Google's AI prophet fast tracks singularity prediction

it feels that way... these sort of garbage articles coming out are really frustrating.

Kurzweil's predictions always seem to be: "Miraculous advances will arrive just in time for me to live forever."

So the world might not be mad, but I suspect a 66-year-old is grappling with one inevitability, while some other folks are grappling with the inevitability that stock prices can't always go up.

People have been in search for immortality since the dawn of humanity. Kurzweil's claim - made by extrapolating graphs using trends - will be appended to the list in no longer than 30 years.

It's not even a cool one like the fountain of youth or prostrating himself to the gods. Waiting on the inevitability of modernism in a post-post-modern age is depressingly archaic.

All of Kurzweil’s predictions stem from his own personal fear of death.

From other posts on the hacker news front page, will AI complete the ipv4 to ipv6 transition this year?

If not, I think it's still a while before we hit the singularity, because it's going to have to be good at solving problems like 4=>6 before it could hope to be a singularity event

You can refer to his bio on Wikipedia [1], but the question itself seems a bit off, as it assumes that someone needs to have accomplished something specific to be worth listening to. While I’m not talking about Kurzweil in particular, the truth is, you don’t necessarily need a list of achievements to say something valid or correct. For instance, Isaac Newton made groundbreaking discoveries, yet also devoted significant time to alchemy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Alchemy”

He has a long track record of making concrete and timed predictions. So you can look at the predictions Kurtzweil made 25 years ago in _The Age of Spirtual Machines_ and 20 years ago in _The Singularity is Near_, and use the hit rate of those predictions to establish credibility (or lack thereof).

But you'd need to read the books yourself and do your own evaluation. Kurzweil's own scoring of those past predictions has been so generous that it borders on fraudulent.