr8ZhoFs
[2]: There's least one I can think of immediately: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6
As I stated, whether or not you find the two comparable or not has as much to do with personal opinion as anything else.
I personally find them both extremely interesting gentlemen that have done very interesting things, but that I will also take a large grain of salt with respect to many of their projects. Whether or not the amount of the salt is the same or the number of projects I need it for is the same ("in the same league" even) doesn't stop it from being a sometimes useful comparison.
I don't know the guy, or follow him closely, but I don't think he's dishonest, I just think he's wrong.
There's a distinction between a snake oil salesman and someone who actually believes in what they're selling.
It’s irrelevant if he believes in their efficacy or not. Alternative health practitioners certainly believe in their remedies. Gwenyth Paltow certainly believes in… whatever absurdities she’s peddling nowadays. The Food Babe probably does too. None of that makes them any less snake oil.
Edit: A quick search on Wikipedia shows me I’m wrong. Apparently it’s only snake oil if the seller is aware the product is fraudulent. TIL.
Edit 2: I might not be as wrong as I believed. A snake oil salesman can also be a quack who promotes medical practices based upon ignorance, which would definitely encompass Gwenyth Paltrow and the Food Babe.
You could (accurately, in my opinion) describe the things Kurzweil is selling as "snake oil" but I wouldn't describe him as a "snake oil salesman."
A whole lot of medicine practiced throughout human history has been based on ignorance, but I wouldn't describe medieval doctors (or whichever era) as "snake oil salesmen" because they believed in what they were selling.
This is a pretty important distinction, in my mind.
Kurzweil, though, might perhaps be more accurately viewed as a spokesman for a new religion.
I think it's more reasonable to conclude that Analemma_'s "crank" comment refers to only those in that subculture, and cannot be extended to all people who are making "any attempt to predict the future."
In fact, a quick check of Analemma_'s history show this comment from 16 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15577671 :
"if you are always predicting disaster, then your predictions are neither useful nor credible, since you will be wrong most of the time as the long-term trend of the market is upward."
I think it's certain that Analemma_ does not consider this sort of future prediction as part of the same crankery subculture as Kurzweil, etc.
It seems to me that Analemma_ (and likely yourself) are proponents of the view "the future will be mostly the same as the present with minor inconsequential variations" which is a very sound and reasonable view to hold, but also kind of sad and unambitious in my view.
I think that "futurist" is only a subset of those who make "any attempt to predict the future". For example, the Congressional Budget Office routinely makes predictions about the future effect of new legislation, though they are never called "futurists".
As to your second paragraph, I have no idea of how you concluded that that is my view. As a kid I enjoyed James Burke's "Connections" which, quoting Wikipedia, "explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress", and that viewpoint has stayed with me.
Personally, I'm of the view that the late 1800s - the Belle Époque - contained much more significant technological and cultural changes than the late 1900s, and that people like Kurzweil end up minimizing the large transitions brought about by the telephone, phonograph, the vertical filing system, punched cards, lighting system, etc.
Concerning just lighting, Paris got the nickname "The City Of Light" because of its early installation (in the 1860s) of gas lighting, and night-life started around them, enabled first by limelight and then arc lamps.
This stuff is old: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools/ It's amazing that people want to lump in anyone associated with it, or just related moral ideas like "death really sucks, what's a general way to end it?" as cranks of the same sort. Or worse compare it to a religion (http://archive.fo/6oI0u)