"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw
If you can give a solid reason, with any actual logic to it rather than referring to past events, I'd be delighted. Just putting quotes and referring to totally different technological developments which many said were impossible indicates that you probably have nothing because you don't know any better than I do. Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.
I have some reasons: a lot of people who should care about machine learning and other fields related to AI who could benefit from it don't; research, even in a hot field like machine learning, moves slowly and it takes years to determine in retrospect that a given body of work made a significant, noteworthy impact. Papers go through months of review/revising and then get published months after that; by the time you read a journal paper the original work behind it might have been done 2-3 years ago. Things move on the scale of _years,_ and I don't see that changing anytime soon. That doesn't sound very singularity-ish to me.
Now, can you give anything based on actual reason/logic/evidence, or are you just going to give me another unrelated quote?
-- Arthur C. Clarke
If you're looking at academic papers, no wonder you don't believe it.
http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize/browse_thread/th...
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html
> Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.
Oh no.
Guess which one is more useful.
I hope my competitors are all very reasonable people.
If you believe the estimates for the computing power of the human brain, we only need a few more years of growth in the dollar/flops ratio to make the required computational horsepower available to smaller organizations. In fact, supercomputers being designed today already touch the lowest estimates of brain computational capacity. So if these estimates hold, we only lack the knowledge of how to copy this process artificially. Which certainly doesn't mean that it is right around the corner, but not looking into it would be stupid.
Then, of course, the regular pro-singularity lament goes like this: Once we have created one machine that faithfully copies what the human brain does best, the exponential growth in processor capability will ensure that we soon have an army of intelligent machines. This sentiment is easy to attack. But even if processors stop getting better overnight (which is a grossly conservative estimate) we can still find improvements to our algorithms to make our hypothetical artificial intelligences better. In nature, brain mass doesn't equate with capability. (This last sentence is anecdotal evidence, but I won't bother to dig up the papers to see whether it holds).
You cite the sorry state of machine learning/artificial intelligence to show that we aren't anywhere near what is required to implement strong AI. I agree that the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence are in a sorry state that barely make any effort at copying what biological brains do. But didn't you just warn against extrapolating future change from history? It is obvious to any young, ambitious scientist that our parents have been banging away at the wrong problems for the last 30 years.
This isn't a pro-singularity post, because I believe that what Ray Kurzweil and his cronies preach carries too much resemblance to a cult. They may or may not have ulterior motives, but as you say, things always look better on paper than they do in the real world. What I am trying to say is that is would be incredibly stupid not to investigate these things closer (not to _try_, throw our full weight on the problem), because the implications of successfully pulling this off would be profound.