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Comment by canttestthis | Hacker News Reader

Could someone explain the Ray Kurzweil hate to me? Predicting the future is hard.

Kurzweil is certainly a very smart guy, and he's done a lot of important things. I think people are uncomfortable with how specific he is when making predictions. He also makes predictions in many fields in which he isn't an expert, but a well-informed observer.

I'm not informed enough to comment on his actual predictions, but I've heard him defend himself. His response to criticism that I've heard is, "my critics are uninformed about fact X," but he doesn't make an attempt to justify X. That approach strikes me as disrespectful and intellectually dishonest, as it's a tactic used by many hucksters and snake oil salesmen. I have a limited understanding of his positions, but the way he presents himself makes me uneasy.

I agree about the elaborate predictions and sales pitch feeling. I've reconsidered my Kurzweil hate since the Google hire, because I trust that they have people who can evaluate his skills. Before that, I had to evaluate them on my own, and I drew similar conclusions to yours.

I also think it was elitist of me. A lot of it was just because he's published books that have been marketed as pop-sci trade paperbacks, but I never actually read any of them.

Everyone knows that predicting the future is hard, but Singularity aficionados try to elevate that fact to a profound prediction in and of itself.

The analogy I always use is a long straight flat desert highway. If you stand in the middle of it and look down its length, it appears to converge to a singularity in the distance. If you can see mileposts, you might even try to estimate how far away that singularity is.

But if you drive toward the singularity, you'll never run into it. It recedes before you. It is just a trick of perspective.

Basically all the talk of how crazy life will be after The Singularity is like trying to explain how crazy life would be on the other side of a rainbow. Fun, but not actually useful.

This response has nothing to do with anything. The singularity as Kurzweil is describing it is marked by tangible events like the development of a true AI or atleast a machine learning algorithm capable of discovering and proving its own concepts. I have no idea how this relates to your very abstract singularity (a trick of perspective?).

Kurzeil attempts to privilege certain technological milestones as substantively "different" from other technological milestones (e.g. "true" AI)--and thus claim their consequences for human culture are uniquely unpredictable.

My point is that this is just an assertion, not a prediction. Every future development to some extent obscures our ability to predict the future of human culture. Look far enough into the future along any line of inquiry (legal, artistic, religious, energy, biology, etc.) and there is a singularity beyond which we cannot predict. It's just a function of trying to predict the future in general, not some special property of AI.

We may not be able to predict future developments in musical composition, but we can predict that song writers will probably not convert the entire mass of the solar system into musical instruments over a two week period.

The same cannot be said of self-improving AIs. Kurzweil's Singularity is not about the difficulty of long term predictions, it is that the progress function may become so steep that even short term predictions become impossible.

Self-aware music might do that-- and beyond the musical singularity, a concept like "self-aware music" has to be treated as plausible.

Which I think is the point.

Why can't the same be said of self-improving AIs? This seems to me like the sort of awesome-sounding but unsupported assertion that leads people to roll their eyes at the Singularity crowd.

For me it's the smug "See, I told you cell phones would be important in the future" gloating over obvious predictions, and the "well I said we would all be using driverless cars but since there is one, that still validates my entire prediction" hedging.

Also his whole "I'm going to eat magic vitamins that will keep me alive forever" thing.

Not wanting to die is a mainstream mindset.

Personally, I think he's way too optimistic about how future tech will be used. And he rarely has good reasons. Stuff like foglets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog He didn't invent the idea of the foglet, he just believes for some reason that people won't abuse them. Also in his book he posits that the Singularity will be nice to people who choose not to join it. His only reason is that he's pretty sure the Singularity will like humans.

Predicting the future is hard, yes. Kurzweil has made some good progress on various forms of AI and other computer applications, but he also has some "fringe-y" beliefs. Belief in mind uploading, his massive regimen of supplements, and his wish to bring back his father by scanning his writings are what I think are what most people object to.