If it were me choosing who to fund, I would make my main criteria who has actually made some progress, has solid models that show promise and not base it on who's the most willing to make tons of unfounded predictions.
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I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.
He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.
As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of.
"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"
"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"
"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"
"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"
I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.
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In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict.
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Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil:
“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”
and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 - @1:25
Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit any of us here personally.
What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his supporters are just as guilty of.
Political awards don't mean anything, just that you have good PR. Hilary Clinton has a Grammy, Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize, and Al Gore has an Oscar. Nate Silver is doing things publicly in statistics but that doesn't mean he's the end-all be-all.
Some of us don't buy into the Kurzweil hype. Frankly, I think he's delusional. But my mother always said that there's a fine line between an idiot and a savant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Medal_of_Technology
It's definitely not a Cracker Jack prize.
He's also racked up a pretty impressive list of Inventor of the Year and Lifetime Achievement awards from more technically astute sources like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_kurzweil - under Recognition and awards
I guess the main point I was trying to make is that he's definitely not this dilettante interloper that some of the more off-base commenters are alleging here.
People always list his accomplishments in this fashion. They state some things that he was "heavily involved in" which are impressive when they sound as if he alone created them in a vacuum.
The reality is a lot of different people were working on a lot of these same things, and it's not as if everyone agrees that Kurzweil was the first to accomplish most of these, or even that he indeed did accomplish them in a satisfactory manner.
Yes, the Kurzweil keyboard was very popular and groundbreaking, but "the first to sound just like pianos"? No. They did not sound "just like pianos." They sounded more like pianos than the keyboards that came before, and less like pianos than the ones that came after.
This is the problem with Kurzweil (and others like him), he paints himself as an iconoclastic, groundbreaking figure; standing alone among a sea of might-have-beens. But the reality is that he was just one of many people working in a field which has had a lot of impact in our lives, and which he likes to wax ecstatic about.
The reality is that his main job for the last 20 years has been making a litany of ridiculous predictions nearly non-stop and then when some of them hit anywhere close to the mark he and his supporters claim that he was visionary.
It's absurd and it annoys me to no end.
Kurzweil's theories deserve scrutiny and thoughtful criticism, just not the emotional middlebrow dismissal you're engaging in - to borrow PG's favorite expression.
I guess it's possible that Kurzweil is The Talented Mr. Ripley of the technology world, and that your "horseshit pattern recognizers" are just that much more astute than those of Gates, Page, Brin, Minsky, Norvig, Wolfram, Kamen, Reif, etc., but I hope you'll understand if I'm leaning a bit more towards their take on this one.
Also, I realize endtime is about to jump in here any minute now with his Argument from Authority wikipedia link, so I'll freely admit that given imperfect information, yes, I'm allowing people I respect, who are extremely knowledgeable about the relevant subject matter, and in many cases have worked closely with Kurzweil (Page, Wolfram, Gates, Norvig, Reif, George, etc.) - to help confirm my own fairly well researched opinion.
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Honestly, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Even his strongest critics generally concede that he's a brilliant man who has contributed significantly to technology.
Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit any of us here personally.
What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his supporters are just as guilty of.
You could tell me that literally every other person on the planet (never mind people who are wealthy and successful in tech) thinks Kurzweil is the second coming, and it would not change my opinion of him.
Now why is that? Is it just because I'm obstinate?
No. It's because I've been reading his asinine screeds for decades and reading the fawning baloney that comes from talking heads like those you've listed, and adoring groupies like yourself as well. And it's all a bunch of horseapples.
If anyone were doing what he's been doing for the last 20+ years and getting the same response from the press and public, I would be annoyed. It doesn't matter who it is.
It's the act of spewing out a bunch of half baked theories as if they are revolutionary and thought provoking when it's really a bunch of trite garbage which wouldn't even pass for a low grade scifi novel. Then the fact that a number of people -- including the poorly informed general media which you expect to be gullible -- most disappointingly, some tech folks, treat it seriously is beyond obnoxious.
Anyway, clearly I'm not going to change your mind. You're very convinced by the sheer fact that other rich and famous people think he's great, so I'm not going to waste my time any further. You're not going to convince me either (since the only thing that would convince me is Kurzweil actually putting out something thoughtful and well considered), so let's let it go.
If Google wanted to build AGI, we'd hire Eliezer Yudkowsky and Luke Muehlhauser. Kurzweil is an evangelist and a public figure, but do you honestly think he is actually going to design an AGI?
(disclaimer: I work for Google, but this is all my own unofficial opinion.)
That said, I did nearly including Ben Goertzel in my comment. But I am familiar with Eliezer and Luke's work (and know them personally); I'm much less familiar with Ben, so I didn't feel I could make such a strong statement about him.
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer[citation needed], the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart).
Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
Basic search term aggregation was illuminating. If Ray K. can go another step beyond statistical analysis, the results could be fascinating... or it could just be "People aren't wearing enough hats" of a let down.
edit: identities, not impressions
Your statement is like saying calculus isn't an impressive mathematical achievement because any moderately competent math major in college could recreate it.
Also, yes, those things existed, but there was no solution available that was so affordable and reasonable for personal use.
Well, not now.
However, Google is not dumb. They have Peter Norvig heading Google X and a team of AI engineers recruited by Norvig. Perhaps Kurzweil is just the hand guiding the ship, but not the one pulling the oars?
They did buy Motorola Mobility.
Kurzweil has recognized the value of Hawkins' ideas and based his latest book on them, though I and others (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...) don't think he did a great job on it.
Full Disclosure: I work at Numenta (Hawkins company) but these opinions are my own.
Even more disappointing is the fact that Kurzweil never bothers to do what any scientist, especially one trained in computer science, would immediately want to do, which is to build a computer model that instantiated his theory, and then compare the predictions of the model with real human behavior.
This is quite damning, if true, and reconciles the apparent discrepancy in this discussion between "Kurzweil, brilliant inventor" and "Kurzweil, futurist hack." Is it possible that Kurzweil, at some point, stopped being an implementer of ideas and became a pure pontificater?
Thanks for bringing Numenta to my attention. It appears to be a very interesting company.
If Google was very serious about A.I. I think they would have just acquired Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and his neuroscience crew, who have real, practical "brain-building" experience.
For example, the Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer illustrates exactly how he approaches problem solving - brute force - 64 MB of memory in 1991, utterly wretched price/performance ratio but awesome performance if considered on that dimension alone.
And the above is 100% consistent IMO with google's approach to solving problems - throw hundreds of thousands of computers at it. He should make an excellent cultural fit. Because today's ridiculous brute force is tomorrow's low-end cell phone.
I think the focus away from training these systems for your own voice is probably a bad direction but I'm not an expert in this stuff.
Sounds like investors talking about Columbus in 1491.