Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Why is Ray Kurzweil considered a luminary in this context?

Sure, he talks a lot. He makes grand statements. Is there any reason to take him seriously in this context?

He sure seems to believe, and to want to believe. But actual evidence that he's going to be right any time soon? That seems to be missing.

View on HN

Have you read Ray's books? I recommend 2005's The Singularity is Near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

It's been 16 years. Is the singularity any nearer? Is there any evidence that the singularity is any nearer?

So, how "near" was the singularity in 2005? How accurate was Kurzweil?

His prediction is that a machine will pass the turing test in 2029.

And yes, there's evidence of incredible machine learning discoveries all around us. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see those. AlphaZero in Go & Chess, the protein folding miracles of Deepmind, all the amazing work being done today. The field is racing ahead. Human minds are good at seeing linear progression. Our brains aren't particularly good at exponential growth, which is what is happening in this field.

He has timeliness on the optimistic side but people were skeptical of his claims in the 80s that a computer will win at Chess by 2000 or that the internet will become ubiquitous. He did think a US company will reach 1 trillion $ by 2010 and that speech recognition will be more widely used but even in cases like that he wasn't massively off.

As far as I can tell for decades he's been consistently more right than his critics and often on issues that are a lot harder to get right than simple coin tosses.

He's been right (approximately) on how fast the tech improves. That doesn't tell you anything about how likely he is to be right about the singularity, though, unless you think he actually has a handle on how much tech would have to improve to get us there, which means that he would have a handle on where "there" actually is, in technical terms. I don't see evidence that he (or anyone) has that.

I've read Ray's books. He's a big talker that writes speculative science fiction, but he doesn't do anything.

As the parent poster said, there is zero reason to take him seriously.

He was inventor of:

the first CCD flat-bed scanner

first omni-font optical character recognition

the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind

the first text-to-speech synthesizer

the first music synthesizer capable of recreating a grand piano

I'm aware of his track record prior to becoming a science fiction author.

But what has he invented after he started writing about the singularity?

Everybody wants to be the Fox Mulder of their story.

It's clear you're not familiar with Kurzweil's work in AI (or his background in general). He's written multiple books on the topic over multiple decades, including the seminal "The Singularity is Near". He's devoted his life to the study of this field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

> It's clear you're not familiar with Kurzweil's work in AI (or his background in general).

Because it's impossible that I could be familiar with his work and still think that he's full of it? (At least on AI and the Singularity.) That sounds like you've had a bit too much Kurzweil Koolaid...

He's also written books on how much of your diet should be fat, and similar topics. I've never been able to tell if he's worth taking seriously. My instincts say no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10%25_Solution_for_a_Healt...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage:_Live_Long_En...

Thank you for enlightening us with the new knowledge of this wonderful luminary. I have learned so much from these URLs. Do you have any more recommendations on what we should read next? I find myself deeply enthralled by his fascinating claims and I want to seek out more of his teachings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com